The Third Reich at War (123 page)

II

Apart from the trial of the ‘major war criminals’, twelve other trials at Nuremberg, involving 184 defendants, were held by the American occupying authorities to deal with a variety of lesser offenders. At the first of them, senior medical men were arraigned for carrying out cruel experiments on human beings without their consent, for killing the mentally ill and handicapped in the ‘euthanasia’ action, and other crimes. Among them were Viktor Brack and Karl Brandt: both were convinced they had done nothing wrong in ordering the killing of the handicapped; both were sentenced to death. In other trials, members of staff at the ‘euthanasia’ centres were tried for their crimes. Hermann Pfannmüller was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment in 1951, and Friedrich Mennecke killed himself while under sentence of death.
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The two medical scientists who had deliberately infected the Pontine marshes with malaria in 1943, causing in all probability 100,000 Italians to catch the disease and an unknown number to die of it, had mixed fortunes after the war. Ernst Rodenwaldt, denounced by his students for his Nazi affiliations, lost his chair, but he had the backing of a number of his colleagues, and was commissioned by the Allies to compile a report on hygiene in the Third Reich (from which he tactfully omitted his own special area of racial hygiene). He published an epidemiological atlas of the world and some works of medical history and issued a suitably discreet volume of memoirs. The Institute of War Medicine and Hygiene of the West German Army, located in Koblenz, was named after him in 1967.
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Martini continued to publish as well, though he was not able to return to his post in Hamburg. In 1952 he published a fourth edition of his standard textbook on medical entomology. He died in 1960.
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Dr Josef Mengele, whose selections on the ramp at Auschwitz had sent so many to their deaths, left the camp before its dissolution, and worked briefly at Gross-Rosen, before joining an army unit headed by a former colleague. He was captured by the Americans but gave a false name and was released in July 1945, when he began working as a farmhand near Rosenheim in Bavaria. Fearing discovery, he obtained help from another former colleague to flee via Switzerland and northern Italy to Argentina, where he re-established himself, buying a half-share in a pharmaceutical company in 1955. In 1959 he moved to a German colony in Paraguay, but left for Brazil the following year. In the meantime he had divorced and remarried, both legal acts that drew attention for the first time to the fact that he was still alive. His flight and concealment owed a great deal to the help of clandestine networks of former Nazis. He continued to elude capture, and died in 1979 after suffering a heart attack while swimming. It was only in 1985 that his grave was located, and the body exhumed and identified from dental records.
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By contrast, Mengele’s mentor, Otmar von Verschuer, resumed his career after the war. He was elected President of the German Society for Anthropology in 1952 and two years later he became Dean of the Medical Faculty at M̈nster University, where he had been Professor of Genetics since 1951. In 1954 he published his book
Human Genetics
, which built on his
Hereditary Pathology
, published twenty years before. He eventually died in a car crash in 1969.
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Not only Josef Mengele but also Franz Stangl and Adolf Eichmann escaped to Latin America. Stangl was transferred to northern Italy when the death camp at Treblinka, where he had been commandant, was closed. His orders were to oversee the construction of defensive fortifications and the suppression of partisan movements. At the end of the war, he escaped to Austria but was arrested by American troops and interned. As war crimes investigations proceeded, his role in the euthanasia action was discovered, and the Americans appear to have discovered at some point that he had been commandant of a death camp. By this time, however, most Allied war crimes tribunals had ceased operation, and he was transferred to the Austrian authorities, who put him in an open prison in Linz. On 30 May 1948 he absconded and, using false identity papers he had acquired in jail, managed to cross the Alps into Italy, where he had made many useful contacts. Reaching Rome, he made contact at the Vatican with Bishop Alois Hudal, a priest and part of the circle of German and Austrian clerics with whom Pope Pius XII surrounded himself. Hudal was in charge of the German Catholic community in the Italian capital. An Austrian, he did a great deal to help his compatriot escape justice. He found him somewhere to stay, gave him money and kitted him out with a Red Cross passport before buying him a ticket for the sea passage to Syria. Stangl’s family joined him there, and in 1951 they emigrated to Brazil. Many other former Nazis and SS men found the same route to safety. In Brazil, the Stangls, making no mention of Franz’s past, found work and a social life in the expatriate German community. The Stangls kept their name and made no attempt to hide, but, though Franz was on the official wanted list of the Austrian and German governments, he was only tracked down by the efforts of Simon Wiesenthal, who had established an information centre dedicated to locating and securing the arrest of former leading Nazis still at large. On 28 February 1967 Stangl was arrested by Brazilian police and deported to Germany, where he was tried for the 900,000 murders he had ordered at Treblinka. It was apparently only at this point that his wife, who travelled over from Brazil to attend the trial, learned of what he had really been doing in the camp. He was sentenced to life imprisonment on 22 December 1970 and died in prison on 28 June the following year.
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Towards the end of the war, Adolf Eichmann had formed a small partisan resistance movement in the Austrian Alps on the orders of Ernst Kaltenbrunner, with the assistance of Otto Skorzeny and the former Romanian Iron Guard leader Horia Sima. But Himmler soon put a stop to the enterprise, and Eichmann went underground, using forged identity papers. Fearing discovery, he too took advantage of the Vatican’s policy of helping ‘anti-Communist fighters’ to escape to Latin America and arrived in Argentina, where the quasi-fascist dictatorship of Juan Peron provided a refuge for a variety of former Nazis and SS men. One of them was Otto Skorzeny, who had escaped from a prison camp in Germany in 1948 and lived in a variety of locations, including Spain and Ireland (he died in Germany in 1975). Eichmann’s identity and location were discovered by the anti-Nazi state prosecutor in Hesse, Fritz Bauer, a Jewish German who had spent the war in exile in Sweden. At his prompting, the Israeli secret service kidnapped Eichmann in Buenos Aires in May 1960 and smuggled him to Jerusalem, where he stood trial for mass murder the following year amidst a blaze of publicity. He was sentenced to death and hanged at midnight on 31 May 1962.
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III

From the late 1940s to the late 1950s, the political climate of the Cold War militated against any major war crimes trials in West Germany. It was widely felt, both by the NATO Allies and by the West German government, that such trials would fuel East German charges that the country was rife with Nazi criminals, and perhaps also destabilize the Federal Republic’s fledgling democracy by alienating large numbers of ex-Nazis who feared that they too might be brought before a court. By 1958, however, there were signs that the situation was beginning to change. The foundation of a Central Office of the Provincial Justice Administrations in Ludwigsburg laid the basis for the nationwide co-ordination of prosecutions. But it was the Eichmann trial that really put pressure on the West Germans to act. Once more, Fritz Bauer was the driving force behind the investigations. These culminated in the trial of a number of SS officers and guards in Frankfurt am Main in 1964. The last commandant of Auschwitz, Richard Baer, who was arrested in 1960 after having lived for many years as a forestry worker under a false name, was to have been a defendant, but he died before the trial began. In the dock were twenty-two men including block leaders, SS camp guards and others who were accused of specific acts of individual, physical violence against prisoners. More than 350 former inmates travelled to the court to give evidence. In August 1965, seventeen of the defendants were given mostly lengthy prison sentences. The trial proved a crucial turning-point in bringing the attention of the younger generation of West Germans to the crimes of the Third Reich; it was followed by four smaller trials in West Germany, in which more Auschwitz guards and block leaders were sentenced to imprisonment. The East Germans riposted with a trial of their own, arresting and executing the camp doctor Horst Fischer in 1966. He had been practising medicine openly in the communist state, under his own name, without hindrance, for more than twenty years before his arrest.
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The survival in positions of responsibility in postwar Germany of men like Fischer suggested strongly to many observers that the process of ‘denazification’ carried out by the Allies had been less than thorough. In the years immediately following the end of the war, millions of Germans were required to fill in and submit lengthy forms on their activities and beliefs under the Third Reich. They were then brought before tribunals, which heard evidence from interested parties and categorized the individual concerned as a Nazi, implicated in Nazism, a fellow traveller, or uninvolved. The process was vast in scope. More than 3,600,000 people in the western zones were affected, of whom 1,667 were classified as ‘chief culprits’, just over 23,000 as ‘incriminated’, and slightly more than 150,000 as ‘less incriminated’. Thus under 5 per cent were judged to have been hard-core Nazis. 996,000 were categorized as merely nominal members of the Nazi Party (27 per cent), and 1,214,000 were exonerated (33 per cent). By the time the process was wound up, in 1948, 783,000 remained uncharged, 358,000 were amnestied, and 125,000 remained unclassified. In a similar process carried out in the Soviet Zone, more than 300,000 people were dismissed from their jobs, and 83,000 were banned from further employment altogether. Denazification could not, of course, ban all 6.5 million members of the Party from employment in positions of responsibility. The need for the expertise of judges, doctors, lawyers, scientists, engineers, bankers and many others was too great. Many of those who had condemned political offenders to death in the courts, taken part in ‘euthanasia’ killings in the hospitals, preached Nazi doctrines in the schools and universities, or participated in ‘desk-top murders’ in the civil service resumed their posts. The professions closed ranks and deflected criticism of their behaviour in the Third Reich, and a veil of silence descended over their complicity, not to be lifted until after the leading participants retired, towards the end of the century.
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The intrusiveness of the action alienated Germans, who wanted above all to forget, and popular approval of denazification as revealed in opinion polls fell from 57 per cent in March 1946 to 17 per cent in May 1949. The superficiality of the denazification process failed to change many of the Nazi views held by those it affected. And yet, overall, despite everything, the action was a success. The open expression of Nazi opinions became a taboo, and those who revealed them were generally forced to resign their posts. The internment, screening and trial before denazification tribunals of tens of thousands of hard-core Nazis opened the way for the re-emergence of anti-Nazis - Social Democrat, Catholic, liberal - and others who had taken no part in the regime, to occupy leading positions in politics, administration, culture and the media. Attempts to revive Nazism in the form of neo-Nazi political movements like the Socialist Reich Party or, later, the National Democratic Party never won more than marginal popular support; if they were too blatant, like the former, then they were legally suppressed. A postwar career like that of Werner Best, who survived more than one trial and condemnation to spend the rest of his long life - he died in 1989 - organizing help for former Nazis and campaigning for a general amnesty, was unusual. All the same, public opinion polls revealed that a majority continued well into the 1950s to regard Nazism as ‘a good idea, badly carried out’, and a worryingly large proportion of the population considered that Germany was better off without the Jews. It was not until the arrival of a new generation on the scene, symbolized by the year 1968, that a real confrontation with the past began. Nevertheless, the political culture of both East and West Germany was from the outset based on a vigorous repudiation of Nazi ideology and values, including the long tradition of German nationalism and militarism that had persuaded so many people to support it. The realities of the total defeat and, in the 1950s and 1960s, the prosperity generated by the ‘economic miracle’ persuaded the overwhelming majority of Germans to embrace the political culture of parliamentary democracy, European integration and international peace with growing enthusiasm and commitment.
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Few Germans found adjusting to this new world easy. Many still regretted the failure of the Third Reich. When Hitler’s former military commanders came to write their memoirs, they took the opportunity to put forward the unrealistic but for many years widely accepted view that, if only Hitler had let them get on with the job, they could have won the war. The conduct of the German army on the Eastern Front went uncriticized in these works, and for decades, therefore, unquestioned. General Gotthard Heinrici was eventually captured on 28 May 1945 and did not get back to Germany until 1948. For the rest of his life he remained convinced that he had fought in a good cause - the German cause. He died peacefully on 13 December 1971.
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Field Marshal Fedor von Bock was not so lucky. On 3 May 1945, in compulsory retirement since the summer of 1942, he was being driven with his wife, his stepdaughter and a friend through the countryside towards Oldenburg, hoping to meet his friend Field Marshal Manstein to discuss the end of the war. The car was spotted by a British fighter plane, which swooped low over it and strafed it with bullets. The car burst into flames; Bock staggered out, the only survivor; he was picked up and taken to hospital, but died of his injuries the following day.
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Among other senior military commanders, Walther von Brauchitsch died in a British prison in 1948, Gerd von Rundstedt was captured and interrogated by the British but never faced trial because of his heart condition, and died in 1953; Friedrich Paulus, who had surrendered at Stalingrad, lived in East Germany until his death in 1957, still outwardly committed to the Communist cause he had embraced in captivity; Erich von Manstein was sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment by a British military court in 1949 for crimes against non-combatants, was released in 1953 and became a military adviser to the West German government, dying in 1973. Like the tank commander Heinz Guderian, who was briefly imprisoned after the war and died in 1954, Manstein was widely respected for his generalship; questions about his involvement in Nazism and its crimes went largely unanswered.