When they arrived in Heide two hours later, the trucks pulled up at a bar in the center of town, where Paul was waiting for them. With Rudolf left in the truck, under guard, Hanns and the other men, around twenty-five in all, piled into the bar. Extraordinarily, Hanns had interrupted the safe delivery of the most wanted war criminal into custody, in order to celebrate.
Paul described this scene to his parents in a letter he penned the next day:
13 March 1946
Hanns had a very successful time here, though very busy. But he is not leaving empty handed. He caught the bastard from Auschwitz. I have never seen such a shit in all my life. After all was over I found the party for celebration while Rudolf’s feet got cold in the car under escort. We drank to the success with champagne and whiskey. Just right for the job. But will have to leave the details of the description to Hanns. He is a good bloke but don’t tell him otherwise he gets eingebildet [smug].
After they were finished celebrating, Hanns walked back to the truck, pulled Rudolf out of the vehicle, removed the blanket from his shoulders, and made him walk naked to the prison on the other side of the snow-covered main square. Once inside the prison Hanns, along with a sergeant from the Field Security Section, began Rudolf’s first formal interrogation. Alcohol was forced down the prisoner’s throat and they beat him with his own whip, confiscated from the barn in Gottrupel. A pair of handcuffs were on his wrists at all times, and with the temperature in the cell well below freezing, Rudolf’s uncovered feet quickly developed frostbite.
*
Three days later, on March 15, 1946, Hanns delivered Rudolf to Camp Tomato, a British-run prison near the town of Minden. There, Colonel Gerald Draper—the War Crimes Group’s lawyer—began a further round of intensive questioning. A few hours afterwards, Rudolf’s statement was typed up into an eight-page confession and a one-paragraph summary. It was the first time that a concentration camp Kommandant had provided details of the Final Solution. Rudolf had confessed to coordinating the killing of two million people.
17
HANNS AND RUDOLF
BELSEN AND NUREMBERG, GERMANY
1946
* * *
After dropping Rudolf off in prison, Hanns drove to Hamburg and checked in at the Atlantic, a luxurious hotel on the banks of Lake Alster. He headed for the bar and began an evening of heavy drinking. Later that night, on the way back to his room on the third floor, he noticed that some guests had left their shoes outside their rooms. Looking around to make sure nobody was watching, he snatched them up and slung them down the stairwell.
The next day he was happily surprised to see his twin brother at breakfast. He had imagined that Paul was still busy supervising a prisoner-of-war camp but, as had so often happened during the war, their schedules coincided.
“What did you do last night?” Paul asked.
“I drank too much and threw officers’ shoes down the stairs from the third floor!”
“Funny, I did exactly the same thing, but I took them from the fourth floor!”
At breakfast, they did not speak about their work at any great length; it was not something they talked about, either then or later. Paul was tired of life in the army, furious at all that the Germans had done, and simply wanted to go back to England. Similarly, Hanns, while proud of his war crimes work, had so much that he didn’t want to relive: the horrors he had seen in Belsen, the testimony given by the SS officers from Auschwitz, the intensity of tracking down the war criminals. Far better, they both thought, to get drunk. And so, the twins embarked on a grand tour of Hamburg’s bars, drinking vast amounts together, continuing their celebration of the arrest of Rudolf Höss.
Five days later, Hanns drove back to Belsen. There he was congratulated again by his commander, Lieutenant Colonel Tilling, and given some big news: it was time to go home.
With the end of the Belsen trials, and with the Nuremberg Trials well under way, Haystack needed to undergo a transformation. They would now focus on different targets: some of the lesser SS guards, industrialists who had collaborated with the Nazis, and a new breed of enemy—the men and women who were undermining the British and American efforts in the burgeoning Cold War. New investigators had arrived in the camp, men with real police and legal experience. Amateurs such as Hanns were no longer required.
Hanns was not disappointed; he was more than ready to return to civilian life. He spent the next few days typing up a report of his time in Berlin and Flensburg and filling out administrative forms. A few days later he said goodbye to his colleagues, and then hitched a ride on an army truck to Brussels. As he crossed the border out of Germany, Hanns swore that he would never return to the country of his birth.
From Belgium he took a ferry across the Channel, and from there, a train to Guildford. Here he was given his demobilization papers and a brand-new dark blue suit. It was April 20, 1946. Hanns’s war had finally ended.
A few days later, he received an envelope in the mail. Inside were his naturalization papers. After six and a half years in the British Army, Hanns Herman Alexander had finally become a British citizen.
On Sunday, May 19, 1946, Hanns and Ann were married at the recently formed New Liberal Jewish Synagogue in northwest London. Hanns wore his starched khaki British Army uniform and shiny patent leather boots, his cap tilted roguishly to one side. Ann had chosen an ivory bridal gown, accessorized with a matching pillbox hat, a short veil and high-heeled shoes. Paul—who had been demobilized on the same day as his brother—stood next to them, also dressed in his army uniform. Behind them, in a curtained cupboard, lay the Alexander Torah.
*
The Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, more commonly known as the Nuremberg Trials, had opened four months before Rudolf Höss’s arrest. The city had been chosen to host the trial partly for its historical significance—it was here that tens of thousands of people had attended Hitler’s rallies at the height of Nazi power in the 1930s—but also because it was located in the American Zone. And although the trials were considered an international effort, the Allies had agreed that the U.S. would run the show.
The trials were being held at the Palace of Justice. Built from a blend of white, beige, bronze and almond-colored stone, the building occupied an entire block. Despite suffering some damage during the war, the palace had survived mostly intact.
The trials began on November 20, 1945. Justice Robert Jackson, the chief prosecutor for the Americans, provided the opening statement.
The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated. That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hands of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.
Charges of crimes against humanity were read out against twenty-four of the highest-ranking Nazis then in captivity, including Hermann Göring (head of the Luftwaffe and designated successor to Hitler), Rudolf Hess (Hitler’s deputy), Albert Speer (responsible for armaments), Joachim von Ribbentrop (foreign minister), Hans Frank (head of the government in occupied Poland), Ernst Kaltenbrunner (chief of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or Reich Security Main Office, and the highest-ranking SS officer after Himmler’s death). Martin Bormann (head of the Nazi Party), who was still missing, would be tried in absentia.
Over the course of the previous four months, the prosecution had called hundreds of witnesses and submitted reams of affidavits from concentration camp victims. They had entered stacks of correspondence, from one senior leader to another, into evidence, as well as purchase orders and receipts which evidenced the supply of Zyklon B in the camps, and copies of the personnel files that proved the precise whereabouts and responsibilities of the defendants. The evidence was undeniable: the Nazis had overseen mass murder and atrocity on an unprec
edented scale. But when the time came for the accused to take the stand, each in turn denied knowledge of this genocide.
The Nuremberg Trials were covered extensively by the world’s media. With each passing day, the newspapers published increasingly alarmed editorials speculating that many of the men on trial might avoid guilty verdicts, despite their apparent involvement with the murder of millions of Jews, Communists and Gypsies in the camps. It looked as though the trials might become an abject failure.
Meanwhile, news of Rudolf’s arrest had spread.
*
On March 17, 1946, the New York Times reported that, after a nine-month search, British agents had captured Rudolf Höss, “probably the greatest individual killer in the history of the world.” A few days later, British military newsletters published in Hamburg, Flensburg and other German cities ran similar stories under the headline “Two million persons gassed! The Kommandant of Auschwitz confesses.” These articles provided details that Rudolf had given to the British at Camp Tomato, including his description of the selections, the gas chambers and the crematoria.
Yet despite his arrest, confession and newfound publicity, it was not clear where Rudolf himself would stand trial. The Allies had agreed that war criminals should be handed over to the countries where their crimes took place. The problem was that such a trial required considerable organizational skills and resources, not something readily available to the nascent Polish government now struggling to run a war-ravaged country, let alone supervise a major war crimes trial.
Cables zipped back and forth between London and Warsaw, with the British offering to try Rudolf themselves, and the Poles refusing to commit to a hearing.
While the argument raged as to where Höss should stand trial, Whitney Harris, a young American prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, came up with an idea. He was coming to the end of the case against Ernst Kaltenbrunner and was desperate to find a high-ranking figure willing to confirm what had taken place in the concentration camps. After reading one of the news reports, Harris realized that if Rudolf Höss appeared as a witness, then his testimony would not only become part of the official record, thus corroborating the evidence given by so many of the victims, but, just perhaps, other defendants might be implicated, or shamed into admitting their own guilt.
Harris sent an urgent cable to Camp Tomato requesting that Rudolf Höss be brought to Nuremberg:
30 March 1946
British War Crimes Executive
European Section Nuremberg
211430A
Restricted
PRESS REPORT THAT RUDOLF HÖSS FORMER KOMMANDANT OF AUSCHWITZ CONCENTRATION CAMPS HAS BEEN CAPTURED (.) CONSIDER HÖSS CAN PROBABLY PROVIDE INFORMATION IMPLICATING KALTENBRUNNER AND OTHERS AND WOULD BE GRATEFUL IF HE CAN BE BROUGHT TO NUREMBERG SOONEST (SOONEST) FOR INTERROGATION (.) ON ARRIVAL HERE HE SHOULD BE TRANSFERRED IN CARE OF 6850 I.S.D. PALACE OF JUSTICE AND ESCORT SHOULD REPORT TO ROOM 216 PALACE OF JUSTICE (.) PLEASE SIGNAL E.T.A.
The next day, two British military policemen transported the manacled Rudolf Höss from Camp Tomato three hundred miles south to Nuremberg. He was processed at the palace by a clerk who filled in a “Prisoner of War Preliminary Record,” which included basic information such as name, date of birth, rank, height and weight. Under “characteristics,” he wrote that the prisoner had gold-filled teeth, brown eyes, fair hair, and “frozen” left and right feet, and then had Rudolf sign the page.
After being fingerprinted, Rudolf was taken down a spiral staircase to the basement, his footsteps echoing off the corridor’s whitewashed walls. Outside each cell stood an American guard, posted there on twenty-four-hour watch ever since the suicide of one defendant, Robert Ley, a few months earlier. Rudolf was placed alone in a bare concrete-walled cell in the basement of the palace’s C Wing. The cell had a tiny window near the ceiling. All it contained was a cot with a thin mattress and a woolen blanket folded neatly at its end, a wooden stool and a bucket in the corner.
The next morning, on April 1, 1946, Rudolf was taken to a small office where Whitney Harris sat behind a wooden table, with a court reporter and a translator beside him. The three weeks in British captivity had taken their toll. Rudolf’s eyes were bloodshot, his cheeks were unshaven and gaunt, his frame appeared fragile. He was a shrunken man. Nevertheless, Harris was surprised by Rudolf’s appearance. He had expected to meet a larger man, someone who exuded power and brutality, someone with charisma. Instead, Rudolf seemed to Harris like an ordinary-looking fellow, like a “grocer’s assistant,” somebody you wouldn’t give a second look to if you passed him on the street.
By contrast, Whitney Harris looked dapper, dressed in a dark blue navy uniform with double-breasted jacket and large brass buttons. Harris was excited, for while he had been in Nuremberg since the previous summer and had talked face-to-face with many of the senior Nazis held there, he still hadn’t met anybody who could provide details on the inner workings of the concentration camps.
Rudolf sat before him, his eyes fixed on the floor, waiting for Harris to speak. The only sound was that of the prisoner cracking his knuckles. After a few moments the American prosecutor asked for a brief rundown of Rudolf’s biography. As the interpreter translated Rudolf’s words, Harris wrote the answers on a legal pad lying on the table. Eventually, they came to Auschwitz. How many people had been killed there? Harris asked. Without hesitation, Rudolf told him that three million had died: two and a half million in the gas chambers and another half a million from starvation and disease.
While Harris was deeply disturbed by the emotionless confession, he was also quietly pleased. Such a statement would play a key role in the trial, since all the defendants had refused to confirm what had taken place at the concentration camps up until this point. By now Harris had rested the case for the prosecution, but he had managed to persuade Kaltenbrunner’s defense lawyers to call Rudolf as a witness. They were happy to oblige, for their defendant had been charged with the construction and the maintenance of camps, and Rudolf’s testimony would prove that Kaltenbrunner had never even visited Auschwitz.
The next day Harris interviewed Rudolf again, and spent the evening typing up his confession. Harris selected only the most pertinent parts of the Kommandant’s testimony, which he put into his own words. The thrust and meaning of the affidavit was the Kommandant’s, he would later maintain; all he had done was to select words that would have the most impact in court. Returning the next day to Rudolf’s cell, he then presented the prisoner with a polished affidavit. With only minor changes, Rudolf agreed—after all, he had learned to speak English while in jail in the 1920s—and signed at the bottom of the last page. Now it was only a question of the defense deciding when to bring Rudolf forward as a witness.
*
With so many senior Nazis held in one place at the same time, the Americans had instructed a panel of psychologists to conduct extensive interviews and tests with the defendants. While Rudolf waited in his cell to be called as a witness, he was visited by a psychologist and a psychiatrist.
The first was Gustave Gilbert, a New Yorker born to Jewish-Austrian immigrants. Gilbert asked Rudolf to complete a simple intelligence test as well as a Rorschach inkblot test. He concluded that, like the other Nazis he had interviewed, Rudolf tested above average for intelligence. Gilbert then asked for a brief career summary. As he had done with Harris, Rudolf admitted in an unemotional tone that he had been responsible for the deaths of more than two and a half million Jews. The American then asked how it was possible to kill so many people. “Technically,” answered Rudolf, “that wasn’t so hard—it would not have been hard to exterminate even greater numbers.” Gilbert then pressed him for an emotional response, but Rudolf continued in a similar tone: “At the time there were no consequences to consider. It didn’t occur to me that I would be held responsible. You see, in Germany it was understood that if something went wrong, then the man who gave the orders was responsible.” Gilbert started to ask, “But what about the human—” b
efore Rudolf interrupted, “That just didn’t enter into it.” After a few more questions, Rudolf said, “I suppose you want to know in this way if my thought and habits are normal.” “Well, what do you think?” Gilbert asked. “I am entirely normal,” said Rudolf. “Even while I was doing the extermination work, I led a normal family life.” When Gilbert then asked about his social life, the Kommandant replied that he was a loner by nature, unable to interact on any deep level with friends and colleagues, and that he felt at his best when he was alone. He confessed that he had stopped having sex with his wife after she found out about the gas chambers in the camp, and although he confirmed having affairs during his marriage, claimed that he was not a very sexual man. When Gilbert asked about his feelings towards his Jewish victims, Rudolf explained that it was just assumed that the Jews were to blame for the economic and social hardships in Germany and that this came from the newspapers as well as the military, who declared that they had to protect Germany from the Jews. “You can be sure that it was not always pleasant to see those mountains of corpses and smell the continual burning,” he continued, “but Himmler had ordered it and had even explained the necessity and I really never gave much thought to whether it was wrong.” Rudolf added, “The problem itself, the extermination of Jewry was not new—but only that I was to be the one to carry it out, frightened me at first. But after getting the clear direct order and even an explanation with it—there was nothing left but to carry it out.”
Hanns and Rudolf Page 23
