After the Reich (87 page)

On 8 September 1947, while the Krupp and ‘Stormtrooper’ trials were in full swing, Clay tried to whittle down the number of cases before the Nuremberg court. He planned just six more: the big six banks; the Press and Propaganda Office; the Foreign Office; those members of the military leadership who had violated the rules of international warfare; the military leaders responsible for the POWs; and the directors of the Hermann-Göring-Werke. He could see no possibility of having them all and thought about running some of them together. He was inclined to drop the Hermann-Göring-Werke case, possibly the Press and Propaganda trial as well.
²

When the final decisions were made, 185 men were arraigned before a dozen tribunals. First was the trial of the medical doctors, which resulted in seven death sentences; next that of Field Marshal Milch, who was tried in solitary splendour for directing slave labour and sent down for fifteen years. The third trial judged the Nazi judiciary; the fourth Oswald Pohl and the concentration-camp hierarchy. Pohl swung, but two other death sentences were commuted. Next in line were the industrialists from the Flick Group, followed by trial six: the senior administration of IG Farben. The next in the dock were the generals who had fought the battles in the south-east. Field Marshal List received a life tariff. The RuSHA (Race and Resettlement Office) were trial eight. No death sentences were handed out, but RuSHA chief Richard Hildebrandt was shipped over to the Poles. Ohlendorf and the other Einsatzgruppen (death squad) leaders were trial nine. Five men were executed, one by the Belgians. Nine death sentences were commuted. The tenth arraigned the twenty-three directors of Krupps. Alfried Krupp received twelve years. The eleventh judged members of the German Foreign Office and other officials - the Wilhelmstrasse case. The sentences were quite haywire, with Ernst von Weizsäcker receiving a seven-year tariff (later reduced to five) and a man who condemned thousands to death in Auschwitz, like Edmund Veesenmayer, receiving twenty years (reduced to ten). The last trial was for the generals who had invaded Russia. There were no spectacular sentences, nor were they handed over to the Russians.
³

Speer and the rest of the seven were still carrying out their menial duties in Nuremberg. The architect was able to offer a smile to Alfried Krupp one day, and on another occasion he saw the Alsatian surgeon Karl Brandt. He had interceded on Brandt’s behalf when Hitler had had him condemned to death for sending his wife and child out of Berlin. Brandt gave Speer a sad wave. Speer claimed that he had not known that Brandt had been in charge of the Euthanasia Programme and had initiated the experiments on human beings in the concentration camps.
⁴
When the SS leadership arrived, Speer observed, ‘These are all candidates for death row.’
⁵

Like many other prisoners, Speer was called upon to give evidence at the trials of his former colleagues. Field Marshal Milch had been in charge of armaments for the Luftwaffe, and had been closely allied to Speer. He had requested labour from Speer, including concentration-camp inmates. Speer’s use of slaves had been an important part of the indictment against him. He permitted himself a philosophic reflection in the secret journals he was penning at the time: ‘Of course all these trials are judgements by the victors on the defeated. In various ways I keep hearing that German prisoners of war, contrary to law, are also being put to forced labour in armaments and supply bases. Who here is the judge?’
⁶

The Americans were insistent on the trial of the industrialists. The old paterfamilias, Gustav von Bohlen und Halbach, had bequeathed his firm to his son Alfried in November 1943 and gone into retirement. Before he did so, he had Hitler enact a ‘Lex Krupp’ imposing primogeniture in violation of the laws of Weimar, which were still in force in Hitler’s Germany.
⁷
As it was eventually decided that Gustav was too ill too stand trial, the major charges were heaped on Alfried, who had been taken prisoner when the Americans went into Essen on 10 April 1945. Alfried suffered the usual series of camps before being taken to the Nuremberg courthouse. After his arrest American soldiers helped themselves to souvenirs at the Villa Hügel - typewriters, a portrait of Hitler, and a model cannon.
⁸
When the British replaced the Americans in Essen they set about arresting the other directors: they wanted to make an example of Krupps along with Flick and IG Farben as ‘Samson’s hair’ - the symbol of Germany’s industrial might.
⁹
The idea of making Alfried responsible for his father’s crimes came from the French. The Americans got cold feet about this and Gustav received a seat in the dock at the main trial, which he was never to occupy. He died in 1951.

The trial of the generals who had led the campaign in the Balkans was considered a watershed. For the first time the second tier, the generals who had acted on Hitler’s orders, became responsible for massacres. The German advocates made a brave effort to prove that the taking and shooting of hostages as reprisals for acts committed by partisans or guerrillas was permitted in the British, American and French military manuals; and they pointed out that a similar charge had been controversial in the Kesselring trial, which the British held in Venice, and that the
Manchester Guardian
had thundered, ‘This is not justice as we know it.’
^eh
They accused the British military of sentencing a man to death for being a figurehead.
¹⁰
Cross-examined, List pleaded a hard fight against non-regular forces. It was a Balkan war, ‘harsh measures’ needed to be taken against partisans who obeyed no laws, who fought ‘Balkan-style, treacherous and atrocious . . .’ It did List no good.
¹¹
Tito had been on the Allies’ side.

The US Supreme Court had refused to grant leave of absence to its members to serve in Germany, and the three judges in the Krupp case were a member of the Tennessee Appeal Court, a member of the Supreme Court of Connecticut, and another from the Supreme Court in Seattle. This was a reasonable showing. There was resistance to using elected judges, particularly from Clay. Non-professional jurists would lead to further criticism of the trials. Clay also resisted the idea of sending out a number of black attorneys to work at Nuremberg - not because he objected to them
per se
, but because Germany did not have a black population.
¹²

Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach had already suffered eighteen months of detention before the trial began, and he maintained a dignified silence throughout. An empty chair had represented his senile father at the international trial. Now it was his turn to be judged -
in loco parentis.
Thirty German lawyers had been engaged to defend the directors during the eleven months of the trial. More than 200 witnesses were called. The minutes run to 13,454 pages.
¹³
The directors were indicted for crimes against humanity, pillage, appropriation, spoliation and exploitation. They were also accused of participating in atrocities and being complicit in deportation, imprisonment, and racial and religious persecution. A further charge laid against them was planning aggressive war, despite the fact that only two of them - Alfried and Ewald Loeser - had been on their boards at the time. Evidence that would have been inadmissible in an American court was accepted at Nuremberg. Some of it had as little value as common gossip. The directors answered for any act performed by any one of a quarter of a million employees.

Of course Krupps was up to its neck in the activities of the state. It profited from German expansion in all directions and took over the running of sequestered firms in France and Holland. It used armies of slave-labourers who were treated with sickening cruelty. For this reason the sentences were severe: Alfried was sent down for twelve years, to be spent in Landsberg Prison. The other directors received similar tariffs. In addition to this Alfried was relieved of
all
his personal property. He was the only man tried at Nuremberg to receive this punishment. The president of the court thought the decision ran counter to the law and dissented.
¹⁴
The Krupp case showed up many of the weaknesses of the Allied jurisdiction: Alfried had wanted to use an American lawyer, but that was not permitted. He had then decided not to defend himself, but that was also not allowed. The German lawyers demanded a conference room, but this was not granted either. When they left the court in protest, they were brought back by force and six of them were arrested for contempt.
¹⁵

The jurists’ trial opened in March 1947. Some of the worst Nazi lawyers had been spared by premature death. Among them was the president of the People’s Court, Roland Freisler, who had been crushed under a wooden beam during an Allied raid on Berlin in February 1945. Hans Frank had been executed by the Poles. A large number of jurists had killed themselves as they saw the regime fall. One of these was the minister of justice, Otto-Georg Thierack. In all, sixteen defendants stood trial; including the three state secretaries Franz Schlegelberger, Curt Rothenberger and Herbert Klemm. The others were officials from the People’s Court. The judges examined 2,093 exhibits and questioned 138 witnesses. They reached their verdict in December 1947. They have been praised for their impartial and balanced approach: ‘If anything, the judgment erred on the side of caution.’
¹⁶
Some of the German jurists were exonerated. Four life sentences were handed down.

The Wilhelmstrasse trial arraigned twenty-one senior civil servants. There was a slight modification of the London Statute and of Control Council Law 10 of 20 December 1945, in that the court finally recognised the principal of
nullum crimen sine lege
, if only in
international
law, which was a fairly nebulous jurisdiction.
¹⁷
The names included Ernst von Weizsäcker, Wilhelm Keppler, Ernst Bohle, Ernst Woermann, Karl Ritter, Otto von Erdmannsdorff, Edmund Veesenmayer, Hans Lammers, Wilhelm Stuckart, Walter Darré, Otto Meissner, Otto Dietrich, Gottlob Berger, Walther Schellenberg, Gustav Adolf Steengracht von Moyland, Schwerin von Krosigk, Paul Körner and Paul Pleiger. It was a hotchpotch of Nazi and non-Nazi diplomats and civil servants which included some who had acted counter to the interests of the regime, some who had simply toed the line - like Schwerin von Krosigk - and murderers like Veesenmayer. Veesenmayer had been allowed to continue at liberty while he gave evidence against his former colleagues. He had freely surrendered to the Allies, but he continued to see them as his enemies: ‘I am a criminal who must be exterminated.’ But he was not executed, despite his role in the deportation of Hungary’s Jews. He was released from Landsberg Prison in 1951.

In the case against the diplomats, four old-school examples (Weizsäcker, Woermann, Erdmannsdorff and Ritter) were flanked by the same number of Nazi outsiders (Steengracht, Keppler, Bohle and Veesenmayer). As Margret Boveri knew, it was not always possible to see them as wholly black or wholly white. Weizsäcker stuck his neck out for a few Jews here and there; Steengracht, his pure Nazi successor, managed (by adding a zero to the figure of 400 Hungarian Jews who had been given permission to travel to Sweden) to save a further 3,600.
¹⁸

The case for the prosecution ran to 39,000 pages of which the British evidence alone amounted to 28,000 pages. The bundle was made up of 3,400 documents. The main arguments against the defendants dealt with crimes against humanity, the deportation of the Jews and their murder in concentration and annihilation camps.
¹⁹
Ernst von Weizsäcker is now acknowledged to have been one of the first and most important opponents to the regime operating in the German Foreign Office, but as state secretary he had been singularly powerless to prevent or alleviate the tragedy of those years. His own son Richard is clear on this: ‘from documents and spoken report he knew more than enough to reach his own decisions’.
²⁰
The state secretary saw it as his role, to the extent of his powers, to prevent the outbreak of the war, and, once he had failed there, to limit its effect by averting the war against the Soviet Union. We now know much more about this than we knew then. We know, for example, that Weizsäcker was a party to the despatch of Adam von Trott first to Britain and later to the United States, to explain the position of the German opposition. Indeed Ribbentrop himself had said that the only reason that Weizsäcker was not arraigned before Roland Freisler and the People’s Court was that on 20 July 1944 he was already safe behind Allied lines, as ambassador to the Vatican.

Once in the Vatican, Weizsäcker had been free to protect Jews from the maniacal purge that was put into action after Italy went over to the Allies. The prioress of the nunnery of Our Lady in Sion attested to the fact that he had directed 185 Jews to her door and issued her with a letter that forbade the SS from searching the premises.
²¹
The question arose whether Weizsäcker was actually a traitor, in that he had warned the British ambassador, Nevile Henderson, that Germany was about to sign a pact with Russia in August 1939. Was he thereby willing defeat on his own country and the death of his country’s own soldiers? Weizsäcker was categorical: ‘I wanted peace without Hitler, but not a defeat that would lead to Hitler’s ejection.’
²²