7
With the arrival of D-Day, Neave at last got his chance to leave his desk and the life of a military civil servant and take to the field. His writings give the impression that the landings were as much a liberation for him as they were for France. Nonetheless, it was not until 11 July 1944 that he finally set foot in Normandy. He was now a major and he was eager to get into action. However, he was forced to endure many anxious days hovering impatiently behind the front line, looking for an opportunity to bring off a series of rescue missions he had been planning since the previous autumn. It was clear that the invasion would change the nature of MI9’s operations. It was preceded by a great shift in the direction of the air effort. Bomber Command and the US Army Air Forces were diverted from their long-term work of destroying the German war industry. They were now given the task of smashing up the enemy’s transportation links to the invasion zone, with the aim of ‘isolating the battlefield’. The French countryside filled up with burned-out bombers. Those who made it out of them alive were turning up in villages and towns, seeking help from underground organisations.
It was Neave who came up with an idea about how to protect them in such a swirling and unpredictable environment, and then to get them home. His great fear was that the Germans, knowing the war was lost, would abandon whatever restraints still bound them and murder any Allied airmen who fell into their hands. Rather than leaving them to stay put in safe houses in town or country, he proposed establishing camps in isolated forests where they could be sustained by local patriots, until the front lines pushed past them. Reports from agents in the field indicated there were hundreds of stranded aircrew who had come to grief in missions to attack railways, transport nodes and the Atlantic ports, scattered across the Northern half of France. There were more in the Low Countries who had been shot down on the way to or from Germany. Neave suggested setting up three camps: one in the Rennes area in Brittany; one in the east, in the forest of the Ardennes; and another south-east of Paris, close to Châteaudun. Months in advance, agents were sent in to liaise with local organisations and – equally important – to persuade the aviators that it was in their best interests to group together in hiding, when the natural boldness that came with choosing to fight in the air was spurring them to make a break for it.
The plan, code-named ‘Sherwood’, was initially considered ‘imaginative but too risky’.1 It was a complicated business to find and equip the camps and move the evaders to them, and it required resources. Furthermore, the Belgians, determined as always to maintain their independence, rebelled against being told what to do. Faced with their opposition, the Ardennes plan came to nothing. Then, to Neave’s chagrin, the airmen who were gathered near Rennes decided not to wait to be rescued and broke camp to seek their own salvation. However, the operation to rescue 120 men living under the boughs of the Forêt de Fréteval, near Châteaudun, was a triumph that Neave would savour all his life.
The arrangements for the camp had been made by Jean de Blommaert, a twenty-nine-year-old Belgian aristocrat and veteran of Comet, who had escaped to Britain in 1943 after being ‘burned’. In April 1944, he was parachuted into the area with Squadron Leader Lucien Boussa, who had previously commanded 350 Squadron of the RAF, which was manned by Belgians and equipped with Spitfires. In conjunction with the local resistance organisation and helped by farmers and tradesmen, they located camp sites and dropping zones. Late in May, airmen who had been hiding in Paris began to arrive by train at Châteaudun and were sheltered by local families. On 6 June, the day of the invasion, the first group of thirty arrived in the forest. By the beginning of August there were 152 fugitives, living in tents and eating well, thanks to the generosity of the locals.
While the battle of Normandy raged, Neave was forced to wait impotently for the lines to move. Having left Room 900 in London in the hands of Donald Darling, he was formally a member of IS9 (Western European Area), which had evolved into a joint British-American formation, commanded by Langley and a US army lieutenant colonel. Neave spent some weeks hanging round the Bayeux headquarters and making trips to the front at Caen, still in German hands despite Monty’s predictions of swift victory. Then, at the beginning of August, with the American success at St-Lô, the impasse was broken and the front began to move fast. General Patton’s Third Army swept down to take Brittany, with Neave hotfoot behind. He ‘packed his jeep, in high elation’ and led the American sections of IS9 (WEA) southwards. The road to Avranches was choked with dead Germans, mules and horses and burned-out vehicles, victims of the merciless harrying of the Allied fighter-bombers. He was on a high: ‘The exhilaration was unforgettable. The restraints of London and the beach-head were past and the smell of pursuit was in the air.’2
Arriving in Le Mans on 10 August, he was disconcerted to find that instead of pressing east towards Chartres, Vendôme and the camp in the Forêt de Fréteval, the Americans were now going to swing north to Alençon, to help close the Falaise Gap, where the death blow would be dealt to the German army. He had been counting on being able to call on their armour to support the rescue operation. It was difficult to know the dispositions and strength of the Germans in the area, and he had only half a dozen jeeps and a few automatic weapons to protect his party and the airmen if they ran into trouble. He drove to the Headquarters of XV Corps, north of Le Mans, to try and persuade the staff it was their duty to lend him an escort. After all, half the men in the forest were American. It was no use. He drove back to Le Mans ‘greatly depressed’, but on arrival had a remarkable piece of luck. In the courtyard of the Hôtel Moderne, where he had set up shop, was an array of armoured jeeps and, milling around them, dozens of British soldiers in maroon berets. It was a squadron of the Special Air Service, four officers and thirty-four men, under the command of Captain Anthony Greville-Bell, twenty-four years old, the son a Ceylon tea planter and already a veteran of the SAS. They had just finished their operations in Brittany and were awaiting orders. Greville-Bell, ‘a dashing young man with a DSO, ideally suited to “private warfare”’, listened enthusiastically to Neave’s proposals and sent a signal to his chiefs. The following day he received permission to escort Neave and his team to the Forêt de Fréteval. Thus began an association between Neave and the SAS that continued through the rest of the hostilities, into the Cold War period, and lasted until the day he died. The regiment’s ethos matched his own approach to warfare: unorthodox, questioning and inclined to prefer the tangential and subtle over the direct and frontal.
On 14 August, ‘a fine, hot morning’, he set off with the SAS at the head of a column of requisitioned buses and trucks on the sixty-mile journey to the forest. At the turn-off to the camp, they found de Blommaert and Boussa and a large crowd who greeted them with cheers. If felt like ‘the departure for a seaside outing’. The airmen were lean, tanned and dressed in rough peasant clothes. Some were angry at the delay and about twenty had already departed. It was nonetheless a great moment for Neave. Sherwood had been his idea, and he had not only made it happen but been there at its execution, exposing himself at least in some degree to the risks faced by the men and women he directed. He recorded proudly that of those he helped rescue ‘nearly all went back on flying operations.’ For some of them, their liberation brought only a short respite. According to Neave, though he does not cite a source, thirty-eight of them were killed in action before the end of the war.
The following day, there appears to have been another sort of rescue operation, one that he never referred to in his writings. On 16 August, while hurrying back to rejoin headquarters, he arrived in Chartres. The city was in American hands, but there were still Germans about. He found the main square deserted, apart from three American tanks, their guns trained on the Cathedral, a Gothic jewel of European civilisation. According to the account given by Jean de Blommaert (who was with him) to Diana, shortly after Airey’s death, a Texan sergeant told them that German troops were holed up in the clock tower and his captain had just returned with orders to blast them out. Neave approached the officer and asked him if he could really justify opening fire on an architectural treasure. He was told that his orders were ‘to demolish rather than risk a single American life’.3 Neave declared, ‘I am in charge of Special Services in this sector and this is a special case. Wait five minutes before firing – no more. I’ll go and look myself, and wave my handkerchief if all is clear.’ Neave entered the cathedral unarmed, with de Blommaert behind him holding a rifle. He told him, ‘Keep your distance, so we aren’t a double target up this damned spiral staircase, and if you must shoot, try not to hit me.’ The clock tower was empty. He waved his handkerchief to the Americans below and Chartres cathedral remained intact. Neave was normally not shy about advertising his exploits. This one he never mentioned in print. Another version claims that it was an American officer with XX Corps, Colonel Welborn Griffith Jr, who with his driver carried out a reconnaissance of the streets around the cathedral and declared it to be free of Germans, sparing it from bombardment. Neave seems to have arrived towards the evening, by which time Griffith had moved on (he was killed the same day), so it may be that there were two separate incidents when the cathedral was menaced and both men share the honour of saving it.
No one reading Neave’s accounts of the days of that dangerous summer of 1944 would guess that he had just become a father for the first time. Marigold Elizabeth Cassandra Neave was born on 5 May, at Chillington Hall, her maternal grandparents’ home in Staffordshire. Fatherhood seems to have done nothing to temper his eagerness to make up for lost time. After the Sherwood adventure, he hurried on to Paris, to check on the well-being of his agents. For many, like Jean-François Nothomb, the arrival of the French and American liberators in late August had come too late. He had been betrayed by Jacques Desoubrie, a Franco-Belgian Gestapo agent responsible for the capture of hundreds of evaders and helpers, including fifty of the Comet line. Nothomb had been arrested in January and sent off to a series of concentration camps, pursued by a death warrant that mercifully never caught up with him, and was eventually freed in April 1945. On the eve of the liberation, rumours had abounded of massacres and reprisals. Neave arrived to find Paris en fête and most of Room 900’s helpers safe and well. He did, however, carry out another minor rescue operation. After setting up his headquarters in the Hotel Windsor, he came across an excited mob and intervened, ‘rescuing two Germans from an angry crowd’.4
This small episode revealed a principle that governed his post-war attitude to the vanquished. While he was in favour of the sternest justice for the chief criminals of the Nazi regime, he had no taste for mass punishments of the defeated, or the imposition of punitive terms on the population that would only nourish a future conflict. In the case of Rudolf Hess, he became one of the chief advocates of compassion, campaigning in the early 1970s for his release from Spandau prison.
There was a pause in Brussels, where he was relieved to find more old Comet hands still alive. Then it was on to Holland, where the headlong Allied advance had come to a sudden halt and the debacle of Arnhem had brought an unwelcome opportunity for him to put his expertise to work. The failure of the airborne operation on 17 September to capture the bridge over the Lower Rhine had left several hundred troops from the British 1st Airborne Division and attached units cut off behind the German lines on the east bank, where they were being sheltered by the Dutch resistance. Neave arrived in the first week of October and set up headquarters on the outskirts of Nijmegen. He claims that while there he made a ‘discovery which revolutionised the situation of the airborne survivors’.5 The power station at Nijmegen was linked by a telephone line to transformer stations across the Rhine in enemy-held territory. He learned this from Dutch resistance workers on the liberated southern bank who were using it to stay in touch with their people on the other side, so the discovery was hardly his own. However, he seems to have seen its potential for organising a rescue operation. Many of the stranded troops were thought to be hiding around Ede (to where the phone link extended), twenty miles from Nijmegen.
Neave wrote that when he proposed a plan to his superiors, the ‘cold feet department’ were ‘horror struck’, believing the Germans must surely have tapped the line. However, the resistance continued to insist it was secure, and soon they were getting a nightly report from an anonymous British officer, later revealed to be Major Digby Tatham-Warter of the 2nd Battalion, the Parachute Regiment, who had been wounded at Arnhem and captured, before escaping from hospital, with information about the number and state of health of the evaders. They received further intelligence from agents Neave had sent to Holland to set up escape lines for Allied airmen long beforehand.
By now, Neave had been joined by a congenial brother-in-arms. Major Hugh Fraser had been seconded to IS9 (WEA) from the GHQ Liaison Regiment, a reconnaissance outfit also known as ‘Phantom’, which was charged with scouting the front lines. Fraser was a member of the Scottish warrior clan and the younger brother of Lord Lovat, whose exploits at the Dieppe Raid and commanding the family regiment, the Lovat Scouts, at D-Day had made him a legend. He was sardonic, relaxed, brave, modest and good fun.
The two got on well and respected each other, and they remained close friends until Neave’s death. Fraser too became a target for Irish Republicans, who in 1975 planted outside his house in London a bomb which went off, killing his neighbour, Professor Gordon Hamilton Fairley, a pioneering cancer specialist. It is perhaps difficult to think of someone so emotionally restrained as Neave inspiring deep affection in another man of his class and outlook, but the bond between them was strong. In the opinion of the historian Antonia Fraser, Hugh’s wife of twenty-one years, ‘Hugh loved Airey.’6 Another member of the team was less satisfactory. Captain Peter Baker had also arrived from Phantom, where he served with Fraser. He was exuberant and bold, qualities that Neave normally admired, but also a fantasist, chancer and glory-hunter. During the Forêt de Fréteval episode, Neave had already had to prevent him from casting off his uniform and heading to Paris in advance of the troops with the aim of scoring a sensational journalistic scoop for an American newspaper.
Any escape plans were dependent on the resourcefulness and bravery of a large network of Dutch resisters from across the social spectrum who sheltered and helped organise the disparate bands of survivors from the Arnhem operation. Among them were several senior Airborne officers, including Brigadiers Gerald Lathbury and John Hackett and Lieutenant Colonel David Dobie, who thanks to the Dutch underground were eventually reunited. Their initial appreciation of their situation had included a plan to stay put in order to carry out behind-the-lines operations in partnership with the resistance when the Allies made another attempt to cross the Rhine. The first thing to do was to establish contact with headquarters.
On 18 October, with the help of Dutch guides, Colonel Dobie arrived in Allied-held territory after an adventurous journey dodging the Germans and involving two river crossings. He was taken to General Sir Miles Dempsey, commander of the Second Army, who told him that the priority was to evacuate all stranded troops and to make a plan to ‘get ’em out’. Dobie teamed up with Neave and others and rapid arrangements were made for a mass evacuation.
In the meantime, on the night of 11/12 October, Neave had sent Baker across the River Waal to enemy-held territory to liaise with the local underground and set up a formal escape route. Baker arrived at Tiel, sixteen miles west of Nijmegen, where he teamed up with Fekko Ebbens, who had a fruit farm near the town and who was prominent in the local underground. An American, Private First Class Ted Bachenheimer of the 82nd Airborne, whose German-Jewish family had fled to the US in 1934, had volunteered to join him and arrived a day or two later. Their task was to organise a chain of guides to bring the evaders and escapers down in small parties from their hiding places around Ede. It was made clear that the pair were to wear uniform at all times, to reduce the risk of being shot as spies.
No more was heard of them for six days. Then a Dutch messenger arrived with bad news. Baker and Bachenheimer had been captured and were believed to have been shot. Neave took the courier back to the crossing point with a request to return the following night with further information. When he reappeared the news was better. Baker and Bachenheimer had been arrested but might still be alive. It was not until after the war that the full story became known. On the night of 16 October, a German patrol turned up at the house of Fekko Ebbens, pretending they wanted somewhere to consult their map. It was a ruse. They appear to have been tipped off that the farm was a base for resistance activities by a Dutch collaborator. It was also suspected that the authorities had been alerted by the sight of Baker and Bachenheimer walking around in the neighbourhood in daylight in civilian clothes.
Baker left an account of the episode in which he maintained that he had been told by his hosts to change out of his uniform.7 Whatever the truth, Ebbens’s fate was sealed. He was arrested and, despite efforts by the underground to buy his freedom, was executed along with four other Dutch resisters a month later. Baker and Bachenheimer were able to show the Germans their uniforms and claim they were simply soldiers on the run and therefore entitled to protection as prisoners of war. The pair were sent off by train to Stalag XIB at Fallingbostel. En route, Bachenheimer managed to prise open a window and escape with three other prisoners. The group split up and the American struck out on his own. A body believed to be his was later found with two bullet wounds in the back of the head. How he met his end will never be known, but there is a likelihood that he was murdered after his Jewish origins became known or suspected.8
The disaster caused consternation at MI9 and much resentment among the Dutch resistance. An inquiry cleared Neave and Langley of responsibility. This episode, grim though it was, did not impede Baker’s post-war career. Like Neave, Hugh Fraser and another IS9 (WEA) officer, Maurice Macmillan, he became a Conservative MP. However, his career ended disastrously when, after starting a publishing house which ran up huge debts, he was sent to prison for forging signatures on financial documents and expelled from the House of Commons. He died in 1966, aged forty-five, after strenuous failed attempts to clear his name.
With the arrests, the dangers surrounding the plan for a mass evacuation – now codenamed Pegasus – multiplied. Despite fears that the Germans had been alerted, it was decided to press on with the operation nonetheless. It went ahead on the night of 22/23 October. A crossing point, about 150 to 200 yards wide, had been chosen on a stretch of the Rhine near the town of Wageningen, on the occupied bank of the Rhine, and Randwijk, a village in Allied hands on the southern side. The operation would be launched from a deserted farmhouse which stood on the bank, a quarter of a mile from a dyke road which was out of sight of enemy territory. The men were to be shipped in assault boats supplied by a company of the Royal Canadian Engineers. A few days beforehand, they were moved by lorry and hidden in farmhouse outbuildings. An artillery barrage was laid on, miles from the launching point, to divert any Germans in the area. At the same time, a Bofors gun was to fire ten rounds of tracer every fifteen minutes, thus providing a point on the friendly bank for the escape parties to aim for. A force of thirty American paratroopers were to travel in the boats as armed escort. Once ashore, white tapes directed the escapees through the fields to another farmhouse, which acted as a reception centre and first-aid post.
At midnight the boats slid into the water. Neave and the team settled down to wait for the signal that the escape party was in place on the far bank – the letter ‘V’ flashed in Morse code on a red torch. When it came, it was 400 yards to the right of where they expected it. ‘There were whispered orders and the Americans entered the boats which, with a splash of oars, began to move off,’9 he wrote. There was a burst of fire from enemy territory. Had a German patrol stumbled across the operation? It was not difficult to imagine the bloodbath that would follow. But the silence rolled back and after twenty minutes the boats appeared out of the darkness. It was Neave’s job to count the men ashore. There were 138 of them, mostly soldiers of the 1st Airborne Division, along with several Dutchmen fleeing the Gestapo.
Pegasus was a triumph, and Neave was justified in judging it ‘a striking, indeed memorable performance’. His name would be associated with it thereafter, though like any complex operation of war, the plan was a joint effort involving, among others, Fraser, Dobie, Tatham-Warter and Lieutenant Colonel Robert Strayer of the US Army’s 101st Airborne. British government propaganda made a feast of the coup, which was lauded in an article in the News Chronicle based on interviews with Brigadier Lathbury and other escapees as ‘one of the greatest stories of the war’.10
Neave was in a hurry to carry out another operation before the winter rains made the rivers too tricky to navigate in small boats. Pegasus II would clearly be a more difficult proposition. The Germans would surely have worked out what had happened. Communications with the remnants of the 1st Airborne Division were conducted through ‘Fabian’, a Belgian officer serving with the SAS who was in direct radio contact with headquarters. Communication with Neave’s own agents had to be relayed via London and was subject to a delay of twenty-four hours. A new crossing site was chosen and the planners managed to commandeer flat-bottomed boats fitted with silenced outboard motors to deal with the rain-swollen river. Neave set the preliminary date for 16 November to move a second group of 140 men, and the arrangements were passed to the fugitives.
The date slipped by a day and Neave began to have doubts about Pegasus II. It ‘involved the possibility of serious casualties among men … who might be killed instead of spending the rest of the war in prison camps’. But everything was in place. The men were alerted and their hopes ‘could not be dashed’. Neave was right to have hesitated. On the first night, no one came and the reception party was shelled by the Germans. The second night, voices were heard calling across the river and a boat was launched. It brought back three men in civilian clothes, two Dutchmen and Sergeant J. M. Mescall of the RAF. They were the only ones to arrive out of a party of 120 men, most of them from 1st Airborne. They had set out from north of Ede, about twenty miles from the river, on the previous evening. While crossing the Ede–Arnhem road they ran into a German patrol, who put up flares and opened fire. Several were killed. Seven escaped. The rest were taken prisoner.
Neave was ‘deeply depressed’ by the news. It was the end of any thoughts of further large-scale escapes. Like others involved in the operation, he would later lay some of the blame for its failure on the appearance of the newspaper article, whose contents could easily have been conveyed to the enemy via neutral capitals. In fact, the piece appeared after Pegasus II had already come to grief and contained nothing that would not have been obvious to the Germans.
He returned to London in December to take charge of Room 900. He still worked with 1S9 (WEA) in Nijmegen, and was able to arrange canoes and other craft for individual waterborne crossings at the mouth of the Waal. Thirty soldiers from 1st Airborne were ferried out of occupied territory before the Allies finally crossed the Rhine the following spring. He was also able to get supplies to one of his agents, Dick Kragt, who had been dropped into Holland in June 1943 and had been a coordinator for both Pegasus operations. Kragt also arranged the exodus in February 1945 of Brigadier John Hackett, the commander of the 4th Parachute Brigade, who had been severely wounded at Arnhem.
Neave did not return to Europe until April 1945. After the Germans withdrew from Arnhem, he, Hackett and Hugh Fraser walked across the famous bridge over the Rhine for which so many lives had been sacrificed and through the rubble of the town. He moved forward on the heels of the retreating Germans, and in Barneveld he was reunited with Kragt. The German forces in Holland surrendered on 5 May and Neave crossed their lines, to arrive in Amsterdam three days later: VE Day. He was there to check on the welfare of his agents, but ‘the Dutch thronged the streets in a frenzy of welcome and rejoicing and it was hours before I could reach the addresses of our helpers.’ On Crockatt’s orders, he spent the rest of the summer in The Hague, overseeing the congenial work of recommending honours for the hundreds of men and women whose bravery had kept the escape lines open. Then, in August, he was given the opportunity of coming face to face with the perpetrators of the horror, destruction and bloodshed of the preceding years.
Neave’s appointment to the British War Crimes Executive was merited on the grounds of his ability to read and speak German reasonably well, his Oxford degree which had given him a grounding in international law, and his pre-war experience as a barrister. It was a plum post that carried considerable kudos, as well as giving him a participatory role in one of the great dramas of the century. It also brought a further promotion, from major to lieutenant colonel, and from October he could add the ribbon of the DSO to that of the MC on his tunic, awarded for ‘gallant and distinguished service in the field’ – presumably his part in Pegasus I. His initial job was to help gather evidence against the twenty-four senior political and military leaders of the Third Reich who, after much debate, had been chosen to stand trial for war crimes at Nuremberg. The tribunal was controversial from the outset. There was no consensus on how to punish the Nazis. Churchill, Eden and others had initially been in favour of selecting fifty to a hundred senior figures and executing them without trial. This course was soon discredited by the argument that to do so would only ensure they died as martyrs. Some process was essential in order to publicly expose the horrors of Hitler’s reign. The legal procedures at Nuremberg were rough at the edges. It could hardly be otherwise. Unprecedented crimes called for novel justice.
Neave was twenty-nine when he returned to Germany. In his short life, his association with the place had been complex and intense. It had started with his exposure as an adolescent in September 1933 to a Nazi rally in Berlin. In his writings, he often referred to the Germans he encountered in caricature terms. They were brutal and bullying or stupid and preposterous. Nonetheless, he professed to feel no animosity towards the German armed forces, declaring that having been ‘fairly treated as a prisoner at Colditz … I understood the difference between the Nazi leaders who were to be tried at Nuremberg and the ordinary German soldier.’11 Nor did he accept the new job ‘in any spirit of personal revenge’. He had received enough satisfaction nearly four years before, when he crossed the Swiss frontier from Colditz. His detached outlook did not make him sympathetic to the attitude of some Allied jurists who were pained at the crudeness of the tribunal’s legal machinery. Nor for a moment did he swallow the tu quoque claims of the defendants who bleated that what they were accused of was no worse than what the Allies had done to them. Putting the guilty to death did not trouble him, as long as their culpability was properly established. Throughout the proceedings he maintained an impressive detachment and sense of proportion, evidence of a rationality and coolness that marked his subsequent career in politics.
Before he arrived in Nuremberg, Neave was given a preliminary mission. At the end of August 1945 he went to Essen, home of the Krupp works which had forged the tools for much of Germany’s war industry. He was charged with collecting evidence that linked the firm to the Nazi party, to the production of any weapon that was forbidden under international law or to the use of foreign slave labourers in Krupp enterprises. Essen had been on Bomber Command’s target list from the beginning of the strategic air campaign and the town and surroundings had been flattened. As Neave remarked grimly, ‘the RAF had done their job.’
Amazingly, the Krupp residence, the 200-room Villa Huegel which sat above the town, was still intact. It was a ‘tasteless mausoleum’ and ‘looked like an early railway station’. Gustav Krupp, who had enthusiastically collaborated with Hitler and the German inter-war rearmament programme, had been partially paralysed since 1941 and was deemed to be too ill to stand trial. The prosecutors tried to substitute in the indictment his son Alfried, who ran the company in his place, but the move was rejected by the judges. At the villa, Neave discovered nearly a ton of documents, which would form a large part of the prosecution case when Alfried was finally put on trial by an American tribunal two years later. Chilly, unrepentant and a convinced Nazi, he was convicted of crimes against humanity relating to Krupp’s wholesale use of slave labour, including workers from Auschwitz. In July 1948, he was sentenced to twelve years in prison and the forfeiture of his property. Three years later, he was free and his inheritance restored to him.
As Neave interrogated the firm’s directors and staff, he heard no word of regret over the fate of the tens of thousands of Poles, Russians, Czechs, Hungarians, Romanians and Jews who had been beaten, starved and worked to exhaustion and death in Krupp enterprises. The astonishing speed of Alfried’s return to grace and Krupp’s revival were a source of wry wonderment in later years, but he told himself that he ‘should have known that the burning passions of 1945 would soon subside’. Although it was not something he brooded about, he believed that history, if allowed, could repeat itself, and only a fool would not be always on the look-out for warning signs.
At the end of September, he was summoned to Nuremberg. The trials were due to start in November and he arrived with other members of the investigating team early one evening in the first week of October. The city had been chosen because it housed a large Palace of Justice which had somehow escaped bombardment, and for its symbolic value as the site of the great Hitler-worshipping rallies of the 1930s. The narrow streets and half-timbered houses, home of the Meistersingers and birthplace of Dürer, were in ruins. Corpses still lay under the mounds of rubble. The people he passed were pale and gaunt and wore clothes ‘the same drab colour as if they had risen from the tomb’.12 They looked at him with expressions of misery and hate. He was unmoved. ‘It was Hitler who did this to you!’ he shouted in German once in response to an accusing look.
At Nuremberg he would be working with the judges of the tribunal, whose president was a Briton, Geoffrey Lawrence. Neave’s name had been proposed by the head of the British War Crimes Executive, Colonel Harry Phillimore. On 18 October, he was standing in the lobby of the Grand Hotel, where the senior staff had their headquarters, when a phalanx of men in dark suits approached. At the centre was an intimidating figure, a bronzed man with a neat moustache and smart clothes: the principal American judge, the former Attorney General of the United States, Francis Biddle. Surprisingly, Biddle seemed to know who he was and asked him if he was ‘ready to serve the indictment’. This was news to Neave. He had yet to meet the British judges and no one had told him what his precise duties were. Biddle expressed surprise at Neave’s youth, then proceeded to explain in a theatrical voice that under the tribunal’s charter ‘the defendants have a right to a fair trial and to counsel of their own choice. We have appointed you to advise them of their rights and select them German lawyers.’
This was a huge responsibility for someone whose legal experience to date had been confined to the lowest rungs of the British bar. Neave ‘nodded as calmly as possible’. However, he felt as if he had suddenly been invited to sing at Covent Garden or deliver a lecture on higher mathematics. It was ‘the most dangerous situation I had faced since Colditz’. He spent a restless night at his billet in the neighbouring village of Zirndorf. Then, on the afternoon of 19 October 1945, in his best uniform, Sam Browne gleaming, he set off with the American governor of the prison, Colonel Burton C. Andrus, to face the men who had plunged the world into war.
The defendants were held in Nuremberg prison, next to the courthouse. Its three storeys of cell wings were grouped around an atrium covered with wire netting to prevent prisoners jumping to their death. In Neave’s writings, he is always alert to the connectivity of events. A sight, a landmark or an experience triggers off a recollection of a related incident. Often there is irony in the observation, or a sense of the wheel of fate coming full circle. So it was when he observed the wire netting. It brought to mind the fate of one of the agents he had trained, Captain Dominique-Edgard Potier, who was parachuted into Belgium in July 1943 to start up a new escape line for Allied aviators. After returning to England he was dropped into France for a second mission. He was captured at Reims and tortured by the Gestapo for several days. On 11 January 1944 he broke free from his guards and jumped from a third-floor window, dying hours later.
At a meeting at the Palace of Justice that morning, Neave’s procedure had been decided. He would introduce himself to each defendant in turn, hand over a copy of the relevant indictment, list the prisoner’s rights and announce he would return the following day to answer any questions. He was accompanied by a large party. With him were the American General Secretary of the Tribunal, Harold B. Willey; Major Wolfe Frank, a refugee from Germany who had joined the British Army and acted as expert translator; a chaplain, should the prisoner require spiritual sustenance; a psychiatrist, to record his reactions; and a strong security detail, led by Colonel Andrus.
The first encounter was with the most charismatic and complex of the prisoners, a man who inspired both mockery and a fascination heavily tinged with fear. As the cell door swung open, Neave got his first glimpse of Hermann Goering. The Reichsmarschall’s eyes were ‘small and greedy … he had the look of a woman about him … He appeared exquisitely corrupt and soft … My first impression was of meeting a dissolute Roman emperor, game to the last.’ His once-bloated form had deflated and his grey air force uniform hung off him. Neave handed him the indictment and told him his rights. Goering’s response was a theatrical ‘So it has come.’ All afternoon Neave traipsed from cell to cell. Next came Hess, then Ribbentrop, Streicher, von Schirach, Frank, Funk and Frick, Kaltenbrunner and Ley. Last on the list was the German naval chief, Karl Doenitz.
Neave appears to have made a record of his first impressions soon after these visitations. It was another thirty-two years before he aired them in a book. He thought it best to wait until the ‘dark passions of 1945 had cooled’, and it was Diana who persuaded him, in the early 1970s, that the time was now right. His assessments of the men in the cells were a valuable contribution to understanding the character of the Nazis and Nazism. The pen pictures are shrewd, precise and not inhumane. He felt most sympathy for Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, who in 1941 had flown himself to the estate of the Duke of Hamilton in an attempt to broker a peace with Britain. He was clearly mentally unbalanced. He wore an old grey tweed jacket and on his feet were the same Luftwaffe flying boots he had worn four years before, ‘all that remained of his mad, courageous mission, which had brought him ridicule and disappointment’.13
Neave’s greatest contempt was reserved for Hitler’s Chief of Staff, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, ‘a weak man trying to be brave’, who had got religion since incarceration. He had a particular reason for his animus towards Keitel. It was he who had signed the order authorising the execution without trial of the ‘Cockleshell Heroes’, the Royal Marine Commandos captured after the raid on Bordeaux. There had only been two survivors, the men helped to freedom by Neave’s agent and protégée, Mary Lindell. When the task was completed, he reported to the judges, describing the reactions and demands of the defendants. It was quite a debut. Apart from defending a young soldier on a charge of accidentally shooting a woman as she rode along on her bicycle in France during the Phoney War, ‘this was my first essay in advocacy before a court.’
The tribunal was unprecedented. There were difficulties and delays as it groped its way towards an approximation of justice. The proceedings stretched into the new year and it took ten months to conclude. The British prosecution team was led by Hartley Shawcross, Attorney General of the incoming Labour government, and Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, who served as Solicitor General under Churchill. Maxwell Fyfe was Edinburgh-born, the son of the headmaster of Aberdeen Grammar School, and a progressive Conservative who had been involved in making policy to meet the aspirations raised in the Beveridge Report for a fairer Britain. He entered parliament in 1935 and managed successful parallel careers as both politician and lawyer.
The ‘short and lively Scot’ made a deep impression on Neave. He admired his ‘industry and skill’ and the way he was able to strike fear into the Nazis. ‘Their patronising smiles and bombast vanished before his questioning,’ he wrote. Maxwell Fyfe’s greatest moment came with his forensic evisceration of Goering over the case of the seventy-seven Allied airmen who tunnelled out of Stalag Luft III, at Sagan, south-east of Berlin, in March 1944. The feat became famous as the Great Escape. The breakout infuriated Hitler, who ordered all the captured prisoners to be shot, a breach of the Geneva Conventions. Until this stage in the trial, Goering had handled himself with increasing confidence. He had held up well under cross-examination by the American prosecutor, Justice Robert H. Jackson, and there seemed a chance that he might escape the noose.
Questioned by Maxwell Fyfe, Goering denied any knowledge of the ‘Sagan’ order. He claimed that he was on leave when it was issued and only learned later that fifty recaptured escapees had been shot. Maxwell Fyfe ‘skilfully tested his alibi as if he were prosecuting a burglar at the Old Bailey’. Neave ‘listened, fascinated, to this historic exchange … cross-examination at its best’. Repeating his denials, Goering became ‘alarmed and blustering’. He ‘lost his self-control’. The sneaking respect felt by some for the Reichsmarschall’s bravado evaporated. ‘Goering had lost the battle,’ wrote Neave. Maxwell Fyfe’s ‘cross-examination saved the face of the Allied prosecution’ and ‘marked Goering down for the death sentence’.14
The episode on which he had been skewered – the murder of escapee POWs – obviously had a special meaning for Neave, which Maxwell Fyfe acknowledged when they spoke in the lunch interval at the end of the opening session. Neave congratulated him, saying, ‘You’ve got him.’ Maxwell Fyfe ‘smiled at me and said, “I know how you must feel.”’ The significance of his acquaintance with the advocate-politician went deeper than that. Here was someone to look up to, and in time perhaps to emulate.
The conduct of the Soviet legal team also left a deep impression, but of alarm and revulsion. They were clearly controlled directly from Moscow. The Soviet alternate judge on the bench, Colonel Alexander Fedorovich Volchkov, was said to be People’s Commissar for Justice and a professor of international law. Neave suspected he was not a judge at all. Instead, it seemed more likely he was an intelligence officer serving with the NKVD. Neave makes clear in his book on the tribunal that as well as his courtroom functions he was still acting as an intelligence operative. He wrote that ‘the intelligence services of the Western world, whose representatives at the trial included myself,’ sent back reports on Moscow’s man. Later, he came to believe that Volchkov was involved in the Katyn massacre of 10,000 Polish officers and intellectuals in 1940. Among the many atrocities of the war, this one held a particular significance for him – perhaps because of Diana’s connection with the Poles.
When his day’s work was done, Neave enjoyed the febrile social life that swirled around the tribunal. The town was full of soldiers, lawyers, secretaries and journalists. In the evenings the well connected gathered in the Marble Room of the Grand Hotel to gossip, flirt, dance and drink. Nuremberg lay in the American zone of occupation, a Land of Cockaigne through which flowed a river of booze. The Soviets, who had gone in no time from uneasy allies to the likely next enemies, were not seen much in the Marble Room and got drunk in the villas they shared with their women, singing, dancing and firing their revolvers. One night shots were heard outside the Grand Hotel. A Russian officer staggered into the lobby, collapsed and bled to death. In order to avoid embarrassment to the Soviet delegation, the band in the Marble Room was ordered to play on.
Neave entered into the spirit of rather desperate fun,including a drinking contest that was arranged among the principal participants in the trial. Each contestant had to gulp down as much as possible of the appropriate tipple. For the Americans it was bourbon, for the Russians vodka, for the French cognac and for the Brits whisky. The winner was Airey Neave.15
An undercurrent of anxiety and melancholy ran beneath the victors’ surface euphoria. The shrewd eyes of Rebecca West, who was covering the trial for the Daily Telegraph and the New Yorker magazine, observed that they were ‘gay for moments but were permanently depressed’. She was then fifty-three, a literary lioness whose love life had been as adventurous as her voyaging. H. G. Wells was an old flame. Francis Biddle became a new one. She and Neave hit it off immediately. Biddle may have been struck by Neave’s youthful looks, but West ‘took him for a man of forty, and rather worn at that’.16 He impressed her in other ways. It seemed to her that he divided ‘his attention between ideals of a sort that refused contentment, amusement at the world, and a puzzled interest in the persistent wickedness of man’. She noted a marked humility. A ‘number of people who had had dealings with him during the war thought more highly of him than he did himself.’ Above all, he grasped the significance of the event. In her view, he was ‘as conscious as anybody there of the true meaning of the trial’.
On 1 October 1946, the sentences were delivered. Twelve defendants were condemned to death, seven imprisoned for terms from ten years to life, and three acquitted. The hangings took place on 16 October. Neave was not there to witness them. A fortnight before, he had flown back to England, wondering what role he would play in the new world that was taking shape and how he was going to provide for his wife and growing family.