The Nazi Hunters (10 page)

Such efforts by Germans trying to justify themselves to the victors were so widespread that the playwright and screenwriter Abby Mann ridiculed them when he wrote his play
Judgment at Nuremberg
. “
There are no Nazis in Germany,” his fictional American prosecutor vents privately to the judge before the trial begins. “Didn’t you know that, Judge? The Eskimos invaded Germany and took over. That’s how all those terrible things happened. It wasn’t the fault of the Germans. It was those damn Eskimos!”

Burson was convinced the Nuremberg trials were critically important precisely because the German people needed to see the record of the Third Reich illustrated in all of its gruesome details. “I felt they had to have this indelibly imposed on them so that they would never forget it,” he said. The key players in the trial saw their task even more broadly. In his opening speech at the International Military Tribunal, Sir Hartley Shawcross, the British chief prosecutor, vowed that the proceedings “
will provide a contemporary touchstone and an authoritative and impartial record to which future historians may turn for truth and future politicians for warning.”

Burson’s daily radio scripts reflected his sense of awe that he was witnessing such an epochal event. “
The spectators in the court knew today that they were conscious participants in the shaping of modern history,” he wrote at the start of the proceedings. The judges from the four victorious powers—the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union—“filed in to begin the world’s first attempt to establish international law as an actual law among nations.”

Among his fellow GIs at Nuremberg, Burson regularly encountered
mutterings that there was no need for trials since summary executions of the top Nazis would have been quicker and easier. In his scripts, Burson countered that view, quoting the reasoning of Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, the chief U.S. prosecutor in that lead trial: “We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow.” Or, as Burson put it in his script: “We do not desire to employ the Nazi way . . . ‘to take ’em out and shoot ’em’ . . . for our system is not lynch law. We will dispense punishment as the evidence demands.”

Looking back nearly seven decades later, Burson—who would go on to become the cofounder of the giant global public relations firm Burson-Marsteller—admitted: “In my scripts there’s a tinge of naïveté that I might not have brought to it today,” especially when it came to his faith that the newly formed United Nations would prevent such crimes in the future. But he remained convinced that Jackson, who shaped so much of the Nuremberg strategy, was sincere in his determination “to give them as fair a trial as could be done where the winner tries the loser”—and to set new international standards of justice.

Among more seasoned reporters, including notables like William Shirer, Walter Lippmann, and John Dos Passos, there was initially considerable skepticism—“that this is a show, that it’s not going to last very long, most of them will get hung anyway,” as Burson put it. And back in the United States, the courtroom dramas sparked not just skepticism but often outright opposition, flowing from both sides of the political divide.

Milton Mayer wrote in his column for
The Progressive
that “
vengeance will not raise the tortured dead,” and that the evidence from the liberated concentration camps “would not under ordinary American judicial practice be held sufficient for conviction in a capital crime.” In
The Nation,
critic James Agee even suggested that the film clips from Dachau’s liberation were propagandistic exaggerations. Speaking after the International Military Tribunal announced its verdicts but before the hangings, Republican Senator Robert A. Taft declared: “
About this whole judgment there is the spirit of vengeance, and vengeance is seldom justice.” The
hangings of the eleven condemned men, he added, “will be a blot on the American record which we shall long regret.” (As noted earlier, ten were hanged in the end because Göring committed suicide.)

Even some of those who saw the trials as an important first step toward establishing new international norms of justice admitted to doubts about their value. “
Punishing the German war criminals created the feeling that in international life as well as in civil society, crime should not be allowed to pay,” Raphael Lemkin, the Polish lawyer who had coined the word “genocide,” declared. “But the purely juridical consequences of the trials were wholly insufficient.” His persistent lobbying efforts would result in the U.N. General Assembly’s adoption of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948.

Many members of the legal teams in Nuremberg had found little time to ponder the deeper significance of the trials. “
The historical value of the Nuremberg trials was hardly perceived by those who were involved in the process,” Ferencz maintained. “Many of us were very young, enjoying the euphoria of victory, and the excitement of new adventures.” Even during the trials, there could be festive touches nearby.
Herman Obermayer, the Frankfurt-based young Jewish GI who had worked earlier with hangman John Woods, visited the main trial for a day, observing Göring and the other defendants. That same evening he watched a performance of the Radio City Rockettes, who were there to entertain the troops.

Yet for those involved in the proceedings for any length of time, it was hard to miss the significance and symbolism, even if the long-range implications were far from clear. Gerald Schwab, who along with the rest of his Jewish family had fled Germany and moved to the United States in 1940, had donned a U.S. Army uniform and served as a machine gunner in the Italian campaign before his superiors assigned him as an interpreter for captured Germans. As soon as he was discharged, he signed up for a similar civilian job in Nuremberg. “
I thought it was wonderful: you realized you were participating in historical events,” he recalled.

Schwab did not usually reveal anything about his German Jewish background to the defendants, feeling that they had enough to contemplate already. But when he found himself in the same room as Field
Marshal Albert Kesselring, who was waiting to testify, the veteran commander asked him where he had learned his German. Schwab explained his origins and his family’s last-minute escape. “This must be a great satisfaction for you to be here,” Kesselring noted. Schwab replied: “You’re right, Field Marshal.”

Among Germans the most common complaint was that the trials were no more than victors’ justice. “
No, they were not,” Ferencz emphatically shot back. “If we wanted victors’ justice, we would have gone out and murdered about half a million Germans.” Revenge was not the motive, he continued; instead, the object was “to show how horrible it was, in order to deter others from doing the same.”

In his opening statement to the International Military Tribunal, Justice Jackson had pointed out the real accomplishment of the trials: “
That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hands of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has paid to Reason.” Given the scale of the vengeance inflicted before the trials, particularly by the Red Army, Jackson’s declaration could be dismissed as overly self-congratulatory. But that would be a mistake. It was precisely because “the hands of vengeance” were so powerful, and could have become even more deadly, that Jackson was largely right.

So, too, were other members of the legal teams who argued that the trials, however imperfect, were both necessary and successful. “
Never have the archives of a belligerent nation been so completely exposed as were those of Nazi Germany at the Nuremberg trial,” wrote Whitney R. Harris, who led the case against Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the highest level Nazi security official in the dock. “The result is a documentation unprecedented in history as to any major war.” According to General Lucius D. Clay, the military governor of Germany in the immediate aftermath of its defeat, “
The trials completed the destruction of Nazism in Germany.”

In the ensuing decades, Ferencz came to believe that the trials, no matter how symbolic in terms of punishing only a fraction of those responsible for the Third Reich’s crimes, contributed to “a gradual awakening of the human conscience.” Perhaps. But there was an even more
compelling argument for holding the trials, which was implicit in the actions of all those committed to making them work. It was spelled out by Robert Kempner, a German Jewish lawyer who had escaped to the United States and then returned as part of Jackson’s prosecution team. “
Without them all these people would have died for no reason and no one was responsible and it will happen again,” he noted.

In fact, the Dachau and Nuremberg trials were far from the concluding chapter in the efforts to bring Nazis to justice. It would prove necessary to track down and prosecute—or, at least, expose—other Nazis for years and decades to come. And to continue educating a public, both in Germany and elsewhere, that was increasingly eager to turn its attention elsewhere.

And the trials had far from answered all the questions that the Nazi era had raised. Most significantly, the biggest questions of all were still left dangling. Judge Musmanno summed up what they were in his reflections on his Nuremberg experience:

“
The great problem which I personally faced in the Einsatzgruppen trial was not in reaching a decision on the guilt or innocence of the defendants. That question began to resolve itself as the trial neared its end. What troubled me as a human being was the question as to how and why such well-schooled men should have strayed so far and so completely from the teaching of their childhood which embraced reverence for the biblical virtues of honesty, charity, and cleanliness of spirit. Did they completely forget those teachings? Were they no longer aware of moral values?”

Those were questions that would be asked again and again.

“
A German will think he has died a good German if he waits at a curb at a red light, and then crosses on a green one though he knows perfectly well that a truck, against the law that it may be, is bearing down upon him to crush him to death.”

American journalist William Shirer, quoting a German woman exasperated by her countrymen’s willingness to follow Hitler, in a diary entry on January 25, 1940

M
any of those who initially saw it as their mission to bring Nazis to justice were not Jewish—most prominently, Nuremberg chief prosecutors Robert H. Jackson and Telford Taylor, Judge Michael Musmanno in the Einsatzgruppen case, and Dachau chief prosecutor William Denson. It was not surprising, though, that other members of the legal teams in both Nuremberg and Dachau, like Benjamin Ferencz, were Jewish, or that Holocaust survivors like Simon Wiesenthal and Tuvia Friedman were eager to help the victors in any way they could in rounding up the perpetrators and developing the cases against them. Their motives hardly required any explanation.

But Jan Sehn was in a different category altogether, about as original a Nazi hunter as could be imagined. He was someone who, to this day, is
largely unknown to the outside world and even to his fellow Polish countrymen. In the Institute for National Remembrance in Warsaw and the Holocaust Museum Archives in Washington, there are countless testimonies from concentration camps survivors that are signed by him as the investigating judge.
He also wrote the first detailed account of the history, organization, medical experiments, and gas chambers of Auschwitz, the camp whose name has become synonymous with the Holocaust.

Sehn orchestrated the trial of Rudolf Höss (not be confused with Hitler aide Rudolf Hess, who was given a life sentence in Nuremberg), the camp’s commandant, who mounted the scaffold on the “death block” of Auschwitz on April 16, 1947. He was deliberately hanged in the exact place where so many of his victims had died earlier. Most significantly, Sehn coaxed Höss into writing his personal story before his execution, producing a volume that to this day provides what is arguably the most chilling glimpse into the mind of a mass murderer in human history. Yet that memoir, too, is often overlooked in the flood of volumes about the crimes of the Third Reich, its impact mostly forgotten.

Perhaps the reason Sehn and his legacy have received so little attention is the fact that he did not record anything personal: no diary, memoirs, or even articles that offered a self-portrait of any sort.
His writings were strictly reports and transcripts based on the testimony and other evidence that he gathered as a member of the High Commission for the Investigation of Hitlerite Crimes in Poland, the Polish Military Commission Investigating German War Crimes—and, of course, as the investigating judge in the Höss trial and subsequent trial of other Auschwitz personnel, including SS officers. He also handled the case against Amon Göth, the sadistic commandant of the Płaszów concentration camp in Kraków who was featured in Steven Spielberg’s film
Schindler’s List.
Perhaps if Sehn had not died in 1965 at the age of fifty-six, he would have told more of his story.

But perhaps not. There was a strong reason why Sehn kept the focus on his work rather than on his personal journey. He was convinced he had something to hide, and he hid it from even his closest colleagues until the end of his life.

It was no secret that the Sehn family was of German descent, although its exact origins remain obscure. In a region of constantly shifting borders and empires, there was nothing unusual about that. When Jan Sehn was born in 1909 in Tuszów, a Galician village that is now in southeastern Poland but then was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the household languages were both German and Polish.
Arthur Sehn, a grandnephew of Jan who was born half a century later and has tried to track down the family history, believes the Sehns are descendants of German settlers who were wooed to Galicia in the late eighteenth century by Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, the ruler over the Hapsburg territory that absorbed much of southern Poland. The successive partitions of Poland by Russia, Prussia, and Austria-Hungary wiped the country off the map for more than a century.