IN APRIL 1945, A prominent American journalist wrote a story for Collier’s magazine describing a series of conversations with ordinary Germans at the end of Nazi rule. Martha Gellhorn was a veteran war correspondent who had spent six years penning dispatches from the front lines. An elegant chain-smoker who customarily dressed for battle in her Saks Fifth Avenue best, she had long made a point of avoiding the honeyed lies of generals in favor of the plain, unvarnished words of soldiers. She hungered for the truth, and on D-Day, she braved enemy fire to walk upon the beaches of Normandy, while her famous husband—fellow war correspondent Ernest Hemingway—contented himself with what he could see from the bridge of a landing craft.
In the spring of 1945, Gellhorn had traveled with American forces as they pushed their way into Germany’s Ruhr Valley. En route, she had chatted daily with German citizens she encountered. She was stunned by what she heard. Not one person she met would confess to being a Nazi. No one, moreover, would admit to knowing any Nazis, past or present. And no one she talked to had a bad word to say against the Jews. On the contrary, nearly everyone had a story about saving a Jewish neighbor or acquaintance from the camps. Gellhorn was deeply dismayed: she heard the same lies over and over again in a terrible refrain. “I hid a Jew for six weeks. I hid a Jew for eight weeks. (I hid a Jew, he hid a Jew, all God’s chillun hid Jews.) We have nothing against the Jews; we always got along well with them.”1
This seeming amnesia distressed the plainspoken writer. She had traveled to Germany in the early years of the Third Reich with a group of French pacifists and seen for herself the feverish worship of Hitler and the country’s appalling depths of anti-Semitism. And in the spring of 1945, she found it disturbing that no one she talked to was prepared to own up to the past or admit the terrible error of Nazism, much less shoulder any of the blame for the war that had destroyed much of Europe. “To see a whole nation passing the buck,” she observed, “is not an enlightening spectacle.”2
Such brazen attempts to conceal the past posed a serious problem for Allied forces intent on bringing Nazi war criminals to justice and rebuilding democratic institutions in Germany. Nazism had deliberately cultivated a culture of lies, equivocation, and fantasy, and at Potsdam in July 1945, Allied leaders agreed that the occupation forces had to publicly expose the errors and crimes of the former regime in order to convince the German people “that they cannot escape responsibility for what they have brought on themselves.”3 To succeed in this, the Allies had to denazify Germany. They had to eradicate the Nazi party and root out Nazism from the German courts, press, and schools. First, however, they had to bring all those guilty of war crimes to justice, beginning with the most senior offenders.
To try the accused, the four major Allied powers established an international military tribunal at Nuremberg, a city replete with symbolism. Before the war, Hitler had presided over annual Nazi party rallies and mass parades each year at Zeppelin Field in Nuremberg, and it was at one of these rallies that party officials had enacted the Nazis’ notorious racial legislation, the Nuremberg Laws. In preparation for the trials, the tribunal’s document division set to work in the city’s Palace of Justice, sorting through the towering piles of government records in search of evidence. The sheer quantity of documentation was overwhelming, but on November 14, 1945, guards led twenty-two of the Nazi regime’s senior leaders—from Hermann Göring and Joachim von Ribbentrop, the former foreign minister, to Julius Streicher, the former publisher of the anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer, and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the former head of the Reich Security Office—into the courtroom.
Over the next eleven months, as reporters from around the world flocked to cover the trial, American investigators began preparing for twelve more major prosecutions of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg. Top on the docket was the Medical Case. Investigators had uncovered shocking evidence of the complicity of senior German doctors in Nazi atrocities committed in mental hospitals and concentration camps. Some of the most chilling evidence came from a thick sheaf of documents describing the Ahnenerbe’s skeleton collection and medical experiments.
AMERICAN AUTHORITIES HAD discovered the Ahnenerbe files in a dark cave near the small Bavarian village of Pottenstein. In the final weeks of the war, Wolfram Sievers had resolved to save documents concerning some of the Ahnenerbe’s atrocities, hoping, it seems, that the researchers could one day pick up where they had left off. On the advice of a cave expert, Sievers had decided to conceal them and many other Ahnenerbe records in a cave known as Kleines Teufelsloch, or Little Devil’s Hole, which was situated near the neighboring village of Pottenstein.4 He obtained a crew of concentration-camp prisoners to transport the boxes, and he saw to it that the records were safely stowed behind the blast rubble in the cave.5 Then he and his assistant, Wolf-Dietrich Wolff, set off from Waischenfeld to join a nearby SS detachment.
On April 14, 1945, the first American tanks appeared in Waischenfeld. A young villager on a bicycle came out to greet them, waving a white flag. Most of the locals had fled, so the troops moved into the official-looking Steinhaus, turning it into a temporary administrative center. Soon after, they received a tip-off about Nazi files hidden in the Little Devil’s Hole. A small detachment of American troops went out to retrieve them. The boxes contained many thousands of Ahnenerbe documents—letters, personnel records, memoranda, orders, maps, handwritten notes, and official reports, some clearly stamped Geheim, or “secret.” They recorded in minute detail the war crimes of the Ahnenerbe—the greedy plundering of museums and private art collections from Poland to the Caucasus; the cold brutality of human medical experiments at Natzweiler and Dachau; and the conspiracy to murder Jewish concentration-camp prisoners for their skeletons.
By this time Sievers had returned to Waischenfeld in hopes of seeing his family. He hid in a village barn for a few days, where he was spotted by some of the local inhabitants. They had never much liked Sievers’s high-handed manners, nor the way he had paraded through town in his SS uniform, so they reported him to the new authorities. On May 1, an American patrol captured him and took him into custody. Impressed by his high rank as an SS-Standartenführer, they photographed him, asked him some preliminary questions, then shipped him off to nearby Bamberg for a brief hearing.6 Soon after that, Allied investigators dispatched him to an internment camp in England.
Over the next eighteen months, American intelligence officers pored over the captured documents, studying their contents and selecting correspondence of evidentiary value. A team of translators then rendered into English clinical reports of freezing experiments, mustard-gas tests, and skeleton collections, and passed the finished documents on to the team of prosecutors, who were stunned by what they read. “Their own reports illustrated with pictures are far better than any of the studies we have compiled on the persecution of Jews, crimes against humanity, etc.,” noted one prosecutor. “The Germans certainly believed in putting everything in writing.”7
With such detailed evidence before them, prosecutors charted the senior chain of command responsible for the Ahnenerbe’s atrocities at Natzweiler and Dachau. They were particularly interested in four of the Ahnenerbe’s staff: Walther Wüst, the superintendent; Sievers, the director of the Institute for Military Scientific Research and the official who had directly overseen the experiments; and the institute’s two senior researchers, Dr. August Hirt and Dr. Sigmund Rascher.
The two physicians, however, lay well beyond the reach of the Allies’ justice. In February 1945, just shortly before the war ended, German police had arrested Rascher for his role in a bizarre child-abduction scheme. According to the original investigators, Rascher’s wife Nini had kidnapped a series of infants after discovering that she was unable to conceive children of her own.8 Rascher himself had gone along with the scheme, proudly representing three of the stolen babies as his own newborn sons to Himmler. But in 1944, Munich investigators uncovered the truth. When Himmler learned of the deception, he sent Nini Rascher to Ravensbrück concentration camp and eventually dispatched her husband to Dachau, the camp where Rascher had once reveled in conducting his experiments. Just a few short days before American forces liberated Dachau, an SS officer shot and killed the physician in his cell.9
Hirt was similarly unavailable. In February 1945, he had suddenly left his office in Tubingen and journeyed secretly to the Black Forest. There he cached food and hid out in a hut in the woods. From time to time, he slipped down to a local farm, hungry for news of the war, until the farm’s inhabitants eventually invited him to stay. And it was there that Hirt heard the news of Germany’s surrender. Fearing arrest by the Allies, he borrowed a pistol from the farmer, then returned to the forest. He shot himself on June 2, 1945. The farmer who had sheltered him recovered his body and reported the death to authorities.10
That left the Nuremberg prosecutors with just two senior Nazi officials to try for the Ahnenerbe’s atrocities—Wüst, the scholar who had overseen all of the Ahnenerbe’s scientific research, and Sievers, the organization’s managing director. But in all the thick files of Ahnenerbe correspondence, they could find little clear evidence of Wüst’s complicity in the experiments. They regretfully struck his name from their list. That left them with just one senior official: Sievers.
ON DECEMBER 9, 1946, twenty-three defendants dressed in civilian clothes and military uniforms carefully stripped of all badges of rank filed into a courtroom in Nuremberg. Taking their places along two long wooden benches, they listened in silence to the charges laid against them. Twenty of the defendants were medical doctors accused of war crimes ranging from planning the mass murder of the mentally handicapped and others deemed “unworthy of life” to forcibly performing medical experiments on concentration-camp prisoners. The remaining three were Nazi officials.11 Sievers numbered among them. Prosecutors had indicted him on four counts, including unlawfully, willfully, and knowingly committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. The indictment specifically detailed his role in aiding and abetting the skeleton collection and the human medical experiments at Dachau and Natzweiler.
The chief of counsel, Brigadier General Telford Taylor, outlined the critical importance of the trial in his opening statement:
The defendants in the dock are charged with murder, but this is no mere murder trial. We cannot rest content when we have shown that crimes were committed and that certain people committed them. To kill, to maim, and to torture is criminal under all modern systems of law. These defendants did not kill in hot blood, nor for personal enrichment. Some of them may be sadists who killed and tortured for sport, but they are not all perverts. They are not ignorant men. Most of them are trained physicians and some of them are distinguished scientists. Yet these defendants, all of whom were fully able to comprehend the nature of their acts, and most of whom were exceptionally qualified to form a moral and professional judgment in this respect, are responsible for wholesale murder and unspeakably cruel tortures.
It is our deep obligation to all peoples of the world to show why and how these things happened. It is incumbent upon us to set forth with conspicuous clarity the ideas and motives which moved these defendants to treat their fellow men as less than beasts …
This case and others which will be tried in this building, offer a signal opportunity to lay before the German people the true cause of their present misery. The walls and towers and churches of Nuremberg were, indeed, reduced to rubble by Allied bombs, but in a deeper sense Nuremberg had been destroyed a decade earlier, when it became the seat of the annual Nazi Party rallies, a focal point for the moral disintegration of Germany, and the private domain of Julius Streicher. The insane and malignant doctrines that Nuremberg spewed forth account alike for the crimes of these defendants and for the terrible fate of Germany under the Third Reich.12
Over the next nine months, the tribunal examined nearly fifteen hundred documents and listened to the nightmarish testimony of sixty-two witnesses, many of whom recounted in hideous detail the experiments performed on prisoners in German concentration camps. Throughout the trial, Sievers sat impassively on the defendants’ bench. On the witness stand, he insisted that he was innocent of all crimes. “I always tried to prevent the Ahnenerbe from becoming involved in medical research,” he asserted under oath.13
In the evenings in a small six-foot-by-twelve-foot cell at Nuremberg, Sievers taught himself English and French and read widely.14 He reassured his wife that he would be released when all the facts of his case were made public.15 He based this belief on a bizarre set of circumstances. Since 1929, he had enjoyed a close personal relationship with Dr. Friedrich Hielscher, the leader of a secret resistance group that had fought Nazism in Germany.16 Indeed, Sievers declared, Hielscher had recruited him as a member of the group, and during the ten years that he had served as the managing director of the Ahnenerbe, he had led a double life, covertly supplying information to the resistance fighters.
Hielscher was an immensely complex, charismatic man, a bisexual who seems to have once written love poetry to Sievers.17 He agreed to testify on Sievers’s behalf and took the stand on April 15, 1947. Under oath, he explained that he had sent Sievers to work for Herman Wirth in April 1932, believing that Wirth was a rising star in the Nazi firmament.18 He also testified that he had later encouraged Sievers to join the Ahnenerbe as a Trojan horse, so that he could funnel secret information from SS and police contacts to the resistance group and eventually help assassinate Himmler.
Hielscher then recounted some of Sievers’s successes as a resistance worker. He had, Hielscher testified, passed on vital information about the movements of the Waffen-SS during the war. In addition, he had assisted several prominent people to elude arrest and imprisonment by the Gestapo. These included the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr. Moreover, he had proven to be such a valuable asset to the resistance group that Hielscher had insisted that Sievers keep his post at the Ahnenerbe even after the medical experiments began. Sievers had been desperate to quit, Hielscher claimed. And in the summer of 1944, the two men had plotted an assassination attempt on Himmler, which had unfortunately come to naught.
Hielscher, however, could produce little evidence for these remarkable assertions, and it later emerged that he had greatly exaggerated the truth.19 He was very fond of Sievers and owed the Nazi official a large debt of gratitude. Sievers had obtained his release from a Gestapo prison during the war and Hielscher clearly wanted to return the favor. While Sievers had supplied some of Hielscher’s group with travel documents, and had even allowed them to meet from time to time in the Ahnenerbe offices—a cooperativeness that likely arose from his old sense of loyalty to Hielscher—most of the witness’s other claims were fictional.20 Sievers played no part in Bohr’s escape.21 And he and Hielscher had never conspired to assassinate Himmler.
The truth was far more sinister. While Sievers had assisted a minor resistance group from time to time, ladling out small favors in order to impress an old friend, he had planned and organized some of the most heinous crimes of the war, and served as a very lethal instrument of the Nazi state. He was, as the prosecution concluded in its final statement, “an unresisting member of a so-called resistance group.”22
On August 21, 1947, the tribunal judges handed down their verdict: they pronounced Sievers guilty on all four counts. Soon after, they sentenced him to death. Ten months later, Sievers climbed the stairs of the gallows in the courtyard of Landsberg Prison, only a few paces away from where Hitler had written the first volume of Mein Kampf.