1 Karin Schawe (ed.), Georg Felix Harsch (tr.), The Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial – A Guide to the Site’s History and the Memorial (Hamburg: Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial, 2010), p. 44.
2 Statement on Atrocities signed by President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill and Premier Stalin as part of the Joint Four-Nation Declaration (the ‘Moscow Declaration’) issued at the Moscow Conference, October 1943.
3 Ted Hughes’s translation of Aeschylus’ The Oresteia (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), p. 169.
4 The Rt. Hon. Clement R. Attlee, introducing an address by Geoffrey Lawrence (Lord Oaksey), together published as ‘The Nuremberg Trial’, International Affairs, Vol. 23:2 (1947), pp. 151–159.
1 The Times, 9 April 1945.
2 The Buchenwald Report was written in 1945 largely by one of its surviving inmates, Eugen Kogon. It refers to the zoo as another excuse for causing suffering to the inmates. If any animal or bird was injured or fell ill, the inmates would be called to account. David A. Hackett (tr. and ed.), The Buchenwald Report (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), pp. 130–131.
3 The Times, 23 April 1945.
4 The Times, 1 May 1945. Sixty years on, this reflection still holds good. Photographs and film of abuse of civilians in Iraq by British soldiers in Basra and Americans in Abu Ghraib prison removed doubt that people had been cruelly mistreated. The pictures showing US soldiers, a young elfin-like woman amongst them (I’m not sure why I mention this though it seems to accentuate the callousness somehow and echoes, as I found, some of the prurient interest in Irma Grese, an SS guard at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, during her trial in 1945), piling up naked Iraqi prisoners, pulling them on dog leads and laughing at their nudity, provoked outrage. The same occurred with the British version at Camp Breadbasket the year before: pictures of detainees strapped to forklift trucks or forced to simulate anal sex. Even with a world now inundated with horrific images, those photographs conveyed a truth that no end of case reports could achieve. The Guardian’s online report on the scandal was available at the time of writing at http://www.theguardian.com/Iraq/breadbasket/0,15804,1419469,00.html.
5 Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Penguin Books, 2003) was an important book for me when thinking of the images of the camps and the Holocaust. This quote comes from p. 102.
6 Christopher Isherwood, ‘Berlin Diary’ in Goodbye to Berlin (London: Minerva, 1989), p. 245.
7 Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts (London: John Murray, 2004), pp. 31–32.
8 Various incidents were reported over the years but it’s worth looking particularly at the Daily Mail coverage: for instance, on 12 December 1925, 26 April 1927 and 16 September 1929.
9 The Times, 19 April 1930.
10 The Times, 18 September 1930.
11 The Times, 18 June 1901.
12 The Times, 9 March 1901.
13 Coincidentally, on the same day that the concentration camps of Germany were first described in the British press, one of the men who in 1945 would become central to the prosecution of those responsible for their operation made his debut in the newspapers. On 21 March 1933 the Manchester Guardian reported a story featuring a Major Henry Shapcott. He was the prosecutor at a sensational court martial in London. Some twelve years later, Shapcott would be a senior figure in the British Army’s investigation and trials of Nazis, but on that day, he was concerned with Lieutenant Norman Baillie-Stewart, an officer in the Seaforth Highlanders accused of breaching the Official Secrets Act. Baillie-Stewart had been passing military information to the Germans since 1931, well before the Nazis came to power. He had been in the thrall of Germany for some time and had agreed to become a spy in return for a modest amount of cash. After a short trial Baillie-Stewart was found guilty and sentenced to five years in prison. In one of those twists that make fact seem absurdly fanciful, Baillie-Stewart would leave the UK after his release from prison shortly before World War II broke out. He would travel to Germany and become the English voice for German radio in the lead-up to the conflict, paving the way for Lord Haw-Haw to take his place. Baillie-Stewart was arrested in Vienna in 1945 and put on trial once more: this time for aiding the enemy. It was one of those that added to the mix of cases the British would pursue after the war.
14 In the same edition, the paper also reported a raid upon Albert Einstein’s house near Potsdam after ‘local political and emergency police’ searched his villa following a tip-off that arms and ammunition were hidden there. Einstein wasn’t in the country. He was on his way home from the USA at the time and had already made public his refusal to return to Germany ‘owing to the persecution of the Jews’: Manchester Guardian, 21 March 1933.
15 Manchester Guardian, 27 May 1933.
16 Hansard, House of Commons Debate, Vol. 287 cols 367–485 (14 March 1934) at 456 onwards.
17 Hansard, HC, House of Commons Debate, Vol. 276 cols 2750–824 (13 April 1933).
18 Manchester Guardian, 23 June 1933.
19 The Times, 26 August 1933.
20 The Times, 6 September 1933.
21 Manchester Guardian, 1 January 1934.
22 Letter to the Editor, Manchester Guardian, 4 January 1934.
23 Manchester Guardian, 16 January 1934.
24 Manchester Guardian, 22 January 1934. The Illustrated London News provided the first pictures of Dachau soon after, although towards the back of the magazine, after the rare chinchillas and reports on the ‘kinema’. Twenty-four pages into the 10 February 1934 edition, photographs of inmates and guards were shown. They bore no resemblance to those that would appear eleven years later.
25 Manchester Guardian, 7 May 1935.
26 Manchester Guardian, 20 April 1935.
27 Manchester Guardian, 20 September 1935.
28 The Times, 8 November 1935.
29 The Times, 15 November 1938.
30 The Times, 19 November 1938.
31 Hans Beimler, Four Weeks in the Hands of Hitler’s Hell-Hounds: The Nazi Murder Camp of Dachau (London: Modern Press, 1933).
32 Letter to the Editor, Manchester Guardian, 10 July 1935.
33 Letters to the Editor, Manchester Guardian, 13 July 1935.
34 The Manchester Guardian printed an interesting article on ‘The Prince and Germany’ on 12 June 1935.
35 Letter to the Editor, Manchester Guardian, 27 July 1935.
36 Hansard, HC, Vol. 337 cols 79–189 (14 June 1938).
37 Hansard, HC, Vol. 341 cols 1987–2107 (24 November 1938) at 2052.
38 The Times, 31 October 1939.
39 The Times, 12 December 1939.
40 The Times, 12 November 1940.
41 The Times, 14 February 1940.
42 The Times, 27 October 1941.
43 The Times, 14 January 1942.
44 Lord Maugham made the statement during a House of Lords debate. See Hansard, House of Lords Debate, Vol. 124 cols 555–94 (7 October 1942).
45 The Times, 7 October 1942.
46 I found these particular entries in a volume of periodic summaries produced by the Government Code and Cypher School working out of Bletchley Park (National Archives, HW16/6). It contained detailed information intercepted from German police communications and deciphered. There are a hundred or so of these volumes. This one shows clearly that the British government had access to information from as early as 1941 mentioning gas chambers and mass executions.
47 New York Times, 18 December 1942, and The Times, 18 December 1942.
48 The Times, 16 October 1942.
49 Lord Maugham talked at length to the House of Lords about the failure of the Leipzig Trials. The experience seemed to have marked the government’s attitude towards post-war justice. See note 44 above.
50 Claud Mullins, The Leipzig Trials: An Account of the War Criminals’ Trials and a Study of German Mentality (London: H.F. & G.Witherby, 1921).
51 Statement on Atrocities signed by President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill and Premier Stalin as part of the Joint Four-Nation Declaration (the ‘Moscow Declaration’) issued at the Moscow Conference, October 1943.
52 The tortuous history of accepting ‘crimes against humanity’ as a legitimate offence in international criminal law is told in Graham Cox’s ‘Seeking Justice for the Holocaust: Herbert C. Pell vs the US State Department’ (2014), Criminal Law Forum, Vol. 25, pp. 77–110.
53 The official account of this development is told in The History of the United Nations War Crimes Commission and the Development of the Laws of War (London: HMSO, 1948), which is now available online at http://www.unwcc.org/documents/.
54 National Archives, WO 311/6 ‘War criminals: proposals to bring suspects to trial during war time’.
55 A full account of this initiative is described from a Canadian perspective in Howard Margolian, Conduct Unbecoming: The Story of the Murder of Canadian Prisoners of War in Normandy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998).
56 National Archives, FO 371/50968 ‘German war criminals: crimes against Jews: atrocities in occupied territories’.
57 National Archives, TS 26/856 ‘Shooting of Allied Prisoners of War by 12 SS Panzer Division (Hitler Jugend) in Normandy, 7th–21st June 1944’.
58 The series of reports on these inquiries can be found at National Archives, FO 371/50968 onwards.
59 National Archives, FO 371/50970, correspondence on proposed republication in the United Kingdom of the 21st Army Group Report on German Atrocities in Belgium January 1945.
60 Ibid.
61 FO 371/50970, note 59 above, letter from FO to Sir Cyril Radcliffe Minister of Information, 15 February 1945.
62 The report is reprinted in Anthony Kemp, The Secret Hunters (London: Michael O’Mara Books, 1986). Papers relating to Galitzine’s investigations at Natzweiler are also available at the Imperial War Museum, ‘Private Papers of Captain Y. Galitzine’ (Document No. 16000).
63 According to Anthony Kemp (note 62 above), Galitzine never lost his belief that the British had failed in their duty towards pursuing war criminals. But his initial investigations would be vital in one of the more successful war crimes investigation operations: the pursuit of those responsible for the murder of British SAS and SOE operatives. That was a priority before the war concluded and once the initial burst of enthusiasm for punishing the Nazis had begun to dissipate. Some of this story is told in Rita Kramer, Flames in the Field: The Story of Four SOE Agents in Occupied France (London: Penguin Books, 1996), and Sarah Helm, A Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins and the Lost Agents of SOE (London: Abacus, 2006).
64 National Archives, WO 208/4296 ‘Papers recovered from Lt Col A.P. Scotland: German concentration camps; POW interrogation reports’.
65 The Times, 12 August 1944.
66 FO 371/50970, note 59 above.
67 Statement by the President released to the press on 24 March 1944, which I found in Robert H. Jackson, Report of Robert H. Jackson, United States Representative to the International Conference on Military Trials (Washington: Department of State, 1949), pp. 12–13.
68 Winston Churchill, History of the Second World War, Vol. VI (London: Penguin Classics, 2005), Appendix C.
69 David Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941–1945 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984).
70 Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies (London: Mandarin, 1991), p. 341.
71 Elie Wiesel, Night (London: Penguin, 2006), preface to new translation, p. x.
72 Memorandum to President Roosevelt from the Secretaries of State and War and the Attorney General, 22 January 1945, in Report of Robert H. Jackson, United States Representative to the International Conference on Military Trials, London 1945 (Washington: US Department of State, 1949), pp. 3–17.
73 The Malmedy massacre above all received the kind of publicity and public outrage in the US as had in Britain the killing of the fifty British and Allied officers who’d escaped from Stalag Luft III earlier in 1944. During the last grand offensive launched by the Germans against the Allies in the west, men of the 1st SS Panzer Division, ‘Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler’, captured over one hundred US troops at the village of Malmedy in the Ardennes, disarmed them and shot them. It was by no means a unique event. But this time, news reports of the discovery in the snow of more than eighty soldiers, with clear evidence of their having been shot at close range (‘Slaughtered in Cold Blood’ was the headline), couldn’t be wrapped up in the general condemnation of Nazi crimes. The killing of the GIs was made very personal and wouldn’t diminish over time. I found newspaper reports from the 1970s that charted the story of the SS officer in command of the unit, Joachim Peiper, who was convicted for the massacre in a US-led trial in 1946 and sentenced to death. The penalty was commuted to life imprisonment in 1951 and reduced further so that he was released in 1957. Peiper was eventually killed in his house in Traves, France, where he’d settled with his family and was purportedly writing his memoirs, on Bastille Day, 1976. A tract denouncing him as a war criminal had been circulated in the area and Peiper, receiving a death threat in the post, had sent his wife and daughters back to Germany. A couple of days later his house was attacked by armed men and firebombed. He died in the blaze. See The Times, 15 July 1976.
74 The most recent book to chart the development of the Nazi concentration camp system is Nikolaus Wachsmann, KZ: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps (London: Little, Brown, 2015).
75 One element of the order was highlighted by the prosecution at the Nuremberg Tribunal to indicate the draconian nature of punishment employed in the concentration camps. The order stated that those to be hanged would include: ‘Anyone who, for the purpose of agitating, does the following in the camp, at work in the quarters, in the kitchens and workshops, toilets and places of rest: holds political or inciting speeches and meetings, forms cliques, loiters around with others; who, for the purpose of supplying the propaganda of the opposition with atrocity stories, collects true or false information about the concentration camp and its institution, receives such information, buries it, talks about it to others, smuggles it out of the camp into the hands of foreign visitors or others by means of clandestine or other methods, passes it on in writing or orally to released prisoners or prisoners who are placed above them, conceals it in clothing or other articles, throws stones and other objects over the camp wall containing such information, or produces secret documents; who, for the purpose of agitating, climbs on barracks roofs and trees, seeks contact with the outside by giving light or other signals, or induces others to escape or commit a crime, gives them advice to that effect or supports such undertakings in any way whatsoever.’ Presentation of the case concerning concentration camps by Thomas Dodd US prosecutor 13 December 1945 which I found at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/12-13-45.asp#camps.
1 Ian Kershaw’s The End: Germany 1944–45 (London: Penguin Books, 2012) conveys the scale of chaos that existed then and the desperately dangerous conflict that was still underway deep into 1945.
2 The Office of the Prosecutor, ICC, ‘Communication concerning the situation in Iraq’, 9 February 2006, available on the International Criminal Court’s website at http://www.icc-cpi.int/NR/rdonlyres/04D143C8-19FB-466C-AB77-4CDB2FDEBEF7/143682/OTP_letter_to_senders_re_Iraq_9_February_2006.pdf.
3 The Times, 14 April 1945.
4 Gerard Mansell, ‘From Belsen to Lübeck’, Illustrated London News, 25 May 1985.
5 The Times, 19 April 1945.
6 Ibid.
7 Daily Mail, 19 April 1945.
8 P.L. Mollison, ‘Observations on Cases of Starvation at Belsen’ (1946), British Medical Journal, No. 4435, pp. 4–8.
9 J.T. Lewis, ‘Medical Problems at Belsen Concentration Camp (1945)’, reprinted in the Ulster Medical Journal, Vol. 54:2, pp. 122–6 (October 1985).
10 W.R.F. Collis and P.C. MacClancy, ‘Some Paediatric Problems Presented at Belsen Camp’ (1946), British Medical Journal, No. 4442, pp. 273–5.
11 M. Niremberski, ‘Psychological Investigation of a Group of Internees at Belsen Camp’ (1946), Journal of Mental Science, Vol. 92, pp. 60–74. The observations are confirmed by the remarkable Viktor Frankl who was an inmate of Buchenwald, a psychologist capable of reflecting on his experiences during and after his captivity. His book, The Doctor and the Soul: From Psychotherapy to Logotherapy (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), is a remarkable account of his time in the concentration camps.
12 National Archives, WO 309/1697 ‘No. 1 War Crimes Investigation Team depositions: 1–175’, deposition of Hughes, 22 June 1945, sworn before Lt Col Genn.
13 Daily Mail, 21 April 1945. Edwin Tetlow’s description of the ‘final horror’ is remarkable for his personal involvement in the story. After describing the terrible scenes, he signs off with, ‘All this I saw, and I do not want to see anything like it again.’
14 Leslie Hardman and Cecily Goodman, The Survivors: The Story of the Belsen Remnant (London: Valentine Mitchell, 1958), p. 16.
15 See note 13 above.
16 Alan Moorehead, ‘Belsen’, in Cyril Connolly (ed.), The Golden Horizon (London: Weidenfield & Nicolson, 1953), pp. 103–12.
17 Thomas Harding, Hanns and Rudolf: The German Jew and the Hunt for the Kommandant of Auschwitz (London: Windmill Books, 2014).
18 Ibid., p. 179.
19 Manchester Guardian, 28 June 1945.
20 WO 309/1418 ‘War crime investigation teams: formation of unit’.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
23 The accounts of the two massacres are told in Hugh Sebag-Montefiore, Dunkirk: Fight to the Last Man (London: Penguin Books, 2007). Despite much effort by the British war crimes investigators no one has ever been brought to justice for these crimes. Identifying those responsible was difficult, finding them more difficult still, and constructing a case that would satisfy the legal standards of a criminal trial the most difficult of all.
24 Winston Churchill, History of the Second World War, Vol. VI (London: Penguin Classics, 2005), Appendix C.
25 ‘Aide-memoire from the United Kingdom April 23 1945’, in Report of Robert H. Jackson, United States Representative to the International Conference on Military Trials, London 1945 (Washington: US Department of State, 1949), pp. 18–20.
26 A good account of Jackson’s appointment is told in Ann Tusa and John Tusa, The Nuremberg Trial (London: Macmillan, 1983).
27 ‘American Draft of Definitive Proposal, Presented to Foreign Ministers at San Francisco, April 1945’, in Report of Robert H. Jackson, United States Representative to the International Conference on Military Trials, London 1945 (Washington: US Department of State, 1949), pp. 22–7.
28 These complaints were repeated in copies of a draft report by the senior investigating officers at Bergen-Belsen amongst the ‘Private Papers of Lieutenant Colonel S.G. Champion’ held at the Imperial War Museum (Document No. 2323).
29 Major Smallwood gave his evidence on Wednesday, 26 September 1945. The transcript of the Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz concentration camp trial can be found in several volumes at the National Archive, WO 235/12 onwards. A full version of the transcript is also available online now at http://www.bergenbelsen.co.uk/pages/TrialTranscript/Trial_Contents.html.
30 National Archives, WO 309/1697 ‘No 1 War Crimes Investigation Team depositions: 1–175’, Exhibit 24.
31 Walter Freud’s private papers can be found at the Imperial War Museum (Document No. 13326). These alerted me to Fred Warner’s papers also stored there, which included a full version of his memoirs (Document No. 7965).
32 National Archives, WO 311/856 ‘Setting up of a Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) court of inquiry to record evidence of atrocities’.
33 National Archives, TS 26/854 ‘Shooting of Allied Prisoners of War at Tilburg, Holland, 9 July 1944: Report of SHAEF Court of Inquiry’.
34 National Archives, TS 26/858 ‘Shooting of Allied Prisoners of War: In the vicinity of Le Paradis, Lestrem, Pas-de-Calais, 27 May 1940: Report of SHAEF Court of Inquiry’.
35 Leo Genn’s papers concerning his military service are listed in the catalogue of the National Archives as held at the Imperial War Museum’s Department of Documents. When I enquired after them I was told that they were in the process of being curated at their Duxford repository and wouldn’t be available for the public for some time. Stephen Walton, the Senior Curator, very kindly sent me photocopies of documents that he thought would be of interest to me. Amongst these I found material which shed considerable light on the attitudes and experiences of the investigators at Bergen-Belsen.
36 See note 28 above.
37 Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation; Analysis of Government; Proposals for Redress (Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944).
38 Ibid.
39 National Archives, WO 309/1418 ‘War crime investigation teams: formation of unit’.
40 See note 28 above.
41 A draft of this announcement was within Lt Col Champion’s papers referred to in note 28 above.
42 The Times, 12 May 1945.
43 The Times, 24 May 1945.
44 The Times, 24 May 1945.
45 Manchester Guardian, 25 May 1945.
46 Though in 2005 someone wanted to fix the deck of proof and placed forged documents in the files at the National Archives in Kew that suggested the British wanted to kill ‘HH’ in case he gave evidence of an embarrassing collusion with the British. No one was ever charged for this offence. The story was reported by the Guardian as ‘29 fakes behind a rewriting of history’, 5 May 2008. The National Archives have now introduced spy cameras in the reading rooms to prevent something similar happening again.
47 One account by a ‘British officer who was formerly in the Salford City Police’ was printed in the Manchester Guardian, 29 May 1945, telling the story of how Himmler revealed his identity when in British custody. This could only have been Capt. Selvester. Others have emerged over the years. Corporal Harry Jones purportedly wrote about what he’d seen as part of the unit that had Himmler in custody (Daily Mail, 2 August 2010). Biographers of Himmler have also compiled accounts of his last moments: see Peter Padfield, Himmler: Reichsführer SS (London: Papermac, 1991), and more recently, Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
48 Selvester retold his story to the Herald, which reported it on 4 July 1998.
49 The film clip is now available online at http://www.britishpathe.com/video/death-of-himmler.
50 Manchester Guardian, 25 May 1945.
51 Collier’s, 22 September 1945. When I read the article it cast into doubt some accounts of the showing of the same film, expanded to cover many other camps, which would be shown at Nuremberg. The impression given then was that that was the first time the film had been seen by the defendants. This account by journalist George Tucker suggests otherwise.
52 National Archives, WO 311/838 ‘Opening of prison for high ranking civilian prisoners at Mondorf-les-Bains, Luxembourg, codename “Ashcan”’.
53 National Archives, WO 208/3154 ‘Special detention centre “Ashcan”: interrogation reports’.
54 The Times, 29 May 1945.
55 The Times, 1 June 1945.
56 ‘Report to the President by Mr Justice Jackson, June 6, 1945’, in Report of Robert H. Jackson, United States Representative to the International Conference on Military Trials, London 1945 (Washington: US Department of State, 1949), pp. 42–54.
57 National Archives, WO 311/61 ‘War Crimes Investigation Unit (WCIU), London District Cage (LDC): general correspondence on war crimes’.
58 No mention was made about the still highly secret material gathered from breaking the German Enigma machine code system. No one was going to admit to that in public or even to the Soviets.
59 The massacre of the fifty was first announced to the House of Commons on 19 May 1944 by the Foreign Minister, Anthony Eden. It left a deep impression on the British public, perhaps because there were so many thousands of British POWs in German hands that families were from then on fearful for their safety. More than a year later, it hadn’t been forgotten and it remained a priority for investigation and prosecution. See Priscilla Dale Jones, ‘Nazi Atrocities against Allied Airmen: Stalag Luft III and the End of British War Crimes Trials’ (1998), The Historical Journal, Vol. 41:2, pp. 543–565.
60 The statement was read out in its entirety during the Bergen-Belsen trial on 2 October 1945.
61 The name Mengele would become synonymous with a particular form of Nazi atrocity, a product of an ideology that denied respect as ‘human’ to all but a select band, and one that the American prosecutors would take up in years to come. The British investigators in May 1945 didn’t yet understand the implications of the Dr Mengele story (he was largely an unknown figure then), but he would come to represent a twisted mentality within the Nazi movement that defined an extraordinary disassociation from humanity. Whole swathes of peoples may have been the specific target of their callous violence, Jews and Roma and gays and Slavs and the disabled, but any person could find themselves persecuted and unrecognised as human and subjected to treatment that denied any value they may have as a life. Such thinking would allow people to be used (and once used and no longer serving a function they would be disposed of like any utensil) for whatever purpose the Germans desired: labourers, killers, playthings, objects of display. Mengele was one of a cohort of medical practitioners who extended the list to guinea pigs. But the story told about Mengele and the Nazi doctors could only be passed back to London. It served little purpose for the immediate gathering of evidence against those in custody in Bergen-Belsen, though similar stories of experimentation were being uncovered in the other camps investigated by the British at Neuengamme, Ravensbrück and Natzweiler.
62 The question was asked for good reason. It was believed that certain SAS and SOE agents were imprisoned in Natzweiler. Investigators wanted to know if Kramer had any idea about their fate, it not being clear at that point what had happened to a number of agents. It was an issue that would assume significance later, although for now the focus was on Belsen and Auschwitz.
63 Affidavit of Renée Erman, 26 May 1945, contained within the Bergen-Belsen trial documents and available online at http://www.bergenbelsen.co.uk/pages/TrialTranscript/Trial_Contents.html.
64 Dr Charles Bendel would give his evidence at the Bergen-Belsen trial on 1 October 1945.
65 National Archives, WO 309/1697 ‘No 1 War Crimes Investigation Team depositions: 1–175’.
66 Klein’s statement was read out at the Bergen-Belsen trial on 5 October 1945.
67 The song and invitation cards are amongst Leo Genn’s military papers deposited with the Imperial War Museum: see note 35 above.
68 The assumption of fanaticism as characteristic of all SS members would later affect the Bergen-Belsen trial. Though it might be true, little evidence of that fanaticism came to light then. The SS personnel accused portrayed themselves as anything but fanatics. They were worker bees, they would claim, drones, automatons carrying out the commands of absent others.
69 The Times, 17 June 1945.
70 Lt Col Champion gave evidence to this effect at the Bergen-Belsen trial on 28 September 1945 when he was brought to explain how investigations had been carried out at the camp.
71 National Archives, WO 309/372 ‘War Crimes Investigation Unit: formation of units and organisation’.
1 Der Spiegel, 22 June 2007.
2 Guardian, 23 March 2015.
3 Wilhelm Lange, ‘Cap Arcona: Summary of the Cap Arcona Disaster in the Bay of Neustadt on 3 May 1945 – On Behalf of the town of Neustadt’ (1996).
4 This wasn’t entirely accurate. 30 Assault Unit, a British intelligence gathering team, had operatives at Neustadt on the day of the sinking. Two SS guards were captured by them. The History of the unit stated that these guards were ‘summarily executed’: National Archives, ADM 223/214 ‘Appendix 1 (Part 5): History of 30 Commando (later called 30 Assault Unit)’.
5 National Archives, WO 309/1592 ‘Neustadt Bay, Germany: death of allied nationals on board ship and investigations into conditions at Neuengamme Concentration Camp, Germany’, Report by Col. J. Christopher to Comd 8 Corps, 14 May 1945.
6 The story of Brigadier Mills-Roberts’ treatment of Field Marshal Milch has passed into general British commando lore. I’m unsure of its truth.
7 Lt Charlton’s statement was part of the evidence presented at the Neuengamme Concentration Camp trial held in 1946: National Archives, WO 235/167 ‘Exhibits 1–40 Place of Trial: Hamburg’.
8 National Archives, WO 309/480 ‘Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp: First Trial: Administrative arrangements and general correspondence’, Memo to 21 Army Group received 27 April 1945.
9 National Archives, WO 309/517 ‘Sandbostel Concentration Camp, Germany: killing and ill-treatment of allied nationals’, Analysis of Inquiry into Sandbostel Camp by Captain Stewart, July 1945.
10 Clifford Barnard, Two Weeks in May 1945 (London: Quaker Home Service, 1999). Barnard was a member of the Friends Ambulance Unit which was sent to Sandbostel on its liberation. In his book, he describes his experiences and the correspondence he had with local Germans about the camp in the late 1990s.
11 National Archives, WO 309/517, note 9 above.
12 National Archives, WO 309/517, Report on Search for Missing of Sandbostel Camp, 18 July 1946.
13 National Archives, WO 309/1418 ‘War crime investigation teams: formation of unit’, Report on organisation of War Crimes Investigation teams, 3 June 1945.
14 The Times, 20 January 1993.
15 There are a number of files held by the National Archives that contain information about the Neustadt Bay disaster. WO 309/637, WO 309/851, WO 309/1592 and WO 309/1788. Major Till’s investigation papers are mostly within WO 309/1592.
16 Missing from the statement, however, were comments Phillip Jackson had made in letters apparently written by him on 8 and 10 May 1945. I don’t know precisely to whom these letters were addressed nor have I seen copies. They’re referred to in a book by Hal Vaughan called Doctor to the Resistance which tells the story of Phillip’s father, Dr Sumner Jackson. Vaughan quotes from letters he says are held by the Jackson family. They seem to retell the same account as relayed to the War Crimes Investigation Team. A couple of inconsistencies appear nonetheless. According to Vaughan, Phillip had written that prisoners who’d made it into the water from the Thielbek ‘were hit by cannon fire from the Typhoons’. He also wrote that after being taken to shore, he and the other rescued survivors, about 200 in all, were put against a wall. ‘The SS set up machine guns to get rid of us. Then a British tank arrived. That was our liberation.’ Jackson’s tale was less dramatic in his formal statement given a couple of weeks later (perhaps the result of its composition by his interviewer), but it was odd that no mention was made of the Typhoons strafing the prisoners in the water in his official statement. If he meant that the aer0planes returned to attack the men, whether inmates or guards who’d jumped overboard, that would be a serious charge: it could be interpreted as a war crime, something that wasn’t acceptable under the Geneva Convention. Maybe all he saw was the ongoing attack by the planes against the many targets in the bay that afternoon. People in the water would have been caught in the crossfire. Whatever it might have implied, this part of his account didn’t find its way into the statement. It only appeared in those reported letters. Hal Vaughan, Doctor to the Resistance: The Heroic True Story of an American Surgeon and his Family in Occupied Paris (Washington DC: Brassey’s Inc., 2004), pp. 152–3.
17 Voth was the spelling in Till’s transcript, but it’s possible this was Ewald Foth. He matches Dora’s description. Foth was handed over to the Polish authorities and tried in 1946. He was sentenced to death and hanged in Gdańsk in 1947 for his crimes committed at Stutthof KZ. See Geoffrey P. Megargee (ed.), Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos 1933–1945, Vol. 1, Part B (Bloomington: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2009), p. 1467.
18 David A. Hackett (ed. and tr.), The Buchenwald Report (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), p. 159.
19 Eugen Kogon, The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System Behind Them (London: Secker & Warburg, 1950), p. 62.
20 Ibid., pp. 276–7.
21 Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (London: Rider, 2004), p. 93.
22 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (London: Abacus, 1989), pp. 28–9.
23 It wasn’t just the Allied forces’ prosecutors who saw the Kapos as potential accused. The Israeli state conducted forty largely unpublicised prosecutions of Kapos during the 1950s and ’60s under its Nazi and Nazi Collaborators Law 1950, which was also used to prosecute Adolf Eichmann. For one of the few analyses of these trials see Orna Ben-Naftali and Yogev Tuval, ‘Punishing International Crimes Committed by the Persecuted: the Kapo Trials in Israel (1950s–1960s) (2006), Journal of International Criminal Justice, Vol. 4, pp. 128–78.
24 I found details of the Dora Love Prize, and an account of her life, at the following web page of the University of Essex: http://www.essex.ac.uk/history/holocaust_memorial_week/dora_love_prize/dora_love.html.
25 What Till didn’t know was how de Blonay came to be there. It was an extraordinary tale in itself. Even amidst the chaos and desperate fighting at the end of the war, the Swiss-based organisation was able to gain passage across the battle zones. In March 1945, it had arranged for a fifty-car train laden with trucks and supplies to leave Switzerland and steam to a POW camp near Munich, Stalag VII-A. The consignment was unloaded by Allied prisoners, many of them Canadian. Two days later, de Blonay turned up at the camp asking for volunteer drivers from amongst the prisoners. More than fifty Canadians and Americans gave their word to the German authorities not to escape and then drove the convoy all the way to Lübeck. The Allied POW drivers may have moved on from Holstein, sent back across Germany in a remarkable feat during the final days of the war, but de Blonay was still in Lübeck on 2 May. Hugh A. Halliday, ‘Relief Amid Chaos: The Story of Canadian POWs Driving Red Cross’ (2002), Canadian Military History, Vol. 11:2, Article 7, available at http://scholars.wlu.ca/cmh/vol11/iss2/7.
26 Imperial War Museum, Piet Ketelaar Interview (1987) (Catalogue No. 9725).
27 Imperial War Museum, Private Papers of Lt Col S.G. Champion (Documents No. 2323).
28 One of those whom Till was investigating was Keith Meyer, who was known to have been captured by the Germans but whose destination couldn’t be located. As it happened, Champion sent his draft interim report on Belsen to Till for his comments and in that Champion mentioned that they had found only one British national who was killed at Belsen. That was Keith Meyer. Till wrote to Champion that they had been presuming Meyer was at Sachsenhausen. ‘It’s rather upset our story his turning up at Belsen!’ Till wrote.
29 Royal Warrant, 18 June 1945, Regulations for the Trial of War Criminals.
30 Imperial War Museum, Champion Papers (note 27 above).
31 Count Folke Bernadotte was something of a controversial figure during the latter stages of the war. He spent many weeks at the beginning of 1945 attempting to negotiate with Heinrich Himmler for the release of prisoners from concentration camps. With a degree of self-publicity, he wrote about his efforts immediately after the end of the war in a hastily composed autobiography: Folke Bernadotte, The Curtain Falls (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1945).
32 ‘Planning Memorandum distributed to Delegations at the beginning of the London Conference June 1945’, in Report of Robert H. Jackson, United States Representative to the International Conference on Military Trials (Washington: Department of State, 1949), pp. 64–8.
33 Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation; Analysis of Government; Proposals for Redress (Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944).
34 Telford Taylor, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials (London: Bloomsbury, 1993), p. 62. Taylor was one of the senior lawyers on Jackson’s US team. He would become chief prosecutor for those trials at Nuremberg which took place after 1946 and the conclusion of the main tribunal hearing.
35 Berlin Potsdam Conference, Protocol of Proceedings, 1 August 1945, Part VI, ‘War Criminals’.
36 The Times published the text of the Leaders’ Statement from the Potsdam Conference in Berlin on 3 August 1945. Truman, Churchill and Stalin all endorsed the form of trial constructed by the Americans in London.
37 ‘Agreement and Charter of the International Military Tribunal, 8 August 1945’, in Report of Robert H. Jackson, United States Representative to the International Conference on Military Trials (Washington: Department of State, 1949), pp. 420–28.
38 Protocol to Agreement and Charter, 6 October 1945.
39 I did, however, happen across a note from Nuremberg US prosecutor Col Amen suggesting that Kramer ‘will testify that the principal officers in charge of concentration camps, Glücks and Pohl, did nothing to alleviate conditions at Belsen’ and should be brought to the tribunal to give that evidence. No mention was made of Kramer’s role at Auschwitz and he wasn’t brought as a witness. See ‘Potential witnesses for trial’, Amen memo 2 November 1945, ‘Witnesses competent to testify at trial’, and Amen memo 17 November 1945, both available in the online archive of Nuremberg Tribunal papers collected by another member of the US prosecution team, General William Donovan (http://library2.lawschool.cornell.edu/donovan/show.asp).
40 The Times, 9 August 1945.
41 Telford Taylor, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials (London: Bloomsbury, 1993), p. 80.
42 The matter was revisited after the tribunal began. The Poles wanted to submit evidence, unsurprising given the years of occupation. But there was resistance from the British. They thought it would be unmanageable. National Archives, FO 371/51001 ‘German war criminals: crimes against Jews: atrocities in occupied territories: Nuremberg war crimes: Belsen trials: minutes of Nuremberg trials. Code 73 File 16 (papers 9708–9804)’, Memo FO to Warsaw Embassy 11 December 1945.
43 Manchester Guardian, 30 August 1945.
1 National Archives, WO 309/480 ‘Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp: First Trial; Administrative arrangements and general correspondence’.
2 Imperial War Museum, Private Papers of Major T.C.M. Winwood (Documents No. 11522).
3 Illustrated London News, 29 September 1945.
4 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken Books, 2004), p. 568.
5 Daily Mail, 18 September 1945.
6 Manchester Guardian, 22 September 1945; Jackson accepted that other defendants could be added to the list of accused later. The main news he wanted to communicate, though, was that the Gestapo and the SS were to be tried as ‘organisations’. If convicted, it would mean ‘all members would be guilty to the extent of their active participation,’ Jackson said.
7 Daily Mail, 25 September 1945.
8 The Times, 18 September 1945.
9 National Archives, WO 309/484 ‘Administrative arrangements and general correspondence’, Memo, 14 November 1945, HQ 30 Corps District 336/1/A(PS).
10 The Times, 17 October 1945.
11 Manchester Guardian, 1 October 1945.
12 Decision on Prosecution Motion for the Admission of Transcripts in Lieu of Viva Voce Testimony Pursuant to 92 bis (D) 30 June 2003 Trial Chamber III (Judges May [Presiding], Robinson & Kwon).
13 Manchester Guardian, 5 October 1945.
14 I accessed the archive of the board at http://www.jta.org/1945/10/11/archive/board-of-deputies-protests-against-anti-jewish-slur-by-british.officer-defending-nazis#ixzz3JhF6FJFk.
15 The Times, 10 October 1945.
16 Though as far as the British were concerned he was going to hang whatever happened. The War Office noted a request from the French government in October 1945 to hand Kramer over to them in the event of him not being condemned to death. He was required ‘for trial by Military Court at Strasbourg for the crimes committed at Struthof’. The note commented: ‘We imagine that, in the unlikely event of Kramer not being condemned to death, the Polish Government might also ask for him for trial on account of his crimes at Auschwitz.’ National Archives, WO 309/484, War Office note to BAOR, 21 October 1945.
17 Manchester Guardian, 4 October 1945.
18 G.M. Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995).
19 Daily Mail, 17 October 1945.
1 US Joint Chiefs of Staff Directive on the Identification and Apprehension of Persons Suspected of War Crimes or Other Offenses and Trial of Certain Offenders, 1023/10, 8 July 1945.
2 Documents of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, ‘Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression Volume IV’, Document No. 2222-PS, Report of Investigation of Alleged War Crime committed in 31 concentration camps all in the vicinity of Nordhausen, Germany.
3 For reports on some of the major cases tried, see Law Reports of Trials of War Criminals: Selected and Prepared by the United Nations War Crimes Commission (London: HMSO, 1949). There are also two excellent narrative-based accounts I came across: Joshua M. Green, Justice at Dachau: The Trials of an American Prosecutor (New York: Broadway Books, 2003), and Tomaz Jardim, The Mauthausen Trial: American Military Justice in Germany (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).
4 Manchester Guardian, 23 September 1945, which reported 40,000 were killed at the institution.
5 Case No. 4, The Hadamar Trial of Alfons Klein and six others, 8–15 October 1945, Law Reports of Trials of War Criminals: Selected and Prepared by the United Nations War Crimes Commission, Vol. I (London: HMSO, 1949).
6 The Times, 17 November 1945.
7 Case No. 60, The Dachau Concentration Camp Trial of Martin Gottfried Weiss and Thirty-Nine Others, 15 November–13 December 1945, Law Reports of Trials of War Criminals: Selected and Prepared by the United Nations War Crimes Commission, Vol. XI (London: HMSO, 1949).
8 Donovan Research Collection, Vol. XIX s 61.01 (http://library2.lawschool.cornell.edu/donovan/show.asp). Such was the desire to present a prosecution untainted by accusations of crimes committed by the Allied nations that all mention of the Soviet invasion of Poland (which followed a secret pact between Hitler and Stalin) was also suppressed.
9 Although for three days the court had been preoccupied with preliminary legal points (whether Martin Bormann could remain one of the accused in absentia (accepted), whether the proceedings should be postponed because the accused Gustav Krupp was ill (rejected), whether his son Alfred could be added to the accused (rejected)). On Tuesday 20 November the real event began.
10 Daily Mail, 21 November 1945.
11 The Times, 21 November 1945.
12 Manchester Guardian, 30 November 1945.
13 Daily Mail, 30 November 1945.
14 Gilbert’s engagement wasn’t part of any general attempt to understand the ‘Nazi mind’. Gilbert described his duties as ‘to keep the [Nuremberg] prison commandant, Colonel B.C. Andrus, aware of the state of [the defendants’] morale, and to help in any way possible to assure their standing trial with orderly discipline’. He would also take part in assessments of the mental health of any prisoner. G.M. Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), p. 3. Psychological profiling had already been used by the Allies during the war in their attempts to understand their enemy leaders and find their weaknesses. The US Office of Strategic Studies commissioned a psychological profile of Hitler in 1943, which of course identified aspects of his upbringing as contributing reasons for his perpetrating atrocities. You can find the report entitled ‘Analysis of the Personality of Adolph Hitler’ by Dr Henry A. Murray in the Donovan Nuremberg Trials Collection at Cornell University Law Library, available online at http://ebooks.library.cornell.edu/n/nur/analysis.php.
15 Daily Mail, 1 December 1945.
16 Documents of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, Volume 3, Document No. 1061-PS.
17 Stroop was prosecuted by the Americans at Dachau for the murder of nine American POW flying crew in 1947. He was then extradited to Poland, where he was tried and convicted and sentenced to death for the Warsaw Ghetto atrocity.
18 G.M. Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), p. 98.
19 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (London: Abacus, 1988), p. 97.
20 Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (London: Tavistock Publications, 1974).
21 Jeremiah 17:9 (English Standard Version). I’m no scholar of the Bible. I came across the reference in the council chamber of the medieval castello of Gradara in Italy.
22 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (London: Penguin, 1992).
23 I can’t leave this subject without mentioning a number of works that have been instrumental in shaping consideration of the human capacity for atrocity. Foremost amongst these, at least as regards the minds of those who exercised authority in the concentration camps, is Gitta Sereny’s somewhat forgotten masterpiece, Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience (London: Picador, 1974). An account of her interviews with the ex-commandant of the extermination camps at Sobibór and Treblinka, this book searches deeply within the psyche of both the Nazi officer and his wife. It is an extraordinary read. Others that I haven’t already mentioned include: Simon Baron-Cohen, Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty and Kindness (London: Penguin, 2012); Ervin Staub, The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Tzvetan Todorov, Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps (London: Phoenix, 1999); and James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). There are many others.
1 Imperial War Museum, Private Papers of Lt Col Leo Genn.
2 Hansard, HC, Vol. 416 cols 1909–10 (3 December 1945).
3 The Foreign Office collected stories about the Bergen-Belsen trial from the world’s press to assess public reaction to the proceedings.
4 National Archives, WO 32/12197 ‘War Criminals: general: war crimes policy’.
5 National Archives, WO 311/682 ‘Establishment of Special Search Units to aid investigation of war crimes’, Message to War Office AG3(W), 16 December 1945, from Major General Chilton.
6 WO 311/682, Message War Office to BAOR, 30 December 1945.
7 A story in its own right and told by Sarah Helm, A Life in Secrets: Vera Atkins and the Lost Agents of SOE (London: Abacus, 2006).
8 The comment was included in an interview with Vera Atkins recorded on tape by the Imperial War Museum in 1986: Imperial War Museum, Recording – Vera Atkins (Catalogue No. 31590).
9 National Archives, WO 311/694 ‘SAS war crimes investigation: policy’.
10 Marked in the margin of this letter was a note that JAG denied Harris’s claim, instead asserting that Barkworth’s evidence was more than enough: WO 311/694 (note 9 above).
11 Letter, 6 October 1945, Harris to Col G.R. Bradshaw DDPS(c), War Office. WO 311/694 (note 9 above).
12 National Archives, WO 311/682 ‘Establishment of Special Search Units to aid investigation of war crimes’.
13 National Archives, WO 309/2204 ‘War crimes: statistics; prisoners held in custody by War Crimes Group (North West Europe); cases held by Field Investigation Section; allocation of cases; progress reports’.
14 Imperial War Museum, taped interview with Ian Neilson in 1998 (Catalogue No. 18537).
15 WO 309/2204, note 13 above.
16 National Archives, WO 309/1672 ‘War Crimes Group (NWE): formation, organisation and standing instructions’.
17 National Archives, WO 309/1826 ‘War Crimes Investigation Unit: administrative records’.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid.
21 National Archives, WO 309/1673 ‘War Crimes Investigation Unit, BAOR and War Crimes Group NWE: war establishment’.
22 Ibid.
23 National Archives, WO 311/15 ‘Deputy Judge Advocate General (DJAG) British Army of the Rhine (BAOR) personnel: interrogating teams and interpreters’.
24 WO 309/1673 (note 21 above).
25 National Archives, WO 309/64 ‘Neuengamme Concentration Camp, Germany: killing and ill-treatment of allied nationals’.
26 National Archives, WO 309/1602 ‘Supplying poison gas (Zyklon B) for use in extermination of allied nationals in concentration camps’.
27 There were, perhaps surprisingly, many letters written to the British forces by German citizens. I came across one dated 24 August 1945 from an Eric Anders, who’d been a political prisoner in Neuengamme. He sent a well-crafted condemnation of SS-Oberscharführer Reese: (National Archive, WO 309/64 (note 25 above)). It contributed to the general file of information against Reese, who was eventually brought to trial in 1946.
28 Further Deposition by Ada Bimko, 28 May 1945.
29 International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, Trial proceedings, 17 April 1945, p. 554.
30 M. Meyer and H. McCoubrey (eds), Reflections on Law and Armed Conflicts: The Selected Works on the Laws of War by the Late Professor Colonel G.I.A.D. Draper OBE (The Hague: Kluwer, 1998); Biographical note by Brevet Major The Count de Salis.
31 Imperial War Museum, ‘Private Papers of Major A.W. Freud’ (Document No. 13326).
32 Pelican was another of those who recorded his experiences for the Imperial War Museum (Catalogue No. 9222). You can still access his tapes. But he also published a memoir as part of a series of Holocaust Testimonies. This was in 1993. He was seventy-five years old. Fred Pelican, From Dachau to Dunkirk (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1993).
33 Ibid., p. 113.
34 WO 309/1602 (note 26 above).
35 National Archives, WO 235/641 ‘Defendant: Bruno Tesch DJAG No. 168’.
36 I’ve tracked down the history of only one other of these named SS men trained to use Zyklon B. Adolf Theuer was only nineteen at the beginning of the war but worked at Auschwitz. His job was to insert the tin of Zyklon B into the gas chamber pipe. After the camp’s evacuation, he served at Ohrdruf KZ. He was captured, tried, sentenced to death and executed in Czechoslovakia in 1947.
37 National Archives, WO 208/4294 ‘Papers recovered from Lt Col A P Scotland: notes on operation of War Crimes Interrogation Unit, work and organisation of Prisoners of War Interrogation Section (Home) and miscellaneous subjects’.
38 See, for instance, Sophie Jackson, British Interrogation Techniques in the Second World War (Stroud: The History Press, 2012). Scotland always denied claims of abuse.
39 The same sentiments governed high-level policy discussions about the prosecution of industrialists who were complicit in the maintenance and supply of the Nazi regime, enabling it to function efficiently, who were complicit also in subjecting millions of workers to inhuman conditions, and who benefited fantastically from that arrangement. IG Farben, chemical giants and the manufacturers of Zyklon B, would be the subject of a later trial run by the Americans a year after the Nuremberg Tribunal was over, as would owners and directors of the arms manufacturing corporation Krupps and the mining and industrial conglomerate Flick KG.
40 National Archives, WO 309/388 ‘Killing of allied children and ill-treatment of allied nationals’.
41 Kurt Heissmeyer avoided capture, returned to Magdeburg and continued to practise as a TB specialist despite being named as a culprit of this atrocity in Lord Russell’s notorious bestselling book on Nazi war crimes in 1954 (Lord Russell of Liverpool, The Scourge of the Swastika: A Short History of Nazi War Crimes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1954), pp. 189–190). He was eventually identified and put on trial in East Germany in the 1960s and sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in 1967.
42 National Archives, WO 309/585 ‘Velpke, Germany: killing of children of allied nationals by neglect’.
43 Ibid., letter, 2 February 1946, Director of Personal Services War Office to HQ BAOR.
44 WO 309/585 (note 42 above).
45 International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, trial proceedings, 3 January 1946.
46 Col Amen Memorandum on Potential Witnesses for Trial, 17 November 1945, General Donovan Archive papers (http://library2.lawschool.cornell.edu/donovan/show.asp).
47 Telford Taylor, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials (London: Bloomsbury, 1993), p. 248.
48 G.M. Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), p. 101.
49 The Times, 4 January 1946.
50 Ibid.
51 The Times, 21 January 1946; Wilson Harris MP wrote on ‘An Atmosphere of Scrupulous Justice’.
1 John Bull, 22 October 1949.
2 National Archives, WO 235/641 ‘Defendant: Bruno Tesch DJAG No. 168’.
3 National Archives, HO 334/161/17843 ‘Naturalisation Certificate: Karl Stephan Strauss. From Germany. Resident in B.A.O.R. Certificate AZ17843 issued 25 March 1946. Alias: Stephen Malcolm Stewart’.
4 The Neuengamme trial proceedings are recorded in several thick lever arch files. See National Archives, WO 235/163-169 ‘Neuengamme concentration camp case’.
5 Christopher Sidgwick was an occasional writer for the Manchester Guardian even whilst serving with the British Army in Germany after the end of the war. The paper published one article by Sidgwick on Neuengamme KZ and the trial: Manchester Guardian, 13 May 1946.
6 Manchester Guardian, Letters to the Editor, 7 April 1936.
7 Daily Mail, 16 February 1946.
8 International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, trial proceedings, 14 March 1946.
9 Telford Taylor, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials (London: Bloomsbury, 1993), p. 330.
10 Daily Mail, 15 March 1946.
11 The Times, 14 March 1946.
12 The Times, 15 March 1946.
13 Telford Taylor, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials (London: Bloomsbury, 1993), p. 335.
14 The letters were made public in 2009. See Guardian, 20 March 2009.
15 Daily Mail, 22 March 1946.
16 The Times, 22 March 1946.
17 News of the trial and conviction was covered extensively by the BBC. See http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24870699.
18 The Times, 4 May 1946.
19 Kauffmann would be tried and convicted, sentenced to a prison term but released early in 1953. He died in 1969.
20 Bassewitz-Behr would be controversially acquitted by a British court of responsibility for killing and ill-treatment at Fuhlsbüttel prison, but then immediately extradited to the Soviets for crimes committed in Russia, the killing of Jews, forced labour. The Russians convicted him and he died in Siberia whilst serving his sentence of hard labour.
21 The Times, 12 May 1946.
22 The Times, 29 May 1946.
1 Primo Levi, If This is a Man (London: Abacus, 1979), p. 15.
2 Anyone, if interested, can read the judgment of the courts that examined the case on the internet. The official title of the case was R. (Al-Skeini) v. The Secretary of State for Defence.
3 But no such legal procedure or court has examined the choice to go to war in the first place and the inquiry established to look into that question (the Chilcot Inquiry) quickly became an exercise in futility. The Chilcot Inquiry was established by the government of Gordon Brown in 2009. One of its members was the historian Sir Martin Gilbert, who had written extensively on the Holocaust and in particular the Allies’ knowledge and lack of response to its execution; see Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz and the Allies (London: Mandarin, 1991). He died in February 2015 before the report was published.
4 Iraq Historic Allegations Team, Quarterly Update – October to December 2014, https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/411437/20150216-Qupdate_Oct_Dec2015.pdf.
5 Though there was a public inquiry that condemned British practices of interrogation and named many soldiers who were believed to be responsible for Baha Mousa and the other detainees’ injuries and those who’d failed to prevent such abuses, no one has been brought to justice for the death. At the time of writing, the spring of 2015, some twelve years after Baha Mousa was killed, the IHAT can only promise that they are pursuing new lines of enquiry.
6 Daily Mail, 16 February 1946.
7 International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, trial proceedings, 28 June 1946.
8 The Times, 29 September 1946.
9 Daily Mail, 1 October 1946.
10 The Times, 2 October 1946.
11 Executive Order No. 9679, 16 January 1946. The Americans prosecuted a further twelve cases after the main trial of Goering et al. They were led by Telford Taylor. A full report of these proceedings can be found in ‘Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals Under Control Council Law No. 10’, available online at http://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_Law/NTs_war-criminals.html.
12 National Archives, WO 309/1672 ‘War Crimes Group (NWE): formation, organisation and standing instructions’.
13 National Archives, FO 371/57587 ‘Proposed trial before a United States Zonal Court of Alfred Krupp and other German industrialists’.
14 National Archives, WO 309/1826 ‘War Crimes Investigation Unit: administrative records’.
15 Hansard, HC, Vol. 468 col. 193W (28 October 1949), reply of Mr Shinwell.
16 Hansard, HL, Vol. 179 cols 1039–40WA (16 December 1952), Parliamentary answer by Parliamentary Under-secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.
17 We’re largely in the dark about the Soviet prosecutions. There are few sources available to judge though some snippets of information have found their way into Western academic analysis. See, for instance, Jonathan Friedman, ‘The Sachsenhausen Trials’, in Patricia Herber and Jürgen Matthäus, Atrocities on Trial: Historical Perspectives on the Politics of Prosecuting War Crimes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), pp. 159–84.
18 The War Crimes Group ceased to function officially on 15 September 1948. Its cases were handed over to Legal Division. No general warning was issued amongst the forces on mainland Europe. The Allied Commission for Austria complained, ‘Although we have always foreseen the possibility of War Crimes Group closing, it was not anticipated that we should get no warning.’ National Archives, FO 1020/776 War crimes: policy: Brief for AAG, 26 August 1948.
19 Hansard, HL, Vol. 162 cols 376–418 (5 May 1949).
20 A report of the investigation into the Malmedy massacre trial preparations was particularly damning. Report of Subcommittee of the Committee of Armed Services United States Senate 81st Congress, available in its entirety at http://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Military_Law/pdf/Malmedy_report.pdf.
21 One struck me in particular for its echoes in those allegations made against British forces in Iraq during its occupation after 2003. The Dulag Luft trial made little sense to me when placed in the same category as those trials I’d followed from 1945 and 1946. According to Sir Frank Soskice QC, a member of the British War Crimes Executive and Solicitor General in Attlee’s government, it represented ‘one aspect of the skein of events which formed the context of Nazi war brutality’. But I wasn’t convinced. Dulag Luft had been the German Air Force’s intelligence centre. It was a prison through which nearly 40,000 Allied aircrew had passed during the war, taken for short periods of time in order to extract information. The SS weren’t involved, nor the Gestapo directly. Luftwaffe serving personnel controlled operations at the prison and directed the methods of interrogation that were alleged by the British prosecution to be ‘war crimes’.
Dulag Luft camp was a wooden building consisting of about two hundred identical separate cells. They were built to be soundproof. Each was small, about 3 metres by 2 metres, and had a tiny window to the outside. The windows couldn’t be opened. Under the window was a tubular heater controlled from the corridor. The cells housed Allied airmen who had been shot down over occupied Europe. They were brought here as a matter of course to be interrogated. First given a questionnaire to complete, the men were then seen separately, either in their cells or the office of the interrogating officer. The interrogations were short for gunners, who wouldn’t be expected to know much, and longer (perhaps three or four days) for a pilot so as to extract information about general air force operations. Servicemen might stay in solitary confinement for several weeks waiting to be interrogated before being transferred to one of the various POW camps about Germany. The official interpretation was less damning, as I discovered whilst reading some of the records of the London-based British War Crimes Executive, which collated evidence for the Nuremberg Tribunal. Group Captain Felkin had reported on Dulag Luft in the middle of 1945. He’d said, ‘Interrogation of many German interrogators and of some of the leading figures in German Air Force Intelligence indicates that the handling of our air crew for interrogation purposes was not out of the ordinary … To our knowledge, all cases of gross mistreatment and murder of prisoners of war may be allayed to the Gestapo or SS.’
Though interrogation of POWs wasn’t sanctioned by the Geneva Convention, everyone knew that both sides asked questions. Indeed, Dulag Luft had been taken over by the US Air Force in 1945 and was also used as an interrogation centre, this time for SS and other Nazis. Neither side stopped with polite questioning. Whether the process slipped into torture or ill-treatment was always a matter of degree and judgement.
The prosecution was headed by Major Gerald Draper, who claimed in his opening speech that the heating of the cells had been turned up to excessive temperatures to soften up the airmen before interrogation. He said threats were made of transfer to the Gestapo if questions weren’t answered satisfactorily, medical attention had been refused for those in need, solitary confinement had been prolonged and in some cases (‘very few’, the prosecution accepted) blows were struck.
One of the first prosecution witnesses, WO Robert Lang, said he’d been shot down north of Amsterdam in April 1943. After his capture he’d been transferred to Oberursel, where the Dulag Luft camp was located. Lang had been put in one of the cells. A German officer came to see him and asked him to complete a form. He filled out the standard information and crossed out everything else. The officer had raved at him, Lang said, before leaving him alone. Then Lang heard the noise of a switch being pulled outside. The radiator began to vibrate and the room had become hotter and hotter. ‘The heat became so intense that I had to strip to my underpants and lie on the floor.’
Major Draper asked about his condition at the time. He was still bruised from his crash a couple of weeks previously, he said. And then there was his finger. He’d broken it on landing and it had been set in the hospital in Amsterdam. But it still hurt at Dulag Luft, he said. He’d asked for medical attention. None ever came, though admittedly his finger healed soon after, he said.
The heat treatment had continued for a few days. The radiator had been turned on and he’d been left to stew. He’d only gained some relief when he’d banged on the door and persuaded the German guard to take him to the lavatories. He’d been very weak, he said. They’d kept asking him questions. He’d refused to answer and the heat had been turned on again. Eventually, the German officer had asked him to confirm the number of his squadron and he’d done so. That was all, he rushed to say. Lang had told the interrogator what he’d wanted to know. Just that and nothing more, he said. After that and later the same day he’d been taken from his cell to a transit camp.
The defendants were the high-ranking officers of the camp. Oberleutnant Erich Killinger, the commandant of Dulag Luft, was presented as the senior officer in charge of the installation and, under the terms of the royal warrant, responsible for any war crime committed by his unit. But Killinger was patently no Nazi. He’d refused to join the Nazi party. As the trial continued and the defence offered its evidence, it was accepted that Killinger had known little if anything of the heat treatment. When he’d finally learned about it he’d issued orders forbidding the practice and it hadn’t been used again. What was more, during his time as commandant, with so many thousands of prisoners passing through his hands, he’d managed to attract the commendation of several British POWs. The same could be said for the other defendants. A long list of affidavits from British officers reflected the high regard in which they were all held. It seemed bizarre that the main defence witnesses were British serving personnel. And high-ranking at that.
Air Vice-Marshal Ivelaw-Chapman, Air Commodore in 1944 and in command of Base 13, Bomber Command, had been shot down in his Lancaster on 6 May 1944. Kept by the Gestapo for three days, he’d then been released to the Luftwaffe and sent to the hospital at Dulag Luft. From that moment, he said, he was treated properly. He told the court he was even allowed outdoor exercise. ‘I had the right to walk round the wire surrounding the grounds’ and ‘I was allowed to go up in the Taunus hills for exercise and managed to get winter-skiing.’ One of the accused, Eberhardt, had taken him. The extraordinary story, deeply contrasting with commonly held suspicions about the German military character, punctured any notion that the court was dealing with a committed Nazi. Ivelaw-Chapman had little but good to say of the German officers and medics he’d encountered.
He wasn’t alone. Affidavits from other British officers were provided. Of Eberhardt, Group Captain Harry Day MC said his behaviour ‘was always most considerate’. Flight Lieutenant Hardy said ‘his behaviour towards me was always correct’. And then there was Douglas Bader, the fêted flier, who was a prisoner at Dulag Luft for a month during 1941. Eberhardt questioned him ‘pleasantly and quietly and in every way correctly’. All the prisoners had been treated fairly, Bader said. By common account, the accused were honourable military personnel.
It counted for little. Major Draper’s closing speech scorned the attempt to present the accused in such a way. If they hadn’t known about the heating and the threats of transfer to the Gestapo, then they should have done. There can be no excuse, he said, for presiding over an abusive operation, one that contravenes the rules of war. Even if the accused didn’t participate directly, should we believe them when they say they didn’t approve of the methods? He said the complaints brought by the British servicemen were serious and shouldn’t be taken lightly. They indicated a brutal and calculated process.
Three of the accused, Killinger and Eberhardt included, were found guilty of the charges. Eberhardt was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment, Killinger to five. The New York Times reported the case as: ‘Allies Jail 3 Torturers’. That was how the case was presented: heinous torture of Allied aircrew.
Reading Draper’s closing speech seventy years later, I wondered whether the prosecution of Erich Killinger and the others of Dulag Luft had any place in that scheme of justice devised in righteous fury before the end of the war. If the matter was too petty to place in the same bracket as ‘war crime’ as employed at Bergen-Belsen, then perhaps not. But if we think of these post-World War II trials as setting a precedent, then maybe Draper was right: there was no room for being lenient or, worse, condoning the methods used – that would legitimate them. Even if the British had been just as free with coercive interrogation techniques, that wouldn’t make the German Luftwaffe officers any less culpable. If you started forgiving such techniques, where would you stop?
A direct test for the British during their occupation of Germany came a few years later. During 1947 a number of deaths of Nazi suspects still held in British custody were investigated. The internment camp at Bad Nenndorf appeared to have operated a regime that was brutal in the extreme. Capt. John Stuart Smith of the Royal Army Medical Corps as doctor at the prison was one of those prosecuted for neglect. Several suspected war criminals had been kept in cells with no heating during a bitterly cold winter, were left untreated when they developed frostbite, were allowed to deteriorate and only sent to the local hospital when it was too late to save them. Dr Smith was found not guilty of manslaughter but guilty of neglect and dismissed from the services. Others were similarly prosecuted. That at least would suggest an institutional intolerance for coercive techniques.
22 The ‘Essen-West’ case, for instance, involved seven Germans, a mix of soldiers and civilians, who were charged with a war crime being ‘concerned in the killing of three unidentified British airmen POWs’. The year previously, during a massive RAF bombing raid over Essen, in the industrial centre of the Ruhr, several aircraft had been shot down. Some crews parachuted to safety. Three flyers (their identity would never be known) had been picked up by the police and were to be taken to the local military barracks. Feelings amongst the German civilians against the bombers were intense. They hated these ‘terror fliers’, as the RAF and USAF were called. The bombing would kill indiscriminately, hitting civilian targets during the night or day without warning. That was the nature of the relentless bombing campaign fought by the Allies. When some of the flying crew escaped from their planes and parachuted into the middle of the places where they had been bombing, civilians would sometimes attack and kill them. Hitler had issued orders to German forces that they shouldn’t interfere if civilians decided to exact mob revenge.
That night in December 1944, citizens of Essen-West heard of the capture of the three RAF crew. A hundred or so intercepted them being marched to the local barracks. Shouts were heard: ‘Kill them.’ They attacked the crew with hammers, threw bricks at them, hit them with sticks. When they reached the Wickenburg bridge the RAF men were thrown into the valley below. Shots were fired to finish them off. Some citizens went down to see they were dead, stripped them and pushed their bodies into the stream. Throughout, the soldiers guarding the RAF men kept to their instructions not to interfere. They were commanded by Hauptmann Erich Heyer.
When the British occupied Essen-West they were told of the killings. Why some of the German civilians came forward with the story is unclear. But Heyer, who was arrested along with various other named soldiers and civilians, called them ‘denouncers’. Perhaps scores were being settled. Perhaps consciences were too troubled to keep silent. Whatever the motivation, the story was undoubtedly true as during the investigations then launched, the British confirmed the basic details as told to them. Even those arrested did not dispute how the RAF men had died.
Various affidavits were collected that implicated the six men eventually placed under arrest. All denied delivering the fatal blows or firing the shots. But they’d been named as involved in one way or another. When the case came to be heard at the end of 1945, proceedings lasted several days. Heyer admitted to giving his men the order sent down to him by Battalion to the effect that if the civilians attacked the British crew, the soldiers shouldn’t prevent them. He admitted it wasn’t an order he agreed with but ‘an order was an order’.
Heyer didn’t accompany the guard on the march to the barracks, deciding, he said, to go to dinner instead. No one suggested he took part in the attacks or the killing. The evidence against him was that he’d incited the crowd and had been overheard giving orders to a couple of the soldiers in the guard company that the flyers should be shot, though that was never firmly established. Under examination by his British Army attorney he claimed that he became ‘ashamed of my fellow German-countrymen’ when he’d heard what had happened. He denied giving any reason for the guard or the civilians to harm the flyers.
By the end of the trial, Heyer and one other (Johann Braschoss, against whom testimony had been given that he’d been involved in the attacks on the bridge) were sentenced to death. Karl Kaufer, another civilian present that night, was given life imprisonment even though there was little to separate him from the rest of the crowd other than an eyewitness’s account that suggested he’d tried to take a rifle from one of the German guards, supposedly to shoot the RAF men.
I couldn’t tell from reading the files whether the trial conducted was fair. Since the information had come to light, it seemed right that the prosecution was brought. And reading through the transcript of proceedings, the questioning and representation appeared competent and reasonable. But later in the file I saw that an appeal against Kaufer’s sentence had been lodged in 1949 by his wife with the intervention of the Bishop of Cologne’s office. It was considered by Lord Russell of Liverpool, Deputy Judge Advocate General, one of the London government lawyers at the heart of war crimes prosecutions. He read the case papers (you can see some of his markings on the transcripts where he’d come across some detail he thought important) and concluded that Karl Kaufer hadn’t deserved to be convicted, let alone sentenced to life imprisonment. Lord Russell wrote that the case against Kaufer was based on ‘flimsy material’, hearsay and unreliable witness testimony. He should never have been convicted, he concluded.
Kaufer was released. There was nothing Lord Russell could do for Heyer or Braschoss, of course, and he didn’t look at their convictions. A review had confirmed the sentence shortly after it had been pronounced, as was the procedure, and nothing untoward had been noticed then. But in 1945 the desire to forgive, to give the benefit of the doubt, to be wary, was limited. The virtue of mercy would only come later. Until then retribution was allowed to run its course where it might.
23 National Archives, WO 309/388 ‘Killing of allied children and ill-treatment of allied nationals’.
24 National Archives, WO 235/189 ‘Bullenhuser Damm Trial: Neuengamme Case No. 3’.
1 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 102.