The treatment of Nazi criminals again became an important test of Allied intentions concerning Germany in the wake of the war. The Moscow Declaration began by agreeing to require the complete disarmament of Germany, then expressed commitments to dissolve the Nazi party in all of its forms, to return Nazis to face judgment in the countries where they were accused of committing crimes, to create a three-power advisory commission in London to make further recommendations on joint policies for postwar Germany, and to reach a “joint decision” among the three Allies concerning the disposition of Nazi leaders.*30
Two points are worth underlining. First, the Western Allies’ agreement that “any armistice” would include provisions to ship Nazi criminals back to the site of their crimes, if it was respected, amounted to a renewed guarantee that there would be no armistice with Germany without Soviet participation. Second, there was no direct mention that the murder of Jews, stateless people, and other Axis civilians was in any sense a crime, because the legal advisors at the State Department and the Foreign Office believed it was not. Jews as such were not mentioned even in the lists of atrocity victims in the declaration. This pivotal question of international law and justice remained unresolved.
A curious blunder occurred on the way to making the Moscow Declaration public. Owing to what was termed “an unfortunate mistake in ciphering,” the British Foreign Office staff in Moscow referred to the “wholesale shooting of Polish officers” in the Declaration’s list of victims of Nazi atrocities, rather than to “Italian” officers, as had been agreed by the three foreign ministers.31 The “Polish” version was released to the press in London and in Washington, while Moscow published the correct “Italian” version.
At the Goebbels ministry in Berlin, the propagandists noticed the difference between the Russian-language and English-language declarations, and exploited the blunder to call the Katyn massacre of Polish officers back to the center of public attention. The Soviets demanded and eventually won a formal correction from the British and the Americans, much to the dismay of the Polish exile government in London. Despite the correction, however, the incident had again placed the Katyn killings on the table, and Soviet enthusiasm for cooperation with the West in war crimes matters again soured.32
The Western Allies gutted Churchill’s plan to reduce Nazi violence through aggressive psychological warfare less than two months after the dramatic pronouncements in Moscow. During early November 1943, U.S. psychological warfare specialists began a major campaign to use the Moscow Declaration’s statements about trials for Nazi criminals as a centerpiece for messages aimed at Germans and other peoples living under Nazi rule. But on November 23, U.S. Army Air Forces (AAF) headquarters in Algiers aborted a planned war crimes trial of Germans accused of a second Italian massacre, then issued directives to shut down all publicity concerning investigations of specific Nazi crimes and plans to try war criminals.33
The AAF feared that if the U.S. tried German criminals during the war—or even threatened to put them on trial—the Nazis would retaliate by ordering war crimes trials for American fliers who had been shot down during bombing raids over German cities. The perceived interests of the Allied airmen won out.
Green Hackworth’s office at the State Department, which had typically required months to respond to any previous initiative involving Nazi crimes, heartily endorsed the AAF’s new policy within hours after it was transmitted to the Pentagon. Hackworth worked through the weekend to put together a memo of support for the AAF action and push it through the secretary of state’s office before AAF headquarters in Washington could back away from the stand taken by the Algiers outpost. The State Department “agrees most emphatically with AFHQ’s decision against publicity in connection with the capture, collection of evidence and trial of war criminals,” Hackworth cabled to Algiers. “[A]ny temporary propaganda advantage that might be gained from such publicity would be completely over-balanced by the danger of reprisals against American prisoners of war.”34 From that point until the end of the war, the claim that action against Nazi crimes might risk American prisoners’ lives became a staple feature of virtually every State Department comment on the war crimes issue.
The conflict within the Allied camp over failure to respond to Nazi atrocities was at last coming to a head. Shortly after the Air Force incident, a half-dozen senior administration officials responsible for various aspects of Jewish refugee issues met in the office of Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., the son of the World War I–era U.S. ambassador to Turkey who had protested the Armenian Genocide. The subject of the meeting was eliminating obstacles to the rescue of refugees from Europe. Members of Morgenthau’s staff were at that moment tracing State Department policy concerning Europe over the previous four years. The title of their report told the story: Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of Jews.35
Secretary Morgenthau, a close political ally of Herbert Pell in the war crimes debate, squinted down through his pince-nez spectacles at Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long. The two officials had frequently locked horns over what to do about Nazi Germany, and both knew that this confrontation could not be put off any longer. Long insisted he was doing everything possible to rescue refugees and that rumors questioning his commitment to fighting fascism were untrue.
“I looked him right in the eye,” Morgenthau noted for his diary shortly after the incident. “Well, Breck, as long as you raise the question, we might be a little frank,” the secretary remembered. “The impression is all around that you, particularly, are anti-Semitic!”36
Morgenthau knew that a handful of Long’s aides at State had for years systematically denied available U.S. visas to refugee Jews, suppressed intelligence about Hitler’s Holocaust, and undermined efforts to establish a commission to document Nazi atrocities. Recently he had learned that Long’s group at State had sabotaged a deal that could have purchased survival for 70,000 Romanian Jews for a mere $170,000 in Romanian currency.37
Long choked and denied Morgenthau’s charge of anti-Semitism. Breckinridge Long—a tiny, rawboned man whose indiscreet praise of Mussolini and Italian fascism during the 1930s had once made headlines38—was not about to permit himself to be pinned down on the wrong side of this issue. He attempted to blame an assistant for the paperwork delays that had buried the Romanian plan. But Morgenthau continued: The position of Long’s group, it seemed to him, was identical to that of the British Foreign Office. At bottom, both institutions had resigned themselves to what the secretary had recently called, “diplomatic double-talk, cold and correct and adding up to a sentence of death” for Europe’s Jews.39
* Prior to Pell’s selection, for example, the British and the Americans had agreed that the U.S. commissioner would chair the new UNWCC. But when Pell was named, Hackworth cabled to London that this arrangement was off: British representative Cecil Hurst should now be the chair. Ordinarily, protocol called for the announcement of two such decisions—Pell’s appointment and the U.S. reversal on the chairmanship—to be transmitted to the British in two separate cables, to avoid embarrassment to the U.S. nominee. Instead Hackworth put out the news in a single statement; a diplomatic insult that was apparent to both Pell and the British.
* The Moscow Declaration is worth quoting in detail, because it became the foundation for later policy and the center of many disputes between East and West in the wake of the war.
“At the time of granting of any armistice to any Government which may be set up in Germany,” the agreement read, “those German officers and men and members of the Nazi Party who have been responsible for or have taken a consenting part in … atrocities, massacres and executions will be sent back to the countries in which their abominable deeds were done in order that they may be judged and punished according to the laws of these liberated countries.… Lists will be compiled in all possible detail” of these criminals.
“Those Germans who take part in wholesale shootings of Italian offi
cers or in the execution of French, Dutch, Belgian or Norwegian hostages or of Cretan peasants, or who have shared in the slaughters inflicted on the people of Poland, or in the territories of the Soviet Union which are now being swept clear of the enemy, will know that they will be brought back to the scene of their crimes and judged on the spot by the peoples they have outraged.
“Let those who have hitherto not imbrued their hands with innocent blood beware lest they join the ranks of the guilty, for most assuredly the three Allied Powers will pursue them to the uttermost ends of the earth and will deliver them to the accusers in order that justice may be done.”
10
“The Present Ruling Class of Germany”
Henry Morgenthau, Jr., had long led the opposition within the U.S. government to any reconciliation with Nazi Germany. He was secretary of the treasury, a New York Democrat (as were Roosevelt and Pell), and a Jew. Morgenthau’s views concerning Germany enjoyed relatively broad public support in the U.S. and won him some political allies in the Justice Department and the War Department. But the State Department’s specialists viewed him as a dangerous rival for control of U.S. foreign policy.
Much of Morgenthau’s popular appeal stemmed from his arguments against clemency for Nazi war criminals. For much of the U.S. public, German industrialists like Gustav Krupp, steel baron Friedrich Flick, and the IG Farben executives were an integral part of the Nazi power structure and shared direct responsibility for a long list of atrocities. Further, there was widespread suspicion in the U.S. that Germany was in some sense intrinsically evil and would rise from the ashes of World War II to instigate new and still more deadly conflicts unless it was stripped of the economic and military capacity for conducting war. Limiting this German enemy, as Morgenthau’s supporters saw things, required a high degree of postwar cooperation between the U.S. and the USSR.1
Morgenthau’s legal advisors at the Treasury Department favored a tough line on Nazi crimes. It was unthinkable that Germany would be permitted to legalize mass murder and the looting of an entire continent, they argued. If previous international agreements on war crimes had failed to deal with Nazi-style genocide, then justice demanded that new legal precedents be set. Morgenthau’s allies contended that substantially all of the economic, political, and military elite of wartime Germany was implicated in one way or another in the Nazis’ crimes. This was not the same as advocating collective German responsibility for Nazi crimes, though there was at times a tendency in that direction. The Treasury’s legal specialists often acknowledged that there were “good” Germans (including “good” German businessmen) and that ordinary Germans suffering under a dictatorship should not be held personally responsible for the criminal actions of their leaders. Even so, the very fact that the Nazis had so efficiently purged their opposition suggested that the economic and political leaders who had survived those purges and gone on to prosper under Hitler had materially aided the Nazis. There was also direct evidence of culpability of the German economic elite in some crimes, including the use of slave labor and the plunder of Jewish property.
The Treasury group’s strategy for postwar Germany favored what amounted to a massive antitrust action to break up the entrenched monopolies and cartels that were a prominent feature of the German economy. They contended that German corporate leaders should be held personally responsible for the institutional crimes that had been committed by the companies they led.2 For Morgenthau, as for Herbert Pell, the systematic removal of the economic and political elite of Germany was necessary to ensure postwar stability in Europe—to “prevent World War III,” as the slogan went. The Germans had been responsible for two world wars within thirty years, they reasoned, and the only way to prevent the outbreak of a third war was once and for all to break apart the power structure of Germany, particularly its heavy industry.
In contrast, the men and women at State who favored the strictly legalist approach to war crimes usually backed a rapid reintegration of Germany into the postwar world. This meant a revitalization of German business and a postwar restoration of German finance and industry to a major place in the overall economy of Europe.
George F. Kennan was among the first State Department officials to grasp the connection between Allied policy on war crimes prosecutions and U.S. political and economic policy toward postwar Germany and the USSR. He began lobbying quite explicitly at least as early as 1943 for the Allies to abandon any efforts to try Nazi criminals after the war. Kennan was a junior diplomat at the time, but he laid claim to comment on such questions because, as second-in-command of the U.S. diplomatic staff in Berlin at the outbreak of war, Kennan had been interned by the Germans (in a luxury hotel) for several months.3 He had also long been a student of German affairs, and had been one of the State Department’s principal back-channel links to the German nobility and business elite.
Kennan’s wartime writings show that he was unable, or unwilling, to separate even the activities at Sobibor and Auschwitz from the carnage created by a more or less conventional war. “The day we accepted the Russians as our allies in the struggle against Germany,” he wrote in a 1944 memo, “we tacitly accepted as facts … the customs of warfare which have prevailed generally in Eastern Europe and Asia for centuries.”4 Kennan’s moral and intellectual failure cannot be attributed to a lack of information about the Holocaust, for the main picture of what was taking place in the death camps and slave labor centers throughout Europe was already widely known in 1944. Indeed, he wrote the memo precisely because of the Allied discussions concerning what was to be done about such atrocities. Kennan continues in his memoirs (where he quotes the 1944 memo) that even after the war, when the record of Nazi atrocities was laid out in all its grotesque detail, the Allies’ “punishment for war crimes” remained “a particular reason for the unhappiness I felt” over the postwar treatment of Germany.5
In a second wartime memo, Kennan explained his objections to purging Nazis from the German state and economic structure. First, the elimination of Nazi influence in Germany “is impracticable,” he said. The Allies could never cooperate well enough to carry out the task, and it would require a massive investigation that would undoubtedly be unpopular with the Germans.
Second, and most pertinent here, Kennan argued that even if a purge of Nazis could theoretically be successful, “we would not find any other class of people competent to assume the burdens [of leading Germany]. Whether we like it or not, nine-tenths of what is strong, able and respected in Germany has been poured into those very categories which we have in mind” for removal from power, namely those persons who had been “more than nominal members of the Nazi party.” Rather than remove the “present ruling class of Germany,” as he put it, it would be better to “hold it [that class] strictly to its task and teach it the lessons we wish it to learn.”6
The same faction at State that was most committed to a revival of the German economy was also highly influential in the execution of wartime U.S. policy concerning Jewish refugees. Both issues were seen as foreign affairs questions involving Germany, so both ended up on the desks of a handful of mid-level State Department officials. The results were tragic. Men like Elbridge Durbrow, R. Borden Reams, and John Hickerson prided themselves on their professed realism toward Germany in the midst of what they saw as a wartime hysteria that had produced exaggerated reports that Jews were being systematically murdered by the millions. Their most potent argument at the time was that the only effective way to end suffering in Europe was to defeat Hitler as quickly as possible. Policies that they opposed were said to divert resources from the war effort, hence were counterproductive in the long run.7 Meanwhile, the State Department’s key legal and political specialists, Green Hackworth and James Clement Dunn, operated on the assumption that the Nazi persecution of German Jews and of non-Jewish Germans was an internal German matter and thus outside the reach of international law.8
This was not a “conspiracy,” in the banal sense of that word, but these men did share com
mon convictions concerning strategies for dealing with Germany and the USSR. As Kennan’s comments suggest, they reasoned that if the U.S. wished to avoid a post-Hitler social revolution in Germany, it would be necessary to have some “non-Nazi” Germans with whom to negotiate, and that such people had to already have a substantial measure of power within that country.9
They favored, in brief, that the U.S. make a sharp distinction between the ostensibly non-Nazi German economic and military elite, on the one hand, and Hitler’s inner circle, on the other. They saw the former group as essential to postwar reconstruction. Hitler’s inner circle, on the other hand, could be made publicly responsible for the war itself and for all Nazi atrocities, then disposed of as quickly as possible—except for Hitler himself, who as head of state involved certain legal difficulties. In this context, the wartime rescue of European Jews raised several problems: it would likely mean increased Jewish immigration to the U.S., for example, which many at State opposed for political and anti-Semitic reasons; it would heighten U.S. conflicts with Britain over Palestine; and it would tend to criminalize the German economic and military elite in the eyes of the U.S. public, thus undermining longer-term efforts to focus public hostility on the USSR rather than on Germany once the fighting was over.
This faction was not sympathetic to Nazism as such. Rather, it viewed Hitler, as Kennan put it, as “stamping out the last vestiges of particularism [sic] and class differences … [by] reducing everything to the lowest and most common denominator.”10 Many were strongly sympathetic to the German business and cultural elite, however, and charitable to the point of blindness to the compromises this stratum had made with Hitler.11
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