In January 1964 Frank Giles, Foreign Editor of the Sunday Times , asked Trevor-Roper to do ‘one of your major pieces in depth’ on the war crimes trials which had just opened in Frankfurt. In 1947 the most senior officials responsible for the Auschwitz extermination camp had been tried under Allied jurisdiction, as a result of which twenty-three of the defendants had been sentenced to death. Now their subordinates were being put on trial, under the jurisdiction of the Federal Republic. Trevor-Roper flew to Frankfurt at the end of February. This time the accused were not the bureaucrats or commanders who had ordered murder, but the torturers and murderers who had pushed mothers and children alive into furnaces.
Hotel Frankfurter Hof, Frankfurt am Main
My dearest James—
It is Saturday night: I have a moment in which to breathe; I am alone; why should I not write to you?
Did Mummy get off all right on Friday? I hope so. I wish I could have stayed to see her off. I hope she got my telegram and will report safe arrival at Hever.1
Ever since I arrived here I have been—until today—stuck in the court house. It is a fascinating but horrible trial. At Nuremberg and in Jerusalem the prisoners were far away, separate from the observers: Eichmann doubly separated, behind bullet-proof glass. Here they sit among us, some of them free, on bail. I find myself next to two SS dentists accused of selecting victims for the gas-chambers, supervising the gassing of them, and extracting the gold teeth from the corpses.2 Both are hideous; but so are most of the defendants: their faces are inhuman, empty with a truly German emptiness. The crimes with which they are charged are revolting: sadistic killing of the most loathsome kind; and yet they all, in true German fashion, knew absolutely nothing—‘can’t remember’ whether they murdered people or not, or, if they did, murdered ‘only Jews’; and then the tears stream down their noses as they reflect on the many unrewarded kindnesses which they performed for those ungrateful prisoners and give evidence of their real softness of heart—how one of them regarded himself as ‘the Angel of Auschwitz’ (he is accused of killing 119 Polish boys by injecting carbolic acid into their hearts), and how another wept for a day when his cat was run over… And then one goes out of the court-house and finds oneself standing next to one of these creatures in the lavatory, or sitting next to them in the restaurant. One of the nastiest of them is Dr Capesius who made enough out of the prisoners—gassing 1200 children at once, etc. etc.—to set up on his own as a chemist afterwards and now has six assistants and a turnover of £30,000 p.a. from his chemist’s shop in Goeppingen and his beauty-parlour in Reutlingen.1 Friday was a dramatic day, when a survivor from Auschwitz gave evidence against one of the defendants (he had shot a woman prisoner for recognising her brother when he was unloaded from a train at Auschwitz, developed a particular method of killing people with his hands, driven others against electric wires, pushed 4000 into gas-chambers etc. etc.). At a certain moment the defendant’s lawyer challenged the witness to identify his client. As twenty years had passed and the witness was a ‘70% invalid’ owing to his experiences in Auschwitz, I was afraid he would fail, especially as the defendants sit among the press, lawyers, etc. in the body of the court-room. But he walked slowly round the room peering through his thick glasses and then spotted him correctly at once. I think everyone in court (except the defendants) was as relieved as I was when he got him right.
After all this I was, as you can imagine, glad of a rest today, Saturday. First of all, I slept late. (The court opens at 8.30 which means that, when it sits, I have to get up at 6.45). Then I went to the Goethe Museum in the house in which Goethe was born. It is an excellent museum in his father’s house, a large town-house built around a courtyard, full of pictures by Fuseli, and Angelica Kauffmann, views of Rome by Piranesi and Volpato, busts of Winckelmann, Schiller, Herder etc. I love Goethe more and more. There is a Goethe Museum in Weimar, now in East Germany, which I have visited too: it has more things in it, because Goethe himself lived there and left all his possessions there; but the communists, though they arrange everything with a kind of antiseptic thoroughness, kill it all by presenting it as propaganda; and there is something disgusting about the attempt to make Goethe a marxist-leninist. I really enjoyed the Frankfurt Goethe-museum far more and spent most of the morning there, forgetting about the horrors of Auschwitz very happily.
Then, this afternoon, I had a sudden idea. I remembered that a German friend had told me that Willy Johannmeyer now lived at Frankfurt.1 Johannmeyer was the German officer whom Robert Maxwell of the Pergamon Press failed to ‘break’,2 but whom, after a long struggle, I forced or persuaded to admit that he had Hitler’s will buried in his back-garden at Iserlohn. I am sure that I have told you the story, probably often. Anyway, he was not a Nazi and he was the only person whom I interrogated in 1945 whom I liked and would ever want to see again. So I looked him up in the telephone-book, found his name, and telephoned. A feminine voice answered. Could I speak, I asked, to Herr Willy Johannmeyer? What name she asked. Trevor-Roper, I replied, preparing myself for the inevitable expostulation, demands for repetition, spelling, etc. ‘Ah, Herr Trevor-Roper’, the feminine voice replied at once, faultlessly and with excitement, ‘I will get him at once’. It was as if I were a familiar friend, whom they saw regularly, not the unnamed English officer whom she had never seen and whom her husband (if she was Mrs Johannmeyer) had last seen 19 years ago in somewhat strained circumstances: so I suppose he must dine out on his side of the story as I do on mine. Anyway, he then came to the telephone, absolutely delighted that I had rung up, and I am going to have tea with them tomorrow. It was very refreshing to feel that, in spite of the strained circumstances, he evidently regarded me as a friend and preserved that feeling for 19 years.
So you see that I have enjoyed the whole day, and it is in order to make it enjoyable to the last minute that I now finish it by writing to you instead of by reading (as I suppose I ought to be doing) documents about Auschwitz; to which however I shall have to return tomorrow if I am going to get my article written in time. For I must stay here until Monday in order to attend what may be another dramatic session, and must fly back on Tuesday, with my article already written in my hand, and give it that morning to the Sunday Times. Then, still on Tuesday, I shall return to Oxford. I hope all is going well there and that the material basis of life—by which I mainly mean the hot water supply—is not breaking down in the absence of the habitual, earthbound, troglodyte stoker who herewith, across the intervening desert air, sends you his love, viz:
Hugh