Ideologues and butchers in the courtroom, defendants at Nuremberg

From the outset, Nazi foreign policy had been geared towards concealing, more or less skilfully, Hitler’s true intentions: to unleash a European war, avenge the humiliation of Versailles, reclaim all territories inhabited, even partially, by Germans, and finally extend dominion over the ‘living space’ to the east, exterminating the ‘untermenschen’ of Slavic race, or at any rate subjecting them to Germanic hegemony. To conceal this colossal plan of occupation – which, incidentally, was set out in minute detail in his "Mein Kampf" – the Führer appointed Joachim von Ribbentrop to head the Foreign Office; he now sat, meek and frightened, in the front row amongst the defendants. He was not a career diplomat; nor was he well-versed in history or international law, two essential requirements for such a strategic post. Yet he too, like most of the accused, was little more than a sycophantic lackey of the dictator. His name still resonates as a symbol of enduring shame and criminal hypocrisy, in the pact signed with Molotov in August 1939 to partition Poland and agree – for that is what it amounted to – on the outbreak of the conflict. But whilst his Soviet counterpart, though compelled to toe Stalin’s line, was a seasoned old fox, Ribbentrop was a hapless amateur, laden with decorations but lacking in experience. His own co-defendants despised him, regarding him as incompetent and arrogant. After the attempt on Hitler’s life on 20 July 1944, Goering, irritated by his colleague’s stupidity, struck him with his Reichsmarshall’s cane, brutally shouting at him: “Shut up, you champagne pedlar!”

In reality, the man was not exactly a former spirits sales representative, as he was ironically described in the immediate post-war period; just as Himmler had not been a mere chicken farmer, although he had cultivated that passion. Ribbentrop had married the wealthy Annelies Henkell, daughter of a wine-growing landowner, and had worked in that sector for a while. But he had attended various schools in Europe and America, learning foreign languages well. In his elegant home, he entertained industrialists and diplomats whom he had met through his wife, and by a technicality in his birth records, he had added ‘von’ to his middle-class surname. He met Hitler and made a favourable impression on him with his hatred of the Bolsheviks and the Jews. Following a series of rival candidates being ruled out, he found himself posted to London as ambassador. At that time, Oxford students had publicly declared that they would never fight for King and Country. Cambridge – as would later become apparent – was rife with Soviet spies, and all the British, except Churchill, supported an unconditional policy of ‘appeasement’. Encouraged by these indications, Ribbentrop assured Hitler that Britain would never come to the aid of the Eastern European countries in the event of a conflict. Hitler loved to hear what he was already convinced of, and appointed him Foreign Minister. He and his wife were the first to be surprised by such an honour. Once again, from his own point of view, the Führer had chosen well: Ribbentrop proved a docile tool in his hands, using the splendour of his uniform and the haughtiness of his manner to mask the aggressiveness of his policies. He did not devise a single one of the crimes of which he was accused, but went along with them all. Like Hitler’s other leading ‘yes men’, the gallows awaited him.

Two other defendants, however, were of a completely different character and background. Admirals Erich Raeder and Karl Dönitz had been, in succession, the commanders of the German Navy. The former had rebuilt it following its annihilation in the First World War; the latter had converted it from a surface fleet to a submarine fleet, unleashing hundreds of U-boats which, for a time, disrupted transatlantic supply lines. Raeder was charged with planning the invasion of Norway and Denmark, as well as the sinking of several ships. Dönitz was charged with ordering his crews to fire even on survivors after a ship had been sunk. These were plausible charges, mitigated by the fact that Allied sailors had also behaved in a more or less similar manner. Raeder was sentenced to life imprisonment, but not even the extremely harsh Soviet prison authorities must have been entirely convinced of his guilt, as they allowed his release after just ten years on health grounds. In fact, the admiral died in 1960 at the age of eighty-four. His conviction was the subject of various controversies: in any case, he was one of the few people who had the courage to oppose some of Hitler’s decisions, and Hitler did indeed dismiss him in 1943.

His position was taken over by Karl Dönitz, an expert in submarine warfare. He was more of a Nazi than Raeder, but this did not make him any more compliant with the Führer’s whims; indeed, perhaps for this very reason, the Führer respected him so much that he appointed him as his successor. The admiral was captured alongside Jodl and Speer, and immediately imprisoned. The accusation that he had failed to come to the aid of the crews was refuted by an affidavit from his (almost) American counterpart, Chester Nimitz, who admitted to having issued quite similar orders. Dönitz was sentenced to a lenient term of ten years, which he served in full. He died at the age of eighty-nine without ever having renounced his conduct as a soldier in any way.

And so we come to the most controversial, enigmatic and, in his own way, fascinating of the defendants. Albert Speer was an architect not yet thirty when Hitler called upon him to design the grandiose structures of his thousand-year Reich. Seduced by such a glorious prospect and backed by virtually unlimited resources, Speer, like Faust, sold his soul to the devil. In his memoirs, this brilliant and multifaceted visionary acknowledged the hypnotic power of his Mephistopheles, and his own unconditional submission. Hitler always treated him with an almost affectionate courtesy, which some insinuated was a sign of latent homosexuality. There is no evidence of such an infatuation, but all historians agree in describing him as the favourite of that exclusive circle. The former house painter probably saw in that young man the qualities of the artist that he himself – having been rejected at the entrance to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna – had longed to become. For the Reich and its leader, Speer designed imaginative plans and colossal structures, from the Nuremberg stadium to the blueprint for a new Berlin dominated by a dome three times the size of St Peter’s. The war brought this peaceful building programme to a halt, and in 1942, Speer was appointed Minister of Armaments. In this role, the artist proved himself to be a creative planner and an unyielding executor. The more Germany was devastated by Allied air raids, the more the factories churned out tanks, aeroplanes, guns and submarines. In 1944, when half the Reich had been reduced to rubble by American B-17s and British Lancasters, Speer quadrupled war production, particularly of panzers and aeroplanes. He unscrupulously exploited slave labourers, prisoners of war and even internees held by the SS. This latter decision led to him being charged with crimes against humanity. However, as far as possible, he preferred, as Davidson wrote, the carrot to the stick, and repeatedly interceded with Hitler to call Himmler and his torturers to order. The Führer granted his request, and without becoming a compassionate philanthropist like Oskar Schindler, Speer improved the conditions of the workers he managed to recruit. He did not do so out of humanity, but out of utilitarianism, aware that a mistreated and undernourished worker produces less than one in acceptable conditions. Naturally, he was aware of the crimes of the SS, of Auschwitz and the massacres there, even though he claimed otherwise at Nuremberg. However, he had no means of preventing the dictator’s planned extermination programmes. In the spring of 1945, with culpable delay, Speer realised that his Mephistopheles was destroying Germany, and when he was ordered to turn the country into scorched earth, he rejected this suicidal delusion, risking both his position and his life. He later claimed to have planned to kill Hitler by introducing poison gas into the bunker’s pipes, but no one ever found any evidence of this impractical scheme. In the end, the young architect acknowledged, at least in part, his guilt, and the court showed leniency: it sentenced him to twenty years’ imprisonment, which Speer served to the very last day. When he was released in 1966, he published his memoirs, which became a bestseller. Today, historians question the sincerity of his account, and Simon Wiesenthal once said to him: “If they had known at Nuremberg what we know about you now, they would have hanged you.”

Even more ambiguous, though far less intriguing, is the figure of Rudolf Hess, who had been languishing in an English prison since 1941, having parachuted there for reasons that nobody explained and nobody understood. He had been one of Hitler’s earliest associates and had helped draft his "Mein Kampf". For a few years he led the party, from which he was gradually marginalised. By the start of the war, he no longer held any influence, and his mind was showing signs of instability. During his imprisonment he remained silent, and his presence at Nuremberg was largely a matter of form. He took part in the trial by feigning amnesia, save for a few moments of deceptive lucidity. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, and following Speer’s release he remained the sole inmate at Spandau Prison, where he took his own life in 1987.

The figure of Hans Frank is far more remarkable. He had been a skilled lawyer, having defended Hitler in dozens of trials, and at the age of 33 he was appointed Minister of Justice for Bavaria. He was a capable jurist, and had he remained so, he would have spared millions of people – and ultimately himself – a tragic end. Unfortunately, following the conquest of Poland, he accepted the post of Governor-General of that ill-fated country, already divided between the two partners in crime in Berlin and Moscow. In that role, he distinguished himself through his efficiency and cruelty. It was under his jurisdiction that the first – and, in fact, the only – extermination camps were established; little is known about them even today because, with the exception of Auschwitz, they were all destroyed by the Nazis. Yet the names Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Maidanek and Treblinka evoke even greater horror than the all-too-familiar names of Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald and Mauthausen. It was in those Polish camps that the first methods of mass murder were trialled. All these death factories were run by the SS and Hans Frank. During the trial, ‘the executioner of Kraków’ converted to Catholicism and declared himself repentant. He always wore dark glasses; it is not known whether this was out of shame or because of a sensitivity to light. He accepted his death sentence as inevitable, and died after five minutes of agony and five years of ignominy.

We do not have much space left to describe the other defendants, who, as the British ‘prosecutor’ put it, were identified on the basis of a reputation that was more or less deserved. Some were veritable butchers, such as Wilhelm Frick, former Minister of the Interior and Protector of Bohemia and Moravia; or Fritz Sauckel, Plenipotentiary for Labour Mobilisation, who sent millions of slave labourers to certain death through exhaustion and starvation. Others were depraved ideologues, such as Alfred Rosenberg, theorist of Aryan superiority and the extermination of the ‘Jewish race’; or Julius Streicher, perhaps the most repugnant of them all, ostracised even by his own comrades for the vulgar and violent anti-Semitic propaganda in his newspaper "Der Sturmer". The last of the criminals destined for the gallows was Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the Austrian Quisling who had facilitated the German invasion and had been rewarded with full powers over Anne Frank’s Netherlands. They were all hanged, and no one raised any objections.

The fates of Baldur von Schirach and Konstantin von Neurath differed considerably. The former had been the leader of the Hitler Youth and Gauleiter of Vienna. He had come into conflict, within the limits permitted, with Hitler’s right-hand man, Martin Bormann, who had marginalised him. He was sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment and released alongside Speer. The latter had been appointed Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, but in 1941 he was replaced by Reinhard Heydrich, who was considered more efficient and more ruthless. Neurath was sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment and was released in 1954 on health grounds.

The last three defendants were sent to trial without a shred of evidence. Hjalmar Schacht, Franz von Papen and Hans Fritzsche had been staunch Nazis, but had taken no part in either the war or the massacres. The first was a skilled banker who had revived the German economy and finances; the second an astute politician who had paved the way for Hitler, only to be rewarded with a minor diplomatic post; and the third a newspaper editor who had assisted Goebbels in his enthusiastic propaganda campaign for the Führer. They were all acquitted, although they were immediately subjected to a German ‘denazification’ tribunal. They received symbolic sentences and were released after a short while.

This overview would not be complete without mentioning the charges brought against the organisations. As we have said, this was an original idea because, according to the general principles of law (and of our own Constitution), criminal liability is personal. However, Jackson decided to bring before the court those bodies which, in various ways, had generally represented German militarism and, in particular, Hitler’s programme of hegemony. Thus, the General Staff of the Armed Forces, the leadership of the Nazi Party (NSDAP), the SA, the SS, the Gestapo and the SD were all charged on various counts. No one fully understood what this meant, particularly whether a conviction of these organisations would automatically imply guilt on the part of all their members. To grasp the implications and paradoxes of this decision, one need only consider that the General Staff, as such, had not existed since 1918, and that its apparent counterpart, the OKW commanded by Keitel, was merely the Führer’s personal staff. As for the SS, the matter was even more complex. This ‘empire of evil’ created by Himmler comprised a series of bodies dedicated to a wide variety of tasks: first and foremost, control of all police forces – the secret police (Gestapo); the public order police (Orpo); and the criminal investigation police (Kripo). Then there was the Security Service (SD) and the Central Administrative Office (Wvha), which exploited the immense labour of internees in the concentration camps. In short, the SS was responsible for the ‘Final Solution’ for the Jews; for the persecution of minorities and political dissidents, Roma, homosexuals and members of religious groups. In short, the entire repressive apparatus of Nazism was managed by this organisation and its diabolical leader. But his role did not end there. Himmler had created a veritable private army, the Waffen-SS, which eventually became the most efficient of the large military units. By the end of the war, there were 38 divisions, and almost all had distinguished themselves through their fanaticism and ferocity. The 1st SS Panzer Division ‘Leibstandarte’ had massacred 600 American prisoners at Malmedy and as many civilians during the Battle of the Ardennes. The Second, ‘Das Reich’, had burnt just as many French people alive at Oradour; the 16th, ‘Reichsführer’, had brought shame upon itself with the massacres at Marzabotto and Sant’Anna di Stazzema. In Poland and Russia, the atrocities had been even more gruesome and widespread. However, the task of trying and convicting the hundreds of thousands of individuals – civilians and military personnel alike – who had been enlisted in this organisation was clearly impossible. And the results became apparent almost immediately, when the sheer scale of the numbers was compounded by a conflict of interests. The Americans and the Soviets divided these former Nazis equally between them, placing the most experienced among them in the security and intelligence services. Klaus Barbie, recruited by the CIA, was perhaps the best known, because his most famous victim, Jean Moulin, became the symbol of the French and European Resistance. But thousands got away scot-free. Even the perpetrators of the Malmedy massacre, although sentenced to death, were in fact released after a few years. When the scales of justice become too heavy, even their sword shatters.

The indictment of the associations was perhaps the most striking anomaly in a trial that was, on the whole, fair. And this was the case despite a series of unusual features and innovations that make it a ‘one-off’ in the history of military jurisprudence. We shall examine this in more detail in the next instalment, when we discuss the charges.

(3 – Continued)