Elsie and Erich had spent the war living in the countryside outside of London, keeping their children safely away from the Blitz. Each day Erich traveled into the city to run his leather business, which had benefited from the war demand. For Bella, though, the war’s end had brought tragedy. A week after VE Day her husband, Harold, had been killed in Wiltshire when his car was hit by an airplane that had missed the runway. Bella was now faced with bringing up two little boys alone.
Ann was living with her parents in a small flat in Finchley, north London. She kept herself busy by working at the North London Metal Company, where she helped produce supplies for the postwar effort. She was also a member of the League of Jewish Women, whose aim was to “intensify in each Jewish woman her Jewish consciousness and to deepen her sense of responsibility to the Jewish community,” spending many weekends delivering food and offering company to the sick and elderly.
Hanns and Ann conducted their relationship by mail, written either on thin airmail paper or on tourist postcards. In July 1945, she took a holiday with a couple of friends to Cornwall. The weather was warm that summer and she enjoyed the time away from the noisy streets of London: a quiet lunch by a lake; sunbathing at the beach alongside families enjoying their summer break; shopping at the colorful boutiques in St. Ives; walking along the picturesque cliff-lined coast. During teatime she would write a postcard to Hanns, telling him that “this is like the end of the world or the part of England nearest to Heaven.”
Since Hanns had begun work with 1 War Crimes Investigation Team, he had been too busy to return home on leave. It had therefore been more than four months since they had last seen each other, and Hanns had spent most of that trip with his family, concerned as he was for his father’s health. Ann was becoming anxious about the future, and was placing increasing pressure on Hanns to commit to the relationship. But Hanns was not sure that he wanted to marry Ann, at least not yet, as he confided in a letter to his sister Elsie:
Talking about problems, there seem to be some more coming up. Ann is very keen on getting married on my next leave, if and when there will be one. Poor me is supposed to get married, have a honeymoon, return to the continent, all this in 10 days, and like it. If I should have 2 minutes to spare in between, I suppose I should also find or at least try to find a job for myself. I feel very sorry for Ann, but she has been warned, one does not start anything with a bloke like me. I had a lovely letter from her a while ago. She asked me what I want, and when I told her, she would have bitten my head off, had I been near enough. Poor thing, trying to get me to solve problems from Belsen. What a hope.
Hanns
Despite her repeated requests that he apply for leave, Hanns was too preoccupied to visit Ann that summer. Hanns the investigator was taking precedence over Hanns the private citizen.
*
Throughout August, Hanns and the other members of 1 WCIT were kept busy preparing witness affidavits for the upcoming Belsen Trial. This trial would be the first in which people were to be prosecuted for crimes against their own citizens, and it was viewed by many as a dry run for the Nuremberg Trials of Major War Criminals, which were slated to start later that year. As a result, the authorities were eager to ensure that all documents were perfectly prepared.
Josef Kramer, Belsen, 1945
Hanns’s first task was to ensure that the number-one defendant, Josef Kramer, correct his original statement. Back in May, Höss’s former adjutant had claimed no knowledge of Auschwitz’s gas chambers. Given the overwhelming testimony to the contrary from both guards and prisoners, Kramer had indicated that he was now willing to change his story. On September 1, Leo Genn asked Hanns to accompany him to Celle to sit down with Kramer.
After brief introductions, Hanns asked the former adjutant about the gas chambers in Auschwitz. His answer, later typed up into an affidavit, would play a key part in the Belsen Trial proceedings.
The first time I saw a gas chamber proper was at Auschwitz. It was attached to the crematorium. The complete building containing the crematorium and gas chamber was situated in Camp No. 2 [Birkenau], of which I was in command. I visited the building on my first inspection of the camp after being there for three days, but for the first eight days I was there it was not working. After eight days the first transport, from which gas chamber victims were selected, arrived, and at the same time I received a written order from Höss, who commanded the whole of Auschwitz Camp, that although the gas chamber and crematorium were situated in my part of the camp, I had no jurisdiction over it whatever.
Hanns then asked Kramer why Rudolf Höss hadn’t stopped the killing.
Orders in regard to the gas chamber were, in fact, always given by Höss, and I am firmly convinced that he received such orders from Berlin. I believe that had I been in Höss’s position and received such orders, I would have carried them out, because even if I had protested it would only have resulted in my being taken prisoner myself. My feelings about orders in regard to the gas chamber were to be slightly surprised, and wonder to myself whether such action was really right.
Now Hanns and Genn could prove not only that Kramer had been aware of the Auschwitz gas chambers but that he was sufficiently morally alert, if his testimony was to be believed, to have questioned their operation.
They now also realized the centrality of Rudolf Höss’s role in Auschwitz. If they could get Höss to testify then they could establish the facts of the Holocaust. But first they needed to catch him.
Over the next few weeks, Hanns accompanied groups of former prisoners to Celle prison, where they signed affidavits identifying Belsen’s Kapos, the prisoners who had brutally supervised the other inmates. He took the statement of Miklos Hirsch, for instance, who described a Kapo named Isaak Judalewsky beating a man to death with a wooden plank. Another prisoner, Joszef Silberstein, confirmed that Judalewsky “went to a sick prisoner on the top bunk. He struck him two violent blows with the buckle part of his belt on the mouth and face and the prisoner leapt down from the bed and collapsed unconscious on the floor.” By the time the doctor arrived, Silberstein said, the prisoner was dead. Hanns also took several female prisoners—women named Blanka Vogel, Margit Spitzer, Ilona Grosz and Helen Jakubovits—to Celle, where they identified Maria Malzyner, a Kapo renowned for her viciousness. Vogel said that Malzyner “beat me with her fists on the head. She struck me several hard blows and pulled me by the hair tearing whole tufts of hair out.” Another woman, Marian Tatarozuk, identified Anton Polanski, a Kapo who she said viciously beat the other prisoners. And Hanns took Alfred Kurzke to the Neuengamme internment camp in Hamburg, where he identified Oscar George Helbig, an administrator of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, who was later sentenced to twenty years in prison by the Americans.
Finally, in the third week of September, Leo Genn determined that they were ready; it was time to start the trial.
*
The world’s first major war crimes trial, “The Belsen Trial of Josef Kramer and 44 Others,” began on September 17, 1945, in a large courtroom in the German city of Lüneburg. The defendants sat in the center of the room: twenty-one women and twenty-four men, each wearing their trial number affixed to a white cotton square. The court was presided over by the impressively named Major General Horatio Pettus Mackintosh Berney-Ficklin, who was joined by four other British military judges. Representatives of the world’s press and members of the public were also present. Lieutenant Hanns Alexander and Captain Alfred Fox sat at the back of the room, waiting to see how their interrogations would be utilized.
After the forty-five “not guilty” pleas were heard, the prosecutor, Colonel Thomas Backhouse, stood and gave a summary of the charges: “At Auschwitz, the prosecution will say there was a deliberate cold-blooded extermination of millions . . . Every member of the gang bore a share in the treatment they knew would cause death and physical suffering. We will produce evidence that they committed deliberate acts of cruelty and wilful murder.” He concluded with the unimaginable asserti
on that “a total of at least four million had been gassed” at the camp.
For the next few weeks, the world was transfixed. Witness, defense and counsel statements were all reported by the press in astonishing detail, with almost all the major papers giving front-page coverage to the proceedings. A short film of the Red Army’s liberation of Auschwitz was projected, and the witnesses for the prosecution—men and women who had been held prisoner at Belsen and Auschwitz—came forward to give their accounts. The defendants’ lawyers had a hard time disputing these testimonies.
When it came to Josef Kramer’s turn on the stand, the name Rudolf Höss was uttered for the first time in a war crimes courtroom. Kramer said that he had been adjutant to the Kommandant and that it had been Höss who was responsible overall for the Auschwitz camp. It had been Höss, he said, who had supervised the construction and the operation of the gas chambers that had killed millions of people. The New York Times ran the story on Kramer’s testimony, describing Rudolf Höss as the “missing man” at the Belsen Trial, and declared that he was now on the list of most wanted war criminals.
On November 17, 1945, the Belsen Trial came to a close. Of the forty-five defendants, thirty were found guilty of war crimes. Nineteen were sent to prison. For the remaining eleven, including the five that Hanns had interrogated—Kramer, Klein, Hössler, Volkenrath and Grese—the judge pronounced, “The sentence of this court is that you suffer death by being hanged.”
At 9:34 on the morning of December 13, the first of these prisoners, Elisabeth Volkenrath, was hanged from a gallows in the courtyard of Hamelin prison. The remainder of the prisoners were executed: Irma Grese was hanged at 10:04 a.m., shouting “Schnell!” before the act; Kramer and Klein were hanged side by side at 12:11 p.m.; Hössler was hanged at 3:37 p.m. It was all over by 4:16 p.m.
*
With every passing day of testimony, it had become clear to Hanns that the men and women standing trial were but a drop in the ocean of senior Nazis who remained at large in occupied Germany. Towards the end of the Belsen Trial, Hanns again approached his commanding officer, requesting leave to hunt for the as-yet-uncaptured war criminals. This time his commanding officer relented, and suggested that he begin by exploring the CROWCASS files—the thousands of names of potential war criminals that had been compiled by the Allies. Genn provided Hanns with a driver and a car from the War Crimes Group’s vehicle pool, and, most important, entrusted him with the authority to go anywhere he wanted in pursuit of his investigations. And for the first time, Hanns was given the power to arrest.
A few hours later, Hanns headed out of the camp. He had a list of names in his pocket, a pistol, a pair of handcuffs strapped to his belt and the travel permit. His modus operandi quickly took shape: first, he chose a name on the list and headed for the suspect’s last known address. When he arrived in the locality, Hanns paid a visit to the police station or town hall to confirm the address and search for any press clippings or recent photographs. More often than not, they had vanished. Hanns would then question whoever was present—a relative, landlady, neighbor—to gather additional information. And so it went on, from one location to another, across the country.
Driving from town to town, many of which had seen little of the occupying forces, Hanns ran into people still committed to the National Socialist worldview. On one such occasion, he was told by the mayor of Fallingbostel that no Jews had ever lived there. Hanns let the statement pass. Soon after, he passed a Jewish cemetery adjacent to the main road. Irritated by the mayor’s shameless lies, he turned back, arrested the man and dropped him off at the local prison.
By November 1945, a month after he had started his official investigations, Hanns had managed to track down only two people of significance: a senior policeman in Hamburg and a high-ranking naval officer who had been hiding near Belsen. But as neither of these men had been involved with the concentration camps, Hanns did not consider either a major catch.
Nevertheless, Hanns was enjoying his life more than he had in recent months. He relished the freedom of the open road and, even better, he had been promoted to the rank of captain. He was no longer a German refugee who helped out with translations; he was now a full-fledged British war crimes investigator.
War Crimes Investigation Team dinner menu, October 1945
13
RUDOLF
BERLIN, GERMANY
1945
* * *
In April 1945, Rudolf and his colleagues prepared their exit from the T-building. With the Red Army closing on Berlin and the American and British tanks creeping through Belgium and into Germany, it was clear to all at Amtsgruppe D that the war was coming to an end.
Rudolf now found it hard to reconcile his belief in the Third Reich’s thousand-year rule with the reality he saw around him: “We could not win the war like this. But I could not doubt the final victory, I had to believe in it, even if common sense told me clearly and distinctly that we were bound to lose. My heart was with the Führer and his great idea, which must not be lost to the world.”
On April 16, 1945, after bombs fell close to the T-building in Sachsenhausen, Himmler finally ordered that the entire Amtsgruppe D archive—documents, films and any other incriminating evidence—be destroyed. A few days later, Glücks told Rudolf to escort a select group of officers and family members, including the wife and daughter of Theodor Eicke, to the Ravensbrück camp, sixty miles north of Berlin. Hedwig and the children, acting on Rudolf’s warning, had already fled Auschwitz for the camp and were awaiting him there.
Rudolf’s plan was to head north towards the Baltic Sea and then northwest towards the Danish border. Here they would be far away from the military storm fast enveloping central Germany, and he would be able to drop off his family with his brother-in-law Fritz, who lived near the German city of Flensburg. Six days later they departed. They traveled in a convoy of cars, Rudolf in his Opel Kapitän, moving from one wooded area to the next to avoid low-flying planes. They drove only when it was dark, for fear of capture. “Our flight was horrible,” Rudolf recalled. “We traveled on the crowded roads by night, without any lights, and all the time I was anxious for parties to stay together in their cars, because I was responsible for the whole column.”
A few days into their flight, on April 30, 1945, they heard the news that Adolf Hitler had committed suicide in his Berlin bunker, just before Soviet forces took the city. Rudolf realized that his work for the Third Reich was finished. “The Führer’s death meant the end of our world.” It was now that he suggested to Hedwig a drastic plan of action.
Was there any point in living on now? We would be pursued, we would be hunted wherever we went. We thought of taking poison. I had got hold of some for my wife so that, if the Russians unexpectedly advanced, she and the children would not fall into their hands. For the children’s sake we did not take poison after all; for them, we would face all that lay ahead of us. However, we ought to have done it, and again and again later I regretted not doing so. We would all, particularly my wife and children, have been spared much. And what will they yet have to face? We were bound and chained to that world of ours—we ought to have perished with it.
In Rostock, a small city on the Baltic coast, the convoy was brought to a halt by tank traps positioned in the road. The group abandoned two trucks, along with the signals equipment and luggage they contained, and crammed into the remaining vehicles. They headed west until they arrived in Rendsburg, a city sixty miles north of Hamburg, where they joined up with Richard Glücks—who was now ill—and his wife and daughter, Dr. Enno Lolling and his wife and son, along with Glücks’s deputy, Gerhard Maurer, and other former members of Amtsgruppe D. Once they were together, Rudolf attempted to find the group accommodation, but failed to locate anything that was both safe and large enough for them all. The group continued on, late into the night, until they discovered some abandoned billets, twenty miles further north, where they could rest for a few hours. Early the next day, they continued their trek tow
ards the Danish border. Wherever possible they drove on side roads, hoping to avoid the British checkpoints that had been set up on many of the main routes.
As his world fell apart around him, Rudolf was forced to reconsider the cause he had pledged himself to for the past twenty-five years. He still believed in the National Socialist vision, the supremacy of the German people, the need for additional land for its citizens, the threat posed by the “enemies of the state.” Yet he now thought that Germany had been wrong to start the “dreadful war” and should never have used its “regime of terror” and “highly effective use of propaganda” to make Eastern Europe submissive. Not that he was remorseful for the millions that had been murdered; he merely acknowledged that the means they had deployed had failed to produce their much-wished-for ends.
On May 1, 1945, Rudolf left the convoy to drop off his wife and children with Fritz in St. Michaelisdonn, a small town situated a few miles inland from the North Sea coast. Rudolf had known Fritz for more than twenty years, ever since the days of the Artamanen League, when they had all worked together on the farm in Pomerania. Fritz had found a rudimentary wooden hut, complete with a small pot-bellied stove, an old farmhouse table and a few rickety wooden chairs, in which the family could remain until alternative accommodation could be found. Hedwig and the children would have to sleep on the floor. Having lost their personal belongings during the hurried flight north, the only clothes the Höss family had were the items that they were wearing.
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