The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (62 page)

Since the liberation of the camp, the British public had clamored for swift justice for Josef Kramer, Belsen’s commandant, who was caricatured in the British press as the “Beast of Belsen.” His evident disdain for the dy- ing prisoners who surrounded him, his effort to deny any knowledge or responsibility for the camp and its state of desolation upon its liberation, had outraged British soldiers and the public, and he was generally portrayed by the press as a sullen, dull, brutal criminal. Kramer was described in the London Illustrated News as “a typical German brute—a sadistical, heavy-fea- tured Nazi. He was quite unashamed.”
40
News reports

just after the camp’s liberation recounted that “Britons, revolted by the daily disclosures from the newly liber- ated torture camps, were bitterly tired of the niceties and legalities surrounding the treatment of Kramer and other brutal Nazi jailers. In a flood of letters to newspa- pers and in the comment that ran through all discus- sion of German atrocities the British people made it clear this week their feeling that they wanted swifter justice for war criminals.” “How will you kill Kremer [sic]?” was the cry of liberated inmates, according to the New York Times.
41
One Londoner concurred: “I wish the Russians had got in there and started hanging them.”
42
Raymond Phillips, a barrister and the editor of the trial’s official published transcript, concurred, writing in 1949 that “to many it seemed superfluous that there should be a trial at all, and the popular cry was for a summary identification and execution of the offenders.” This view was never completely dispelled from the proceedings, and indeed, for many, the trial itself, with its emphasis on protecting the rights of the accused, seemed “an insult to those who had died at Belsen, and to those who had died to liberate it.”
43

The British authorities, however, were determined to follow the practices being laid out by the U.N. War Crimes Tribunal, and it was not until early June that a clear division of labor had been established: while

“arch criminals” would stand trial under the Interna- tional Military Tribunal being established at Nurem- berg, “ordinary war criminals” in the custody of Allied military authorities could be dealt with by military courts. Kramer and his subordinates fell into the ordi- nary category, and so faced a court made up exclusive- ly of five British military officers. Although the British government wanted to move speedily, it also wished to establish a process that would do credit to British legal traditions, so as to make the contrast with the Nazi regime all the more clear. The army painstakingly gathered evidence, produced witnesses, provided the accused with defense counsel, allowed the defense to answer the charges against them, and treated the pris- oners with a degree of respect and dignity that they had no moral right to expect. Just five months after the liberation of Belsen, the trial of forty-five war crimi- nals began, and it was concluded in fifty-four days. By contrast, the Nuremberg trials—against twenty-two defendants—lasted almost a year. Raymond Phillips ended his analysis of the Belsen trial by praising the government’s refusal “to be stampeded into the wild justice of revenge and, at the end of a war, in bringing to the trial of its enemies…a cool, calm, dispassionate and unhurried determination.”
44

If the British had hoped to impress world opinion by

this demonstration of evenhanded justice, however, they failed miserably. Wartime allies, especially the Russians but also the French, criticized the trial pro- ceedings as unnecessarily attentive to the rights of the defendants. The Soviets saw this as evidence of the West’s unwillingness to eradicate fascism.
45
More surprising, Jewish organizations and Jewish survivors paid the trial little heed. Partly this had to do with coin- cidence: the trial reached its critical stage just as Bev- in’s November speech on Palestine so inflamed Jews around the world. But there is also another factor—the absence of Jews at the heart of the Belsen trial. British prosecutors, though diligent in ferreting out details of the criminality of the Belsen guards, refused to place Jewish victimization in the forefront of their case. For the British military and civil administration, the Jewish wartime experience was not unique, or even qualita- tively different from that of other victims of Nazi op- pression. The Belsen defendants, in the charge laid out by the British military court, were not on trial for crimes against Jews, nor indeed for genocide, but for mistreating and abusing Allied nationals. This latter was a broad category and one that certainly included Jews from Allied nations like Poland and the Soviet Union. But the fact that Jews as a distinct people, with a destiny now marked by unique tragedy, did not oc- cupy a central place in the trial only underscored Brit-

ain’s failure to address the realities of the Nazi geno- cidal war on Europe’s Jews.

Jewish victimization did not frame the Belsen trial, and for some scholars this absence has been enough to con- demn the proceedings as seriously flawed.
46
Yet suffer- ing there was aplenty in the exposition set out by the prosecution, and it is worth noting the detailed record that the prosecution amassed in drawing a portrait of life inside Belsen and Auschwitz. Indeed, the British undertook the investigative work with enormous zeal. Almost immediately upon entering the camp, British soldiers diligently set out to gather evidence that would help convict Belsen’s camp commandant, Josef Kram- er, and officers, guards, and kapos who were arrested in Belsen upon its liberation. (The kapos were notori- ously brutal prisoners who, in exchange for some privi- leges, collaborated with the camp authorities in polic- ing the camp.) Given the enormous press coverage of the ghastly conditions uncovered in Belsen, the army felt it imperative to begin judicial proceedings against those responsible without delay. On April 27, just two weeks after Belsen’s liberation, the 21st Army Group sent to Belsen a team of war crimes investigators con- sisting of two majors, a captain, and a few noncommis- sioned translators. This small team was supplemented by about fifteen personnel in mid-May. Thus, some two

dozen investigators were allotted to a camp of nearly 60,000 potential witnesses.

The difficulties of gathering evidence in the circum- stances of a newly liberated concentration camp were extreme, and throughout the trial, the defense cast se- rious doubts upon the methodology of the war crimes investigators. The largest body of evidence presented at trial were affidavits gathered by these investigators. The war crimes team simply walked through the camp grounds with a stack of photographs of guards and kapos, and asked witnesses to come forward to make statements about them. These statements were taken down and sworn by the deponents. The accused were seldom if ever present when the statements were sworn, and by the time the Belsen trial opened, in September, the great majority of witnesses had either been repa- triated or disappeared. In short, few witnesses were produced in court, and the prosecution had to rely on what amounted to hearsay. Such a proceeding would not have been accepted in an ordinary courtroom. This did not unduly concern the military court, however, which briskly dismissed requests by the defense to throw out such questionable documentation.
47

The trial therefore opened on September 17, 1945—Yom Kippur, as it turned out, and the very day that Gen-

eral Eisenhower was visiting the Feldafing DP camp. The defendants were sixteen male members of the SS, including Josef Kramer, commandant of Belsen; Dr. Fritz Klein, camp doctor in Belsen; and Franz Hoessler, commandant of Camp 2 at Belsen. Also accused were sixteen female SS guards, including Irma Grese, who commanded a compound, and Elisabeth Volkenrath, who acted as a camp overseer. Grese, who while work- ing in Belsen had sported two long blond braids, high leather boots, and a short whip, became an irresistible target of the more lurid press accounts of the trial. In addition, twelve former kapos were also accused of mistreating their fellow prisoners. (The case against three other defendants was dropped.) The prosecution team was composed of four officers of the legal staff of the British army of occupation, led by Colonel T. M. Backhouse; the accused had a larger defense coun- sel made up of eleven British regimental officers and one Polish officer, all of whom had legal training.
48
In all, forty-four accused were arrayed in rows in a spe- cially built dock in a gymnasium on the outskirts of Lüneburg, a small city about forty miles northeast of Belsen. While seated in the courtroom, each defendant wore a number pinned to his or her shirtfront.

Expectations in some quarters were high. Alex Easter- man, the political secretary of the British Section of

the World Jewish Congress, was in attendance as an official observer, and after the opening day sent WJC headquarters in New York a perhaps hyperbolic tele- gram that depicted the trial as a “significantly dramatic moment in the story of civilization,” as these “beasts in human form” would be “brought to justice to answer for their crimes.” The trial, Easterman claimed, was recognition “that the crimes by Nazi Germany against Jews of Europe bear their own distinctive significance in character, in purpose, and in extent.” Easterman re- layed his sincere disappointment that the British mili- tary had not placed the “colossal crime against Jews” at the center of the indictment, but once the prosecu- tor began to detail the crimes of the accused, Easter- man’s hopes were raised that the trial would give suf- ficient publicity to this “drama of perfidy.”
49
The Jewish Chronicle was also pleased with the first day of the trial: “it is fully expected,” the paper reported, “that even in its limited form, this, the first war crimes trial, will be a powerful indictment of Fascism, Nazism, and anti- Semitism.” The Times described the testimony in the opening days as “worthy of Dante” and a “night- mare.”
50

After such a buildup, the trial itself came as a disap- pointment. The charges were twofold: first, that the ac- cused had, in violation of the laws and usages of war,

mistreated Allied nationals in Bergen-Belsen; and, second, that some of the accused had done the same in Auschwitz. This double charge stemmed from the fact that twelve of the accused, including Kramer, Klein, Hoessler, Grese, and Volkenrath, had all worked in Auschwitz before being transferred to Belsen. As Colo- nel Backhouse, the lead prosecutor, made clear in his opening statement, “we are not, of course, concerned in this trial with atrocities by Germans against Ger- mans.” This distinction was vital in placing the case on the plane of international law: this was no mere inter- nal German police matter but a question of violating previously accepted laws of war, namely, the Hague and Geneva conventions (of 1907 and 1929 respectively, to which Germany was a signatory), which governed the care and protection of prisoners of war and civilians. The Allied nationals were mistreated by the Germans, Colonel Backhouse stated, “because of their religion, or their nationality, or their refusal to work for the en- emy, or merely because they were prisoners of war.” Jews as a group were only occasionally singled out by the prosecution as having any particular status as vic- tims of the Nazis. Backhouse declared that the defen- dants had shown “a complete disregard for the sanctity of human life and for human suffering,” and that the conditions in Auschwitz and Belsen were “caused by deliberate starvation and ill-treatment, with the mali-

cious knowledge that they must cause death.” In light of the later Nuremberg trials, in which prosecutors had a difficult time showing specific acts of war crimes on the part of each individual, it is instructive that at the Belsen trial the prosecution could show “personal acts of active and deliberate cruelty and, in many cases, murder.”
51

Backhouse spent much of his opening statement deal- ing with the conditions in Belsen that the liberating troops had encountered on April 15—”its abominable smell, the filth and squalor of the whole place which stank to high heaven.” Backhouse also zeroed in on Jo- sef Kramer, who from December 1944 had been in com- mand of Belsen, and was “primarily responsible for ev- erything that happened in that camp.” But Kramer had a long and horrifying personal history that predated Belsen. Kramer had spent his entire career in camps. Born in 1906 in Munich, Kramer had volunteered for the SS in 1932 and was immediately sent for duty in a concentration camp, and within this ghastly secret world he remained for the next thirteen years, moving from Dachau in 1936 to Sachsenhausen in 1937, to Mau- thausen in 1939, and to Auschwitz in May 1940, where he served briefly as adjutant to camp commandant Obersturmführer Rudolf Höess. In April 1941 he was named commandant of the camp at Natzweiler, where

he remained until May 1944. He was then reassigned to Auschwitz, and took charge of the camp complex of Birkenau; in December 1944, just as the death march- es were getting under way, Kramer was sent to Belsen to take command of that camp—a target destination for many of the death marches. Kramer was therefore present at—and at times in command of—some of the worst charnel houses of the Second World War.
52

Colonel Backhouse also highlighted a number of the in- dividuals in the dock alongside Kramer. Dr. Fritz Klein, a Romanian by birth, had joined the Waffen- SS in 1943, and while in Auschwitz conducted selections of Jews for the gas chamber. Franz Hoessler, a member of the SS since 1933, had served at Auschwitz and also at the notorious Dora camp. The prosecutors, along with the press, laid particular emphasis on the cruelties perpe- trated by some of the female defendants. Juana Bor- mann, Elisabeth Volkenrath, and Herta Ehlert had all allegedly enjoyed beating prisoners, depriving them of food and clothing, and setting dogs on them. But twen- ty-one-year-old Irma Grese, who with her custom- made whips and calf-high boots fit perfectly the cari- cature of a sadistic dominatrix, occupied a particularly prominent role in the demonology of the Belsen trial. Grese had served as a camp guard at Ravensbrück from July 1942 to March 1943; then was at Auschwitz until