The Nuremberg Interviews (5 page)

It was the first great Nuremberg trials of the major war criminals, however, that really shocked public opinion. Although Allied governments had publicized examples of Nazi atrocities during the course of the Second World War, including the mass murder of the Jews, there was a tendency to write off many of these stories as similar to the exaggerated propaganda that was heard about the Germans in the First World War. At the very least, therefore, the massive documentation presented at Nuremberg made the crimes abundantly clear.

The general public, including people inside Germany, were unprepared for what they learned, but on balance favored the trials and learned a great deal from them.
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We still find it difficult to believe the full extent of the human rights abuses, the sheer scale of the murderousness, and the depths of the unspeakable cruelties.

In the United States, Great Britain, and elsewhere, legal positivists have generally maintained that the trials were invalid because they were not based on existing international law. This position was rejected by pragmatic natural law theorists, who insisted, to the contrary, that the trials were necessary in that civilization had to protect itself in the face of such unprecedented criminality. These two approaches continue to be
used in the scholarly debate and they are important for our understanding of contemporary issues such as the debates about the new International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.
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In 1945, all legal and philosophical objections were overruled, and the trials went ahead, more or less as the pragmatic natural law theorists wished.
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—
ROBERT GELLATELY

Leon Goldensohn’s extensive notes, taken in the prisoners’ cells during the Nuremberg interviews, were handwritten in notebooks. Each interview was typed within a few days. When Leon left the Army in 1946, he brought his papers back and kept them in his New York City apartment until 1950 and subsequently in his Tenafly, New Jersey, home until his death in 1961.

For many years after Leon’s death, his widow, Irene, kept the notebooks, the typed interviews, the lecture notes, and other related materials (including his personal correspondence) intact in their home.

In 1970, when she moved to a small apartment in nearby Fort Lee, she sold most of her library to a dealer from Englewood. Inadvertently included in this lot were several books written by some of the defendants and purchased by Leon in a Nuremberg store. The books were autographed — some authors had written short messages addressed to Leon on the frontispiece; others simply signed their names. These books were purchased later from the Englewood dealer by Dr. John Lattimer (a colleague of mine at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City). Dr. Lattimer asked if I could tell him about the “Major Goldensohn” on the frontispieces. I explained to him that Leon was my brother, and we had several pleasant meetings, in which I supplied him with information about Leon. Dr. Lattimer sent me photocopies of the frontispieces for my possible use.

In 1983 Irene gave all the remaining Nuremberg materials to her children. In 1994 — responding to my long-standing offer to review the work and discuss possible publication for it — two of Leon’s children (Daniel, of San Francisco, California; and Julia, of Jackson, Wyoming) agreed to send me all their material, which arrived piecemeal over a period of several months.

The original typed interviews and original carbon copies are now in my safe deposit box in the M&T Bank in Nyack, New York. Leon’s plans for publication, discussed in his letters from abroad, his later lecture notes, and six of his many notebooks are also in my care.

—
ELI GOLDENSOHN

Karl Doenitz
1891–1980

Karl Doenitz was grand admiral, commander in chief of the navy from 1943. In Hitler’s last testament Doenitz was appointed the Führer’s designated successor. He was sentenced at Nuremberg to ten years’ imprisonment for crimes against peace and war crimes.

Spent afternoon with Karl Doenitz. He is polite, affable in a half-suspicious way, speaks fairly perfect English, but must be given his own reins or he shuts up with mouth firmly compressed. I inquired after his health. He asked me to be seated, made room on his cot for me. We talked of his rheumatism, which is particularly annoying in his left wrist. There is a slight swelling of the left wrist compared with the right, but no marked difference. He asked what I thought of the trials and I said that I had been rather busy in the past few days and had not attended the sessions regularly.

The past week’s sessions have been concerned mainly with the indictments against the various organizations. “Your Judge Francis Biddle,” said Doenitz, “he sees clearly, very clearly.
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Did you hear him ask the prosecutors all those questions?” I replied that I had heard some. Doenitz is very impressed with Biddle, who he says towers above the rest of the judges. “He has that little smile about his lips,” he said, “when he is listening to something that is questionable. An admirable man. Very fair and sharp.” I responded that Biddle was an excellent man, was one of the Roosevelt cabinet. I made that remark quite pointedly, as
there has been some talk of bringing anti-Roosevelt propaganda into the defenses when they get started next week.

Doenitz liked particularly the question Biddle asked Justice Robert H. Jackson about how far the responsibility for criminal acts would go, in the event the organizations were found criminal. Doenitz feels it is “very dangerous” to make these organizations criminal because so many thousands of people belonged to them, and every German had at least a relative belonging to the SA, SD, SS, and so forth. “You know what your General Lucius Clay said.
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He said that should this tribunal find the organizations guilty, he must immediately arrest 500,000 Germans.” I replied that I had not been aware of General Clay’s statement, but that Justice Jackson had made it quite clear that he did not intend for all members of these organizations to go on trial, but that the leadership and certain individuals be brought to justice.
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This point was ignored by Doenitz, as it is ignored by Baldur von Schirach, and Wilhelm Frick, and the others to whom I’ve spoken in the last few days.

We talked of many things. Doenitz’s plans for the future, for instance, consist of “I will get myself a little room, and isolate myself with my wife, and I will write my memoirs. I think I should do this for the German people. So they can see for themselves what things went on and how little those of us in the leadership knew about Hitler and Heinrich Himmler’s atrocities.”
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It is hard for an American to understand, said Doenitz, but the watchword of Hitler was “Mind your own business and just do the job you have.” Therefore Doenitz knew nothing about plans for an aggressive war, nothing about extermination of the Jews, nothing about the plans for extermination of 30 million Slavs, nothing of the atrocities in Russia and Poland. “I do know that the Russians did the same things when they went through East Prussia.” I challenged this by asking how he knew this and what evidence he had. He admitted it was not firsthand information but that much had been carried in the Nazi press about Russian atrocities and some of it was undoubtedly true.

He feels he has had a “hard life.” He was in the last war, and at its end was a lieutenant in the submarine division. He remained in the navy all through the years. He went all over the world, but strangely never went to America. He feels this was unfortunate, and he would have liked to see the United States. He has been to Japan and all around the globe. From 1918, until he was summoned by Admiral Erich Raeder in 1935 to reorganize the submarine service, he served on cruisers and other naval
craft.
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It was a tough assignment and one he was quite surprised to get. He remarks on Raeder’s telling him he was in charge of submarines and submarine training. He had been out of touch with submarine developments for so long, and there were only young men in the navy, and he had to brush up on the whole subject.

From that time forth he was in submarines daily. “It wasn’t good for my rheumatism,” he said, “to be in dampness, oil and water, all the time.”

Until 1943 he saw Hitler once every two years. After 1943 he saw Hitler twice a month. In the last few months he was in frequent contact with the Fuehrer. When he was informed that the latter had committed suicide and he had been chosen as Hitler’s successor as chief of state, he decided to sue for peace “at once, which I did.” I said that if I recalled the radio correctly at the time, it was announced at first that Germany would surrender to the British and Americans but not to the Russians. He assented. It was just a token gesture, he said. He knew it was impossible. He did not consider himself Hitler’s successor. He felt that he had been selected to sue for peace and arrange the surrender because only a nonpolitical figure could do it. That was the reason he accepted the designation as Hitler’s successor as chief of state.

I asked him what he thought of the “Fuehrer principle.” He said he had never been in favor of it because a man always needs a “corrective.” That is why a chief of state needs a chief of staff and other advisers. Did he oppose Hitler in any way, by any actions or expressed opinions? No. He was a man of the sea and that was all.

Most of the atrocities, he believes, were committed by Austrians, or at least by Bavarians. He seems to dislike Bavarians more than he does Austrians. “They are choleric.” He explained this by stating that the Bavarians were overly emotional. For instance, if a group of northern Germans went sleigh riding and the stick between the sleigh and the horse broke going up the mountain, the northern Germans would get out and proceed to repair the stick. But the Bavarian driver would get out, rave and rant, take the broken stick, and wildly beat it against a rock, saying: “You bad stick, you terrible stick!” and so on. He laughed at this description. What about the northern character? I asked.

“The north German is slow, quiet, thinks, maybe stupid.” He smiled as he said this. He was obviously trying to give a self-characterization. “The north German does not go in for extremes. He has broader horizons than the men from the mountains of Bavaria and Austria.”

I asked him whether he felt that Hermann Goering, too, knew nothing
of what went on regarding plans for war, atrocities, and extermination programs. He said he believes Goering is telling the truth and does not know more than he says he knew. “I realize how impossible that must sound to an American. It could not happen in a democracy. But in our type of government, it was possible.”

Joachim von Ribbentrop, he feels, is “like a man of wood.” He will not express much opinion regarding him, except that “when these trials began, you know, Ribbentrop said his memory was impaired because of sleeping pills.” I replied that it was rather improbable that a man’s memory could be seriously damaged because of sedatives. Doenitz laughed and said he hardly thought it was likely, either. “My lawyer is a good one. He will show in my defense that I hardly knew any of these men. Ribbentrop I met a couple of times, the first time in 1943, I think. Schirach I met for the first time, I believe, in 1944.”

He feels that his lawyer, a naval judge, is very capable. When he was informed that he would have to have a defense counsel, he knew of no one. Then he recalled having been present at a hearing where this naval officer had presided, before the war, concerning an incident in which responsibility was to be placed for the ramming of a naval boat. “I liked the way he handled that affair, so I requested Otto Kranzbuehler. I must say I am not disappointed in him. And the British and Americans are doing everything in their power to assist me in my defense. Last week my second defense counsel, also formerly a naval officer, was flown to London and granted every courtesy to get documents in my behalf. He is expected back this week.

“Did you know,” Doenitz continued, “that the British judge, Sir Geoffrey Lawrence, sent me a letter which the court had received from about a hundred U-boat commanders now interned in England, in which they made an affidavit that I had never ordered the shooting of survivors of sunken boats, but that quite the contrary was true?”

Regarding the projected plan for the future, after his release from prison, I queried: What will the theme of your memoirs be? Well, he said in substance, I will take them all through my life, during the empire, during the Weimar Republic days, through the Third Reich days. His main theme, he believes, will be that there should be a United States of Europe, under the direction of Great Britain. “A commonwealth of nations of Europe,” he said, “to band together and balance Russia in the east.” I asked whether he thought that was actually going to happen. He
replied that it was his idea, and that it was not a new idea to him. If Britain should do such a thing, she must invite Germany to be a member of this commonwealth of nations. He said that Germany must do this, because her culture is related to the West and not to the East, like Russian culture.