Mission at Nuremberg (21 page)

Gerecke's responsibilities didn't end with the defendants and their families. He and O'Connor were the chaplains for the Americans, too. Gerecke conducted services at the small church in Mögeldorf each Sunday at 11:00
A.M.
and provided army transportation for any member of the 6850th who wanted to attend. And, as he had during the war, he encouraged Jewish members of the unit to seek out Jewish chaplains among the vast Allied occupation of the city. He also encouraged his superiors to erect an army chapel “complete in every detail” somewhere on the two-mile road between the Palace of Justice and the Grand Hotel. “Open for prayer at all times for men and women of all faiths,” he wrote in his monthly report. “Just a touch of home.”

O'Connor's smaller flock of four Catholic defendants also used the tiny chapel. Two of them, Hans Frank and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, were particularly murderous.

Hans Frank had been a quiet, scholarly child who preferred his books, chess, and music to the company of other children. He had married a typist when he was twenty-five and became a doting father to five children.

In 1926, nearly straight out of law school, Frank became the chief legal authority of the Nazi Party, defending its activities in several hundred cases across Germany. Frank even served as Hitler's personal attorney before enjoying a string of party posts—Bavarian minister of justice, Reich leader of the Nazi Party, Reich minister of justice. Hitler named him governor general of Poland in 1939, where he would earn nicknames like “Slayer of Poles” and the “Butcher of Krakow.”

Hitler's goal in that country was to eradicate the Polish intelligentsia by closing the universities and sending intellectuals to concentration camps. By eliminating the intellectual class, the Nazis believed they'd be left with a Polish “nomadic labor” class that they could turn into slaves for the greater good of the Reich. To that end, Frank had every professor at the University of Krakow arrested and sent to concentration camps in Germany. The Jews, on the other hand, were sent to ghettos across Poland where they would starve to death.

The position of governor general came with the perks of unlimited confiscation and endless luxury. When American troops took an inventory of Frank's house in southern Germany in 1945, they found a da Vinci portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, a landscape by Rembrandt, a gilded chalice, an ivory chest, and a fourteenth-century Madonna with child. The paintings had both been stolen from the Krakow Czartoryski gallery, the chalice and chest had been taken from the Krakow Cathedral, and the Madonna had been swiped from the Krakow National Museum.

As people were starving in the Warsaw ghetto, the Franks were tireless hosts—consuming one thousand eggs each month, along with huge quantities of meat, geese, and butter at the governor's table. Frank also owned a luxurious armored Mercedes and a private railroad car with
Governor General
inscribed in bronze.

In the labor camps, the Germans gave the Jews wages of forty cents per day, which Frank considered charity rather than earnings. In 1940, he told a gathering of German soldiers that they should tell people back home that there were fewer lice and Jews in Poland these days, adding, “of course, I could not eliminate all lice and Jews in only one year's time.” Krakow, he said once, was “crawling with Jews so that a decent person would not step into the street.”

In July 1941, six months after Goering signed the document that would set into motion the “final solution to the Jewish problem,” Frank sent a deputy as his representative to the Wannsee Conference in the Berlin suburbs, where Nazi officials discussed how to implement the Jewish genocide. A bizarre plan to send four million European Jews to Madagascar—which Frank supported as an alternative to sending them into Poland—had fallen through.

Instead, the men at the conference decided that the Jews would be sent east, organized into giant labor camps, and worked to death. Those who survived would be sent to extermination camps. The evacuations to the labor camps would begin in Poland.

“Before I continue, I want to beg you to agree with me on the following formula,” Frank told his cabinet five months after Wannsee.

 

We will principally have pity on the German people only, and on nobody else in the entire world. . . . This war would be only a partial success if the whole lot of Jewry survived it, while we shed our best blood to save Europe. My attitude toward the Jews will therefore be based solely on the expectation that they just disappear. They must be done away with. . . . Gentlemen, I must ask you to rid yourselves of all feeling of pity. We must annihilate the Jews wherever we find them and wherever it is possible. . . . The General Government will have to become just as free of the Jews as the Reich.

By December 1942, the Germans had transported to the extermination camps 85 percent of the Jews of the General Government, which made for roughly 1.4 million people.

Hans Frank was Chaplain O'Connor's greatest success at Nuremberg. Over the winter, O'Connor rebaptized Frank, who seemed by all accounts to have been a serious student of the faith. He gave Frank a copy of Franz Werfel's novel
The Song of Bernadette,
which Frank read in his cell. Werfel, an Austrian Jew fleeing the Nazis across France in 1940, fictionalized the story of Bernadette Soubirous, a nineteenth-century miller's daughter who had seventeen visions of the Virgin Mary in Lourdes. Werfel first heard Bernadette's story in Lourdes, where he and his wife had found refuge from the Nazis.

If Frank sent thousands to the Reich's concentration camps, it was Ernst Kaltenbrunner who received them. Ernst was born in 1903 in Ried on the Inn, Austria, a small town near Hitler's birthplace, Braunau, and where he and Adolf Eichmann were boyhood friends.

His father and grandfather were lawyers, and Kaltenbrunner too studied law. He set up a practice in Linz in 1926, married, and had three children. He joined the Nazi Party in 1932, and in 1935 became commander of the Austrian SS. The massive intelligence network Kaltenbrunner created in Austria and spread into Hungary and Yugoslavia impressed SS chief Henrich Himmler, and after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in 1942, Kaltenbrunner was named head of the Reich Security Main Office.

A relative unknown among Nazi leadership at the time, Kaltenbrunner suddenly found himself controlling the Gestapo, the SD—or Security Service—and the Security Police. He had authority over the Einsatzgruppen units that roamed eastern Europe killing as many Jews as they could find, and as Eichmann's superior, he was responsible for the administrative apparatus behind the entire concentration and extermination camp system. From January 1943 until the end of the war, it was Kaltenbrunner's responsibility to see that the Final Solution ran smoothly.

Kaltenbrunner was a giant man—nearly seven feet tall with massive shoulders and bulging arms. His neck was more like a block connecting his shoulders to his head. An alcoholic who smoked a hundred cigarettes a day, Kaltenbrunner's square chin jutted forward when he spoke, which he did in a clipped, precise manner, through thin lips and crooked teeth. A scar that ran from the left side of his mouth up toward his nose was rumored to have come from a duel he fought in college but was actually the result of an accident that launched him through the shattered windshield of his car. Much of the rest of his face was pockmarked, and his eyes were narrow and brown. Rebecca West wrote that Kaltenbrunner “looked like a vicious horse.”

By the end of the war, even Himmler was afraid of Kaltenbrunner, who was a terrifying combination of smart, devious, deceitful, and sadistic. He loved to hear about the various methods of execution used at his camps, and he was especially intrigued by the gas chambers. Unlike so many of the Nazis who were ideologues, Kaltenbrunner was loyal to no place and no one—not Austria, not Germany, not Himmler, not Hitler.

“He was a gangster filled with hatred and resentment and plans for improving his own condition,” according to historian Eugene Davidson. He “would use any weapon to advance himself and anyone might be his victim.”

When Kaltenbrunner took the witness stand at Nuremberg in April 1946 to defend himself, the prosecution asked him repeatedly about his association with the Austrian concentration camp Mauthausen. Prosecutors wanted to implicate Kaltenbrunner in the crimes that took place there, and they produced a photo of Kaltenbrunner and Heinrich Himmler on either side of Mauthausen's commandant, SS-Obersturmbannführer Franz Ziereis. In the photo Ziereis stands inside the camp and points to something unknowable in the distance, possibly something beautiful.

 

HIGH ABOVE THE DANUBE,
on a plateau overlooking blending shades of green pastureland, purple and white wildflowers bow in the breeze. To the east, small farmhouses dot distant hills, and to the south, the snowy peaks of Mount Kremsmauer on the Austrian Alps frame the end of the Danube Valley. Atop the plateau is a granite wall enclosing Camp Mauthausen, and the best views of the Alpine scenery in the distance come while standing on stones that enclose a gas chamber just below. In this spot in the middle of Europe, nearly one hundred thousand people were tortured and murdered. Less than half of those killed have been identified.

The town of Mauthausen, with its colorful ice cream shops and comfortable pubs on the bank of the Danube, is a suburb of Hitler's childhood city of Linz, situated twelve miles northwest, up the river. In May 1938, two months after Austria was swallowed into the Third Reich, the Nazis chose Mauthausen as a site to hold Austria's political prisoners. Inmates from the German camp at Dachau built the camp with granite from nearby quarries. By November, one thousand of the former Dachau prisoners lived and worked as slave laborers in Mauthausen. In February 1939, Ziereis was named the camp's commandant. Nearly three thousand inmates were imprisoned at the camp by September 1939, almost all of them from Austria and Germany.

As the camp's population grew, so did its operations and its death toll. In 1938, as construction on Mauthausen began, thirty prisoners died, according to Ziereis's camp death register, which he called “the book of numbers.” After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the killings at Mauthausen began to increase dramatically, and the number of those killed grew to 445. As the German war effort ramped up, Mauthausen served as the hub to an ever-increasing array of satellite camps around Austria.

Ziereis oversaw seven SS officers and heads of divisions. Under them were ninety-one block officers and labor-gang officers, who were German SS men from the Death's Head Battalion. Below them were kapos, typically violent criminals, who were given supervisory duties over their fellow prisoners and wide latitude to punish them as they wished.

As the Nazis built more subcamps, they also needed more guards, so they brought them in from Romania, Slovakia, Hungary, and Croatia. The
volksdeutsche,
as the Third Reich called them, were ethnically German and had declared their loyalty to Hitler, and many were ready to do his bidding. Regular Wehrmacht units, municipal police officers, and Ukrainian volunteers joined them later.

The SS soon moved prisoners from other camps like Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen to Mauthausen. Polish intellectuals began arriving in 1940, followed by republican Spanish Civil War fighters, Soviet POWs, and Czech Jews. That year alone, eleven thousand prisoners were living on the beautiful plateau above the river.

Mauthausen did not have its own crematorium during that time, so the SS shipped bodies to municipal crematoriums in Steyr and Linz, which competed for the lucrative Mauthausen contracts. By the time the camp built its own, the crematoriums in the nearby cities had disposed of 2,100 bodies. By the end of 1940, 2,312 prisoners had died at Mauthausen.

In 1941, Reinhard Heydrich designed a three-tiered concentration camp system to be implemented throughout the Reich based on levels of prisoner behavior. Mauthausen was classified as a Category III camp, reserved for asocial, hardened criminals, “those who have hardly any chance at rehabilitation.” This classification made Mauthausen and its largest subcamp, Gusen, situated about three miles away, “camps for murder.”

That year, eighteen thousand more prisoners arrived at Mauthausen, and the SS used them in the subcamps for construction projects, such as the building of roads, tunnels, and power plants. Prisoners also worked in the armaments factories that the Nazis forced them to construct.

As the war dragged on, prisoners arrived from Yugoslavia, France, Greece, Belgium, and Luxembourg. Mauthausen's prisoners soon began to represent nearly every nation in western and eastern Europe. While there was a variety of cultures in the camp, the Jews were singled out for systematic slaughter. Most didn't last more than a few weeks. For instance, in 1941, two large groups of Jews—more than a thousand people from Czechoslovakia and the Netherlands—arrived at the camp and all were soon murdered.

At times the camp leadership focused on other groups. After Czech special agents assassinated Heydrich in Prague in 1942, Ziereis ordered 263 Czechs in the camp killed in one day. The shootings began at 8:30
A.M.
and ended at 5:42
P.M.
Kaltenbrunner took Heydrich's place as head of the Reich Security Main Office.

Twenty-one thousand people entered Mauthausen in 1942, and by the end of the year, 4,392 had been murdered there. Ziereis had cut food rations in February. Overcrowding in the barracks led to degraded sanitary conditions. Typhoid and dysentery epidemics followed, killing even more. Until the end of 1942, Mauthausen had the highest death rate among all Nazi concentration camps.

In the middle of 1943, when the SS decided to move the Reich's armament facilities for rocket and airplane-part production underground, it used Mauthausen subcamp labor to dig the massive caverns that housed the factories. The SS sent subcamp prisoners who were singled out for punishment to Mauthausen, where guards gassed them, worked them to death in the granite quarries, or shot them.