The Third Reich at War (122 page)

AFTERMATH

I

For the vast majority of Germans, 8 May 1945 did not come as a liberation, however much it might have appeared as such in retrospect. Germany’s defeat was unambiguous. People were struggling to adjust their minds to the new situation, and to free themselves from the moral and mental burden of Nazism. Many had already taken the first steps along this road. The end of the war for the Germans was not a single event but a process, affecting different people at different times, over a period of months, as the Allied armies advanced slowly across the Reich. Wherever and whenever they were overrun by the Allied armies, however, the German people submitted meekly to their conquerors. The partisan organization which Himmler and Bormann had hoped to organize against the Allied occupation, in imitation of the Soviet partisans who had caused so much havoc in the German rear during the previous years, was set up too late for any real momentum to develop. Known as the ‘Werewolf’ movement, it tried to recruit fanatics of the Hitler Youth generation for continuing resistance behind the lines. A few units were formed, and on 25 March 1945 one of them managed to assassinate Franz Oppenhoff, who had been installed as mayor of Aachen by the invading Allies.
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In the Bavarian mining town of Penzberg, the workers deposed the Nazi mayor in order to open the way for the advancing American troops to enter the area peacefully, but a local army unit arrested them and executed them on the orders of the Munich Regional Party Leader, and further executions took place when a Werewolf unit arrived on the scene.
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But such actions were isolated and without wider-reaching consequences. For this, there were many reasons.

To begin with, the Nazi Party, like the SS, the armed forces and virtually every other organization in the Third Reich, was in a state of complete disintegration and collapse. Large numbers of people who might in other circumstances have been able to provide leadership for a resistance movement were dead or captured. Communication was difficult if not impossible. The death of Hitler had in any case destroyed the factor that had cemented many people’s loyalty to the Nazi cause. Many people had believed they were fighting for Hitler as much as for Germany; there seemed little reason to go on fighting now he was gone. More generally, Nazi dogma, repeated on innumerable occasions throughout the history of the Third Reich, proclaimed that ‘might is right’, that success carried its own justification with it. Germany’s total defeat seemed therefore to confirm that the Allies after all had right on their side, a belief strengthened by the strong feelings of guilt for the extermination of the Jews that had begun to haunt the consciences of many Germans well before the end of the war. So complete was the defeat, so all-encompassing the devastation of Germany, that many patriots in any case blamed Hitler and the Nazis for it. Nobody could argue it away. Moreover, the Allied presence in Germany was pervasive, and the Allied occupying forces were very much alert to the threat of a partisan or resistance movement thanks to the propaganda pumped out by Goebbels’s media urging young Germans to join it. On the other hand, the Allied forces, including even after the first few weeks the Russians and the French, proved less vengeful and more sympathetic than ordinary Germans had feared. Goebbels’s prophecy that millions of Germans would be taken off to Siberia proved unfounded, even in the east. Resistance movements had indeed emerged to the German occupation of other European countries, but (with the exception of Yugoslavia) only after an initial period of two or three years when the vast majority of people were waiting to see which way the war would go, resigned to occupation at least for the time being. The same was the case in Germany. And finally, the Nazis had never won more than 37.4 per cent of the votes in a free national election. At times, notably following the victories of 1940, their popularity had been far greater. But popular opinion in Germany as elsewhere was commonly fickle and volatile, and by early 1945 support for the Nazis, as we have seen, had sunk to depths not plumbed since the middle of the 1920s.

Nevertheless, there were, of course, large numbers of committed Nazis still at large in Germany at the end of the war despite all the suicides and deaths. To deal with them, and in particular to settle accounts with the remaining Nazi leaders, the Allies established an International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. In a series of trials, beginning with the major war criminals (November 1945 to October 1946), Allied prosecutors presented a wealth of evidence of Nazi criminality, accusing Göring, Ribbentrop and others of waging an aggressive war of conquest, committing the mass murder of innocent civilians and carrying out a wide variety of atrocities and crimes against humanity and in violation of internationally agreed laws of war. The legitimacy of the proceedings was undermined to a degree by the participation of Soviet judges and by the Western Allies’ carpet-bombing of German cities. It proved difficult to make some of the charges stick, notably the charge of conspiracy. Nevertheless, the Tribunal established a crucial precedent for the future. It was also widely publicized. The reporters present included William L. Shirer, who had left Germany in December 1940, possibly because he was told the Gestapo were compiling a dossier on his activities. Shirer subsequently used the documentary evidence compiled for the trial as an important source for his best-selling history of Nazi Germany,
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
, which he published in 1960 and which was still in print at the time of his death thirty-three years later. For the mass of ordinary Germans, however - some at least of whom had been made by Allied troops to help clear up the dead bodies of prisoners in concentration camps at the end of the war - the trials were further evidence, along with the bombing and the expulsions of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe, that they were being singled out as victims in a war where justice was inevitably being meted out by the victors.
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23. Post War Arrangements in Central Europe

The Nuremberg trial of the major war criminals resulted in a number of death sentences being handed out, one of them (Bormann)
in absentia
. Hans Frank (General Governor of Poland), Wilhelm Frick (Reich Interior Minister and Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia since 1943), Hermann Göring, General Alfred Jodl (head of operations at the Combined Armed Forces Supreme Command), Ernst Kaltenbrunner (head of the Security Service of the SS from 1943), Wilhelm Keitel (Jodl’s superior), Joachim von Ribbentrop, Alfred Rosenberg, Fritz Sauckel, Arthur Seyss-Inquart and Julius Streicher were all sentenced to death; all were executed apart from G̈ring, who, as we have seen, committed suicide the night before he was due to be hanged. Rudolf Hess was sentenced to life imprisonment. He spent his last years as a solitary prisoner in Spandau jail and hanged himself in 1987 at the age of ninety-three, the last of the Nazi suicides. Hans Fritzsche, head of the news division in the Propaganda Ministry and a well-known radio commentator, was tried as a substitute for Goebbels, but it was clear that his crimes were in no way comparable to those of his boss, and he was acquitted. Hjalmar Schacht, the economics supremo in the 1930s, who had largely provided the funding for rearmament before the war, was also acquitted; he had after all retired some time before the war began. He wrote his memoirs and died in 1970 at the age of ninety-three. Walther Funk, his successor, received a life term but was released on health grounds in 1957, dying three years later. Karl Dönitz was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment, served his full term and died in 1980; his predecessor as head of the navy, Erich Raeder, was sentenced to life imprisonment but was released on health grounds in 1955, dying in 1960. Konstantin von Neurath received a fifteen-year sentence but was freed because of ill-health in 1954; he died two years later. His fellow aristocrat Franz von Papen, Hitler’s Vice-Chancellor in 1933-4 and subsequently Ambassador to Austria and then Turkey, was acquitted, but rearrested and sentenced to eight years in prison for war crimes by a German court in 1947; he was released on appeal two years later and died in 1969. Baldur von Schirach, leader of the Hitler Youth and subsequently Regional Leader of Vienna, was sentenced to twenty years in jail; released on 1 October 1966, he died on 8 August 1974.
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Albert Speer was also sentenced to twenty years in jail at Nuremberg. He escaped a death sentence by presenting a subtle and sophisticated mixture of self-exculpation and self-blame. He had not known about Auschwitz, he said - a palpable untruth - but he should have done. Some thought his smooth, professional middle-class demeanour had won over the judges, and that he was as much to blame for the murderous exploitation of forced labour as was Fritz Sauckel, whose rough image earned him the noose instead. During his time at Spandau prison, Speer fought boredom and lassitude by measuring out during his daily constitutional an imaginary walk round the globe, and wrote a secret diary (on lavatory paper), as well as more than 25,000 letters, smuggled out by sympathetic visitors. He was released in 1966, and published a widely acclaimed set of memoirs. The book was remarkable for its frank appraisal of his relationship with Hitler, and for its shrewd judgements on the Nazi system of rule. But as time went on, it also became clear that the memoirs were less than honest. Speer embellished or edited many incidents, usually to his own credit, and concealed his knowledge of the extermination of the Jews. Towards the end of his life, in a remarkable series of interviews with the journalist Gitta Sereny, Speer was forced to retreat from the position he had adopted in his memoirs on many issues of detail, but, despite Sereny’s claim to the contrary, he admitted no more to her about his knowledge of Auschwitz than he had to the court at Nuremberg. He died of a stroke during a visit to London in August 1981.
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There were other trials apart from those held at Nuremberg. Many of them were held in Poland, among them the trial of Rudolf Ḧss, former commandant of Auschwitz. At the end of the war, Ḧss went to the holiday island of Sylt, entering the Naval Intelligence School under a false identity. He managed to find work on a farm under an assumed name, but was finally tracked down and arrested on 11 March 1946. He had accidentally broken his little phial of poison two days before. He was harshly treated and complained of being beaten and he signed confessions that were not wholly accurate. The interrogators, he claimed, were all Jews. Ḧss did not abandon his Nazi convictions. Before the war, he thought, the concentration camps had been necessary and served a valuable purpose as re-education centres. But the extermination of the Jews had been ‘fundamentally wrong’ because it had not only drawn down on Germany ‘the hatred of the entire world’ but also ‘in no way served the cause of antisemitism, but on the contrary brought the Jews far closer to their ultimate objective’.
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Ḧss was brought to the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal on a number of occasions as a witness, most notably for the defence of Ernst Kaltenbrunner, but most of the time he was imprisoned in Cracow, where he wrote a lengthy autobiography, inaccurate in many details but unconsciously revealing the attitudes and beliefs that had made him the commandant of the largest murder factory in history. On 11 March 1947 Höss was brought into the dock in a trial attended by numerous foreign observers; he was found guilty of murder, sentenced to death and hanged in the main camp at Auschwitz, next to the SS camp administration building, on 16 April 1947.
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Later in the year, in November 1947, the Cracow Supreme Court tried forty SS officers and guards from the camp. Twenty-three were sentenced to death, including the camp leader, Hans Aumeier, and another former commandant, Arthur Liebehenschel. Others received prison sentences of varying length; one, the SS doctor Hans M̈nch, who had researched malnutrition among prisoners, was acquitted because of many testimonials on his behalf from former inmates. The engineer Kurt Pr̈fer, who had designed the gas chambers, was arrested in Erfurt in 1946 and sent to a Soviet labour camp, where he died in 1952. Ludwig Topf, co-owner of the firm Pr̈fer had worked for, Topf & Sons, committed suicide, but his brother, Ernst Wolfgang Topf, escaped unscathed and set up a new business in Wiesbaden making ovens for crematoria. Of the manufacturers of the poison gas Zyklon-B, two, the owner and chief executive of the Hamburg firm Tesch and Stabenow, were executed by a British military court, but others, including the general director of Degesch, Gerhard Peters, were acquitted.
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Those executed after being tried for their crimes in various European countries included Friedrich Jeckeln, the SS commander who had been responsible for massacres of Jews in Riga and elsewhere; Otto Ohlendorf and Werner Naumann, who had led the murderous SS Task Forces in the east; the police chief Kurt Daluege; the SS commander who had destroyed the Warsaw ghetto uprising, J̈rgen Stroop; the head of the concentration camp organization, Oswald Pohl; and the Nazi Party Regional Leaders Arthur Greiser and Albert Forster, who had ruled over the incorporated territories in Poland. Erich Koch, Regional Leader of East Prussia, was condemned to death by the Poles, but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment on grounds of ill-health. Many others were condemned to lengthy terms of imprisonment.
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The diarist Felix Landau, an Austrian SS man responsible for mass shootings as part of a Task Unit in occupied eastern Poland in 1941, and further murders carried out in his capacity as organizer of Jewish forced labour in the Lemberg district, was recognized in Linz by one of his former workers in 1946 and put in a prison camp by the Americans, but the following year he escaped. He lived as an interior decorator under a false name near N̈rdlingen until his arrest in 1959, followed by his trial and sentence to life imprisonment in 1962; he died in 1983.
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