by Helen Fry
von Brauchitsch, Field Marshal (no date)
von Kleist, Field Marshal (no date)
von Manstein, Field Marshal (no date)
von Leeb, Field Marshal, 20.6.46
Halder, Generaloberst, 21.6.46
List, Generalfeldmarshal, 24.6.46
Back in the cells in C wing were various other Field Marshals and Generals, including Sepp Dietrich, 54-year old head of the Hitler Bodyguard regiment, SS General and commander of the Sixth Panzer Army from 1944 until 1945. He was originally captured by American forces and brought to Nuremberg prison. He protested that he was not a member of Hitler’s inner circle but was only involved with him on official business. Howard and Goldensohn entered his cell to question him about his relationship to the Führer. Dietrich told them he last saw the leader on 25 February 1945.
‘How did he look?’ asked Goldensohn. ‘Sick. Almost completely finished,’ replied Dietrich. When questioned about atrocities, Dietrich argued that the mass execution of Russians was purely propaganda on the part of the Allies to discredit Germany. He claimed that as a Catholic, he himself was not anti-Semitic as borne out by his belief that the solution to the Jewish problem should have been to allow Jews to leave en masse, aided as much as possible by the Third Reich.
Other witnesses interviewed by Howard and Goldensohn included former Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, later sentenced by a British Military Court and imprisoned. Albert Kesselring, Field Marshal of the Luftwaffe and Supreme Commander of German forces in Italy, was tried in Venice by a British Military Court; and Franz Halder whom Hitler had dismissed in September 1942 for opposing the German offensive on Stalingrad. Halder made an attempt on Hitler’s life in 1944 and spent the rest of the war in Ravensbrück concentration camp.
SS AND DEATH SQUADS
Another witness at the original trial was Walter Schellenberg who had been in Counter-Espionage, the Chief of Secret Intelligence Services of the RSHA, then head of the SS. He would later receive a prison sentence for his crimes. The witnesses were visited less often than the main defendants and, as such, kept their distance from Howard and Goldensohn. In their responses about war crimes and their own part in them, witnesses like Ohlendorf and later Rudolf Höss often appeared more ruthless than the main defendants.
Otto Ohlendorf, head of security services of the Reich Security Main Officer and Commander of the death Squads (Einsatzgruppe) on the Eastern Front, was questioned by Goldensohn about his role in the orders to liquidate Soviet Jews. Ohlendorf proceeded to describe in detail the rounding up and shooting of Jews. In a matter-of-fact way with no sign of remorse he told Howard and Goldensohn that he had been informed that 90,000 Jews were shot, including children but he reckoned the figure was nearer 70,000.
‘He confidently analyzed his figures,’ says Howard, ‘and told us it was about 5,000 a day for a year. Ohlendorf explained his position by telling us he did not personally carry out the shootings but gave the orders to the death squads.’ So Ohlendorf justified his actions by claiming he could not disobey orders from above. He went on to explain that if he had not carried out the killings, someone else would have done it for the regime. He maintained that lives would not have been saved by his refusal to carry out orders. This marked a totally new line of argumentation. Rather than disobey his leaders, Ohlendorf understood his role to ensure the killings were carried out in a humane way. Howard could not believe the coldness and audacity of the man. He recalls:
‘As I translated his responses, a chill ran through me. By now, I should have been used to anything, having already heard so much in the cells. But still there were shocks for us. Did he expect us to feel that his approach towards humane killings exonerated him?’
Otto Ohlendorf was sentenced to death at a later Nuremberg hearing in April 1948 and hanged on 8 June 1951.
Another witness brought into the prison was former SS Obergruppenführer Oswald Pohl who arrested by British forces on 27 May 1946. Pohl had built up the Nazi administration in the 1930s as chief in the SS and towards the end of the war was responsible for the administration of the concentration camps and SS industrial enterprises. Goldensohn questioned him about his background and family. Pohl explained how he had been sought out by Himmler as early as 1933. He gave assurances to Howard and Goldensohn that he would tell them everything and hold nothing back.
In an interview in June 1946, they learned how gold teeth from victims of the concentration camp were sent to Pohl’s office on Himmler’s direct orders. Pohl said he never handled the goods himself because his task was the administration of the camps, which he carried out efficiently according to Himmler’s orders. Pohl was therefore adamant that he had no part in the killing of Jews. Taking charge of the administration of eleven concentration camps did not in his eyes make him guilty. For him, administration had nothing to do with Hitler’s extermination program. Pohl believed that the Jewish problem should have been solved for Hitler and Germany without extermination. He told Goldensohn through Howard:
‘If I were really an anti-Semite, I would have hated Jews – but I never hated them. All I did was follow orders. My conscience is clear. I never ordered the death of a Jew or personally killed one.’
Pohl’s solution to the Jewish problem was to deny the Jews their jobs and homes, and thus drive them out of Germany, without a need to kill them. In this way, Pohl denied any responsibility for the acts of the other Nazi leaders.
The questioning of Pohl then turned to his views on the forced labour of Russians in the camps, especially in Landsberg which Goldensohn had visited just before the end of the war. Pohl responded that he himself had nothing to do with the Landsberg camp. He told Howard and Goldensohn that there were several hundred labour camps all over Germany and he could not visit all of them to regulate conditions. In this way, too, he could argue that he was not responsible for conditions in the camps. The Allies had too much incriminating evidence on Pohl to free him. Pohl found himself in the dock at a subsequent Nuremberg trial and was sentenced to death. On 8 June 1951, he was hanged at Landsberg prison.
FACING THE PAST
Occasionally, figures from Howard’s past came to Nuremberg and sought him out, maybe with a guilty conscience to put their minds at rest about the past. During 1946, visitors included Mr Povel who had purchased Berthold’s factory in the summer of 1938, and his manager Mr Dittmann who had survived the war in spite of being half-Jewish and married to a Gentile. From their visit, Howard learnt that his father’s old factory at 2-4 Mueller Strasse had been subjected to Allied bombing and could no longer be used. Povel was running the business from different premises. Povel tried to convince Howard that he had paid an honest price for the factory and that Berthold Triest had got what he wanted for it.
Povel and Dittmann asked Howard if he harboured any resentment or bad feeling towards them. Howard assured them that he did not. This was in part due to the fact that, as he admits, he was ‘riding on top of the world as part of the occupying American forces.’ What did he want with a few rooms in a factory? Howard was now an American soldier and American citizen. Munich held nothing for him materialistically that he wanted to save from his past.
Before he said goodbye to Howard, Povel asked if he could have a can of gas because their vehicle had run out. One thing Povel knew was that the Americans were not short of certain supplies. Six decades later, Howard can look back on the irony of that moment and say, ‘the young Jewish lad whose father had been forced to sell out to the big German industrialists, gladly gave them a can of gas.’
It is clear that part of Howard’s ability to deal so well with the pain of the past comes from his year spent at Nuremberg. In the cells, he faced the past head on. That has to have made the difference to his psychological healing. On a daily basis, he came personally close to those who had destroyed his life in Germany and murdered his parents. It provided an immediate and personal form of closure which other victims of the Holocaust did not experience, including those who served in different
units of the American forces.
Of the two psychiatrists, Howard became closer to Goldensohn, partly because they worked together for much longer than with Kelley. But also Goldensohn took a genuine interest in Howard’s past. The two men become friends over the seven months that they worked together. Goldensohn expressed a desire to see Munich and the places of Howard’s childhood. One weekend, Howard and Goldensohn drove to Munich together. They walked the sites of Howard’s childhood and saw for themselves the textile factory which had once belonged to Berthold Triest and was now bomb damaged. The devastation from Allied bombing was as bad there as other major German cities.
As they explored old haunts, Howard was able to explain how his father Berthold was a proud German veteran of the Great War who had served from August 1914 to February 1919 as a Field Hospital inspector and been awarded the Iron Cross. Howard stood with Goldensohn outside the former artist’s apartment at 2-4 Manhardt Strasse where he was born twenty-three years earlier. So much had happened in the intervening years. Re-living the memories and the past with Goldensohn, a psychiatrist, must have contributed to the emotional journey and healing process for Howard.
FIFTEEN
NUREMBERG: THE VERDICT
THE ARCHITECTS OF the war were dead: Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler, but the Nuremberg Court would ensure the other defendants paid for their part in the crimes. Now July 1946, after nine long months, the trial proceedings were over. The world had been presented with evidence for the worst atrocities in human history. Now it awaited the verdict on the twenty-one defendants who were deemed responsible for heinous war crimes. The psychiatrists had done their job and ensured the men had been fit to stand trial.
Dr Leon Goldensohn left Nuremberg on 26 July 1946, the day the final speeches were given to the courtroom by US Chief Justice Jackson and British Prosecutor, Sir Hartley Shawcross. In his speech that day, Chief Justice Jackson told the court: ‘If you were to say of these men that they are not guilty, it would be as true to say that there had been no war, there were no slain, there has been no crime.’
Howard remained at the prison on various duties for Colonel Andrus until October. The defendants faced just over two months of isolation in their cells before the verdicts would be decided.
On 1 October 1946, the courtroom convened for a final time to read out the verdicts. The Court was told by Sir Hartley Shawcross that all were guilty of ‘common murder in its most ruthless form’, but the sentences would vary for some of them:
•Hermann Goering: guilty on all 4 counts. Death by hanging
•Julius Streicher: guilty on all 4 counts. Death by hanging
•Rudolf Hess: guilty on counts 1 and 2. Life imprisonment
•Joachim von Ribbentrop: guilty on all 4 counts. Death by hanging
•Ernst Kaltenbrunner: guilty on counts 3 and 4. Death by hanging
•Alfred Rosenberg: guilty on all 4 counts. Death by hanging
•Hans Frank: guilty on counts 3 and 4. Death by hanging
•Wilhelm Frick: guilty on counts 2, 3 and 4. Death by hanging
•Walther Funk: guilty on counts 2, 3 and 4. Life imprisonment
•Karl Doenitz: guilty on counts 2 and 3. Ten years imprisonment Erich Raeder: guilty on counts, 1, 2 and 3. Life imprisonment
•Keitel: guilty on all 4 counts. Death by hanging
•Baldur von Schirach: guilty on count 4. Twenty years imprisonment
•Fritz Sauchel: guilty on count 3 and 4. Death by hanging
•Alfred Jodl: guilty on all 4 counts. Death by hanging
•Artur Seyss-Inquart: guilty on counts 2, 3 and 4. Death by hanging
•Albert Speer: guilty on Counts 3 and 4. Twenty years imprisonment
•Baron von Neurath: guilty on all 4 counts. Fifteen years imprisonment
•Hans Fritzsche: not guilty
•Hjalmar Schacht: not guilty
•Franz von Papen: Not guilty.
Martin Bormann, Hitler’s secretary and successor to Rudolf Hess, was sentenced to death in absentia. The Allies did not know then that he had already committed suicide and that his body lay under the ruins of Berlin. It was not until 1972 that the remains of his body were discovered in the city.
Three defendants, Hjalmar von Schacht, Franz von Papen and Hans Fritzsche were found not guilty and freed by the court. It was to be a bitter sweet freedom. In spite of the verdict, they walked out of the prison complex to a hostile reception by the German people and feared for their lives. They found a world deeply embittered by thirteen years of a brutal Nazi regime. The world was not ready to receive them as free men.
Albert Speer, Erich Raeder, Karl Doenitz, Walther Funk, Baron von Neurath, Baldur von Schirach and Rudolf Hess received prison sentences. Hess served his sentence of life-imprisonment in Berlin’s Spandau prison and died there in 1987 in his nineties. Ironically Hess’s paranoia was proved wrong because he lived the longest and no one poisoned him, although conspiracy theories have since suggested that he was assassinated at that time by the British or American Secret Service. The other eleven defendants were sentenced to death by hanging.
GOERING’S LAST ACT
On 16 October 1946, the hangmen prepared the gallows at Nuremberg for the eleven men. None of the defendants were informed when the executions were to be carried out. For sixteen days they waited. They were finally told the exact time of their fate just hours before the scheduled hangings. The executions were to take place during the night, on gallows specially constructed in the prison gymnasium. In an unexpected last minute move, one man evaded justice. Goering had one final surprise in store for Colonel Andrus. After the verdicts were delivered by the court and the sentences read on 30 September 1946, Goering had made a request to be shot according to military code. His plea was denied. He returned to his cell where psychologist Dr Gilbert awaited him. Gilbert asked him about the verdict.
Goering looked pale, his eyes popping. ‘Death!’ he replied.
Dr Gilbert records: ‘he dropped on the cot [bed] and reached for a book. His hands were trembling in spite of his attempt to be nonchalant. His eyes were moist and he was panting.’ Gilbert was then asked to leave the cell.
All the best efforts to keep a constant watch on the defendants could not prevent a determined Goering from committing suicide just hours before his hanging. Prison staff rushed into his cell but it was too late to prevent fatal effects of the cyanide pill. While Howard was not present for the hangings, because he had just been transferred to Military Government in Munich, he kept up with the final days of the accused at Nuremberg.
Rumours circulated at that time that the cyanide pill was given to Goering by an American prison guard who had befriended him over the course of his time in the jail. A Texan and former hunter, the guard came to admire Goering the hunter. Since he and Goering shared a passion for the sport, it gave them common ground during the extraordinary period in the prison. If true, this growing friendship had possible consequences in the final days of the trial. It was believed that Goering gave the guard his expensive gold watch in exchange for a cyanide pill. What use was the watch to a condemned man? A cyanide pill was far more valuable. Ultimately, no one really knew for certain how Goering obtained that fatal pill.
Howard comments: ‘Goering’s suicide broke Colonel Andrus who felt personally responsible. There was a feeling that like Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels, Goering had escaped any form of justice by taking his own life.’
The other ten men faced their fate and were hanged by executioner John C. Woods. Julius Streicher remained anti-Semitic to the end. His last thoughts and fanatical words were ironically for the Jews. From the gallows, he shouted the words ‘Purim Fest 1946’, a mirror reference to the biblical event of the suffering of the Jews in the time of Esther and Purim over two and a half thousand years earlier. Streicher knew the Bible well.
After the hangings, to prevent conspiracy theories, each defendant’s body was photographed as evidence to the world that they were dead. The bodies wer
e taken under armed guard to Dachau concentration camp where they were cremated in the same ovens that had killed thousands of Jews. It is believed that the ashes of the condemned men were, ironically, taken to Munich’s Isar River and scattered there – the same river that Howard and his father had walk along during the pogrom against Jews on 9/10 November 1938, and the same river in which Berthold’s WW1 dagger and helmet had been cast.
Although Howard had left Nuremberg before the hangings, he comments: ‘I did not personally see the men hang, but I saw pictures afterwards. I was glad that at least we had eliminated some of the evil from the world but, in my estimation, not enough of them.’
In summing up his experience of Nuremberg, Howard says: ‘None of them, however relaxed and open they were with us, confessed to being guilty. They could not see the wrong they had done. Whatever they said in the prison cell, we listened. Some of their stories made very little difference to their situation – certainly it did not change their fate. And I never once felt sorry for them.’
THE LASTING IMPRESSION OF NUREMBERG
It was to be the figures of Hermann Goering and Julius Streicher who made a lasting impression on Howard. Howard would live forever in the shadow and pain of the Holocaust and the shadow of the figures responsible for it. They left an indelible, if uncomfortable and painful, mark on Howard’s psyche. But of all the defendants, it is the memory of Julius Streicher which continues to haunt him over six decades later:
‘Although I became closely connected to all the defendants and came to know them well, I did not warm to any one of them. The defendants stood united in disowning the killing machine and saying they were following orders. They felt that the only reason they were on trial was because they had lost the war, not because they had committed terrible things. They may appear larger than life as far as history is concerned but they certainly did not offer a picture of superiority. They were ordinary men and some looked very pitiful. When I think back to the one who was the nicest to me and who treated me the best, it was Streicher – the biggest Jew-baiter of all time. That does not mean that I ever grew to like him, but Streicher seemed to like me and trusted me. They all did, but him most of all.’
