“It became evident to us very quickly that … the United States would have to support Germany for the rest of time, or as long as that policy [JCS 1067] stayed in effect,” Draper contended in a later interview. “And so, we had to wiggle here and waggle there and do the best we could without openly breaking our directive to permit the German economy to begin to function. We argued with this one and argued with that one here in Washington and in Germany, wherever we had the chance, and bit by bit, we recouped or revised the situation so that it became possible.
“We didn’t pay as much attention to it [JCS 1067] as perhaps we should from the point of view of military discipline. There were several efforts to pull me back [to Washington] and have me charged with not carrying out the directive. [But] General Clay always defended me. He knew perfectly well that such a policy couldn’t last just as well as I did. We fought it out and finally persuaded Washington.”15
Draper’s critics pointed to the tough language in the JCS 1067 order and to U.S. public commitments at Potsdam, arguing that Draper failed to implement the letter and the spirit of official policy. But what the critics did not understand was that the hard-line declarations of JCS 1067 were not in fact U.S. policy at all, despite what was said on paper. Here is how General Lucius Clay, the U.S. military governor in Germany, explained it in an interview some years later:
“JCS 1067 would have been extremely difficult to operate under.… It was modified constantly; not officially, but by allowing this deviation, that deviation, et cetera. We began to slowly wipe out JCS 1067, [which] prohibited us from doing anything to improve the German economy. It was an unworkable policy and … [it was modified] by gradual changes in its provisions and changes of cablegrams, conferences, and so on.” Clay was convinced that President Truman was on his side. “We had … a change of administration [after Roosevelt]. The people who had had the greatest influence and developed the occupation powers went out, and Mr. Truman’s administration came in,” Clay remembered. Truman never supported the hard-line approach, Clay continued. “He had nothing to do with its creation and I don’t think he ever believed in it.”16
What can be seen, then, was a tough policy on paper that was useful for pacifying public opinion in the West, for making promises to the Soviets, and for general public relations purposes. Meanwhile the upper echelons of the U.S. occupation government agreed as early as the summer of 1945 that a thorough denazification and decartelization of the German economy would never be attempted, regardless of what might be said for public consumption.
This institutionalized double-talk—even double-think, as George Orwell might have it—grew out of the splits inside the Roosevelt administration discussed earlier. Perhaps more fundamentally, it was a product of the division between mass public desire in the U.S. for harsh punishment of the whole structure of Nazism, on the one hand, and the U.S. economic and foreign policy elite’s determination to revive German markets and producing capabilities as quickly as possible, on the other. The revivalist point of view was buttressed at least in part by consensus among specialists and Western elites that there had been splits between businessmen and the state in Nazi Germany. Such schisms presented opportunities for the West, they reasoned, and made it easier for German industry to downplay its role in Nazi crimes.
Draper’s administrative techniques from the summer of 1945 on became a classic example of bureaucratic maneuver. He announced tough anti-Nazi measures in accordance with the official policy; then, shortly afterward he proclaimed success in carrying out those measures while at the same time undermining the very policies he publicly claimed to support.
That fall, for example, some Draper subordinates attempted to initiate a program to arrest and interrogate several hundred top German bankers and industrialists for the roles they had played during the war. This was not an indiscriminate program aimed at all German businessmen. It focused only on those who had thrived under National Socialism, or who had played some personal role in Nazi expropriation and looting. And the proposal did not call for criminal trials of these suspects: The aim was simply to investigate what they had actually done during the Third Reich while the evidence was fresh.
Draper blocked the measure as soon as it came to his attention. He refused to permit the investigation, contending that it would interfere with German economic recovery. When subordinates complained to sympathetic congressmen in Washington, Draper’s allies Robert Murphy and Colonel Clarence Adcock (General Clay’s most senior aide and longtime colleague) issued a series of reports stating—in October 1945—that the main work of denazifying the German economy had already been completed, so there was no need to go ahead with any further studies. “What [the investigators] are doing here through denazification is nothing less than a social revolution,” Murphy’s top aide Charles Reinhardt complained. “If the Russians want to bolshevize their side of the Elbe that is their business, but it is not in conformity with American standards to cut away the basis of private property.”17
Draper’s rebellious subordinates nonetheless managed to win some congressional support in Washington, notably from a West Virginia Democrat, Senator Harley Kilgore, and from FDR loyalists in the Senate’s liberal caucus. Kilgore delivered a broadside against Draper’s Economic Division, using ammunition provided by dissident insiders. U.S. Military Government officials were countenancing and even bolstering Nazism in the economic and political life of Germany, Kilgore charged. They “take the position that German businessmen are politically neutral and that no effort should be made to penalize German industry or prevent it from recapturing its prewar position in world markets.… They look forward to resuming commercial relationships with a rehabilitated German industry whose leading figures are well known to them, rather than striking out on new paths of economic enterprise.” Kilgore named William Draper, Frederick Devereux, Rufus Wysor, and others as particular problems. “Nazi industrial organization is not repugnant to them,” Kilgore charged, “and they have shown every disposition to make peace with it.”18
Over the next four months, Kilgore returned again and again to the theme that the U.S. Military Government in Germany was refusing to carry out the mandate of the Potsdam agreements and the publicly professed U.S. policy on Germany. Much of his information was leaked to his staff by dissidents inside the U.S. Military Government’s decartelization branch, who believed—accurately, as it turned out—that Draper and other higher-ups had systematically thwarted their initiatives against IG Farben and many other German companies. Kilgore charged that top U.S. officials in Berlin were “reluctant to carry out the policy of military and economic disarmament of the Reich as agreed upon at the Potsdam Conference,” as the New York Times summarized it, and that “some of our officials were connected with [U.S.] industrial and financial firms that had close pre-war ties with the Nazis, would like to resume commercial relationships with Germany, and were working for a strong Reich as a counterbalance to Soviet Russia.”19 But the Times report provided few specifics and declined to name names. Reportage on the issue, which had once been a front-page story, gradually drifted toward smaller articles buried deeper in the paper.
Kilgore, however, provided increasingly specific information, though it only rarely found its way into the prestige media. State Department and U.S. Military Government spokesmen bitterly denied his accusations. But the senator was in time proven to be substantially correct by an independent 1949 Federal Trade Commission investigation and—decades later—by the frank comments of Lucius Clay, William Draper, and others who had once aggressively rejected Kilgore’s claims.20
18
“It Would Be Undesirable if This Became Publicly Known”
The political conflict among the Allies over how to deal with accused quislings and war criminals such as Miklós Horthy, SS General Wolff and his aides, and others with similar war records propelled the UNWCC into an important new role as what amounted to an international grand jury on war crimes. Because bringing most war criminals to ju
stice was ostensibly an international, inter-Allied matter—as distinct from an issue on which the U.S. or Britain could rule without consultation—the UNWCC became the proper forum to make a prima facie determination whether any particular defendant was being charged with war crimes appropriately. As will be seen, this new authority spurred U.S. State Department and British Foreign Office efforts to shut down the commission and seal its records so that they might never be seen again.
The UNWCC’s task since its beginning had been registration of the criminal complaints filed by a dozen Allied countries. The commission naturally made a determination when processing a registration whether the complaining government had made a prima facie case against the defendant. Though not particularly controversial at first, these determinations took on new significance as cooperation among the Allies over transfer of prisoners began to break down. After the UNWCC accepted the registration, the U.S. and Britain found it quite difficult to argue credibly that the defendant was a “political” rather than “criminal” suspect, as they had in some of the Yugoslav cases. That meant their efforts to bury cases or to refuse to turn over suspects became considerably more troublesome.1 If the UNWCC did not find a prima facie case, of course, the country holding such prisoners was within its rights to refuse to turn them over or to release them.
The UNWCC’s work thus became more urgent than ever. True, the Big Four Allied governments agreed to handle the crucial International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg through a new committee set up among themselves rather than through the UNWCC—an important blow to the authority of the commission. But the judgment of the two dozen prominent Nazi leaders at Nuremberg served to drive home with new force how manifold and complex Nazi crimes had been. Tens of thousands of criminals and collaborators remained scattered across Europe, some of them in positions of authority in postwar governments.
The UNWCC’s work in this sensitive and symbolically potent area of East-West relations gave the commission a prospective power far beyond anything that the State Department or Foreign Office had ever envisioned. Worse yet, as Green Hackworth of the State Department saw things, the smaller Allied states were relatively strong in the UNWCC, and included aggressively anti-Nazi delegations from the Czechs, Yugoslavs, French, and the London Poles. Though the U.S. and United Kingdom dominated key UNWCC committees, their authority was by no means absolute.
The State Department and Foreign Office moved to shut down the UNWCC as quickly as they could, given the political realities of 1945. Their first step was to choke the commission by systematically denying it funds and personnel.2
The U.S. had replaced Pell early in 1945 with Colonel Joseph V. Hodgson and a legal assistant, Navy Captain John Wolff. That summer, working nearly alone, Hodgson and Wolff shared nominal responsibility for scores of demanding assignments, such as reviewing UNWCC war crimes case registrations, developing consolidated case lists of war crimes suspects and witnesses, facilitating the international evidence-sharing necessary for successful prosecutions, doing legal research in a dozen different countries and languages, attending endless meetings and making regular reports to Washington, drafting international agreements on the transfer of war crimes suspects, and keeping up with all the aspects of international liaison among the Allies on war crimes issues. Some of these jobs were being simultaneously pursued by rival committees in the U.S. War and State departments and by Justice Jackson’s prosecution staff at the International Military Tribunal. That left Hodgson and Wolff with yet another assignment: attempting to straighten out the bureaucratic infighting and confusion created by the overlapping spheres of authority.
John Wolff collapsed from overwork shortly after the Nuremberg tribunal convened that fall, according to State Department records.3 Hodgson pleaded with State for at least two new assistants to handle just the correspondence from U.S. war crimes staffs at Nuremberg, Wiesbaden, and Washington, but there is no record that help arrived.4 A few weeks later, Hodgson resigned. Wolff, then still convalescing, replaced his former chief and carried the U.S. administrative burden at the UNWCC single-handedly.5
Hodgson’s resignation precipitated a renewed effort at State to dissolve the UNWCC altogether. Green Hackworth, still on the job, approached H. Freeman Matthews, State’s senior specialist on Europe who was at that time representing the department in inter-agency meetings with the War Department and the White House, and convinced Matthews to move against the War Crimes Commission as soon as possible. Hackworth “wishes to have the Commission discontinued and desires to use the question of appointing a successor to Col. Hodgson as the occasion to bring this about,” Matthews noted during the first weeks of 1946.6
This strategy had evidently already been informally discussed by key officers at State, for it received prompt support from the department’s leading European and legal affairs specialists. “In view of the troublesome Yugoslav activity, [State] is inclined to favor the prompt dissolution of the United Nations War Crimes Commission,” said James Riddleberger, the department’s expert on Germany. Unfortunately, “it would be very undesirable if it were to become publicly known that this Government took the initiative in bringing about the dissolution.” Therefore, he continued, Hackworth proposed to “informally and discreetly approach the British in order to ascertain their views.… Such approaches could be made in such a way that any eventual publicity would not be likely to be damaging.”7
Riddleberger, Hackworth, and Matthews set up an ad hoc committee to delicately close the doors of the UNWCC without being held accountable for having done so. Hackworth delegated his assistants for war crimes issues, Katharine Fite and Albert Garret-son, both of whom had been active in the firing of Herbert Pell, to head the new group.
Fite was the State Department’s chief liaison with the UNWCC, responsible for guiding the U.S. representative’s votes on the commission. She meanwhile carried the burden of explaining the least popular aspects of State’s legal policy to Congress, the media, and the public. Fite and Garretson also served as State’s representatives on a half dozen other interagency committees dealing with war crimes policy issues, including those drafting policy for the War Department and for the U.S. occupation government in Germany. Fite and Garretson were responsible for drafting and implementing high policy, not for determining it, and were in that sense junior players. Nevertheless, their work on these coordinating committees illustrates the means by which Hackworth and his staff undermined the UNWCC and extended his influence into related issues such as the denazification and decartelization policies for Germany.
To outsiders, Washington seemed strongly committed to open-handed cooperation with the Allies in war crimes prosecutions and to a thoroughgoing reform of German society. In reality, though, opponents of these policies occupied many key posts at the State Department, the White House, in the U.S. occupation government in Germany, and in U.S. financial circles interested in foreign affairs and foreign trade. The influence of the advocates of rebuilding Germany as a bulwark against the USSR was well established, and on the rise.
Paradoxically, the challenge of prosecuting even major Nazi criminals grew more complex as evidence of the scope and character of Nazi crimes came to light. The International Tribunal at Nuremberg adopted the substance of a U.S. proposal for a joint prosecution of the SS, Nazi party leaders, and a handful of similar groups as “criminal conspiracies” responsible for crimes against humanity and crimes against peace.8
The occupation government’s Control Council law No. 10 applied the conspiracy theory to hundreds of thousands of individual cases. This law specified that any person who “held a high political, civil or military position in Germany or one of its Allies, cobelligerents or satellites or held a high position in the financial, industrial or economic life of any such country” was deemed to have committed a crime against peace, namely, planning and executing an aggressive war in violation of treaties.9 Membership in an organization such as the SS became sufficient cause for arrest. Law No. 10 did not require t
hat all persons declared criminal be prosecuted; it simply gave the commanders of the occupation forces authority to investigate what individuals may have done during the war and, if appropriate, to bring charges against them.
But this solution raised almost as many questions as it answered. First, it was by now clear that thousands of suspects shared direct responsibility for some atrocities. Contemporary estimates concluded that there were about 250,000 to 300,000 members of the SS (this includes the militarized Waffen-SS units), 70,000 full-time Nazi party executives, 15,000 in the party intelligence service Sicherheitsdienst (SD), 15,000 in the Gestapo, and as many as 1.5 to 2 million in various brownshirt paramilitary and militia units. Even considering that these numbers might be inflated and the categories overlap with one another, it seemed in late 1945 as though “not less than 2 million persons in all of Germany (and probably not less than 500,000 persons in the U.S. Zone) will be war criminals under the Control Council Law.”10
The U.S. apparatus for war crimes trials in Germany “obviously cannot prosecute anywhere near this number of cases,” a U.S. Denazification Policy Board concluded in December 1945. “No matter how summary the proceedings, it will be necessary to determine the degree of culpability of the accused, the existence of mitigating circumstances, and other factors affecting the punishment to be imposed.” The presumption of criminality in the cases of the Gestapo, SS, and SD was so strong that in many cases “relatively quick determinations” would be possible, the board said. But the role of other Nazis varied so widely that even summary justice would take time. And the complexities of the cases of collaborators from foreign countries, or of those who “held a high position in the financial, industrial or economic life” of Axis puppet states were more complicated still.11 The main U.S. war crimes prosecution group would be able to handle at most “a few hundreds or thousands of cases,” the board contended.
The Splendid Blond Beast Page 30
