The Nuremberg Interviews (81 page)

  
1.
See chapter on Fritzsche, note 11.

  
2.
In the literature on the persecution of the Jews, there is no evidence of such an English proposal in 1936. Some of the destinations mentioned in the text have been verified by research, particularly Madagascar, but others, such as Alaska, Uganda, and Guiana, may have been mentioned from time to time among leading Nazi officials but do not seem to have been seriously entertained. The standard account of the persecutions, including the policy of forced emigration to specified areas within and outside of Europe, is Hilberg,
Destruction of the European Jews
.

  
3.
Proportional representation was used in the elections of the Weimar Republic, but the Nazis, the strongest party, did not win a majority. See above, chapter on Funk, note 2.

  
4.
On the crisis and collapse of the Weimar Republic and how this made Hitler possible, see Gellately,
Backing Hitler
, 9–33.

  
5.
William Averell Harriman (1891–1986) was closely associated with the New Deal. He was the American ambassador to the USSR (1943–46) and also administrator of lend-lease. James Michael Curley was the colorful Irish-American mayor of Boston and served on and off, between 1914 and 1950.

  
6.
On the postwar forced population transfers and the “ethnic cleansing” of Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other newly liberated areas in Eastern Europe, see Philipp Ther and Ana Siljak, eds.,
Redrawing Nations: Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central Europe, 1944–1948
(Lanham, Md., 2001), 2. Some 1.5 million people lost their lives when an estimated 12 million ethnic Germans were driven from this area.

  
7.
In 1919 Gen. Tasker Bliss (1853–1930) was in Europe as the American military representative on the Supreme War Council. He became one of President Woodrow Wilson’s representatives to the Paris Peace Conference. Jan Smuts (1870–1950), an Afrikaner in Britain’s imperial war cabinet (1917–18), helped plan the League of Nations. For a recent account, see MacMillan,
Paris 1919
.

  
1.
For the background and precise statistics, see Ulrich Herbert,
Hitler’s Foreign Workers: Enforced Foreign Labor in Germany Under the Third Reich
(Cambridge, 1997).

  
2.
The Gustloff Works (Gustloffwerke) were factories that produced various kinds of weapons for the German military. At a number of sites, such as one located near the Buchenwald concentration camp, the factories used slave and camp labor.

  
3.
Presumably this refers to John Llewellyn Lewis (1880–1969), the American labor leader who, among other things, once headed the United Mine Workers and the American Federation of Labor.

  
4.
On Kuhn, see Sander A. Diamond,
The Nazi Movement in the United States, 1924–1941
(Ithaca, N.Y., 1974).

  
1.
On Jewish attempts at self-protection in Nazi Germany, see Friedländer,
Nazi Germany and the Jews
.

  
2.
The stock market crash in the United States began in October 1929 and ushered in the Great Depression. The effects were reflected almost immediately in Germany, where stocks also fell and unemployment rose dramatically. For the crisis at the end of Germany’s Weimar Republic, see Gellately,
Backing Hitler
, 9–33.

  
3.
On July 31, 1932, the Nazi Party won 37.4 percent of the votes cast and 230 out of a total of 608 seats in the Reichstag elections. In the November 6, 1932, elections, they won 33.1 percent of the votes and 196 seats out of a total of 584.

  
4.
In the March 5, 1933, elections the Nazis gained 43.9 percent of the votes cast, and 288 seats out of a total of 647 in the Reichstag.

  
5.
Neurath was ousted on February 4, 1938. On the same day, there were announcements of the “retirement” of commander in chief of the army Gen. Werner von Fritsch and his colleague Minister of War Werner von Blomberg. An additional sixteen high-ranking generals were retired at that time and forty-four were moved about in order to remove any potentially unreliable elements. For a brief account and introduction to the larger problem, see Gordon A. Craig,
Germany 1866–1945
(Oxford, 1978), 700.

  
6.
For a brief account of the postassassination crackdown in Operation Thunderstorm, see Gellately,
Backing Hitler
, 225–26. Germans generally disapproved of the attempt to assassinate Hitler. Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben (1881–1944) was executed for his part in the attempted putsch.

  
7.
Ambassador Hemmen had been in charge of the Economic Department of the Armistice Commission dealing with France after its defeat in 1940.

  
8.
For the importance of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service (April 7, 1933) see especially Friedländer,
Nazi Germany and the Jews
.

  
9.
For an excellent account of sterilization and euthanasia programs, see Henry Friedlander,
The Origins of Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution
(Chapel Hill, 1995).

10.
Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929) was a veteran French statesman and known for his role in forging the Treaty of Versailles (1919).

  
1.
For an innovative account, see Lewis H. Siegelbaum,
Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935–1941
(Cambridge, 1988).

  
2.
The reference appears to be to texts used in German schools, which the German boys were surprised to find in the Russian language.

  
3.
Richard Gluecks (1889–1945) was one of Theodor Eicke’s (1892–1943) staff leaders in 1936, and succeeded Eicke as inspector of the concentration camps after the outbreak of the Second World War. Gluecks contributed to the creation of the concentration camp system, including Auschwitz, working under Oswald Pohl. It appears that he committed suicide in 1945.

  
4.
In fact Alois Brunner (born 1912) — who was one of Eichmann’s close colleagues — managed
to escape justice and, according to a recent investigation, as of 2000, continued to live in Syria. See Georg M. Hafner and Esther Schapira,
Die Akte Alois Brunner
(Frankfurt am Main, 2000).

  
5.
Josef Buerckel (1894–1944) was Nazi Party boss (
Gauleiter
) of Austria for a time after its union with Germany in 1938. Odilo Globocnik (1904–1945) was, among other things, the organizer of the notorious Action Reinhard death camps. On the latter see especially Yitzhak Arad,
Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps
(Bloomington, 1987).

  
6.
For the background see Gordon J. Horwitz,
In the Shadow of Death: Living Outside the Gates of Mauthausen
(New York, 1990).

  
1.
Speer was evidently reluctant to be interviewed by Goldensohn, but in the end Hitler’s former architect proved to be the most talkative of all those tried at Nuremberg. He published two lengthy and important books, which are cited in my introduction to this volume. He has been the subject of many studies. For the latest and most thorough, see Gitta Sereny,
Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth
(New York, 1995).

  
1.
See above, chapter on Fritzsche, note 11.

  
2.
For the November 9, 1938, pogrom, see above, chapter on Doenitz, note 9.

  
1.
The limited size of the army was imposed by the Versailles Treaty; see Boemeke, Feldman, and Glaser, eds.,
Treaty of Versailles
.

  
2.
Erich Koch (1896–1986) was tried in Poland after the war and in 1959 sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

  
3.
Josef Wagner was at one point district Nazi Party leader in Westphalia South, to which he added Silesia in 1934. He was dismissed in 1940 for pro-Catholic sympathies, but that resulted less from Hitler’s own appreciation of the situation than from inner-party intrigues and power struggles. See Dietrich Orlow,
The History of the Nazi Party, 1933–1945
(Pittsburgh, 1973), 270. Hitler had Wagner’s case sent to the highest party court, which, much to Hitler’s consternation, acquitted Wagner and reinstated him as a member of the party. See Donald M. McKale,
The Nazi Party Courts: Hitler’s Management of Conflict in His Movement, 1921–1945
(Lawrence, 1974), 178–79.

  
4.
On Auschwitz, see Franciszek Piper, “Auschwitz Concentration Camp: How It Was Used in the Nazi System of Terror and Genocide and in the Economy of the Third Reich,” in Berenbaum and Peck, eds.,
Holocaust and History
, 327–86. For an account of specific issues, see Yisrael Gutman and Michael Benenbaum, eds.,
The Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp
(Washington, 1994).

  
5.
The Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto began an uprising on April 19, 1943, and ultimately cost the lives of an estimated 14,000; another 7,000 were transported to Treblinka or Majdanek. The Germans suffered an estimated 400 dead and 1,000 wounded. For a brief, general, and reliable account, see Doris L. Bergen,
War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust
(New York, 2003).

  
6.
General Bor-Komorowski is mentioned in the trial documents in the context of the Warsaw rebellion of July 1944, which Bach-Zelewski was ordered to repress. For a brief account of what happened, including the deaths of an estimated 225,000 civilians in the failed rebellion, see Overy,
Russia’s War
, 246–47.

  
7.
Arthur Nebe (1894–1945) was an SS general and head of the Criminal Police. He attained infamy as the leader of Einsatzgruppe B. He is also said to have become involved in the plot to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944, but then disappeared. The complete story is told in Hoffmann,
The History of the German Resistance
.

  
8.
For discussion of the significance of the “stab in the back of 1918,” see Michael Burleigh,
The Third Reich: A New History
(London, 2000), 27–101.

  
1.
For a brief account of Daluege, the uniformed police, and references to further literature, see Gellately,
Backing Hitler
.

  
1.
Erwin Rommel (1891–1944), field marshal in the German army, won fame at the head of the Afrika Korps, and became known as the Desert Fox. He was not directly involved in the plot to assassinate Hitler (July 20, 1944) but was thought to be implicated, and took the choice offered him of suicide, instead of arrest and trial before the people’s court.

  
2.
Gen. Anton Dostler was one of the commanders of the 63rd Army Corps in Italy. In March 1945 he ordered the execution of fifteen captured American soldiers. He was tried and found guilty by a postwar court and was sentenced to be shot to death. Dostler evidently became used to using brutal methods in the eastern war, as for example, following a raid in Kharkov on November 15, 1941, when his division took 500 hostages. Of these at least seventy were hanged in public soon after in reprisal for Soviet sabotage. For the latter story see Bernd Boll and Hans Safrian, “On the Way to Stalingrad: The 6th Army in 1941–42,” in Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann, eds.,
War of Extermination: The German Military in World War II, 1941–1944
(New York, 2000), 237–71; here, see 262.

  
3.
Kurt Meyer was a general of the Waffen-SS who was sentenced to death before a Canadian court in 1945 for ordering the execution of some twenty Canadian prisoners of war after the beginning of the Allied invasion. By the end of 1951 he was turned over by Canada to Britain, and after special pleading by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, he was eventually released. For this case and the context,
see Norbert Frei,
Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration
(New York, 2002), 223, 387.

  
4.
The Malmédy massacre took place at nearby Baugnez, in Belgium, on December 17, 1944. The Sixth SS Panzer Division, on the orders of Dietrich, carried out a mass execution of American prisoners of war in which eighty-six were killed and forty-three survived. This was the largest such incident, but not the only one. Although the German perpetrators were caught, tried, and sentenced to death, none of the death sentences were ever carried out. See I. C. B. Dear, ed.,
The Oxford Companion to World War
II (Oxford, 1995), 713.

  
5.
Based on German records, at least 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war died in captivity, many of them shot out of hand or starved to death. For details, see Gellately,
Backing Hitler
, 225.

  
1.
Halder had considered participating in a coup against Hitler as early as 1938. For these plans and later developments, see Hoffmann,
History of the German Resistance
.

  
2.
Admiral Wilhelm Canaris (1887–1945) was head of military intelligence, and Hans Oster (1888–1945) was his chief of staff. Both were involved in the attempted assassination of Hitler and both were executed. For details, see Hoffmann,
History of the German Resistance
.

  
3.
For an overview of the resistance in general and these executions in particular, see Hoffmann,
History of the German Resistance
.

  
4.
Walter von Brauchitsch (1881–1948) was commander in chief of the German army 1938–41, appointed by Hitler to replace Werner von Fritsch (1880–1939). Brauchitsch was dismissed by Hitler on December 19, 1941. Hitler demonstrated who was boss with the ousters of military leaders like Brauchitsch and Fritsch, as well as Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg (1878–1946). The latter was Reichswehr minister and (from 1935) minister of war and commander in chief of the
Wehrmacht
until 1938. He was forced from office through an orchestrated scandal in 1938. Halder was dismissed on September 24, 1942.

  
5.
The crisis that almost led to war in 1938 concerned the Sudeten area of Czechoslovakia. The crisis ended with British and French appeasement at the Munich Conference, September 29–30, 1938.