After the Reich (86 page)

Göring could not claim so easily that he had had no knowledge of the killings that took place on the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. It had been chiefly his party. He dismissed Röhm, however, as a ‘dirty homosexual swine’ and justified himself by saying it was them or him. As Speer and others sought to atone for their roles in the mass murders, or claimed a dubious role in opposition, or - like Paulus - chose to implicate Hitler and his gang in monstrous crimes, Göring started to talk about honour. He didn’t care whether he lived or died, but he was not going to grovel before the court. He urged the generals to be equally resolute. He said they were all going to be treated as martyrs before too long, and their bodies set up in mausolea like Napoleon’s.

When the defendants were shown a Soviet film of German atrocities, Göring yawned and scoffed. With a little justification he pointed out that the Russians did not necessarily occupy the moral high ground. As it turns out, he was right to be scornful: the Soviet film showed images of Katyn, and the mortal remains of a large element of the Polish officer corps, murdered not by the Germans but by the NKVD. (The massacre was part of the Soviet indictment.) He was, nonetheless, appalled by the images he had seen.
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The defendants all took the trial very differently. Jodl was calm and soldierly, and awaited his fate. Seyss-Inquart thought he would be acquitted, and told Viennese stories. The one thing that disturbed him was the knowledge that Hitler had appointed him in his will to replace Ribbentrop. Frank admitted his guilt and spent his time in meditation. He, Papen, Seyss-Inquart and Kaltenbrunner were regular in their attendance at Mass. Ribbentrop continued to write long letters in self-justification; Rosenberg made pencil-sketches of the witnesses; Streicher let out cries and screams during the night. To the end he maintained that the trial was the triumph of world Jewry.
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Of the service chiefs Keitel remained his pompous self, pleading not guilty to the indictment, but Dönitz and Raeder - who had been turned over by the Soviet authorities in a rare gesture of cooperation - conducted themselves with dignity, as did Neurath.
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The prosecution opened its case against Hess on 7 February 1946. Göring took the stand at last on 13 March, and remained in the dock until the 22nd. He had waited five months for his moment. He put on a fine performance and refused either to grovel before the court or to deny his role in the ‘movement’. He gaily quoted Winston Churchill’s line, ‘In the struggle for life and death there is, in the end, no legality.’
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He took responsibility for everything he could, thereby removing much of the case against Papen, for example, when he claimed that the Anschluss had been his show.
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Asked about some aspect of mobilisation, Göring answered that the Americans had so far kept quiet about their own strategic plans. The Americans now began to doubt the wisdom of this sort of public trial. Göring was in danger of becoming a hero again. Even the American press reported. ‘Göring wins first round.’
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There was a reluctance among the Allies to produce witnesses for the defence, and it took them a while to locate Göring’s chief of staff, Koller, even though he was in British captivity.
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The British proved more successful at badgering Göring than the Americans had been. Under Sir David Maxwell Fyfe’s cross-examination he began to sweat. The British case hinged on the shooting of the fifty airmen after the so-called Great Escape - a terrible crime and a contravention of the Geneva Convention, but one that looks peripheral now compared to others perpetrated by the Nazis. They had been shot on Emmy’s birthday. Göring may well have known nothing about it, but that hardly absolved the Luftwaffe chief of the ultimate responsibility for the crime.
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One of the Nazis who dramatically turned his coat at Nuremberg was Frank, the governor of the Polish General Gouvernement. Many of the most repulsive acts of grisly murder and cruelty had occurred on his beat, even if it was not necessarily true that the murderers were in any way responsible to him. When asked if he had participated, however, he replied with a clear ‘Yes’. It had been the testimony of Höss, he said, that had made him want to take the responsibility on to himself: ‘My conscience does not allow me to throw the responsibility solely on these minor people. I myself have never installed a concentration camp for Jews, or promoted the existence of such camps; but if Adolf Hitler personally laid that dreadful responsibility on his people, then it is mine too, for we have fought Jewry for years; and we have indulged the most terrible utterances - my own diary bears witness against me . . . A thousand years will pass and still this guilt of Germany will not have been erased.’
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The atrocities in the concentration camps nettled even the most obstinate Nazis. After the camp commandant Rudolf Höss had given his testimony Göring turned to Raeder and Jodl and said, ‘If only there weren’t this damned Auschwitz! Himmler got us into that mess. If it weren’t for Auschwitz we could put up a proper defence. The way it is our chances are blocked. Whenever our names are mentioned, everybody thinks of nothing but Auschwitz or Treblinka. It’s like a reflex.’
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Some of Göring’s greatest crimes were not even mentioned in the indictment. Nowhere did the Allies make mention of the bombing of Warsaw, Rotterdam, London or Coventry. The Soviets, who had not possessed the capacity to bomb Germany with the same ferocity as the Anglo-Americans, had wanted to bring the matter up, but it was vetoed by the West. For good reason, thought Speer: ‘The ruins around the courthouse demonstrate all too plainly how cruelly and effectively the Western Allies on their part extended the war to non-combatants.’
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Göring addressed the court for the last time on 31 August 1946. He reiterated the precept of
nulla poena sine lege
and declared that the German people were ignorant of crime and ‘free from blame’. He would expiate their guilt with his martyrdom.
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Less dramatically perhaps, he reminded the court of his efforts to negotiate a peace in 1939 - behind Hitler’s back. More and more was leaking out from the courts. It was not just the Germans who were shocked. In Bendorf in the Rhineland, Elena Skrjabina thought the whole process hypocritical, and the bench’s impartiality compromised by the judges from her own land. On 1 September she wrote:

Recently the Nuremberg trials have been creating great interest. Now they are over. The accused have been most severely punished and rightly so. However, who were the judges? When I think that the most savage measures of punishment were being demanded by the representatives of the Soviet Union, I cannot help but feel oppressed by the injustice of it all. Indeed, the Soviet Authorities have destroyed and are right now destroying millions of their own people for nothing whatsoever. No other country in the world has so many jails and camps.
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The French academic Robert d’Harcourt had no reason to love the Germans, having had two sons pass through Buchenwald. He was even harder hitting in his accusation of hypocrisy: the Germans ‘are not angry with the fliers who destroyed their towns today, it is the judges. By their attempts to forcibly convert them the Allies have lost most of the moral high ground that they had obtained through victory. To take on the role of Solomon presupposes a moral qualification. It is this moral authority that the vanquished no longer recognise in the victors.’
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The summing up began on 30 September. The judges rehearsed the entire history of the Third Reich, giving the impression that the trial was entirely political. It was Lord Justice Lawrence who read out the sentences: his speech lasted a day and a half. The defendants slept ill that night. Lawrence began with Göring, who was found guilty on all four counts and sentenced to death on 1 October. Apart from Hess - who was given life - similar sentences were meted out to those seated on the front bench until the judge reached Schacht. Göring flinched when Schacht was acquitted, then slammed down the earphones in disgust. Hess was not wearing his earphones and later told Speer that he had assumed he had been awarded the death penalty, but he had not bothered to listen.
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In the back row there were custodial sentences for Dönitz and Raeder, then came Papen, who was also acquitted. In Berlin 25,000 workers downed tools in protest when they heard the news about Papen.
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The Russians still insisted he was an important Nazi.

Göring’s counsel entered a plea in mitigation, again mentioning his efforts to maintain peace in 1939 - moves that must have been known to the British government at least. The British had no desire to modify the sentence, and the government issued an instruction to Sir Sholto Douglas in Berlin that such a thing would not be politically expedient. As it was, the Soviet judge, Nikitchenko, had called for the three acquitted men, Schacht, Papen and Goebbel’s deputy propaganda chief Hans Fritzsche, to be convicted, and wanted the death sentence for Hess.
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Schacht had been liberated because his role in the expropriation of the Jews was a pre-war internal matter, but Streicher had been sacked as Gauleiter of Franconia in 1940 and banned from public speaking two years before. Fritzsche believed he had been tried because Goebbels was not around to take the rap.

After the sentences those on ‘death row’ were creamed off - Göring, Ribbentrop, Keitel, Jodl, Streicher, Sauckel, Frick, Rosenberg, Seyss-Inquart, Frank and Kaltenbrunner. The cellar of the courthouse emptied, leaving the condemned men to themselves. The seven men who were eventually to be transferred to Spandau Prison in the British Sector of Berlin were provided with new cells upstairs: Hess, the economics minister and Reichsbank chief Walter Funk, the Grand Admirals Dönitz and Raeder, the Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach, the former foreign minister and ‘protector’ of Bohemia and Moravia Constantin von Neurath and Speer. They had been given sentences ranging from ten years to life.

Göring cheated the executioners by taking cyanide from a phial he had managed to conceal from his guards. One of the reasons he gave for his choice of end in the note he left in his cell was the Allied decision to film the deaths of their prisoners. The gallows equipment arrived at Nuremberg on the night of 13 October. The next day hammering could be heard from the gymnasium, and the slave-driver Fritz Sauckel had begun to scream. In the absence of Göring, the other Nazis went to their deaths at the appointed hour on the 16th. Ribbentrop was now the leader. The hangman botched the execution and the rope throttled the former foreign minister for twenty minutes before he expired. The others died as planned.
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Speer could hear them being collected from their cells: ‘scraps of phrases, scraping of boots, and reverberating footsteps slowly fading away’. When Streicher’s name was called, someone cried, ‘Bravo, Streicher!’ Speer thought it was Hess. As they went to their deaths, the others shouted words of defiance. Keitel’s last utterance was ‘Alles für Deutschland. Deutschland über alles’ (All for Germany, Germany above all else). Ribbentrop, Jodl and Seyss-Inquart said something similar. Streicher chanted, ‘Heil Hitler! This is the Purim Festival
^eg
of 1946!’
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The bodies were photographed. On 16 October they were taken to a house at 25 Heimannstrasse in Munich-Solln which the Americans had been using as a mortuary. They were inspected by Allied teams before they were cremated. The ashes were scattered into the Conwentzbach seventy-five metres downhill from the house - a muddy, Bavarian ditch. The cremated were entered in the books under false names: Hermann Göring was Georg Munger, and the scourge of the Jews, Julius Streicher, received the name of Abraham Goldberg.
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The next morning the seven men they left behind to serve out their sentences were called to clean out the cells. Speer observed the remains of the last meal in their mess tins. Papers and blankets were strewn about. Only in Jodl’s cell was everything in apple-pie order, the blankets neatly folded. On Seyss’s wall he noted that the former Austrian chancellor had put a cross on the calendar for the 16th, the day of his death. In the afternoon Speer, Schirach and Hess were handed brooms and mops and sent into the gym where the men had been hanged. The scaffold had already been taken down, but - spotting a mark on the floor he took to be a bloodstain - Hess stood to attention and raised his arm in a Nazi salute.
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17

The Little Fish

A Prosecutor cannot also be a judge . . . Justice is by its nature light, which also renders the shadows starker. The less passion is reflected in its source, the clearer the crime emerges in its hideousness.

Ernst Jünger, Der Friede, Vienna 1949, 50, 51

Lesser Nuremberg Trials

T
he Allies put a brave face on it, but the International Military Tribunal had not been deemed a success and it was put in mothballs. Robert Jackson was ‘thoroughly disenchanted’ with the trials. He had particularly disliked the methods of the Soviets. The Allies had in fact taken stock of the criticisms levelled at the trials. The presence of a Russian judge on the bench (and a general rather than a jurist) had been an embarrassment. It was decided that the Allies should try their own Nazis in their own zones. That way the ideological differences between the Allies would be less immediately obvious. Jackson had recommended to Truman that any more international trials of this nature would have to be held in Berlin. This never happened, of course.
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Nuremberg would go on, but as a solely American jurisdiction. After the first eleven victims had been despatched, the cells filled up with new inmates who were to pass before the tribunal.