After the Reich (89 page)

On 16 July 1946 the defendants in the Malmédy trial learned of their fates. Forty-three men were sentenced to death by hanging, including Peiper; twenty-two more received life sentences, including Sepp Dietrich. The prisoners were then transferred to Landsberg Prison, the very place where their former master Adolf Hitler had penned
Mein Kampf
. Dietrich’s sentence was commuted to twenty-five years in 1951, and he was released four years later. Many of the men on death row survived. There was a discomfort felt by many of the Americans who had been involved in the case. The presence of so many Jews in the court, the way that the confessions had been extracted and the fact that many of the Americans could recall their troops carrying out similar illegal acts contrived to raise doubts about the security of the convictions. A year later the sentences were reviewed, with a number of the death sentences being commuted. In the middle of 1948 there were still 150 men in Dachau on death row. Clay still wanted to execute them. Most of them wriggled off the hook in the end. A few months later there were ten cases on his desk from the condemned men of Dachau: six writs of habeas corpus and four who had been granted leave to appeal. Another ninety-five were still supposed to be hanged. On 4 March 1949 Clay was anxious to dispose of ten of the Malmédy murderers; twelve more were still on appeal.

He did not think much of their claims to have been tortured. On 12 March he examined the appeal of Sergeant Tank Commander Bersin of the 1st SS-Panzer Regiment: ‘He was forced to spend two months on a prison floor, beaten and kicked by the guards to the extent of losing several teeth, carried to the dental clinic and to interrogations with a hood over his head and grossly mistreated in an interrogation of March 20 1946 by Mr Kirschbaum in the presence of Mr Ellowitz.’ Clay had no doubts about Bersin’s guilt. The supposed torturers denied the charges against them.
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Whatever Clay felt, the methods used to extract confessions had discredited the trial.
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On top of these he had nineteen death sentences from the Buchenwald trial to ratify, including Ilse Koch - the ‘Bitch of Buchenwald’ - who had managed to get herself pregnant.
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She was the wife of Karl Koch, the camp commandant, and was renowned not only for her collection of lampshades but also for her fondness for riding through the camp on a horse and lashing out at the prisoners. Her case presented particular difficulties. She had left Buchenwald in August 1943 and no one seemed to know what she had done after that. Clay commuted her sentence, but by doing so he aroused a storm of protest. He found a way out of ‘double jeopardy’: she could be transferred to the German courts because there were German nationals in Buchenwald. This stratagem worked, and she was sentenced to life imprisonment. She committed suicide in prison in 1967.
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Dietrich’s life sentence was severely criticised, as no link could be found between him and the murderous command. Unfortunately for him, Clay was not prepared to revise the decision. On the other hand now only twelve men remained on death row. Clay later halved that number again. The last six were let off in 1951, at the same time as the revision of Dietrich’s life ticket.
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Germans accused of atrocities conjured up some ingenious arguments in their defence, but as the courts had been able to impose their own rules they stood little chance of success. So it was that the SS man Fritz Knoechlein, accused of killing ninety-seven British POWs in cold blood, claimed that there had been a
Standgericht
- or drumhead court - before the massacre, something that was permitted by the rule book. On the other hand the court was told that such a tribunal could not be set up once soldiers had laid down their arms. POWs are entitled to protection by the opposing army.
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The SS regimental commander Kurt Meyer was tried by a Canadian court for ordering the killing of forty Canadian POWs. Meyer was effectively being tried for atrocities committed by his regiment, as no evidence could be produced to show that he had issued the fatal orders. Allied commanders were mercifully spared this ‘chain of command’ principal. In general Meyer impressed the court by his dignity at the trial. He was convicted, however, of responsibility for the deaths of eighteen soldiers and sentenced to death by firing squad. This was later commuted to life imprisonment by the general commanding Canadian forces in Germany whose conscience, it is alleged, was not entirely clean when it came to the actions of his own men in dealing with German and Italian POWs. Meyer was imprisoned in New Brunswick before being transferred to the British high-security prison at Werl near Dortmund, where he had Kesselring for a cellmate. He was released in 1954.
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The Canadians lost heart after that, and allowed the British to look into atrocities perpetrated against their men after D-Day when widely circulated rumours that Canadian and British troops were not taking prisoners led to some scenes of savagery on the part of the SS.
^ei
Once again the orders to refuse quarter appear to have come from Wilhelm Mohnke. The killings at a first-aid post were carried out by an SS man called Wilhelm Schnabel. His superior officer, Bernhard Siebken, actively resisted implementing the orders and was not present when the shootings took place. The trial began in Hamburg on 28 August 1948. When Siebken was sentenced to death, a plea was entered in mitigation, but the deputy judge advocate, Lord Russell of Liverpool, decided that the court had pronounced the correct verdict. Both men were hanged in Hameln by Pierrepoint on 20 January 1949. It was a classic case of
vis victis
, or victor’s justice.
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Another Nazi who was imprisoned in Dachau was the former Gauleiter of Mecklenburg. Tisa von der Schulenburg travelled to Dachau to see Friedrich Hildebrandt, who was implicated in the shooting of two American airmen. She was told that she could not save him, even though he had protected her and her sister-in-law after 20 July 1944. She tried to understand why Hildebrandt, a ‘harmless’ man, would have ordered the shooting of the fliers, and she remembered that it was in response to the strafing of a train, in which a hundred people, chiefly women and children, had been killed. Hildebrandt had decided that the next ‘terror-bombers’ that fell to earth alive would suffer accordingly.

The Germans Begin to Prosecute Nazis

Those who were liquidated first tended to be those who had committed atrocities against Allied citizens. Hence the Russians wanted the heads of the generals responsible for invading the Soviet Union; the Yugoslavs and the Poles those who had performed that role in their lands; the Czechs those who had administered their country. The Russians killed the SS chief Friedrich Jecklen in 1946; the Yugoslavs the minister Siegfried Lasche and the general Alexander Löhr; the Poles executed Josef Bühler, Jürgen Stroop and Rudolf Höss, and the more prominent Nazis in Danzig were also passed though the Polish courts: the Gauleiter, Albert Forster, was caught by the British and handed over to the authorities in Warsaw. He and Richard Hildebrandt, head of the RuSHA, were executed. Before his despatch, Greisser, the head of the Danzig Senate and Gauleiter of Posen, was paraded in an iron cage through the streets of the city that had reverted to its Polish name of Poznań.
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The Czechs killed Karl-Hermann Frank, Hanns Ludin and Dieter Wisliceny.

Officers who had ordered the killing of Allied POWs could expect death sentences. Many who had ordered the killing of thousands of their own citizens escaped scot free: Mengele, Gestapo Müller, Alois ‘Jupo’ Brunner and others managed to elude the Allies, and some say that the Allies connived at their disappearance. The Allies’ fury was quickly spent. In the main Nuremberg trials sentences became lighter with the passage of time; and even those given capital sentences or life often had the tariff commuted or reduced. As the trials edged towards the end of the 1940s, the fear developed among the judges that the Soviets were about to invade western Germany and wind the proceedings up.

There was a large element of hypocrisy. Since that time many Allied atrocities have come to light, particularly the killing of POWs at Biscari, on orders from General Patton. The sinking of the French fleet at Oran by the British, with the loss of some 1,500 French lives was no secret. It was a continuation of a British naval tradition that originated at Copenhagen in 1801. The last German Kaiser had feared that it would happen to his fledgling fleet. It was possibly a ‘usage’, but it can hardly be called any more legal than the German Blitzkrieg.

The British made the decision to stop the trials in April, and in September they handed the business over to the Germans. They passed Nazi Party members before the Spruchkammer according to the American Law for Liberation issued on 5 March 1946. Nazis were now being judged by Germans, essentially their former political enemies in the SPD or the KPD. The biggest calls for retribution came from the American Zone, as a response to pressure from OMGUS, the American military government. One of those arraigned before the courts was Winifred Wagner, who was reduced to penury, cycling up to seventy kilometres a day to forage for kindling. In between foraging for wood, she put together a sixty-four-page document on her relations with Adolf Hitler, appending copies of documents showing how she had gone out of her way to help the oppressed of the Third Reich. She also quite rightly pointed out that she had not broken the law by joining the NSDAP at the time.
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In her deposition, Winifred claimed to have only the vaguest knowledge of the concentration camps, though other documents showed that she had been involved with trying to get someone out of Auschwitz. She had probably been given poor advice, but by that time she had seen how savage the courts had been with some of her friends, who had been guilty of little more than Party membership. Particularly galling had been the treatment accorded to her doctor Helmut Treuter, who was dispossessed and imprisoned, largely as a result of denunciation by a rival. It was not until November 1949 that he was able to practise again. Winifred feared the worst.
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She had no problem understanding the methods of her interrogators. They were similar to those employed by the Gestapo, ranging from threats to normal chit-chat. She learned that she had been indicted because she had made Hitler ‘socially acceptable’. Meanwhile her daughter Friedelind - an American citizen - was telling the world that Winifred’s former lover, Heinz Tietjen, had been used to interrogate British spies. It transpired that she meant Hermann Göring (or ‘Teddie’, as he was known in the Wagner household). Indeed, the case against Winifred relied substantially on the account of the family’s history provided by her daughter’s book.
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Winifred Wagner’s trial took place in Bayreuth. The principle was
sauve qui peut
. Heinz Tietjen, who had directed the festival after Siegfried Wagner’s death, cried off. His own denazification trial was coming up, and he preferred not to venture out. Winifred was again scrupulously honest about her belief in Hitler, which had seized her as early as 1923. Hitler’s love of Wagner and Wagner’s hatred of the Jews were also aired at the trial, though neither could have been said to have had any bearing on the case against Winifred. The Spruchkammer showed an unfortunate bias towards conviction that must have reminded many Germans of the proceedings of the infamous People’s Court it had to some extent replaced. When one witness said that she saw things ‘from a different point of view’, the prosecutor rejoined, ‘Your different point of view is of no interest to us here.’ It might have been Roland Freisler himself.
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The prosecution called for Winifred to be classed grade one. If she had provided help to victims of the regime, it had not been from sentiments of opposition. They called for a sentence of six years in a labour camp and the confiscation of her assets. As it was, Winifred was condemned grade two. She had to do 350 days’ community service and yield up 60 per cent of her assets. She was later reclassified as a ‘lesser offender’ on appeal. The initial sentence proved controversial. Some Germans howled about the leniency of the court. Foreigners sent her food parcels. As one Jewish friend conceded, her chief crime was succumbing to the widespread delusion that Hitler had not been responsible for the crimes committed in his name. It was a view she was later to express to a like-minded person, the historian David Irving. To the end of her days Hitler was ‘USA’ - ‘Unser selige Adolf’ (Our blessed Adolf ).

The Western Allies started out well. In the summer of 1945, for example, they sacked 90 per cent of legal officials in their zones, but they soon realised that by doing so they were greatly adding to their own workload, and that they would have problems rebuilding the German legal system. Many of the German lawyers were able to receive testimonials from colleagues attesting to their ‘inner’ rejection of the system. Once these had been approved, a
Persilschein
was issued: named after the soap powder, it ‘washed white’ the former Nazi. Similarly, prison officials who had been responsible for myriad murders and who had carried out a policy of unrivalled brutality were absolved for the simple reason that the prison service was short staffed. In the new state of Baden-Württemberg the proportion retained was an astonishing 96 per cent.
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Once washed clean, the jurists returned to the bench or ministry. About 80 per cent of Nazi jurists went back to work in the Federal Republic, including seventy-two former judges and prosecutors from the notorious People’s Court. Some of these continued to serve as late as the 1970s. The German courts proved incapable of sentencing any former Nazi judge or prosecutor. Their excuse was that they were applying the law as it existed at the time.
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In the East the situation was different. After the initial teething problems, when a lot of very dodgy men were elevated to the bench, of 1,000 GDR judges in 1950, only one had been a member of the NSDAP. To deal with the shortage of skilled jurists, judges were given crash-courses. These judges however, would not have been impartial. The prison service was similarly purged, but again this hardly made the prisons of the GDR preferable to those administered by ex-Nazis in the West.
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