The Nazi Hunters (14 page)

Among those who either are Holocaust deniers or at least believe that the overall number of victims is vastly exaggerated, Sehn and his writings are often targeted, with some calling him “a Soviet dupe.” But while both the Soviet and Polish commissions that first investigated Auschwitz were undoubtedly predisposed to accept the most damning testimonies, the notion that the original numbers were a product of deliberate falsification is not justified by the evidence.

Since it was both Höss and some survivors who provided the early higher numbers, it is hardly surprising that they were taken seriously. Pointing out that SS officers burned about 90 percent of the camp’s records before abandoning the camp, Piotr Cywiński, the current director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, noted that it took a considerable amount of time before accurate estimates could be pieced together. “
I wouldn’t assume bad will on the part of the war commissions,” he said. “At a certain point, the Soviet commission went with the notion ‘the more the better.’ ” And once that became the official line in the Stalin era, “you would have had to be a crazy person to try to contradict statements from the Politburo.”

Franciszek Piper, a Polish historian in the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum during both the communist and post-communist eras, painstakingly calculated the first much lower estimate of the number of the camp’s victims: between 1.1 million and 1.5 million.
He was finally able to publish a book with his findings in 1992, after the fall of communism. Although he knew the official figures were wrong long before they were officially changed, he noted that the authorities probably feared taking any step that could appear “
to minimize the crime of genocide in general and the crimes perpetrated in Auschwitz in particular.” Besides, he added, “
anyone who would try to reduce the estimates in those times would be attacked as a defender of murderers.”

In reality, the four million figure roughly corresponds to the total
number of Jews who perished in
all
the death camps and ghettos after more than a million had been killed by the Einsatzgruppen, the special execution squads on the Eastern Front. This was largely coincidental. But it underscores the fact that the revised figures for Auschwitz have not changed the estimate of the overall number of Holocaust victims.

As for Sehn, he was hardly an ideologue of the new regime. In fact, even after he became the director of the Institute of Forensic Research in 1949, he did not join the Communist Party, which would normally be expected of anyone in such a position. Instead, he joined the Alliance of Democrats (Stronnictwo Demokratyczne), which he referred to as “
the illegitimate child” of the communists—in other words, a small party the regime tolerated to provide a facade of pluralism. Interestingly, this would be one of the two small parties that broke with the communists in 1989, ending their rule by throwing their weight in parliament behind Solidarity.

To be sure, that was long after Sehn’s death, but his instinct was clearly to maintain good relations with the new rulers while also keeping them at arm’s length where he could. During his tenure as director of the Institute of Forensic Research from 1949 to his death in 1965, he managed to avoid the formation of a Communist Party organization there; almost all similar institutions had such an in-house unit. “During his tenure, there was never any political pressure,” former co-worker Zofia Chłobowska maintains.

At the same time, he nurtured a close friendship with Józef Cyrankiewicz, a prewar Polish Socialist Party leader and an Auschwitz survivor who later served as prime minister in communist Poland. Without such connections, he probably would never have been given the responsibility of handling the Auschwitz investigation and trial, or allowed to travel abroad. As was typical of those times, he always had a “bodyguard” when he traveled out of the country, particularly to Germany where he delivered evidence for other trials. Although he received anonymous death threats as he kept up his pursuit of Nazi criminals, the bodyguard’s real purpose was to make sure he did not have any unauthorized contacts with foreigners.

Sehn was never vindictive when he interrogated Höss and his accomplices. “He was humane in dealing with the perpetrators because he knew what fate awaited them,” Chłobowska pointed out. He also knew that the prisoners were more responsive when they were treated well, making them more forthcoming about their monstrous deeds. He was convinced that his job was to elicit the fullest possible testimony from the former commandant, which would provide the most damning evidence against him. Under his skillful direction, Höss unleashed a cascade of words that did exactly that.

At least subconsciously, Sehn may have begun his war crimes investigations because he wanted to demonstrate how different he was from his brother, who, as a self-proclaimed
Volksdeutsche
, had worked as a village mayor under the German occupiers. But his determination to convict the perpetrators and gather testimony from their victims was sustained well beyond any point where that might have been the decisive factor.

Sehn was always especially solicitous in his dealings with the camp survivors who provided him with their gruesome accounts—and on at least one occasion Sehn took a political risk to help them. His former colleague Kozłowska recalled his gathering of testimony from Polish women survivors of medical experiments at the Ravensbrück concentration camp. “They were often devastated psychologically, and he was able to convince them that it was still worth living,” she said. In the early communist era, he also managed the unusual feat of convincing the authorities to permit a group of about a dozen of those survivors to travel to Sweden for recuperation.

In those days, ordinary citizens usually had no chance to travel outside the Soviet bloc since the authorities feared they would not return. And, in fact, only two or three members of the group of Ravensbrück survivors returned, which could have been enough to doom Sehn. Thanks to his friendship with Prime Minister Cyrankiewicz, he weathered that crisis.

Another Ravensbrück survivor, limping on battered legs from beatings she had received at the camp, periodically showed up in the institute’s offices “to scream out how she was wronged,” Kozłowska recalled,
adding that “of course she was tremendously wronged.” Sehn made sure his staffers treated her well. They provided her with pencil and paper and a place to sit, and she would write furiously for hours. The result was usually illegible but she would leave calmed down, at least for a couple of weeks.

In his efforts to convict the perpetrators, Sehn never forgot who had really suffered—and was never taken in by Höss’s pathetic attempts to portray himself as someone to be pitied. The former commandant was someone who needed to be studied thoroughly, allowing him to present his whole self-incriminating story—and someone who needed to pay the ultimate price. That was how Sehn saw his mission.

“
In our view, punishment of war criminals is more a matter of discouraging future generations than of meting out retribution of every guilty individual. Moreover, in view of future political developments in Germany . . . we are convinced that it is now necessary to dispose of the past as soon as possible.”

A secret telegram sent from the Commonwealth Relations Office in London to Commonwealth members Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Pakistan, and Ceylon on July 13, 1948

T
he war had not even ended when some of the victors began questioning whether hunting and prosecuting Nazi war criminals made sense. The judges and prosecutors at Nuremberg, along with the war crimes investigators and Holocaust survivors like Simon Wiesenthal and Tuvia Friedman, believed passionately in transforming the rhetoric of their leaders about seeking justice into reality. But others were already looking ahead to the postwar world and what they saw as the inevitable confrontation with a new totalitarian enemy—the Soviet Union.

In the spring of 1945, Saul Padover, the Austrian-born historian and political scientist who was serving in the U.S. Army as it moved deeper into German territory, wrote detailed notes of his conversations with
local Germans and, occasionally, the Americans who were put in charge of their cities and towns. Part of his assignment was to gauge popular attitudes and also spur the process of identifying and removing Nazis from prominent positions. Padover met with an unnamed lieutenant colonel whom he identified as the MG (military governor) of an industrial city in the Rhineland, and recorded the senior officer’s skepticism about those efforts. The notes are rough, but their import is clear:

Not our concern to discover what Germans think. Find democrats? Can’t find democrats even in U.S. I don’t care who runs this country, & who lives here, so long as don’t bother MG. More worried Russian threat than German problem. Only U.S. strong enough fight Russia; England is a laugh. Committee in this city supposed screen Nazis; not my business. I really don’t have anything vs. Nazis unless they work against me. This list Nazi lawyers you gave me, maybe valid, maybe not, but member Nazi party not necessarily bad.

General George Patton was no less caustic about his superiors’ efforts to punish or at least remove Nazis from a broad range of positions in postwar Germany. While he was serving as the military governor of Bavaria in 1945, he wrote to his wife: “
What we are doing is to utterly destroy the only semi-modern state in Europe so that Russia can swallow the whole.”

Even some German Jews who had fled their homeland in the 1930s were coolly pragmatic about the challenges they faced when they returned to a vanquished Germany as newly minted Americans.
Peter Sichel was twelve in 1935, when his parents shipped him out of Berlin to a British school. He recalls his mother’s warning when Hitler’s regime enacted the Nuremberg racial laws that year: “All the Jews are going to be killed”—and how most of their friends thought she was crazy for saying so. In 1938, his parents managed to flee Germany as well. By 1941, Sichel had arrived in the United States and six months later, after Pearl Harbor, he volunteered for the Army.

During the war, Sichel served in the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services,
which was the precursor to the CIA. He recruited German POWs for spy missions, and, when the war ended, the young captain was the last head of the 7th Army OSS detachment located in Heidelberg. But like the lieutenant colonel Padover encountered, he was dismissive of the efforts to identify and punish all but the highest-level members of Hitler’s regime. “Our mission was to find high Nazi officials, members of the security service and high SS officials,” he said. His heart was hardly in that task. “Don’t ask who we caught, what we caught,” he added with a shrug.

At a conference in London a year earlier, he had told his superiors that they had no need to be worried about resistance from hard-core Nazis once the war was won. “It’s not like the first World War,” he explained. “There’s absolutely no doubt about the terrible things they’ve done. They’re going to be in hiding, but they’re not going to be trying to make life difficult for us.” He added that while his former countrymen were highly effective when fighting as a group, “the Germans do not lend themselves to individual fighting.” He was proven right. The fears that
Werwolf
forces—those trained for a guerrilla struggle against the Allies—would prove to be a formidable opponent quickly evaporated.

Soon after Germany’s defeat, Sichel was transferred to Berlin where he continued his clandestine activities for the OSS—and then for the CIA once the new agency replaced the dissolved OSS. A Berlin operation was set up that reported back to the main CIA station in West Germany, and Sichel rose to chief of that Berlin base by 1950. The priority of his team, he pointed out, was getting intelligence on the Russians, protecting German scientists and technicians so they did not get snatched by them and dispatched to the Soviet Union. They also helped arrange to get the scientists, regardless of what they had done for the Nazis, to West Germany, from where some of them were sent to the United States. “There were not many people fighting the last war,” he noted.

As for the war criminals, he added: “It’s a horrible thing to say but I really didn’t care much. It was always my philosophy that the criminals ought to be shot and then we should forget about the whole thing. Everyone who was really bad should be gotten rid of, and [as for] everyone else who was weak, let’s look forward and not look back.” As far as he was
concerned, the initial round of trials in Nuremberg and elsewhere had pretty much taken care of the problem.

• • •

That was a far cry from the initial assumption of Germany’s new masters. On May 10, 1945, President Truman signed a declaration outlining an ambitious “denazification” process for a defeated Germany. “
All members of the Nazi Party who have been more than nominal participants in its activities, all active supporters of Nazism or militarism and all other persons hostile to Allied purposes will be removed and excluded from public office and from positions of importance in quasi-public and private enterprises,” it declared. It then defined the categories of offenders who would be banned under those terms, using language that was sweeping enough to encompass a very broad array of the Third Reich’s adherents.

All four occupying powers—the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union—in principle agreed that denazification was essential. Germans seeking positions of almost any kind had to fill out the soon-to-be infamous
Fragebogen,
questionnaires with 131 queries about everything from their physical characteristics to their past political affiliations, and denazification panels were to then rule on who was disqualified from public and private jobs. The German writer Ernst von Salomon would later publish
Der Fragebogen,
a book that consisted of his lengthy, mocking answers to each of the questions about his activities during the Nazi era.

But the challenge the victors faced in determining how to deal with a people who had largely marched to the beat of the Nazi drummers was both serious and daunting.
Eight and a half million Germans had belonged to the Nazi Party, and their full membership records had survived the war thanks to a paper mill manager in Munich who had deliberately ignored instructions to pulp them. Millions more were involved in Nazi-affiliated organizations. If everyone who had in some way served the Third Reich were excluded from public and private positions, there would be few people left. Noel Annan, a senior intelligence officer in the British zone, aptly described what even the most fervent proponents of denazification instinctively knew: “
Democracy in Germany could not be
born unless it was delivered with the forceps of de-Nazification; but it was also important not to crush the infant.”