CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

“OTHER BEASTS IN
OTHER LAIRS”

Appropriately code-named “Terminal,” the Potsdam Conference was the last of the Big Three’s wartime meetings. Yet, although it was held amid the ruins of Hitler’s capital, it had little impact on Germany’s fate, or indeed that of anywhere else. This was already being decided by events on the ground.

Stalin’s will was firmly fixed on stripping the defeated Reich of as much of its wealth as he could. Already, trains and trucks loaded with machinery from Hitler’s factories were steaming east to help rebuild the ravaged Soviet economy. In Berlin, special “trophy units” formed by SMERSH were successfully hunting for spoils among the city’s museums, galleries and bank vaults. Even as the Potsdam meeting opened, reports from Austria disclosed that, in one Vienna factory, only forty out of five thousand machines were left, and that the city municipality had been stripped of all but twelve of its trucks. Agriculture was being targeted too, with the whole country virtually denuded of its cattle.¹

The expulsion and killings of the Sudeten Germans of Czechoslovakia also continued apace. Even as the Big Three met, there was an explosion at an ammunition dump near Usti, a Sudeten town known as Aussig, on the River Elbe. Although it was an accident, it was attributed by the local Czech militia to Nazi Werewolves, and a massacre followed: Germans were shot down in the street, women and children were thrown into the river, several hundred people perished, and yet more fled to the West. Some of the bodies were loaded onto trucks and driven to the former Nazi concentration camp at Theresienstadt (Terezin) for cremation.

The Sudeten expulsions were not the only ones. Stalin also sanctioned the mass forced exodus of millions of ethnic Germans from their historic homelands in Silesia and Pomerania, which pushed Poland’s border westwards, to the line of the Oder and Neisse rivers, and compensated his communist satellite for his own eager annexation of its eastern territories.

Giving all these mass migrations the polite description of “population transfers,” the allies at Potsdam merely asked for them to be “humane and orderly,” and requested a moratorium to allow Germany time to absorb the vast influx. The plea was ignored. Over the summer, Berlin’s railway stations began to fill up with trainloads of diseased and famine-stricken refugees from Silesia and East Prussia. “They died in hundreds,” reported the Australian war correspondent Osmar White,

lying on platforms awash with filth. I walked through sidings where trucks were piled with corpses, and where women stewed dog meat and turnips in blackened cans beside heaps of human dung. One of them plucked at my jacket sleeve, pointed to her mouth and hissed: “essen, essen.” I wondered if she, simply because she was German, deserved less pity than the live skeletons down the hill at Buchenwald. I realized then that the war had not ended with the execution and dismemberment of Hitler’s Germany. There were other beasts in other lairs.2

It wasn’t just the railways that delivered their wretched human cargoes. Only ten days after Churchill toured the city, a boat arrived in the West Port of Berlin carrying a cargo of German children aged between two and fourteen. They had been expelled from Pomerania and lay half dead, motionless, stomachs swollen from malnutrition, and eaten up by vermin. That month alone, the figures of such German deportees for successive weeks came to 4,832, 11,343, 14,365 and 14,764. They joined the total of 120,000 others already there when Churchill and Truman arrived in the city.³

The capital attracted the expellees like some promised land. “As they trekked daily in their tens of thousands towards this illusory Shangri-la,” writes Douglas Botting, “the rumor spread that refugees were met at the station by the Oberburgermeister and taken by bus to their new homes, where they were fed on real coffee and cream cakes.”⁴

The reality could hardly have been more different. A British reporter for the News Chronicle went to the Stettiner railway station to see things for himself. A train from Danzig loaded with refugees had just arrived after a seven-day journey. One cattle truck had been shunted onto a siding beside Platform 2. The reporter looked inside:

On one side four forms lay dead under blankets on cane and raffia stretchers. In another corner, four more, all women, were dying. One, in a voice we could hardly hear, was crying for water. Sitting on a stretcher, so weakened by starvation that he could not move his head or mouth, his eyes open in a deranged, uncomprehending stare, was the wasted frame of a man. He was dying too.

On the platform itself, as well as in the booking hall, hundreds of other bundles lay dead, dying and starving.⁵

Just a few miles away from such scenes, the Big Three also agreed on the general principles that should govern their treatment of Germany, such as denazification and demilitarization. Yet there were huge variations in what this meant in practice, and it was by no means clear that the defeat of the Nazis would in itself bring democracy to Germany.

Among ordinary Germans, old attitudes and patterns of behavior died hard. Contrary to the post-war myth, the nation’s defeat did not produce some magic “Zero Hour” that swept clean the slate of history to enable a bright new future to emerge instantly. Newsreel pictures and photographs of the acres of bombed-out and deserted buildings fostered a misleading image. For while German cities were reconstructed with remarkable determination and speed, and impressively presented a gleamingly modern face to the world, the mindsets of their inhabitants remained largely traditional. Continuity, not change, was the order of the day. A noble minority of Germans faced up to the truth, but the vast majority in 1945 appeared unable or unwilling to accept any causal link between the catastrophe that now overwhelmed them and their all too recent enthusiasm for Hitler and Nazism.

Shortly after VE Day, Count Folke Bernadotte returned to Germany at the invitation of allied headquarters in Frankfurt. Then, he flew in a private plane to Hamburg. As they approached the city, he asked the pilot to circle over the Neuengamme concentration camp, where he had helped its Scandinavian prisoners. Flying low, he looked down to see a large number of people moving about. They were Germans, taken into custody and now having their backgrounds investigated for evidence of Nazism and war crimes. He also asked to be flown over Bismarck’s country manor at Friedrichsruh, which the Swedish Red Cross had made its headquarters. He could see that the castle had been almost totally destroyed by allied bombers. The Bismarck family was now living in one of the nearby buildings, used previously as a museum to the founder of modern Germany.

His host in Hamburg was the city’s British military commander. That night, he was taken to a theater to attend a performance of Peer Gynt presented by the Old Vic Company of London and starred Sybil Thorndike and Laurence Olivier. The orchestra was German. “It was a wonderful performance,” recorded Bernadotte, “the first time since the war that I had witnessed collaboration between Englishmen and Germans in a cultural field.”

Yet outside lay a much grimmer scene. In late July 1943, Hamburg had been attacked by fleets of British and American bombers. Forty-five thousand people were killed, and half the city’s houses totally destroyed. Bernadotte visited the city’s largest cemetery, in Ohlsdorf, where the victims lay buried. The mass grave was fashioned in the shape of a giant cross. Across it were laid enormous wooden beams at fixed intervals, listing the different areas of the city where the dead had once lived. At the outer edge of the cemetery lay small private graves which preserved the names of at least a few of the victims. “They tell their own story,” recorded Bernadotte. “One man commemorates his wife and his seven children, aged three to fifteen years–his entire family.” On another little wooden cross erected in memory of a wife, there was a laconic but eloquent commentary consisting of just one word: “Warum?” (Why?).⁶

“Why indeed?” pondered Bernadotte. The question was directed to the whole country. There was no doubting his profound compassion at what lay before his eyes, nor his firm belief that the Germans should be helped, but already he was noticing that many of them were lamenting the “good old days” under Hitler before the war, expressing dislike of the occupiers, and revealing nationalistic feelings. He believed they should face up to the facts:

The German people as a whole never made a serious attempt to cast off the yoke. They never seriously protested against the anti-Semitic policy, against conditions in the occupied countries, or against cruelties in the concentration camps. They have failed. They have allowed themselves to be led by ruthless scoundrels. They must drain the cup of suffering.7

He was not the only man of professional compassion who worried that the Germans were in denial. The Reverend David Cairns was a padre with a Scottish division that had fought its way from Normandy to the Baltic. He also witnessed the horrors at Belsen. He believed, as a man of God, that the Germans must be treated fairly, but he was disturbed by what he found. He spent much of the spring and summer of 1945 with the occupation forces in a small village outside Lübeck. When he returned home, he gave a report on his impressions to a meeting of the British Council of Churches.

German civilians, he told it, were obsessed with their own survival and that of their families and friends, and were walking around “as in a dream [where] nothing can move or horrify them any more.” But what particularly bothered him was “the lack of understanding for the suffering that Germany has caused other people, and an unawareness of the hatred and contempt that, for example, Holland and Denmark, Poland and Belgium, feel for her.” The sense of guilt, he concluded, with masterly understatement, was “rather lacking.”⁸

This was an observation shared by numerous others at the time. “I have not found a single German ready to admit his personal guilt in the war,” reported the war correspondent Alan Moorehead. “The deeper I go into Germany, the more I am convinced that there is no shred of pity in the hearts of German women for all the misery and suffering their race has brought to the world,” wrote another correspondent, Anne Matheson, who was appalled by what she described as the “Who, me?” attitude of Germans when confronted with evidence of Nazi atrocities.⁹

All too soon, evasion of responsibility elided into a sense of victimhood, and Germany’s ills were being blamed on the allied occupiers. Voices, some of them distinguished, rose to denounce the allies as little better than those they had defeated. One example was Cardinal Josef Frings, the Catholic Archbishop of Cologne, who declared that the Anglo-American occupation regime was “scarcely different from a totalitarian state.” This was an astonishing claim given all that had happened in Germany over the previous twelve years, and a dismaying indicator of how little had been learned from the Hitler years.

Not all Germans agreed with Frings and others like him, though. The Berliner Tagespiegel roundly denounced the national mood of denial. In particular, it singled out

the erection of walls to shield oneself against the gruesome crimes against Poles, Jews, and prisoners; the stupidly arrogant ingratitude for the gift of foodstuffs received from America and England; the naïve reproach that others contributed to Hitler’s rise by entering into pacts with him; [and] the falsely understood “national solidarity” that will not form an alliance with the truly different Germany.10

Yet such self-critical views were an exception. Not for the first–or last–time in history, those who overthrew a dictatorship rapidly fell out of favor with those they liberated. The massive death toll among German civilians caused by allied bombing–some 600,000–in devastating raids such as those inflicted on Hamburg made denial much easier. After all, it was argued, the Germans were victims too. This attitude was strengthened by the punitive sentences being handed down by allied courts. Early in June, Eisenhower’s Paris headquarters announced the execution of two teenagers. Aged sixteen and seventeen, they were Hitler Youth members who had been found guilty of spying on US troops.¹¹

Alongside the public screening of newsreels showing other Germans being tied to stakes and shot by firing squads, such punishments began to backfire and turn opinion against the allies. British war correspondent Leonard Mosley toured the Western zones of occupation immediately after the surrender and was dismayed to find how quickly the allies were becoming unpopular–a fact that he blamed on the harshness of nonfraternization. Reporting from the Rhineland a month after VE Day, he told his readers that Nazis who had gone underground were regaining hope and forming blocs again, holding secret meetings and giving instructions.¹²

This was the dilemma for the allies. On the one hand, their occupation had to be firm enough to crush the remnants of Nazism and cement the foundation of victory. On the other, if it was too heavy-handed, they risked fomenting resistance. “All large armies of occupation are disastrous,” wrote Francesca Wilson on the strength of her experiences in Bavaria. “They strangle the conquered and demoralise and make helpless the conqueror.”¹³

In the summer of 1945, it remained to be seen how, and if, the allies and the conquered alike would resolve the problem. In June, an allied commission was sent to report on how much coal was available to keep Europe fueled over the coming winter. It returned with a gloom-ridden prediction: there would be such a severe famine, it concluded, that it would threaten basic law and order. As far as Germany was concerned, it said that it might be necessary “to preserve order by shooting.” Before the year had ended, at least one American intelligence report was noting with alarm a growing reluctance to accept the defeat of Germany as final, and a “bold and unashamed veneration of Hitler and National Socialism.”¹⁴

Alongside the resolute denial of responsibility for the catastrophe, anti-Semitism continued its insidious life. In the initial shock over revelations about the death camps, anti-Jewish feeling became muted. Yet only six months after Hitler’s death a survey in the American sector of Germany revealed that, while the majority of those questioned agreed that Hitler’s actions against the Jews were in no way justified, fully a fifth believed that “something had to be done to keep them within bounds.”

Anti-Semitic views even rose in Bavaria. As Francesca Wilson was personally finding out, thousands of Jewish survivors were crowded into dozens of displaced persons camps. Here, just twelve months after Hitler’s death, another survey revealed that almost 60 percent of Bavarians exhibited racist, anti-Semitic or “intense anti-Semitic” views. Not surprisingly, Munich, the birthplace of Nazism, demonstrated the highest percentage of anti-Semitism of any city.¹⁵

But Bavaria was by no means unique. Elsewhere, those who had openly denounced the Jews under Hitler simply donned new clothes and reinvented themselves. One such case was in Eutin, the small and pretty market town in Schleswig-Holstein all too familiar to British commando Bryan Samain. Here, the town’s most outspoken prewar opponent of Hitler, a lawyer named Dr. Ernst Evers, was appointed by the British military authorities as a trustee of sequestered Nazi property, as well as a member of the town’s first post-war council.

Yet Evers’s opposition to the Nazis had sprung from internal rivalries between nationalists on the anti–Weimar Republic right, not from any commitment to liberal democracy. Moreover, as the local chairman of the pre-war German National People’s Party (DNVP)–the party supported by Fey’s father, Ulrich von Hassell–Evers had signed a stridently anti-Semitic declaration of party policy: “The Jew is a problem the world over . . . Entire nations . . . have so far not been able to defend themselves against this race. Thus the entire world is now looking towards Germany to see what form anti-Semitism will take here.” Now, amid the ruins of Hitler’s war, Evers also emerged as cofounder of the Eutin branch of the Christian Democratic Party.¹⁶

In Austria, denial ran as deep, or even deeper. Mostly to kill off any lingering hankerings for the Anschluss, the allies declared the country of Hitler’s birth as the “first victim of Nazism.” This idea was eagerly embraced by the millions of Austrians who only seven years before had welcomed Hitler’s coup with equal enthusiasm.¹⁷ Denying the past also enabled their country to concentrate on securing a future for the new and once-again independent small nation. But on the eve of Potsdam, there was still no fully recognized government in Vienna because Karl Renner’s administration had received approval only from the Soviets.

As for Italy, even as Churchill and Truman were touring Berlin, members of the forty-thousand-strong Majella Brigade, the first Italian partisan formation officially to be recognized by the allies–and the only one ever formally entrusted with holding part of the allied line against the Germans–took part in a stand-down ceremony in the town of Brisighella. As eight hundred partisans marched off from their final parade, soldiers of the British Coldstream and Grenadier Guards shouted, “Viva Italia.”¹⁸

Yet what, in reality, was the future for Italy? In the summer of 1945, this was far from clear. The formation in mid-June of a coalition government under one of the main pillars of the wartime resistance, Ferrucci Parri–for whom Fey von Hassell’s husband, Detalmo, was now working as a private secretary–extinguished the prospect of a partisan insurrection. Outwardly, life was returning to normal. In Rome, the open-air opera season resumed with the reopening of the ruined Baths of Caracalla for a performance of Verdi’s Aida. But, as in Germany, it was by no means a certainty that democracy could survive. Disorder and violence still dominated the north of the country. In mid-July, over thirty partisans being held in one of the city’s prisons escaped with the help of their guards. And a few days later, a trial of partisans accused of several acts of armed aggression, robbery and murder was disrupted when an angry crowd trying to break into the Palace of Justice in Milan smashed down its glass doors before being repelled.

Italy was politically and geographically fragmented and ravaged physically, financially and economically. It was swamped with illegal arms and half a million refugees, while a million Italians had yet to return home after being deported as slave laborers or kept in prisoner-of-war camps. The country, reported the Rome correspondent of The Times, was “at a crisis in her history. Revolted by the results of Fascist rule, the Italian people is clamoring for democracy, with little idea of how to achieve it.”¹⁹ Admiral Ellery Stone, the allied high commissioner after Parri’s government took office, took an even more gloomy and apocalyptic view. “Italy is at the parting of the ways,” he reported. “If present conditions long continue, Communism will triumph–possibly by force.”²⁰ This was alarmist, but it highlighted the uncertain and unstable future now facing Italy.

The Italian popular mood, however, was still one of triumphant anti-Fascism. On Saturday 14 July a huge festival with dancing in the streets of Milan was held in imitation of the Bastille Day events in Paris, while loudspeakers mounted on trucks broadcast the refrain: “Dance, citizens of Milan, it is your day, for Hitler and Mussolini are dead.” Shortly before, a band of anti-Fascists had literally danced on the Italian dictator’s grave in one of the city’s cemeteries. They were accompanied by an accordion and by a woman who stood, legs apart, and urinated contemptuously on the packed earth.

Yet if Mussolini was dead, it quickly became clear that Fascism was not. Less than a year later, over Easter 1946, three neo-Fascists dug up the dictator’s grave and concealed his body in a convent. Only when the authorities agreed to give him a Christian burial was his corpse handed back. The leader of the group was a twenty-six-year-old Fascist militant and journalist who was determined to keep Mussolini’s memory alive and prove that Fascism had survived.

Later that year, after an amnesty was declared for Fascists, a legal Fascist party, the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), was established with the approval of the Ministry of the Interior and the Vatican. The initials MSI, party militants claimed, also stood for “Mussolini Sempre Immortale”–(Mussolini Ever Immortal).²¹

Mussolini had perished, certainly. But what of Hitler? By now, speculation was rife. Following the identification of his dental remains in early May, Red Army officials in Berlin had firmly stated that Hitler was dead. Yet almost immediately their tune changed. Early in June, Marshal Zhukov backtracked and announced to surprised allied correspondents in the German capital that the dictator’s present whereabouts were “unknown.” Hitler and Eva Braun could well have flown out of the city at the last moment, he said. His personal view was that Hitler was in Spain.

This abrupt turnaround was entirely due to Stalin. Through a combination of paranoia and political calculation, the Soviet dictator had quickly convinced himself that Hitler was alive and now in hiding. He told this to President Truman’s personal adviser Harry Hopkins in Moscow in late May, pointing to reports that German U-boats loaded with Nazi gold and other valuables had headed for Japan. He suggested that Hitler might have been on board one of these. The whole thing, he remarked, was “curious.” By this time, a full-scale Soviet disinformation campaign was under way to spread such rumors. Two days after Stalin’s remark to Hopkins, Time magazine published a deliberately planted story that Hitler had escaped on a trolley that ran on tracks beneath Berlin. Other equally far-fetched tales quickly began to surface. One of the most widely believed was that Hitler had fled from Berlin in a small plane bound for Hamburg that took off from the Tiergarten just minutes before Red Army soldiers arrived.

At Potsdam, the Soviet dictator made it all official. Over lunch on the first day, while Truman sat listening at the table, he told the US Secretary of State James F. Byrnes that Hitler was alive and probably living in Spain or Argentina.²² The result was that rumors of Hitler’s escape were universal over the summer of 1945. Even Count Bernadotte was inclined to believe them, and Eisenhower had doubts about the Nazi dictator’s fate. This all played nicely into Stalin’s hands. If he could blame his allies for facilitating Hitler’s escape, so much the better. It morally compromised the West while diverting attention from his own role as Hitler’s partner between 1939 and 1941, which had helped precipitate the war in the first place.

Later in the year, Stalin launched Operation Mif (Myth) to propagate the legend even more thoroughly. Directed by his henchman and fellow Georgian Lavrenti Beria, it kept rumors that Hitler was alive and hiding in the West going at full speed for the next decade or so. Germans who had survived the battle for Berlin seemed especially prone to believing them. Easter Sunday 1946 happened to fall on 20 April, Hitler’s birthday. A British officer curious about the endurance of the myth informally interviewed twenty educated Berliners on the subject. Only one thought that Hitler was dead. “The other nineteen,” reported the officer, “were conscious of the fact that it was their Führer’s birthday. They were convinced he was alive, and spoke of him with anything but reproach. I found also that children, who are usually good guides to the beliefs of adults, almost without exception spoke of Onkel Adolf as a living being.”²³

Claiming that London and Washington were secretly sympathetic to Nazism and sheltering or assisting its war criminals became standard Cold War propaganda. Like all such claims, it benefited from a plausible distortion of a modicum of truth, while conveniently omitting how many former Nazis now served the communists. This Moscow line also proved useful to neo-Nazis, who had their own sinister reasons for keeping the myth of Hitler’s survival alive and well.

However, the fate of other top Nazis was beyond doubt. Within weeks of Potsdam, the prisoners held at Bad Mondorf were brought to trial in Nuremberg before an allied military tribunal. Absent, apart from Hitler himself, was his secretary Martin Bormann, who had disappeared during the last chaotic hours as Red Army soldiers advanced on the Chancellery. Rumors of his survival were also deliberately kept alive, and only ended when his remains were found many years later under ruins in Berlin. Both Himmler and Goebbels had committed suicide. Goering, though, was brought before the court. During the year-long proceedings at Nuremberg, as befitted the man who had so eagerly strutted before the cameras after his capture, he dominated the proceedings, blustering and playing to the gallery, showing no repentance, proudly proclaiming his Nazi ideals, and often running rings around the prosecutors. “Nobody,” wrote one of the British lawyers in his diary, “appears to have been prepared for his immense ability and knowledge and his thorough mastery and understanding of the detail of the captured documents.”²⁴

He was also too wily and determined to permit the hangman to place a noose around his neck. He asked, as a serving officer in the German armed forces, to be executed by firing squad, but the request was flatly refused–hanging was the deliberately undignified death chosen for Hitler’s henchmen. However, throughout his trial, he had managed to keep two poison capsules concealed in his cell. His execution was scheduled for the early hours of 16 October 1946, but just before midnight Goering swallowed one of the pills and was found dead by a guard just minutes later. In one of several letters found in his cell, he made clear his utter lack of remorse or guilt. “Let me stress once more,” it read, “that I feel not the slightest moral or other obligation to submit to a death sentence or execution by my enemies and those of Germany.”²⁵

Others, though, were hanged that morning, starting at 1:11 a.m. After climbing the thirteen shallow steps to the scaffold, the first to be dispatched by John C. Woods, the American hangman, was Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Foreign Minister found by British troops in a Hamburg boarding house. He was followed in sequence by: Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Hitler’s top military adviser; Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Himmler’s SS deputy who had fled to the so-called Alpine Redoubt in the futile hope of saving his skin by fomenting a falling-out between the allies; Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler’s wartime minister for the occupied Eastern Territories; Hans Frank, governor-general of occupied Poland; Wilhelm Frick, Nazi Minister of the Interior, the fervid promoter of the euthanasia program, and successor to the assassinated Reinhard Heydrich as Protector of Bohemia and Moravia; Julius Streicher, the unrepentant anti-Semite who had escaped from Nuremberg just hours before the arrival of the Americans; General Alfred Jodl, chief of staff and operations of the German High Command; Fritz Sauckel, who had directed the armies of slave labor in the Reich; and finally, Artur Seyss-Inquart, whose last-minute retreat from Hitler’s scorched-earth policy failed to redeem his occupation crimes in the Netherlands. His final words before the lever was pulled were: “I believe in Germany.”

By 2:45 a.m., it was all over, and by 4 a.m. their bodies, including that of Hermann Goering, were speeding secretly on their way to a crematorium. The allies were terrified of any kind of shrine or place of pilgrimage for unrepentant Nazis, so had agreed that after cremation the ashes would be secretly scattered. Oddly, however, there is no official record of what happened to them. One deeply held belief is that the bodies were driven to Dachau and cremated in the ovens where thousands of the Nazis’ victims had been consumed by the flames. This would, indeed, have been an appropriate end. So too, however, would another, claimed by one of the biographers of Goering. After being cremated in Munich, Leonard Mosley writes, the ashes were driven into the countryside, where in pouring rain they were simply tipped into a muddy gutter.²⁶

Of the remainder of the top Nazi leaders, Rudolf Hess, one-time close confidant of Hitler and deputy leader of the Nazi Party who had been in prison in Britain for most of the war, was given a life sentence. So were Admiral Erich Raeder, head of Hitler’s navy from 1935 to 1943, and Walter Funk, his minister of economics. Albert Speer–Hitler’s favorite architect, Minister of Armaments and War Production, and a prominent member of the last Nazi government at Flensburg–was given a twenty-year sentence, as was Baldur von Schirach, former Hitler Youth leader and the Gauleiter of wartime Vienna, who alone of the top Nazis had turned himself in. Early in June, after hearing a report of his death on the BBC and of the arrests of several Hitler Youth leaders, the latter had decided he should take the blame for misleading Germany’s youth. Constantin von Neurath, Ribbentrop’s predecessor as Foreign Minister and one-time boss to diplomat Ulrich von Hassell, received fifteen years. Ironically, Admiral Karl Doenitz, head of the last Nazi government, received the lightest prison sentence of all–ten years.

Three of the accused were acquitted: Franz von Papen, Hitler’s deputy chancellor in 1933–34; Hans Fritzsche, head of Goebbels’s radio broadcasting service; and the former Reichsbank president, Hjalmar Schacht, who was furious at having been arrested and charged in the first place. How, he kept asking, could a man imprisoned by the Nazis later be held captive by their enemies? Yet, like too many of his compatriots, he exhibited extraordinary blindness, prejudice and selective amnesia. When someone asked him if he had ever tried to inform himself about the true state of conditions and policies under the Nazis by–for example–listening to the BBC, he dismissed the idea with contempt: “The BBC dealt only in rotten propaganda–Jewish if not in diction in style,” he sniffed, “of the kind no decent German would listen to.”²⁷

After the major trial, several others took place at Nuremberg and elsewhere in Germany, and dozens of lesser disciples of Hitler were either hanged or imprisoned for war crimes, crimes against humanity and other offenses. They included Josef Kramer, the SS commandant at Bergen-Belsen, who was hanged along with eleven others from the camp staff in December 1945. Max Pauly, the commandant at Neuengamme (and previously of Stutthof), the man responsible for sending the several thousand prisoners on the Cap Arcona and the other ships to their deaths, went to the gallows in Hamburg along with ten others in October 1946. Between 1945 and 1948, some five hundred defendants appeared before US military courts for war crimes committed at Dachau, Buchenwald, Flossenburg and Mauthausen, and several death sentences and lengthy terms of imprisonment were handed out.

As for Dachau itself, it served as a DP camp for many years after the war, and is now a museum and memorial site. Belsen was also used to house DPs, while Buchenwald had a sinister after-life as a concentration camp for opponents of the communist regime in the Soviet zone of Germany, including social democrats, liberals and Christian dissidents. Several hundred prisoners there were murdered or died of maltreatment and sickness. It, too, is now a memorial site.

The war crimes trials were not perfect: their sentences were sometimes inconsistent, they were tainted by politics and a small number of war criminals escaped, never to be found. A few even notoriously worked for the intelligence services of both sides during the Cold War. Yet, in 1945, these tribunals provided an essential damning verdict against Nazism. With plenty of evidence that underground Nazis were still active, they were deliberately staged to provide a warning to Germans and others tempted to think that Hitler’s ideology might still have a future. “We have no choice but to fight fire with fire and blood with blood,” pronounced the president of the military court that sentenced the two adolescent boys to death for attacking US troops in the summer of 1945. “You will pay the supreme penalty for your offence, so that Germans will know that we intend to use whatever force is necessary to eradicate completely the blight of German militarism and Nazi ideology from the face of the earth.” ²⁸ The avenging sword of justice, rough-edged though it was, did its work.