Admiral Doenitz and the members of the last German government to fly the swastika flag were arrested at Flensburg on May 23, 1945, and subsequently brought to trial in Nuremberg for war crimes. Germany now came under an occupation government of the Allied powers.
When Arthur Seyss-Inquart joined former Nazi colleagues in court, he failed to impress the judges at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946. While he and other surviving Nazi military and political leaders headed by Reichsmarshall Hermann Goering had been called to account, charged with crimes against humanity, a number—including Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels, SS chief Heinrich Himmler and navy chief Admiral Von Friedeburg—had avoided trial by committing suicide. Seyss-Inquart’s hopes that he would be given credit for facilitating the mercy mission of April–May 1945 that brought thousands of tons of food into occupied Holland by air, sea and road were misplaced. He was given only the briefest opportunity to mention the matter, and the court was uninterested in his claim that he had attempted to mitigate the excesses of the SS and SD in Holland throughout his time as governor. Seyss-Inquart was found not guilty of conspiracy to commit crimes against humanity, but he was convicted on all three of the other counts that he faced—Crimes against Peace, War Crimes, and Crimes against Humanity. Like Goering and many of the other surviving Nazi leaders, Seyss-Inquart was sentenced to hang.
Seyss-Inquart was rated second most intelligent of all the Nuremberg defendants by prison psychologist Dr. Gustave Gilbert, who gave Seyss-Inquart an IQ of 141 on tests he conducted with all the defendants. Seyss-Inquart was smart enough to know what was coming and accepted his fate after his sentence was handed down. “Well, in view of the situation,” he said to Gilbert shortly afterward, “I never expected anything different.”1
Hermann Goering, the most senior of the Nazi defendants at Nuremberg—Luftwaffe chief, former deputy to Hitler and at one time in charge of the German economy—cheated the hangman by taking poison concealed in his cell the night before he was due to be hanged. But Seyss-Inquart and nine other convicted Nazi war criminals, a mixture of generals and government ministers and administrators, were duly hanged on October 16, 1946, a little over two weeks after the death sentences were handed down, in the gymnasium of the Palace of Justice building at Nuremberg where they had been tried.
The bodies of Seyss-Inquart and the other Nazis executed that day were placed in plain coffins, each labeled with a false name. One was given a Jewish name, to the amusement of the troops carrying out the gruesome work. The coffins were then loaded into trucks and driven under high security to the Eastern Cemetery in Munich, where all of the bodies were cremated. The ashes of the war criminals were then taken secretly to a bridge over the Isar River, where they were scattered into the waters below so that no repository for their remains could ever become a shrine for Nazism or neo-Nazis.
Former Nazi armaments minister Albert Speer, with whom Seyss-Inquart had consulted in April 1945 about how to react to Hitler’s scorched-earth order, was treated more leniently by the Nuremberg tribunal, being sentenced only to twenty years’ imprisonment. Released in 1966, he wrote a memoir that became an international best seller. Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz, U-boat and German navy chief and Hitler’s brief successor as Germany’s head of state, was sentenced to just ten years in prison, being released in 1956.
German-born Prince Bernhard was extremely popular with the Dutch in the years immediately following the war, even more so once his wife became Queen Juliana in 1948 on the abdication of her long-serving mother, Queen Wilhelmina. In 1946 Bernhard was appointed inspector general of the Dutch navy, in addition to his role as inspector general of the army. In 1953 the Dutch air force was added to his area of responsibility, with his title changing to that of all-encompassing inspector general of the armed forces. Following the war he also became heavily involved in business, sitting on the boards of scores of corporations, including KLM Royal Dutch Airlines and Fokker Aircraft. In 1961 he cofounded the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), which was later renamed the World Wide Fund for Nature. The prince served as the WWF’s first president.
Bernhard’s younger brother, Aschwin, who had served on the German side during the war, survived the conflict and in 1949 settled in the United States, joining the staff of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art as an expert in Chinese art and remaining with the museum until his retirement in 1973. After he developed Parkinson’s disease, Aschwin was encouraged by Bernhard to resettle in Holland, which he did, dying in The Hague in 1988.
Bernhard was involved in several postwar scandals that soiled his reputation. One, in the mid-1950s, involved a manipulative spiritualist and faith healer, Greet Hofmans, whom Bernhard’s wife, Queen Juliana, made her close confidante for nine years. So much did she come to rely on Hofmans for advice on all matters, the queen even allowed her to live at the royal palace. Considering Hofmans to have an improper influence over the queen, Bernhard sought the involvement of the government of the day, which set up a commission of inquiry headed by former prime minister Pieter Gerbrandy. That commission agreed with Bernhard’s view of Hofmans, and the Dutch government had the woman officially banished from the Netherlands. Needless to say, this had a severely detrimental effect on the royal marriage, and it was not a surprise to many commentators when it later came out that Bernhard had fathered at least two illegitimate children during his marriage (born in 1952 and 1967).
There was worse to come. In 1976, it was revealed that Bernhard, as inspector general of the armed forces of the Netherlands, had accepted bribes of more than $1 million from the Lockheed Corporation in the United States. Bernhard later claimed that the money all went to the WWF. The scandal forced the prince to resign as inspector general and to step down from his board positions. The long-lasting scandal was also believed to have influenced Queen Juliana’s decision to abdicate the Dutch throne in favor of her daughter Beatrix in 1980. Bernhard lived to the age of 93, dying in 2004. For all his adventures, and scandals, Bernhard was nonetheless much respected by the Dutch for his role during the Second World War. Despite the likelihood that he had been a German agent in Paris in the 1930s, everything points to Bernhard’s having been genuine about becoming a Dutchman once he married Juliana, and all his activities and energies seem to have been directed to helping the Dutch in occupied Holland in 1944–45 for all the right reasons, even though he clearly lied to hide his Nazi past.
It is difficult to know whether Operations Chowhound and Manna would have gone ahead without Bernhard’s nonstop attempts to push the Allied political and military leadership into committing to the mission. Certainly, the greatest praise should be reserved for Dwight Eisenhower, who drove the air-drop operations forward when his own superior, General Marshall, was clearly holding back on the idea and worrying about the Russian reaction. But there can be no doubt that Bernhard’s earnest and tireless advocacy of aid for the starving Dutch gave Eisenhower the gumption to push ahead with the operation. And, as Andrew Geddes said, the efficient distribution of the food aid once it hit the ground was attributable in great measure to Bernhard. Perhaps, without Bernhard, Chowhound and Manna would still have gone ahead. Perhaps not. Or maybe, without Bernhard, the food drops would have come days later—too late for the very young and the very old in occupied Holland.
What no one in Holland disputes to this day is the psychological and physical impact that the Hunger Winter of 1944–45 had on the Dutch people. According to a Dutch government report presented at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946, an estimated 25,000 Dutch died from malnutrition through that winter—a figure with which Seyss-Inquart agreed at his trial. Meanwhile, more than 200,000 men, women and children suffered from hunger edema in occupied Holland. General Alexander Galloway, commander of the Holland District, was to say in a careful and considered report to his superiors shortly after the liberation, “The average loss of weight is over forty pounds. Half of the population in the big cities suffers from undernourishment. Fifteen percent lives at the brink of starvation. Only thirty-five percent is reasonably healthy.”2
Many survivors of the occupation, such as Audrey Hepburn, would suffer physically and emotionally for the rest of their days. Some among the millions of affected Dutch would, like Audrey, eat like birds. Others would become compulsive eaters, consuming everything that was put in front of them—in case there was no food the next day, as had often been the case during the Hunger Winter. Others, until their dying day, would habitually hoard food, just in case the bad times returned. None would forget the Hunger Winter—or the food raining from the skies that signaled its end.
Between April 28 and May 4, 1985, the fortieth anniversary of Operations Chowhound and Manna was remembered in Holland with week-long celebrations and the unveiling of a special monument dedicated to all involved. Many former aircrew who had flown the mercy flights from a variety of nations, including the United States, Canada and Britain, were present for the commemoration. A number of those who had flown the missions only discovered the vast scope of Chowhound and Manna at those celebrations. “The Dutch people remembered so vividly after forty years,” said a surprised Ellis B. Scripture, who was one of the Chowhound veterans to attend. “That visit to Holland will be the highlight in the lives of all the veterans and their wives for all time. None of us privileged to be present had ever seen such a display of genuine emotion and great national pride as we witnessed during that memorable week.”3 There was a similar commemoration in Holland in 2010, by which time many of the veterans, including Scripture and Grif Mumford, had passed away.