On December 22, 1947, more than nine months after Telford Taylor read the indictment against Flick and his five accomplices, the American judges returned to give their ruling. Over six full months had been spent in session, almost fifteen hundred pieces of evidence had been introduced, and almost sixty witnesses, including the six defendants, had been heard. The English transcript of the proceedings ran to over eleven thousand pages. It had been a monster of a trial.
The judgment was bound to disappoint, on all sides. Friedrich Flick was sentenced to seven years in prison, credited against time served since he was arrested in mid-June 1945. Otto Steinbrinck was sentenced to five years in prison. Lastly, Flick’s nephew Bernhard Weiss was sentenced to two and a half years in prison. The remaining three men, including Flick’s cousin Konrad Kaletsch, were acquitted.
Of the six men, only Flick and Weiss were found guilty of using forced and slave labor, and at only one of their factories. Flick alone was found culpable of looting, but only at the expropriated Rombach steel complex in France. The charges of Aryanization were dismissed entirely — the transactions had been concluded before the war started, and the court said that its jurisdiction pertained only to crimes committed during the war or related to it. Flick and Steinbrinck were found guilty of having financially supported the SS and its crimes via Himmler’s Circle of Friends. Steinbrinck was sentenced on an additional charge: as an SS officer, he had been part of a criminal organization.
In his final report on Nuremberg’s subsequent proceedings, Taylor came to call the Flick ruling “exceedingly (if not excessively) moderate and conciliatory.” Especially considering what would happen to Alfried Krupp: he would be sentenced to twelve years and his assets would be confiscated. In Flick’s case, the judges followed the defense’s line of argument on its most important point: that the program of forced and slave labor was created by the Nazi regime and operated beyond the control of the six accused, and German industry as a whole. Only in one factory did the prosecution prove, beyond any doubt, that Flick and Weiss had gone above and beyond to procure Russian prisoners of war to increase productivity, according to the American judges.
The judges also held that the steel firms expropriated in the Soviet Union had previously been state, not private, property, so in the context of war, Flick’s seizure of them had been permissible. The mogul was deemed guilty on that count only for withholding the Rombach steel complex from its French owners. At the same time, the court somehow also concluded that Flick had left the place better than it had been when he seized it. The judges dismissed the charges of Aryanization because of a lack of jurisdiction, but they also failed to see how these transactions were criminal in character. It was best left to a civil court, the judges contended: “A sale compelled by pressure or duress may be questioned in a court of equity, but . . . such use of pressure, even on racial or religious grounds, has never been thought to be a crime against humanity.”
However, the three judges didn’t buy Flick and Steinbrinck’s claim that their membership fees to Himmler’s Circle of Friends merely supported the SS leader’s esoteric hobbies and cultural interests. Though the court considered it a mitigating point that membership may have constituted some sort of personal insurance for the two men, it must have also been clear to them at some point that their substantial annual financial contributions went, at least in part, to maintaining a criminal organization that was undertaking the mass extermination of Jews and other people. Flick and Steinbrinck gave Himmler “a blank check” and it was “immaterial whether it was spent on salaries or for lethal gas,” the American judges said.
Flick’s next destination was Landsberg Prison, where more than two decades earlier Hitler had dictated Mein Kampf to two aides while they were jailed after the failed Beer Hall Putsch in nearby Munich. Flick too would rise again. Long before the ruling came down, he hired a lawyer in America. Flick was the one Nuremberg convict to appeal his sentence in the American court system, and it went all the way up to the Supreme Court. But in 1949 the Court refused to hear his case. His conviction stood.