Not all the interviews were so stomach-turning. Baldur von Schirach, Hitler’s Youth Leader and Governor of Vienna, was a smartly dressed man in his late thirties with a teasing bisexual manner. He tried to turn the indictment process into a social occasion. Neave imagined him at ease beneath the palms in Cannes in co-respondent shoes, but he saw through the soft persona to the well-groomed enthusiast for Hitler’s racial solutions who referred to the monstrous Nazi tyranny as a ‘misfortune’. Alfried Rosenberg, the Nazi ‘philosopher’ who celebrated his master’s thinking in the party’s ideological bible, The Myth of the Twentieth Century, was a seamy contrast to the effeminate von Schirach. His stinking cell was littered with torn papers, and his pompous rejection of the indictment for conspiracy gave way to a whining request for help, and a meeting with Hans Frank, the Butcher of Poland, next on Neave’s list. Frank, a lawyer who insinuated his way to the top by defending Brownshirt thugs in the late twenties, made an unctuous bid to enlist his sympathy. ‘I regard this trial as a God-given world court, destined to examine and put an end to the terrible suffering under Adolf Hitler,’ he began, before Colonel Andrus cut him short. Neave found his legal protestations as unconvincing as his conversion back to Roman Catholicism. ‘I had no faith in his remorse,’ he remarked. Frank sweated, mumbled and seemed on the point of nervous collapse. In Neave’s view, this man, who once wrote a marginal note on a memorandum saying ‘1.2 million Jews will perish’, was ‘far the most execrable’ he met that afternoon. ‘He was the one man whom every soldier shunned like a leper, despite the claims of priests that he was saved,’ he recorded.
Two other ‘Fs’ remained: Walter Funk, the former President of the Reichsbank, and Wilhelm Frick, Hitler’s sinister Minister of the Interior. Funk wept uncontrollably as Neave read out his script. ‘Be a man, Funk!’ barked Andrus. ‘Listen to the Major!’ But the former financial journalist who rose to become Plenipotentiary of the War Economy was also personally responsible for ordering the confiscation of valuables from Jews as they were herded into the concentration camps, and for stealing the gold from their teeth when they succumbed ‘for Germany’s war effort’. Funk pulled himself together and asked to see his counsel at once. ‘I have a great interest in the outcome of this trial,’ he told an astounded Neave. So, he was tempted to say, had the relatives of those whose gold teeth were deposited in the Reichsbank. Frick, who had studied law and became a police official before realising that the Nazi Party offered the best route for his talents, was the man who stripped Germans of their civil rights and set in train the extermination of the weak-minded and insane. He dismissed the indictment of conspiracy as ‘fictitious’.
It was getting dark as Neave moved on to his next ‘client’, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the most wanted member of the SS after the suicide of Heinrich Himmler. At 6 foot 5 inches, Kaltenbrunner was the very worst kind of Nazi, an alcoholic sadist, built like a bull, violent and devious. He had directed extermination units against the Jews and taken personal charge of executing the leaders of the plot to kill the Führer in 1944. He had also signed the death warrants for British and American POWs in Mauthausen concentration camp. He put down the revolt in Warsaw with exemplary savagery and razed the city. But when confronted with Neave and the redoubtable Andrus, he was reduced to silent tears and begging for electric light. For the other defendants, Neave had managed to keep a diplomatic face, but with ‘the Lord High Executioner’ the mask slipped. First, he read out his prepared text, and then extracts of his war crimes from the indictment itself. Asked why he had done so, Neave replied grimly: ‘Because of Mauthausen. And because of Warsaw.’ Rage aside, he felt that he had come to speak for the dead that fearsome afternoon. The Tribunal would ‘speak for the civilised world’, but he had already seen compelling evidence of Kaltenbrunner’s crimes. ‘I was furious with this man for crying like a child,’ he recollected. ‘The Poles had died gloriously, but this savage Austrian lawyer, born in the next village to Hitler, was a coward.’3 There was a clear distinction in Neave’s mind between soldiers who fought for their country and the militarist Nazi politicians who did not fight but caused the deaths of millions. So, he had some admiration for Admiral Canaris, chief of the Abwehr, who was strangled with piano wire on Kaltenbrunner’s orders for his complicity in the plot to murder Hitler. Canaris was a ‘chivalrous adversary on the other side’, while Kaltenbrunner was scum. Yet he tried to argue that he was a soldier. Perhaps he believed it, Neave reflected contemptuously.
The burden of bringing these evil men face to face with their crimes began to tell on the young major. He doubted if he could take much more but he led his posse into the cell of Dr Robert Ley, head of the German Labour Front, the Nazi usurper of free trade unionism. This ‘slobbering creature’ had connived in the slave labour programme, yet confronted with the indictment he claimed: ‘The whole thing is preposterous.’ The following evening, he hanged himself with a towel from the toilet lever in his cell, the sounds of his choking deadened by his underpants stuffed into his mouth. Fritz Sauckel, Ley’s fellow slave-trader, or ‘General Plenipotentiary for the Employment of Labour’, and also a general in both the SS and the SA, turned out to be a little bald man with a feeble Chaplin moustache and stupid brown eyes. He, too, shed tears, prompting Neave to ask himself: were they all going to cry, except the genuine soldiers?
It only occurred to him later that his tour of the cells at Nuremberg terrified the defendants. They assumed, because that was what they were accustomed to, that the trial would be short and sharp and they would soon be dead. It was a belief shared by some on the Allied side. Even the chief American prosecutor, Robert Jackson, thought they would all be home by Christmas 1945. ‘I did not realise that day how many of these defendants regarded the service of the indictment as the moment of doom,’ he wrote later. ‘It was as if I had come to read the death sentence.’
Neave next moved on to Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect who became Minister of Armaments. He found Speer a gifted and compelling man. Speer thought Neave’s style was ‘unceremonious’. Neave could not trust Speer but he was initially impressed, believing him to be a man of integrity. Speer spoke English very well and offered that ‘the trial is necessary’ as he took the indictment. But despite his advice to the Führer in March 1945 that the war was lost, he had been at Hitler’s side for more than a decade, and Neave had no doubt that without his formidable organisational skills, the Third Reich could never have become so powerful or lasted so long. Neave was ambivalent about this brilliant man. He seemed the one civilised man among the Nazi leadership. He was the only member of Hitler’s inner cabinet who did not lose his will or reason, yet he deployed his great talents to make the Nazi dream a reality. Speer smiled pleasantly at Neave’s offer to find him a lawyer, and Colonel Andrus frowned, evidently uncomfortable about the bond that appeared to be springing up between prosecutor and defendant. Neave understood. They must not fall under the spell of Speer, a man perhaps even more dangerous and beguiling than Hitler. Speer himself did not share this analysis. Long after the war, in his memoirs, Inside the Third Reich, he disclosed his dismay at being included in a general arraignment. ‘In my naïvete, I had imagined that each of us would receive an individual indictment,’ he wrote. ‘Now it turned out that we were one and all accused of the monstrous crimes that this document listed. After reading it I was overwhelmed by a sense of despair.’4
Baron Constantin von Neurath, Hitler’s pre-war Foreign Minister and Reichsprotektor for Bohemia and Moravia after the Munich crisis, presented no such difficulties. He was a diplomat of the old school, who betrayed the traditions of the German Empire to insinuate himself into the Nazi hierarchy. Von Neurath, by now aged seventy-three, had won an Iron Cross (First Class) in the First World War, and rising in the diplomatic service he had been ambassador to London for two years in the early thirties. He spoke to Neave as though he was a Foreign Office courier, rather than the angel of death as others feared. ‘I am much obliged to you, Major,’ he responded t
o the service of the indictment. He was also gracious about the offer of defence counsel. ‘I was always against punishment without the possibility of a defence,’ he murmured. Neave was furious at being patronised by the former ‘Protektor’. ‘You will have every opportunity to put forward your defence,’ he retorted angrily.
Franz von Papen, his next quarry, Chancellor of Germany before Hitler, and subsequently the Führer’s Vice Chancellor, was equally disdainful, if not more so. He spoke to Neave in smooth Old Etonian English, affecting to misunderstand his situation. ‘I cannot imagine why I find myself in this situation, Herr Major,’ he submitted. Neave advised him to read the indictment, accusing him of conspiracy to wage aggressive war, and he would see exactly why. He found von Papen untrustworthy, long before evidence emerged that, for all his diplomatic standing, he was a born liar.
Steeling himself for the next confrontation, with Dr Artur Seyss-Inquart, Reichskommissar of Holland for the entire war, Neave moved down the prison hall in fading light. His experience of the Netherlands war theatre and the atrocities meted out to the anti-Fascist Dutch primed him to meet a ‘thin-lipped monster, a murderer with a limp’. The limp was there, but he was otherwise shaken by the wan figure wearing thick glasses who waited in his cell: the ‘gentle Judas’ of Austria who had betrayed his country to Hitler for personal advantage did not live up to his cruel image. Yet there was a cold fury in his eyes. Seyss-Inquart, who presided over the liquidation of four-fifth’s of Holland’s 150,000 Jews – including the fifteen-year-old Anne Frank – and the slaughter of Dutch hostages, bowed to Neave and smiled: ‘Last act of the tragedy of the Second World War, I hope.’
Despite the demeaning confines of his narrow cell, Dr Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler’s banker, retained an impressive bearing. He talked down to Neave, with a withering promise to read the indictment ‘but, of course, I expect to be acquitted. I am, after all, a banker.’ The white-haired former president of the Reichsbank could not browbeat the young British major. Neave took an instant dislike to the man who had funded the Nazi terror. He believed Schacht was lying about his relationship with Hitler, even though he had belatedly defied Hitler. Neave’s next client, General Alfred Jodl, Chief of the Operations Staff of the German Armed Forces, shared some of Schacht’s doubts, but continued to carry out orders. Neave, with his customary sharp eye for detail, described him as ‘a trim little man, like a Leach cartoon of a Victorian coachman’ with ‘fierce blue eyes, a strawberry nose and huge ears’. Nonetheless, he was every inch a high-ranking officer, addressing Neave as if he were his junior and questioning him closely about the qualifications of the German lawyers chosen to defend him. Were they experts in criminal or international law? Neave equivocated. He did not know and Jodl was perfectly aware of that. Hitler’s reluctant ex-chief of staff demanded stationery to prepare his defence and showed none of the self-pity of some of his fellow defendants. He considered himself above all a soldier, doing his duty to his country. ‘He did not believe himself guilty of any crime,’ recorded Neave. Not even the shooting of POWs, which he had sanctioned. Jodl, the tidiest of the prisoners, protested at being stripped of his marks of rank, but Neave rejected the complaint. In his soldierly way, he did not think Jodl was evil, though he was part of a criminal government and took a leading role in its military organisation. Jodl’s fault, Neave concluded, was an obsessive loyalty to Hitler, who they thought would recover Germany’s lost pride. ‘They pretended not to understand politics and in fact they did not do so,’ wrote Neave.5 Here, Neave’s lifelong ambiguity with regard to values is laid bare. As a man of arms himself, he admired soldiers and soldierly virtues, and was contemptuous of Hitler on the simple grounds that ‘he never cared a fig about his soldiers’. Yet he insisted that soldiers should also understand politics, and Nuremberg was the greatest example of civil society seeking to make soldiers understand the nature of their actions and their responsibility to recognise political right and wrong. In his own life, the soldier – politician Neave was not always so scrupulous. He vigorously propounded the virtues of liberty and democracy but flirted dangerously with quasi-military groups in Britain determined to halt what they saw as a drift towards Communism. For the most part, the politician was in charge, but sometimes the soldier took over, as in his attitude to Northern Ireland much later.
Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of the High Command of the German Forces, was a man Neave had come a long way to meet. Keitel, the ‘square-headed murderer’, had signed the order for the execution of the captured ‘Cockleshell Heroes’ in May 1942 and British commandos captured at Stavanger later that year. The conqueror of Europe had been a figure of hate in Colditz and Neave told him the story of his abortive escape from the camp dressed as a German corporal. ‘Yes. I remember the camp,’ replied Keitel. ‘Your comrades in Colditz were a trouble to us.’ Yet, Neave reflected, he might owe his life to this toady of the Führer. His soldiers had guarded Colditz and they had respected the Geneva Convention. The SS would have thrown him into a concentration camp for impersonating an officer of the Wehrmacht.
Neave analysed Keitel’s claims to be a ‘real soldier’ in some detail, confirming his acute interest in differentiating between the real thing and the fake. He concluded that this man with stupid eyes had fawned on Hitler and betrayed his fellow officers for personal gain. Had he not also instructed his commanders on the Russian Front to execute fifty ‘Communists’ – civilians, in fact – for every German soldier killed? If he had not sold his soul to the devil, he would never have gone beyond the rank of colonel before retiring to a small estate. American combat GIs crowding outside the cell shared Neave’s revulsion at this sweating, purple-faced creature who sought to excuse his crimes by claiming he was ‘only a soldier’.
Two German admirals – Karl Doenitz and Erich Raeder – were more difficult clients. They attracted substantial sympathy from US and British naval officers, who argued that they had fought an honourable war and should not be tried for war crimes. Neave did not share their reservations. He was astounded that the apologists for Doenitz did not know he was the Führer’s chosen successor: a man who spoke of Hitler as the new Napoleon, and demanded that the war be fought to the bitter end when it was quite clear that it was lost. Over and above the general crime of conspiracy to wage aggressive war, he was charged with violating the rules of war at sea. Neave had personal experience of Doenitz’s ideas of total war: an officer friend, his wife and baby had drowned when the British passenger liner Laconia was torpedoed in the South Atlantic in 1942. Days later, Doenitz issued War Order 154, forbidding the rescue of survivors because such action could put the submarine at risk. That was his idea of chivalry. Yet still he puzzled Neave, who kept repeating to himself Doenitz’s words, ‘Compared with him [Hitler] we others are worms’, as he emerged from the long ordeal of indictment service. Taking a deep breath of fresh air, Neave hurried off to make his report to the Tribunal.
However, he reckoned without the momentous journalistic nature of the story that was now unfolding. The American GIs’ paper Stars and Stripes picked up a fairly accurate account of Neave’s activities, particularly the reactions of the Nazis. It came not from him, because he was wary of the press, but from his accompanying US guards, and perhaps even officers, who were not so reticent. From the Stars and Stripes, the story moved rapidly to daily newspapers, and after breakfast on 20 October, barely hours after his ordeal, Neave was ordered into the presence of a very angry Judge Biddle. If the defendants were to have a fair trial, any statements made by them were confidential. There must be no more leaks. Furthermore, demanded the judge, had Neave given notice of the trial date? He had not, for the simple reason that he didn’t know it. ‘Jesus!’ expostulated the judge. They must be told, forthwith, that the trial was to start on 20 November. Neave must meet these monsters all over again. He and Burton Andrus served notice of the date, leaving aside the question of defence counsel until the next day.
By then, the condition of some of the defendants h
ad deteriorated even further, though they could still not shake off their Nazi past. Goering retained his composure, but Keitel was ‘woebegone’ and Kaltenbrunner attended in a ‘most emotional state and wept during part of the interview’, Neave recorded in a memorandum to Willey. Sauckel also cried and pleaded for a Nazi lawyer. Hess was indifferent to the choice of a lawyer, so long as the court did not appoint a Jew. Doenitz called for naval experts, ‘anti-Semites and persons who were not Marxists or pacifists’. The banker Schacht was in good form, demanding ‘immediate action’ to find a Dr Dix of Berlin (he was promptly found). Over the succeeding weeks, Neave put together a formidable team of defence counsel, though he still found personal dealings with them distasteful.
He also had to face the eight judges several times, in private session in an ante-room in the Palace of Justice. Neave found these hearings wearying, particularly the Soviet judges’ perplexity over Western legal values. For them, Nazi war guilt had already been decreed by order of Stalin. They objected strongly to lawyers who had been Nazi Party members but their objections were overruled. This was Neave’s first appearance in a court of law since he had defended a young soldier on a charge of accidentally shooting a woman civilian cycling through Armentières during the phoney war of 1940. Now, despite ‘looking twenty, being thirty, acting forty’ (in the words of a colleague), he was appearing on behalf of the men who had incarcerated him and enslaved Europe. ‘This reversal of fortunes was not lost upon the judges as they considered my pleas,’ he later reflected.6 Neave was charged with securing pleas from the defendants before the opening date of the trial. German lawyers worked frantically to meet the deadline, badgering the office where he operated with a bevy of beautiful German-speaking Wrens. However, the trial opened on schedule under the presidency of Sir Geoffrey Lawrence, a jurist for whom Neave had boundless respect. In his wing collar and bowler hat, he embodied the British virtues of correct appearance, conduct and values. A barrister since 1906, and a judge in the King’s Bench Division of the High Court since 1932, he lived contentedly in rural Wiltshire. ‘Lawrence could be sharp, biting and stern,’ observed Neave, ‘but I always found him impeccably just.’ His arrival at the Palace of Justice every day in black coat and striped trousers was one of the sights of ruined Nuremberg. He was more than equal to prosecution and defence, and even won over the defendants who came to look on him in high regard. ‘Without his quiet wisdom and personal charm,’ Neave decided, ‘the trial would have collapsed in mockery and Allied recrimination, at a time when the Cold War had already begun.’7 Norman Birkett, Lawrence’s ‘warm-hearted and fair’ alternate, also impressed Neave.
Public Servant, Secret Agent Page 19
