AFTERMATH

Two of the principal members of the ‘Hitler gang’ left the stage long before the end of World War II. Rudolf Hess had been Deputy Führer until 3 September 1939, when he was succeeded by Hermann Göring. Thereafter Hess became a back number until 10 May 1941, when he flew an Me 110 on a lone and unauthorized mission to Scotland. Hess’s aim was to make contact with the Duke of Hamilton, whom he had met before the war, and, using him as an intermediary, persuade the British government to come to terms with Germany. To his great surprise, he was treated simply as a prisoner of war and his proposals were ignored. At the end of the war Hess was arraigned with the other surviving Nazis at Nuremberg and sentenced to life imprisonment in Spandau Prison, Berlin, where he remained until his suicide in 1987.

SS General Reinhard Heydrich, the evil genius behind the formulation of the ‘Final Solution’ at the Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942, had been rewarded for his work with a new appointment as Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, which made him to all intents and purposes the ruler of Czechoslovakia. On 4 June 1942, he died of wounds sustained when his car was ambushed by a party of British-trained Czech Resistance fighters. In the German reprisals one thousand three hundred Czech civilians died, some three hundred and forty of them men, women and children from the village of Lidice, which was also destroyed.

Josef Goebbels died by his own hand in the Berlin bunker. After Hitler’s death, while the rest of the bunker’s occupants planned to break out, he came and went, gaunt, chain-smoking and looking like a bankrupt restaurateur waiting for the last guests to leave. At about 8.30 p.m. on 1 May, his wife Magda administered poison to their six children, who were also in the bunker, and then joined her husband in the Chancellery garden where they both took poison. Like Hitler, Goebbles shot himself in the head as he bit on the capsule. A perfunctory effort was made to burn their bodies but although the corpses were horribly charred, they remained recognizable.

Martin Bormann joined the third escape party to leave the bunker. With the death of Hitler, his authority had evaporated. Before he left the bunker, he had been told to ‘get lost’ by an SS man, to the delight of all who heard this belated reproof. Shortly thereafter, while trying to thread his way past Red Army patrols in the company of Dr Stumpfegger, he and his companion committed suicide on the railway tracks leading out of the Lehrter railway station. Their bodies were noticed by another escapee from the bunker, Artur Axmann, whose account was subsequently confirmed in 1972. Workers constructing an exhibition park on the site of the station had uncovered two skeletons in a shallow grave, one of a tall man, the other short and burly. Lodged in their jawbones were splinters from glass cyanide ampoules. Forensic examination confirmed that here was the last resting place of Martin Bormann.

Heinrich Himmler was captured by the British Army on 21 May 1945 when, disguised as a private soldier, he was arrested at a British control point halfway between Hamburg and Bremen. The Reichsführer SS went unrecognized for two days before he revealed his identity to an interrogating officer. When he was shown photographs of the victims of the death camps, Himmler remained unmoved, declaring, ‘Am I responsible for the excesses of my subordinates?’ He was then taken to an interrogation centre at Lüneberg, where he was stripped and searched. However, his captors could not prevent Himmler from biting on a cyanide capsule concealed in his mouth. On 26 May, Himmler’s body, wrapped in a camouflage net, was secretly buried on Lüneberg Heath.

Robert Ley, head of the German Labour Front, was captured by US troops on 16 May 1945. Due to stand trial for war crimes, he committed suicide in his prison cell on 26 October 1945, hanging himself with strips of cloth cut from a tea towel. The surviving Nazi leaders were duly tried for war crimes at Nuremberg, the spiritual home of the Nazi Party and the scene of the spectacular annual rallies of the 1930s. Hermann Göring, who had been captured by the Americans, deprived of his spectacularly tasteless uniforms and weaned off the drugs which had sustained him during the war years, gave a robust account of himself, but was nevertheless condemned to death. He cheated the hangman on 15 October 1946, the eve of his execution, by taking poison, possibly with the connivance of one of his guards. In death Göring still cut a dash of sorts – his corpse turned bright green.

Of Göring’s co-defendants at Nuremberg – Hans Frank, General Jodl, Field Marshal Keitel, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Frick, Alfred Rosenberg, Fritz Sauckel, Artur von Seyss-Inquart, Julius Streicher and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the last the highest-ranking survivor of the SS apparat – were sentenced to death. Admiral Raeder and Walther Funk received life imprisonment. Baldur von Schirach and Albert Speer were both sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment while Admiral Dönitz, Raeder’s successor as commander-in-chief of the Kriegsmarine, received a sentence often years. Von Neurath, Ribbentrop’s predecessor as foreign minister, was given a sentence of fifteen years. The wily Hjalmar Schacht was acquitted, as was Hans Fritzsche, the head of the news division in the Nazi Propaganda Ministry, who was tried in the absence of his boss, Josef Goebbels. Franz von Papen was also acquitted, but in 1947 was reclassified as a war criminal by a German de-Nazification court and sentenced to eight years’ hard labour. He appealed successfully and was released after serving two years.

The war crimes trials at Nuremberg were accompanied and followed by many related trials marking the de Nazification of Germany after World War II. One of the most significant was that of Adolf Eichmann, which took place in Israel in the spring and summer of 1961. Eichmann was found guilty and sentenced to death in December 1961. After an unsuccessful appeal, he was hanged on 31 May 1962 and his ashes were scattered in international waters in the Mediterranean.

The spoils of war – captured Nazi standards are tossed on a pile outside Lenin’s tomb on Red Square in Moscow. It is estimated that some sixty-four million people died as a result of World War II, twenty-four million servicemen and forty million civilians. The Soviet Union suffered 8.6 million soldiers dead or missing and some eight million civilians killed, although the figure is constantly being revised upwards. Germany lost 3.5 million military personnel dead or missing and two million civilians. In Yugoslavia civil and guerrilla war killed at least a million people. The civilian and military casualties in Eastern Europe were swollen by the savagery of the war in this theatre and the German racial oppression of Jews and Slavs. Before June 1940 and after November 1942 France lost two hundred thousand military dead, while four hundred thousand French died in air raids or concentration camps. The British lost two hundred and forty-four thousand servicemen and some sixty thousand civilians. In the United States there were no civilian casualties while US military losses, in the West, Far East and Pacific, were two hundred and ninety-two thousand dead or missing. The Japanese lost 1.2 million men in battle and nearly a million civilians.