Mission at Nuremberg (27 page)

Niklas Frank was seven years old, the youngest of Hans Frank's five children, when he visited his father at Nuremberg. He entered the room with his mother and saw his father behind the screen with an American soldier with a white helmet standing next to him. His father tried to make him laugh and said it was only a few months until the family would be celebrating Christmas together at the family's lake house in Schliersee, Bavaria.

“Why is he lying?” Niklas asked himself. “He knows that he will be hanged. He knows it. Why is he lying to me?” Niklas didn't say a word. He just watched his father smile at him, and then he left. “I was very, very disappointed because my father had no real idea how to talk to his youngest child,” Niklas said later. “He should have said, ‘Nikky . . . you are seven years old, and we will never meet again. I will be hanged. I have earned this hanging. I have done a lot of crimes. Don't do it the same way like me.' Something like this.”

In a book he later wrote, Niklas fantasized that as his father retracted his statement of guilt on the witness stand, the arm of God reached down from heaven and plunged into his father's throat and into his stomach so that Niklas, “like an eternal zombie,” could feast on his father's heart:

 

There God's fingers grab hold, and then He, Supergod, begins to pull His arm back, slowly, very slowly, and He turns you inside out, skin side in, with a squishy sucking sound, so that I, amazed by this spectacle of flesh, come down to you from the judges' bench and watch your organs wriggling on your outside; your face has disappeared inside your head. Your eyes are gone. I come closer and see your heart anchored to its tough arteries and veins; it's beating like crazy. . . . I will be trying to leap away from you for the rest of my life.

Niklas never forgave his father. “Too many people [were] killed for nothing,” he later said.

The other defendants had less contentious—though no less painful—interactions with their families. Fritzsche said it was “heart-rending” for the defendants to have to speak to their families “through glass and wire netting and to be unable to help them in their struggle to maintain a bare existence.” The families, he wrote, “were looked after by the two American clergymen who saw to it that the grim atmosphere of the jail was not too obtrusive.”

Fritzsche found it difficult to even describe “the emotional impact of these meetings” on the prisoners. “Some were hard put to maintain their composure and it was on a visiting day that, for the first time, I saw Goering's usual imperturbability forsake him,” he wrote.

Edda Goering was eight years old when she visited her father for the last time at Nuremberg. Later in life, she recalled standing on a chair to get a better view of him through the screen, and the strangeness of seeing him surrounded by white-helmeted guards. She remembered seeing Niklas Frank and his older brother Norman running around the jail.

Goering and his daughter were close. He had written her a birthday letter from Nuremberg in June that she kept into old age:

 

My darling, sweet child! My golden treasure!

Now's the second time that your birthday has come around, and I can't be there. And yet, my darling, today I'm especially close to you, and send you my warmest and most heartfelt greetings. I pray to Almighty God from the bottom of my heart to look after you and help you. I can't send you any gift, but my boundless love and longing is all around you and always shall be! . . . I hope the weather's fine so you can spend your birthday outside in the wonderful forest. My little sweetheart, once more all my warmest wishes for today and always; fondest hugs and kisses from your Papa.

 

Emmy had urged Edda to talk to Gerecke, and when she did, the chaplain asked her if she said her prayers.

“I pray every night,” she told him.

“And how do you pray?” Gerecke asked.

“I kneel by my bed and look up to heaven and ask God to open my daddy's heart and let Jesus in.”

Gerecke tried in a similar vein with Rosenberg's pretty fifteen-year-old daughter Irene, but she interrupted him. “Don't bother me with any of that prayer stuff,” she said.

All right, Gerecke said, “is there anything at all I can do for you?”

“Yes,” said Irene. “Got a cigarette?”

When the prisoners were not visiting with their families, they were spending time with each other. Andrus had relaxed another rule—one of association. Each man was allowed to invite three others to a maximum of two “parties,” and each could accept as many invitations as he received. The parties were just meetings around a table in a special cell set up with cards and chess that the men never used. For the most part, the defendants just talked as guards stood behind them against the cell wall. Even the prisoners considered outsiders by the others—Streicher, Kaltenbrunner, Frick—received invitations. When the hour-long party was over, a guard shouted, “Finished!,” and the next group would be ushered into the cell.

About a week before their scheduled deadline, the tribunal decided it needed more time to work out differences with the judgments, so they announced that the adjournment would be extended for another week, until September 30. This gave the families more time for hour-long visits every day.

The final visitation day was Saturday, September 28. On Sunday, the chaplains provided services and more counsel in an atmosphere of general gloom. Most of the prisoners had said good-bye to their wives and children, believing they'd never see them again.

On Monday, the judges arrived at the Palace of Justice in black, bulletproof cars escorted by jeeps topped with sirens and machine guns. Many of the prosecutors who had left Nuremberg after oral arguments returned for the verdicts. Andrus activated every guard in the 6850th for the occasion.

One thousand extra guards surrounded the Palace of Justice. Snipers positioned themselves at strategic points. Telford Taylor wrote that in Courtroom 600 Andrus “was at his most absurd, ordering ladies not to cross their ankles and telling his guards to wake up elderly gentlemen dozing in the heat and boredom.” The prisoners filed into the dock to hear the tribunal's judgment. During the proceedings, reporters noticed that the defendants huddled close together and talked in undertones. Some thought they looked shrunken and faded.

The judges read through their opinion all day, and they spoke of the prisoners in sweeping condemnations. “Many of these men have made a mockery of the soldier's oath of obedience to military orders,” the tribunal judges read. “When it suits their defense they say they had to obey; when confronted with Hitler's brutal crimes, which are shown to have been within their general knowledge, they say they disobeyed. The truth is that they actively participated in all these crimes, or sat silent and acquiescent, witnessing the commission of crimes on a scale larger and more shocking than the world has ever had the misfortune to know.”

That evening, the defendants returned to their cells in a bleak mood. They would receive their individual sentences in the morning.

Days earlier, the American prosecutor Justice Robert Jackson had written to Thomas Dodd, remarking that “if there is ever to be a demonstration by the defendants, it could occur at the time of sentencing. . . . The world's eye will be focused on the courtroom on that day, and if these defendants should burst out in angry demonstrations, that will be the thing that will get the newspaper play.”

When the morning came, Andrus gathered the defendants in a semicircle outside their cells. “It is your duty to yourselves and to posterity and to the German people to face this issue with dignity and manliness,” he told them. “I expect you to go into that courtroom, stand at attention, listen to your sentence and then retire. You may be assured that there are people to assist you and to take care of you after you have moved out of sight of the general public.”

Andrus placed a doctor and nurse in the courtroom and another doctor at the door to the elevator that carried the defendants up to the courtroom. Two soldiers stayed with the second doctor and manned a stretcher and a straitjacket “in case a prisoner went berserk,” Andrus wrote.

The defendants walked into the dock together for the last time and found the courtroom strangely changed. Lawrence had banned photography while the Nazis learned the verdicts, and the bright lights that had for nearly a year shined in their faces—and that often forced the defendants to wear sunglasses in court—were dimmed.

The International Military Tribunal did not waste time. Just after 9:30
A.M.
, it began with its verdict on Goering, the Allies' most important prisoner. The justices said the prosecution's evidence proved that after the führer, Goering was “the most prominent man in the Nazi regime” who had “tremendous influence with Hitler.” They continued:

 

Goering persecuted the Jews, particularly after the November 1938 riots, and not only in Germany, where he raised the billion-mark fine as stated elsewhere, but in the conquered territories as well. His own utterances then and his testimony now shows this interest was primarily economic—how to get their property and how to force them out of the economic life of Europe. As these countries fell before the German Army, he extended the Reich anti-Jewish laws to them. . . . Although their extermination was in Himmler's hands, Goering was far from disinterested or inactive, despite his protestations in the witness box.

The tribunal found Goering guilty on all four counts of the indictment.

For the rest of the morning, the four voting judges alternated reading the tribunal's verdicts for each of the twenty-one defendants and for Martin Bormann in absentia.

A
Newsweek
reporter in the gallery wrote that Ribbentrop was in the “worst shape of any man on the dock . . . looks as if noose already around neck . . . sweating.” When most of the defendants heard their own verdict, they took off their headphones.

The tribunal acquitted Fritzsche, Papen, and Schacht. Fritzsche's translator was just a yard away from him, behind glass, and he spoke softly: “The Tribunal finds that Fritzsche is not guilty under this Indictment, and directs that he shall be discharged by the Marshal when the Tribunal presently adjourns.”

Though Fritzsche could only hear the translator through the headphones, he said that his voice “may well have seemed to me to sound like those trumpets which made the walls of Jericho crumble.”

The rest were guilty on one or more counts of the indictment. The court recessed for lunch at 1:45
P.M.
, and because Lawrence did not want the defendants paraded through any public part of the building, Andrus served them lunch in a basement cloakroom.

The acquitted men were separated from the rest. Schacht shook hands with no one. Papen only shook hands with Keitel, Jodl, Raeder, and Doenitz—the former military leaders. Fritzsche wished an emotional good luck to each of those convicted. After receiving some congratulations in return, the acquitted men were then taken to a bizarre press conference where reporters offered them chocolate, cigars, and drinks. They were also told that an angry mob was forming to meet them outside the Palace of Justice. Schacht asked Andrus if they could stay inside the prison for a few days until security could be arranged, and the commandant agreed.

An hour after breaking for lunch, the afternoon session began, and the judges announced the sentences. Gerecke was in court that day. He had heard the evidence presented by the prosecution teams in the previous months as the defendants took the stand in their own defense.

“The request came to me to be the Spiritual Councilor to the high Nazi leaders on trial,” he wrote later. “I am not a jurist. I take it the prosecution teams did their job according to the rules of their professions and the judges did what they thought was best according to the evidence brought before the tribunal.” The men he had spent nearly a year ministering to “took the verdicts like soldiers and as far as I could see, not one flinched when he heard his sentence.”

One by one, the defendants rode the elevator up to the dock to hear their sentences. They were handed a pair of headphones to hear the German translation of Lawrence's words. Goering was first. His face was pale, as if it were powdered.

“In accordance with Article 27 of the Charter, the International Military Tribunal will now pronounce the sentences on the defendants convicted on this Indictment,” Lawrence said. “Defendant Hermann Wilhelm Goering, on the Counts of the Indictment on which you have been convicted, the International Military Tribunal sentences you to death by hanging.”

Goering dropped his headset, turned, and walked back into the elevator. As he exited on the lower floor, Goering, handcuffed to a guard, saw Fritzsche standing nearby and walked toward him. He offered his hand, and Fritzsche took it. “Very glad you've been acquitted,” Goering said, in a nonchalant, friendly tone.

Fritzsche couldn't muster the nerve to ask Goering what had just happened upstairs. The once powerful reichsmarshal turned to the rest of the defendants, bowed, and walked back to his cell.

Hess appeared in court next, refusing the translation headphones. “Defendant Rudolf Hess, on the Counts of the Indictment on which you have been convicted, the Tribunal sentences you to imprisonment for life.”

Ribbentrop, whom Gerecke had usually found to be unemotional, stepped up to the dock afterward. He slumped as if punched in the gut when he heard his fate: “death by hanging.”

Keitel nodded curtly as he heard his sentence. His fate would be the same as Ribbentrop's. Many after him were sentenced to die as well—Kaltenbrunner, Frank, Sauckel, Rosenberg, Frick, Streicher, Jodl, and Seyss-Inquart would all hang.

When Speer heard his sentence—twenty years in prison—it sounded abstract to him and almost impersonal. He was aware that many were looking at him: the judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and reporters. Yet he mostly just saw the dilated eyes of his own lawyer, shocked that his client had escaped the gallows. Barely conscious of what he was doing, he bowed to the judges and returned to the elevator. A guard led him back to his cell, and shortly afterward another guard ordered him to pack up his possessions and head to a new cell on the prison's second tier. Some of his codefendants had also moved tiers, while others, he saw, had remained in their ground-floor cells.