The Splendid Blond Beast

by Simpson, Christopher; Miller, Mark Crispin;

  Interestingly, both poles of the debate over Germany within the U.S. government tacitly acknowledged that Germany’s economic elite had been deeply implicated in the work of the Nazis, though the two sides drew nearly opposite conclusions from it. At the State Department, the complicity of much of the German elite was seen as one reason that war crimes trials should be restricted as much as possible, in order to ensure continuity of the core of German society after Hitler was gone. For Morgenthau at Treasury and for Pell at the UNWCC, the same complicity was seen as proof that German society should be fundamentally reorganized and that the political and economic elite of the Hitler period had to be completely removed from power.

  Thus, the question of what to do with Germany after the war became tied up in complex questions of international economics, U.S.-Soviet relations, and war crimes enforcement. Political developments in one issue had immediate and often substantial implications for each of the other concerns. This was the context in which the controversies over the Morgenthau plan for postwar Germany and the establishment of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg were to be hammered out.

  By 1943, important changes were also under way among the German economic elite, and these had an indirect but nonetheless important effect on political debate in the U.S. Up until the German defeat at Stalingrad in late 1942, Adolf Hitler remained the best thing that had ever happened to the German financial elite from a strictly business point of view—notwithstanding the Nazi party’s occasional flourishes of anticapitalist rhetoric. The sophisticated conservatives that dominated German business made the most of National Socialism. Virtually all major German enterprises adopted elements of Nazi ideology in their day-to-day operations, including the purging of Jews, decimation of labor unions, and exploitation of forced labor. Along the way, they invented a variety of triumph-of-the-will rationalizations for corporate brutality and theft.

  But in early 1943, the German financial and industrial elite began to split on the future of Hitler. Increasingly, the very forces that they had helped set in motion were now dragging the whole of Germany toward catastrophe. Hitler had irrevocably blundered and, it was rumored, might even be mentally unbalanced. The banker Hjalmar Schacht—long the quintessential German establishment banker who had backed the Nazis since before Hitler came to power—left Hitler’s government. Even Oscar Henschel, whose weapons companies made extensive use of forced labor, claimed to have concluded as early as December 1942 that the military situation was hopeless.12

  The economic elite turned their attention to self-preservation. But such planning, regarded by Hitler’s government as defeatist or even treasonous, could be carried out only under a thick veil of secrecy. Intriguingly, the existing social networks used by the economic elite to coordinate their actions and to secure influence within Hitler’s government provided some of the most effective “covers” for German corporate efforts to prepare for the postwar world.

  The notorious Himmlerkreis, the Circle of Friends of Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler, is a good example of the dynamics of Germany’s high-level business networks during the decline of the Third Reich. The Nazis and leading German businessmen had jointly created the Himmlerkreis in the early 1930s as an informal communication link between the financial and industrial elite and the SS. Himmler sought the political and economic support of the business elite, and the elite in turn sought influence outside of official channels with the increasingly powerful police leader. Senior business leaders active in the Himmlerkreis included Siemens’ general director Rudolf Bingel, Unilever and Kontinentale Öl director Karl Blessing, steel industrialist Friedrich Flick, Dresdner Bank’s Karl Rache and Emil Meyer, shipping and oil executive Karl Lindemann, and board members or senior managers from the Deutsche Bank, RKG, IG Farben, Krupp, and a dozen other companies central to the German economy.13 As the SS grew as an economic power, the SS members of the Himmlerkreis often migrated to new positions on corporate boards, where they could secure government contracts and embody corporate loyalty to the regime. SS men and Nazi party activists who made this transition included Wilhelm Keppler (of the BRABAG brown coal combine and SS enterprises), Fritz Kranefuss (BRABAG, Dresdner Bank), and Ritter von Halt, who joined the Deutsche Bank board.14

  Officially, the Himmlerkreis meetings were not for conducting business, because that would have suggested corruption in National Socialist circles. As a practical matter, however, the encounters served as an informal coordinating point for German industry’s negotiations with the SS on policy matters. IG Farben appears to have used Himmlerkreis meetings to seek support for the company’s vast forced-labor complex at Auschwitz, for example. The companies represented in Himmler’s circle became pacesetters in Aryanization, exploitation of concentration camp labor, seizure of foreign companies in the occupied territories, and similar business ventures that depended on SS cooperation.15

  But as the war turned against the Third Reich, a number of business leaders in the Himmlerkreis began to cooperate in clandestine and semiclandestine contingency planning for the postwar period. Two of the best known of these groups, the Arbeitskreis für aussenwirtschaftliche Fragen (Working Group for Foreign Economic Questions) and the Kleine Arbeitskreis (Small Working Group), were nominally sponsored by the Reichsgruppe Industrie association of major industrial and financial companies. They brought together Blessing, Rasche, Kurt von Schroeder, Lindemann, and others from the Himmlerkreis with other business people such as Hermann Abs (Deutsche Bank), Ludwig Erhard (then an economist with the Reichsgruppe Industrie and later Konrad Adenauer’s most important economic advisor), Ludger Westrick (RKG, aluminum industry, nonferrous metals), and Philipp Reemtsma (tobacco, shipping, banking), and with Nazi business specialists such as Otto Ohlendorf (the former commander of the Einsatzgruppe D murder troops) and Hans Kehrl (SS business specialist).16 A half-dozen similar business forums emerged during the last years of the Third Reich. Most of these overlapped in membership, and all of them favored some variation of the “corporatist” strategy for empire articulated by Hjalmar Schacht, Abs, and others during the showdown over Aryanization in Vienna discussed earlier.17

  A number of top German corporate officials initiated attempts to reach Allied governments with offers to serve as intermediaries in negotiations of a separate peace between Germany and the Western Allies. Men such as Hermann Schmitz and Georg von Schnitzler of IG Farben, the international lawyer Gerhardt Westrick (of the Albert & Westrick law firm, and brother of Ludger Westrick), and others were prominent in these efforts, precisely because it was they who had the international ties to powerful U.S. and British circles.18 OSS man Allen Dulles became the focal point of many of their efforts, as noted earlier.19 They extended somewhat similar peace offers from time to time to the USSR as well.20

  The German industrialists’ roles in these efforts have frequently been raised in their defense since the end of the war. Such activities are sometimes described as a form of resistance to the Nazi state, and there is some merit to that argument. But these industrialists wanted the Allies to permit Germany to keep most of what it had looted from Germany’s Jews and from Eastern Europe. They also usually insisted that there should be no punishment for Nazi atrocities, and in several variations of the separate-peace proposals, the SS would remain in power, but without Hitler. Finally, they usually insisted that the Western allies tacitly support Germany’s ongoing war against the USSR.21 These were not “peace” proposals in a fundamental sense, but rather efforts to rationalize the management of the war and to gain time to digest the billions of marks worth of personal and industrial property that had fallen into German hands.

  Some U.S. factions clearly supported the general concept of a separate peace with Germany, though very few other than Allen Dulles knew the precise terms that German emissaries had offered. John Foster Dulles advocated consideration of this strategy in early 1943, for example.22 There was also an undercurrent of support for a separate peace among some of the more conservative Democrats
who, like Harry Truman, had an open mind about the advantages of encouraging an ongoing German-Soviet slaughter by withdrawing U.S. troops from the conflict.23 Nevertheless, President Roosevelt forcefully ruled out any possibility of a separate peace—in part to help stabilize U.S. relations with the USSR.24 As the likelihood of total victory over Germany became increasingly clear, the murmurings for a separate peace died away.

  German industry’s efforts reveal the moral bankruptcy of this group during the later Hitler years. They proved to be willing to engage in risky conspiracies to protect their company positions and corporate assets, but not to save the lives of the concentration camp inmates who worked for them. According to their own accounts, they knew that Hitler’s strategy had collapsed and that the war would be lost. Many knew of Hitler’s extermination programs, and some of them—members of the IG Farben and Siemens boards, for example—had personally procured slave labor from concentration camps or directly participated in other atrocities.25 Yet in most cases they failed to remove themselves from positions of authority, or to ameliorate conditions for forced laborers working for their companies, or to resist the Holocaust in any way. As the war lurched into its final months, conditions in the corporate concentration camps deteriorated dramatically. Food ran out, and new epidemics ripped through the camps. The pace of exterminations actually accelerated during 1944, despite the Red Army’s encroachments on the death camps in eastern Poland. Tens of thousands of the Jews who were gassed that year were veterans of the corporate camps in the East, and their murders often required active or tacit cooperation from company leaders.26

  Jewish blood became the currency, in effect, with which German companies bought legitimacy in the eyes of the Nazis during Hitler’s last years. Legally speaking, of course, corporate leaders must be judged on their individual acts, not as members of a group. But from a sociologist’s point of view, from the perspective of how groups of people behaved, it is evident that most members of Germany’s corporate elite were willing to sacrifice the lives of innocent people in their determined pursuit of institutional survival.

  11

  The Trials Begin

  The Soviets placed captured Germans on trial for the first time in late 1943, less than a month after the U.S. Army Air Forces had determined that it would not try Nazis for war crimes as long as imprisoned U.S. airmen were still in German hands. This was actually the second known Soviet trial, but it was the first to prosecute Germans.

  The USSR had opened the first recorded war crimes trial of the war the previous July in Krasnodar, near the Turkish border in the southern part of the country. There, they tried eleven Nazi collaborators accused of taking part in the murder of 7,000 Jewish civilians. The Krasnodar collaborators had executed the men by shooting them, the women and children by loading them on closed trucks that had been modified to channel exhaust fumes into the rear of the van. The vans—nicknamed Dushequbka (“Soul-killers”) by the collaborators and known as “black ravens” among the Jews—had been painted with false Red Cross insignia to encourage cooperation from the victims. (Interestingly, the inspiration for the design of these wagons has been attributed to SS Colonel Walter Rauff, who will return later in these pages during secret negotiations with Allen Dulles in the last weeks of the war.)

  During the murder campaign, the SS had enthusiastically reported to Berlin that the Dushequbka saved German ammunition. But there were problems for the Nazis. The killing took a long time and sometimes failed. Einsatzgruppe D leader Otto Ohlendorf, who was in charge of mass-murder operations in the southern USSR, testified later that his troops experienced “spiritual shock” upon emptying the vans, because the dead had covered themselves with vomit and excrement during their death agony. The Nazis eventually developed more efficient death camp technologies to replace the vans.

  The Soviet court in Krasnodar handed down prison sentences to three of the Nazi collaborators, then condemned the rest to death. The government encouraged a public celebration of the punishment and filmed the hangings in gruesome detail. Trucks brought the prisoners to the hanging ground, where executioners placed a noose around each convict’s neck. The trucks then slowly pulled away, leaving the men dangling and twitching until life was choked out of them. The camera caught every shudder.1

  The war crimes trials that placed Germans in the dock for the first time were held in Kharkov, USSR, in December 1943. The Soviets prosecuted three captured German Einsatzkommando officers and a Soviet collaborator. All were convicted and hung.2 The Soviet announcement of the verdicts made direct reference to the Moscow Declaration on Nazi crimes of a month earlier. This was clearly the type of quick justice that the Soviets had in mind when they had pledged with their allies to bring the Nazis back to be “judged on the spot by the peoples they have outraged.”3

  Henry Morgenthau was at that moment struggling with the State Department to win approval for a U.S. program to aid European refugees, particularly Jews facing Nazi gas chambers. He issued a statement congratulating the Soviets on the trials, noting that by executing the Einsatzkommando officers at Kharkov, “the Russians are wiping from the face of the earth one of its most repulsive stains.… In so doing they are giving the freedom loving peoples firm confidence in the future.”4

  But the State Department and the British Foreign Office were aghast at the Soviet trials and at Morgenthau’s response. Their concerns were amplified a week later when the Nazi party newspaper Völkischer Beobachter published on its front page photos of a captured U.S. pilot whose bomber jacket was emblazoned with a notorious gang’s name. “USA Air Gangsters Name Themselves ‘Murder Incorporated,’” the headline read. The prisoner was said to illustrate the “underworld character of the air terrorists.” Coverage in this and other German newspapers stressed the pilot’s destruction of civilians, including German women and children. The State Department interpreted the publication as an implicit threat that the Germans would place the airman and other American pilots on trial.5

  Secretary of State Cordell Hull quickly announced that as far as the United States was concerned, the “direct handling of war criminals” did not fall within the terms of the recently signed Moscow Declaration—an ambiguous statement that raised obvious questions concerning just what it was that the declaration did cover. Green Hackworth’s office at the State Department dispatched a message to the Germans via a Swiss government intermediary, promising that the United States had no intention of trying captured German soldiers.6 Western press reports claimed that the U.S. and Britain appealed to the Soviets to postpone further trials of Nazis until after an armistice with Germany, though this was denied when it became public.7 Meanwhile, State’s political advisor James Clement Dunn huddled with colleagues at State and the War Department in an effort to line up critics of Morgenthau.8

  The War Department distributed internal directives to U.S. forces stating that suspected Axis war criminals then in captivity were not to be separated from the general POW population, nor was there to be any indication that they were under suspicion.9 The practical effect of this order was to sharply restrict U.S. efforts to collect evidence concerning Nazi atrocities, including those that had been committed against American servicemen. There was no effective way to investigate Nazi crimes without systematically questioning prisoners on the subject—exactly the type of probe that the War Department ordered U.S. interrogators to avoid.

  The Western concerns over POWs then in German hands carried little weight with the Soviets, however. The Nazis had systematically murdered about two million Soviet POWs through starvation, gassing, and torture since 1941. Holding off on trials of captured Nazis now would not improve the Germans’ treatment of surviving Soviet POWs.* To the Russians, their ongoing “demands for the immediate trial of Hitler and his savages fulfill the lawful rights of nations [and] are in accordance with international law,” a Moscow dispatch in the Communist party magazine War and the Working Class stated.10

  Herbert Pell’s arrival in the United Kingdom was
inauspicious. He disembarked in late 1943 with a serious case of influenza that hospitalized him for days. The weather was damp and chilly in England; the hotels usually unheated; and the food terrible. “The cold in London that winter was beyond anything I have ever suffered,” he remembered after the war, “and yet, it hardly ever got below freezing. It was the rarest thing. While you didn’t see any ice all that winter, as far as real suffering from cold was concerned, I have never been as badly off.” By all accounts the best kitchen in London was at the American officers’ club, where a dollar would fetch soup, some tough meat, and a nonsynthetic dessert. It was, Pell said, “about as good as a rather poor college commons in America, but immeasurably better than anything else in London.”11

  Worst of all for Herbert Pell, there was little to do. The UN commission had remained dormant after its first organizational meetings. Pell had no offices, no telephone, and no fixed address for a number of weeks. “The result was that with no work to do and no particular place to go I walked and walked and walked over London, hour after hour. I lost a lot of weight and got to feeling more and more miserable,” Pell remembered. “When I say I had nothing to do, I mean exactly what I say. The commission existed, the members would meet once a week, and decide to put off the definite organization until later. Then we would go home.…”12

  After two months of frustration, Pell turned his restless energy to the task of extracting substantive action from the bureaucracies he believed were stifling Allied initiatives on war crimes, not least of which was the UNWCC itself. His vision of the task ahead was more than a little bit bloody, as was reflected in an unpublished memoir he wrote shortly after the war.