The Splendid Blond Beast

by Simpson, Christopher; Miller, Mark Crispin;

  Can different genocides and episodes of mass political violence be compared with one another or even jointly discussed within the covers of a single book? This question becomes particularly acute when studying the Nazi Holocaust side by side with other mass crimes. At least four legitimate concerns are sometimes raised when authors identify common elements among the Holocaust and other crimes. The first and most basic of these concerns is that the Holocaust may be denigrated, cheapened, or exploited by comparison to other events. The second concern is that the events of the Holocaust were factually so different from the events of any other suffering—in the scope of the Nazi crime, its sophistication, and its absolute determination to exterminate Jews as such—that for strictly scientific reasons it may be impossible or inappropriate to compare the Holocaust with other genocides. Third, there is a belief that the positivist scientific method used by most historians and authors is not adequate for understanding the Holocaust, that the limits of this method will inevitably reduce attempts at understanding to banalities. Finally, some people are convinced on religious or philosophical grounds that the Holocaust was unique, separate from all other human history, and that it cannot be rationally understood, but instead must be contemplated on a spiritual or even mystical plane. These concerns are realistic and are sometimes based on bitter experience.

  But to claim that study of the Holocaust must be separate from all other inquiries “romanticize[s] evil and gives it mythic proportions,” contends Ervin Staub, who is himself a survivor of the Jewish ghetto at Budapest. “It discourage[s] the realistic understanding that is necessary if we are to work effectively for a world without genocides and mass killings and torture. Only by understanding the roots of evil do we gain the possibility of shaping the future so that it will not happen again.”13

  Extreme evil such as genocide defies comparisons of magnitude. The Holocaust is clearly not the same as the Armenian Genocide, nor are these atrocities equal in some hackneyed sense. Each has terrible, distinctive features that set it apart.

  The tendency in some quarters to mystify the Holocaust can actually rob it of significance, according to Yehuda Bauer, head of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at Hebrew University. If the Holocaust is reduced to an event outside of any historical context, the world can then neither understand it in itself nor learn from it as a warning for the future. Discussion of the Holocaust with other atrocities does not mean they are simplistically equivalent, Bauer insisted.14 Instead, it is appropriate to compare events accurately, including instances of genocide, and to discern the differences among them on the basis of facts.

  Sociologist Helen Fein, author of Accounting for Genocide and the director of the Institute for the Study of Genocide in New York, made a similar point in a recent discussion of the various understandings of the uniqueness of the Holocaust. For Fein, comparative studies should probe not only the singular features of the Holocaust, but also those elements that it had in common with other, crimes.15 Other noted scholars contend that historically based, scientific studies of the Holocaust and other instances of genocide are not only appropriate, but are also morally imperative.16

  The Turkish murders of Armenians and the Nazi Holocaust are more deeply linked than simply being two examples of genocide. The international failure to halt the Armenian Genocide or to bring its perpetrators to justice was in part a product of the then-existing structure of international law and international relations. That failure was not inevitable, but it was in a certain terrible sense the logical result of a mass murder committed within the context of international law as it then stood.

  That tragedy in turn helped shape Hitler’s ambition to exterminate Jews. Hitler repeatedly pointed to the Turkish race-murder of Armenians as an example for his own thinking.17 Meanwhile, the reasons of state that had obstructed international efforts to rescue Armenians carried through to World War II largely intact, so that by the 1940s the Allied refusal to rescue Jews also seemed to key U.S. officials of the day to be reasonable and “appropriate,” even in situations where rescue would have been relatively simple and inexpensive.18

  The account that follows traces how leaders of the United States and the major European powers intentionally frustrated the “immediate demands of justice” for the victims of World War I, as U.S. Secretary of State Robert Lansing put it,19 in the hope of reestablishing a world order that would favor them in the aftermath of the war.

  During the 1920s, this shaky new order gave birth to a coterie of bankers, international lawyers, and diplomats who specialized in the complex tasks of U.S.-European trade, investment, and geopolitics. For simplicity’s sake, this book focuses on U.S.-German relations, though of course the United States established substantial new economic and political ties with almost every European country, Japan, and leading Asian nations.

  Hitler’s seizure of power in Germany presented U.S. and German business groups with complex opportunities and challenges. The Nazi-sponsored Aryanization campaigns, clandestine rearmament, industrial bailouts, and public-works programs created a gold rush for businesses favored by the Nazi government. The chauvinistic Nazis tended to view U.S.-based multinational companies with suspicion, but encouraged them to invest in Germany when it seemed to be in their interest to do so. Soon U.S. corporate investment was expanding more rapidly in Hitler’s Germany than in any other country in Europe, despite the worldwide economic depression.20

  During World War II, the structure of international law established in the wake of World War I not only obstructed efforts to rescue European Jews, but it also became a tool in the hands of factions in Washington and London who favored making a separate peace with the Nazis at the expense of the USSR. They contended that Hitler’s crimes inside Axis countries were legal, technically speaking, and that Hitler himself was immune from prosecution because of his status as head of state. The Allies should avoid making too much of an issue of Nazi crimes, argued British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden and the U.S. State Department’s chief legal advisor, Green Hackworth, because doing so would undermine political initiatives to settle the war through negotiations; in addition, most atrocities would be impossible to prosecute.21 Tragically, these same factions often controlled the U.S. State Department’s day-to-day implementation of policy concerning Jewish immigration and refugee relief.

  This “legalist” faction was opposed by President Franklin Roosevelt and his secretary of the treasury, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., by U.S. War Crimes Commissioner Herbert Pell, by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and, for somewhat different reasons, by Soviet Premier Josef Stalin. These groups within the Allied camp fought tough legal and political battles over the extent of the authority of the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC); over the USSR’s massacre of Polish officers at Katyn; and, perhaps most importantly, over the Allies’ postwar plans for reconstruction of Germany.

  Meanwhile, much of the economic, political, and social elite in Germany, Vichy France, and most of the Nazi-occupied territories cooperated with the Nazis throughout their rule, only to lose confidence in Hitler’s government late in the game. De Gaulle’s France, the USSR, and some U.S. leaders favored harsh treatment of these corporate collaborators after the war, particularly in Germany. The U.S. and British foreign ministries strongly disagreed, as will be seen, as did leading corporate interests in the West.

  Both Allied factions acknowledged that much of Germany’s business elite had directly participated in the Holocaust, but they drew quite different conclusions from this fact. For Allied hard-liners, the business elite’s participation in Hitler’s extermination-through-forced-labor program rekindled their argument that new precedents must be set in international law by bringing such people to justice. In contrast, the foreign ministries insisted that most of the German elite’s activities had not been illegal under existing international agreements. Capitalism had grown terribly fragile in Europe owing to depression and war, they contended, and removing national elites from power would only streng
then the hand of native revolutionaries.

  The careers of John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles, who were to become U.S. secretary of state and director of the CIA respectively, were archetypes of the complex paths traveled by international economic elites during the first four decades after World War I. Their stories are emphasized in the pages that follow as an illustration of broader trends.

  In the wake of World War I, the Dulles brothers helped construct the international treaties and legal definitions that shut down efforts to bring mass murderers of that time to justice.22 Between the wars, both were active in U.S.-German trade and diplomatic relations, particularly in developing ornate corporate camouflage intended to frustrate efforts to increase public accountability of major companies. Like many other corporate leaders in the United States, the two brothers also disagreed for a time on how best to respond to the new war unfolding between Germany and Britain. They did agree, however, on what was to them the pivotal issue: the preservation of the influence of European business and diplomatic elites, including that of Germany, when the conflict was over.

  Allen Dulles exploited his post in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) to quash war crimes prosecutions of senior Nazi officials and German business leaders who cooperated with him in a series of clandestine schemes to secure U.S. advantage in Central Europe. He personally intervened to ensure the escape from prosecution of major German bankers and industrialists complicit in the Nazis’ extermination-through-labor program, according to archival records brought to light here for the first time.23 Dulles also protected SS Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff, the highest-ranking SS officer to survive the war and one of the principal sponsors of the Treblinka extermination camp, as well as a number of Wolff’s senior aides, who were alleged to have been responsible for deportation of Jews to Auschwitz and massacres of Italian partisans.24

  Meanwhile, John Foster Dulles helped forge consensus on Wall Street and in the Republican party in favor of an “internationalist” U.S. foreign policy based on rebuilding the German economic elite into a renewed bulwark against revolution in Europe. As will be seen, a key element in his effort was the extension of a de facto amnesty to most of Germany’s business leadership, regardless of their activities during the Third Reich.

  Herbert Pell’s UNWCC became one of the first targets for the Allied factions favoring clemency for Axis notables who had collaborated in Nazi crimes. State department legal chief Green Hackworth succeeded in engineering Pell’s dismissal in early 1945, then in shutting down the UNWCC altogether within thirty-six months after the end of the war. Then a U.S. intelligence agent named Ivan Kerno, who had worked with Allen Dulles since the 1920s and who served as senior legal counsel to the new United Nations Organization,25 sealed the UNWCC records, keeping them off-limits to war-crimes investigators for more than forty years. It took the scandal surrounding the wartime career of UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim to break these files open at last.

  The issue of personal and institutional responsibility for these events raises complicated questions of evidence and justice that are discussed more fully in the pages that follow. But one point is clear: There is no guarantee that the mere good faith of military victors or of a postgenocidal government will be adequate to come to grips with the crime of genocide or with similar systemic violence. The tendency, in fact, will be quite the opposite. The overall drift will be to forget, to compromise, and to walk away from injustice.

  But that is getting ahead of the story. To understand why the postwar efforts to bring Nazis to justice turned out the way they did, it is first necessary to go back to an earlier generation’s experience with slaughter, when the international community tried for the first time to bring the perpetrators of genocide to justice.

  * A good definition for these terms can be found in the Allied Control Council Law No. 10, promulgated at Berlin in December 1945.

  War crimes, that text said, are “atrocities and offenses … constituting violations of the laws or customs of war,” such as murder or ill treatment of prisoners of war, plunder, wanton destruction, or devastation that is “not justified by military necessity.”

  Crimes against humanity on the other hand, include “atrocities and offenses including but not limited to murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, imprisonment, torture, rape, or other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population,” or “persecution on political, racial or religious grounds whether or not in violation of the domestic laws of the country where perpetrated.”

  Finally, crimes against peace are defined as “initiation of invasions of other countries and wars of aggression in violation of international law and treaties,” including the planning of such wars.

  2

  “The Immediate Demands of Justice”

  Punishment of defeated powers for war crimes and crimes against humanity was the first item on the agenda of the peace conference that opened in Paris in 1919. The previous year had seen extraordinary changes in world affairs. Three world empires that had stood for centuries all finally collapsed. In czarist Russia, Communists seized power in late 1917 and took that country out of the European war a few months later, though a civil war continued in the East. The Ottoman Empire in the Middle East disintegrated, and Republican governments supplanted the old monarchy in what once was Austria-Hungary. Armies mutinied in Germany and serious attempts at revolution exploded in Berlin and Budapest. Nations such as Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia that had long been subordinate territories of old regimes could see independence on the horizon. Existing countries wanted their borders redrawn at the expense of the defeated powers of World War I.

  The governments that waged the war had killed at least seven million soldiers, but that was only the official estimate, and it was almost certainly low. Czarist Russia alone lost about 1.7 million soldiers; Germany, a much smaller country, lost 1.6 million; France, about a million. The United States, which entered the war after much of the killing had already taken place, suffered over 120,000 dead.1 It was by far the most deadly conflict in history up to that time.

  Civilians sacrificed the most. In Turkey, the ruling junta attempted to exterminate that country’s largest minority group, the Armenians, through pogroms, mass murder, and deportation. They killed about one million people between 1915 and 1918. More than half of the dead were children, and almost all the casualities were civilians.2 In Europe, civilian suffering became desperate even where there was no genocide. There is no reliable accounting of these losses, but some insight can be gained from the fact that in Europe new forms of starvation diseases were discovered during the war. These took the name hunger edema—hunger swelling—and were believed to be “a species of dropsy first noticed in 1916,” according to contemporary reports, “which specially affected the old, the overworked, and inmates of institutions.”3 Epidemics of tuberculosis and influenza during the war killed at least three times as many people as did the fighting itself, and most of the afflicted were children and the elderly. Cholera and typhus ripped through civilian populations, particularly in southeastern Europe, despite improvements in public health measures among soldiers.4

  The U.S. Federal Reserve Board found that by the spring of 1918 the belligerents had spent about $140 billion on the execution of the war, with the expectation that another $20 billion would be spent before the year was out. This was strictly for soldiers’ pay, military hardware, and other direct costs. These were almost unimaginable outlays for that era, representing the bulk of existing productive capacity of all Western society.5

  When the 1919 Paris Peace Conference opened, most of the victors believed that the defeated Central Powers—Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and Bulgaria—should be compelled to pay reparations to cover the winners’ war costs, and that the defeated military leaders should be punished. If Germany had instigated World War I (as the victors agreed) and had been criminal during the war’s execution, then Germany’s rulers and the country generally should be forced to pay heavy damages for
the destruction that had flowed from these acts. If, in the process, Germany should be eliminated as a commercial rival in the postwar world, so much the better.

  The 1919 conference was the forum at which these demands were to be made concrete. Officially, this was a gathering of the successful Entente, or Associated Powers—Great Britain, France, Italy, the United States, and several smaller countries—to decide the peace terms to present to Germany in what would become known as the Treaty of Versailles. The conferees made a self-conscious effort to bring defeated war criminals to justice as one element in a broad endeavor to redress the grievances left by the war.

  The issue of punishment for wartime atrocities played a much greater part in these peace talks than it had in any previous conflict, for at least three reasons.

  First, public opinion had been a more important factor in the conduct of war than previously, and public opinion strongly favored harsh punishment of those who had perpetrated atrocities. When fighting broke out in 1914, there had been plenty of nationalist enthusiasm among the citizens of the belligerents. But this support diminished as the number of casualties mounted and the futility of the fighting became apparent. Pacifist and Communist arguments that blamed the war on an imperial squabble among the rich won a widening audience as the months passed. By 1916, European governments on both sides of the conflict faced increasing difficulties mobilizing their populations to fight.