The Bitter Taste of Victory (24 page)

Nuremberg: November 1945–March 1946

In November 1945 lawyers, judges and journalists from across the world converged in Nuremberg. A decade earlier this had been the scene of the Nazi rallies triumphantly filmed by Leni Riefenstahl. Then the neat medieval Bavarian city had been swathed with swastikas. Tens of thousands of adoring Germans screamed and swooned as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Göring and Julius Streicher ushered in a new world. Now Hitler and Goebbels were dead, while Göring and Streicher were confined in thirteen-foot cells in the city jail, furnished only with an iron bedstead, a straw mattress and a wooden table and chair. The city had been bombed and shelled to fragments, leaving its inhabitants living underground in freezing cellars.

That August, Göring and Streicher had been transferred to the Nuremberg jail from a prison in Mondorf-les-Bains, a small town in Luxembourg where fifty-two high-ranking Nazis were held by the Americans. Just before they were moved, the prisoners had received a visit from Erika Mann, the only woman permitted to enter the jail they had constructed out of the former Grand Hotel. This, she wrote in an article for
Liberty
magazine, was an adventure she had anticipated for over twelve years. For a decade these men had wielded power over her family, banning them from publication and listing their names in their black books. Now they were a sad and bedraggled group of delusional
prisoners, denied ties and shoelaces, although Göring was occasionally granted a top hat at meal times. The regime here was spartan: pillows were only allowed to prisoners who became ill and food was limited to 1,550 calories a day. None the less, the authorities were determined to keep their more famous Nazis alive. Erika was informed that when a thunderstorm had frightened Göring into a minor heart attack, the creator of the Blitzkrieg had been provided with a mattress for his campbed and breakfast in bed.

Erika Mann was shown around the cells and encouraged to peer at the inmates in their living room, but was not introduced by name. Hermann Göring, former field marshal and commander-in-chief of the German Luftwaffe, was in bed when she entered his cell and she was shocked by the fifty-two-year-old’s physical diminution. The prison regime had cured him both of his drug addiction (to paracodeine) and his corpulence. He had lost thirty pounds and his tanned skin now seemed to hang off his face and body. Afterwards she was told that Göring regretted not knowing the identity of his visitor as he would have liked to explain himself to her. If he had been in charge of the Mann case, he would have handled it differently, he claimed. ‘Surely a German of the stature of Thomas Mann could have been adapted to the Third Reich.’ The others were less conciliatory. ‘
Du lieber Gott 
!’ Streicher exclaimed, ‘and that woman has been to my room.’
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At the end of August, a convoy of ambulances drove the 300 miles from Mondorf-les-Bains to Nuremberg, transporting the most important prisoners to the jail where they would await their trial. The windows were blackened to hide their identity from retributive victims or admiring fans. Erika Mann followed at the start of November, excited by the prospect of witnessing the final humiliation of these men. Since visiting the prisoners in August, Erika had become progressively weaker. She had been constantly moving for five months, never remaining at a single address for more than a few days, catching lifts on army vehicles or driving her own increasingly decrepit car. The nervous and self-righteous energy that propelled her criss-crossing journey across the country was running out.

In August she had told her mother that she no longer had the strength to write letters. She hardly had enough strength to travel, either, but she managed to reach Rome in September, to see Klaus for the first time in three years. Her visit was not a success. Aware that his days as a reporter were numbered, Klaus was busy trying to make himself indispensable to the film-maker Roberto Rossellini, so there were members of the crew for the film that would become
Rome, Open City
constantly present. On their final night they at last had dinner alone and Klaus spent the evening berating Erika for abandoning him in 1940. ‘It might be that the moment was not altogether well chosen (on your part, I mean),’ she wrote to him afterwards; ‘Perhaps it was, though, and I deserve nothing but reproaches.’
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By the end of October, Erika had lost her voice and had to cancel a well-paid American lecture tour. Determined to write even if she could not speak, she remained in Europe as a journalist. By the time she reached Nuremberg, her voice had returned but she was finding the privations of army life increasingly onerous. Journalists in Nuremberg were billetted in a tastelessly ornate but barely heated palace, formerly owned by the Faber pencil family and nicknamed ‘Schloss Schrecklich’, where they lived in very basic conditions. Drink was plentiful but the food was largely from tins; sleeping in makeshift twelve-bedded dormitories, the journalists woke each other up clambering into bed after late-night drinking sessions. This set-up was hardly conducive to recovery.

The trial was scheduled to begin on 20 November. The day before it started Erika Mann met John Dos Passos who had arrived from Berlin. Dos Passos was an old though somewhat estranged friend of Hemingway’s, schooled in the same reportage tradition and determined to witness history. Having already seen the carcasses of several other destroyed German cities (in Frankfurt he had found that his surroundings resembled a town ‘as much as a pile of bones and a smashed skull on the prairies resembles a prize Hereford steer’), his first act on arriving in Nuremberg was to seek out the ruins of the ‘old city of toymakers and Meistersingers’.
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He found that the view was dominated by the isolated arches of smashed churches, towering hazardously over the rubble. It was a
bright, cold day so the taller remains were outlined crisply against the sky. In an open space in the rubbish, Dos Passos encountered German women wrapped thickly in coats and sweaters boiling potatoes on a stove improvised from a sheet of galvanised roofing. He asked them where they lived and was directed to the concrete entrance of an air-raid shelter. These people seemed more hostile to their occupiers than the natives Dos Passos had met elsewhere in Germany. He had to duck to avoid a shower of stones flung at him; there was a swastika freshly chalked on the wall. The citizens of Nuremberg were resentful that their town had once again become the setting for a symbolic rallying of power. Ultimately, they stood to gain no more from the trials than they had from Hitler’s rallies.

Dos Passos visited the Palace of Justice where the tribunal would commence the next day. It was a dark pink sandstone building half a mile from the old town, pockmarked with bullets and shell holes. Inside, there were German POWs high up on stepladders applying fresh paint to the walls. German scrubwomen garbed in heavy knitted stockings and big boots were scouring the marble floors. The corridors thronged with efficient Allied visitors: American secretaries whose heels clacked cheerfully as they passed; French women with high-piled Paris turbans.

Touring the palace, Dos Passos caught a sudden glimpse of the Nazi prisoners taking their daily exercise. The jail where the twenty-one senior Nazis were now held was connected to the courthouse by a wooden covered walkway and its exercise yard was visible from the windows. Dos Passos was not close enough to perceive their faces and saw only a group of prisoners in American fieldjackets walking briskly apart at equal distance from each other. ‘Funny to think those guys may hang in a couple of months,’ a voice said behind him; ‘they look just like anybody.’
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Several of the defendants were household names in Britain and the US. Chief among them was Göring. Then there was Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister; Streicher, the publicist of the Nazi Party; Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and Minister for Armaments and War Production; and Rudolf Hess, who had been deputy leader of
the NSDAP before he defected by parachuting into Scotland in 1941 and who was now arguably unfit for trial because of his apparently comprehensive amnesia and mental imbalance. Others such as Hans Frank, the governor-general of Poland, and Alfred Jodl, the chief of the operations staff, were less well known. Some had been selected more as representatives of an element of Nazi aggression than for their own criminality.

The choice as to which Nazis to try had been a slow and difficult one for the four Allied powers, as indeed had been the decision as to whether to try them at all. Until remarkably late in the day, Winston Churchill and many others in Britain had argued that the Nazi leaders should be shot without trial in a political rather than a judicial act. For Churchill and his supporters (who included the Archbishop of York), a trial would be too dangerous because it would involve making up new laws which the defence could easily undermine. It was the Americans and, somewhat surprisingly, the Russians, who insisted on a full trial; the Americans because a trial would be consistent with the American Bill of Rights and the Russians because they were practised at staging show trials and had no doubt as to what the outcome would be. It was not until the beginning of May 1945 that the British agreed to co-operate in an international tribunal, aware that they would be left in an embarrassing position if the others proceeded without them.

In the months leading up to the tribunal, the Allies had debated how many Nazis to put in the dock. When he planned to shoot the Nazi leaders, Churchill had fifty to a hundred candidates in mind, but it was evident that only a smaller number could be tried formally. By June 1945 the Allies were agreed that some of the defendants would serve symbolic roles: Julius Streicher would represent anti-Semitism and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the Reich Main Security Office, would represent the system of state terror. They also debated how exactly the trial would proceed. The main architect of the charter formulating the principles of the tribunal was the American chief prosecutor, Robert Jackson, a crusader for the rule of law who was determined to set a
precedent for a new international judicial standard, while also drawing on the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing war and the 1929 Geneva Convention. Jackson’s task was an extremely difficult one. He had to reconcile the Anglo-American common law tradition with the very different civil law traditions of France and the Soviet Union and to devise a list of charges that the British, French and Soviet legal teams would all ratify. In the end the tribunal was founded primarily on American notions of justice; as in the common law tradition, the defendants would be able to defend themselves against clearly formulated charges.

In drawing up the charges, Jackson and his team had to find a way to indict individuals simultaneously for particular acts of terror and for creating the system that produced them. He could use as a basis a list of war crimes drawn up in 1919, but this needed adapting so that the long-planned German aggression would be more criminal than the arguably defensive acts of brutal warfare committed by the Allies.
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Jackson solved this problem by inventing the charge of conspiracy. The German crimes were worse than the Allied crimes because since 1933 they had engaged in a concerted conspiracy to subjugate Europe. By July, Jackson had divided the charges into four counts: participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of a crime against peace; planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression and other crimes against peace; war crimes; crimes against humanity. The charges were outlined in the indictment published on 18 October 1945 and issued to the defendants the following day.

Most radical of the charges was ‘crimes against humanity’. If Nuremberg was to serve as a mode of redemption – to make the world a better, more peaceful and humane place – then it was chiefly through this charge. For the first time, a government was responsible to an international court for its actions not against other nations but against its own people. Specifically, here the German leaders were on trial for authorising torture and genocide against their own subjects, in particular political opponents and Jews, although the mention of the Jews was added as something of an afterthought. According to Article 6c of the charter, they were charged with ‘murder, extermination, enslavement,
deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime’.
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Everyone involved in setting up the tribunal was convinced that it would have a crucial significance for the Occupation as a whole. Potentially the trial could persuade ordinary Germans of their guilt and provide them with tools for redemption or at least re-education. By officially condemning the senior Nazis, the Allies would make clear what in particular about their actions they saw as criminal. The Germans could then be educated to avoid these crimes in the future. And not just Germans but other warmongering nations would be deterred by the new costs of aggression. In June, Jackson had informed Truman that the tribunal would demonstrate that a war of aggression was a crime and that modern international law no longer accepted that those who incited war were engaged in legitimate business. ‘Thus may the forces of the law be mobilised on the side of peace.’
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