The problem of what to do with the leader of all the Nazis, the Führer, had been solved for the Allies by Hitler himself. He was dead. Not that the Allies could be certain – no identifiable body was found. A British Intelligence officer and historian, Hugh Trevor-Roper, was detailed to investigate the story of Hitler’s last days and to cross-examine witnesses before there could be any confidence that Hitler had not escaped and gone into hiding. His report deducing that Hitler was indeed dead was submitted on 1 November 1945. What was known meanwhile was that on 1 May, Hamburg Radio interrupted a performance of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony. There was a role of drums, followed by a solemn announcement: Hitler ‘fighting to the last breath against Bolshevism, fell for Germany this afternoon in his operational headquarters in the Reich Chancellery’.
Not surprisingly in a radio service controlled by Dr Goebbels, this brief announcement was a tissue of lies and evasions. Hitler had in fact died the previous afternoon; he had not been killed in his last fight, he had committed suicide. Bolshevism had not been his only enemy; the Russians had indeed reached Berlin, but their allies were in occupation of much of the rest of the country. Nor did he die for Germany, or at least not for the German people. He had come to hate them and blame them for military defeat. In revenge for what Hitler regarded as their betrayal he had given orders in March for the total destruction of all military, industrial and communications installations, all means of transport. When Albert Speer protested that this order would destroy the basis of existence for the nation, the Führer told him: ‘If the war is lost the nation will also perish . . . Besides those who remain after the battle are only the inferior ones, for the good have been killed.’ It is doubtful that Hitler had proved himself to be either superior or good by shooting himself through the mouth in his bunker in the Reich Chancellery.
Those who had been closest to him in the final weeks and shared his delusions of victory while Germany outside the bunker was bombed and shelled to ruins would have come top on anyone’s list of criminal Nazi leaders in 1945. Dr Goebbels, however, was certainly dead. He had marketed Hitler as the saviour of Germany, used his oratory and theatrical flair to foist Nazism on Germany, deployed the media and his own venom to incite the people to hatred of Jews, Slavs, Marxists and Christians, then screamed at them his fantasy that the Allies would split and be defeated. On the day after Hitler’s death, Goebbels poisoned his own six children, then he and his wife were shot, on his instructions, by an SS orderly. Some time before his death he had commented: ‘We shall go down in history as the greatest statesmen of all time, or as the greatest criminals.’ History has put Goebbels in the latter class.
By the time Berlin fell it was probable that Heinrich Müller, the former head of the Gestapo, and director of the extermination of the Jews, was dead. He had shared the final madness in the Führer’s bunker and was last seen there on 28 April. Thereafter he disappeared. His burial was recorded on 17 May, but when the body was finally exhumed it could not be identified. Given the lack of certainty, rumours flew about Müller. Some said he had defected to the East, others that he had been seen in South America. The public imagination was to be titillated for years by similar unsubstantiated reports of the reappearance of Martin Bormann. Bormann had been Hitler’s private secretary and Head of the Party Chancellery. His posts had given him unparalleled knowledge and power: control over Party finances and appointments, control over what documents Hitler saw and who had access to him. Bormann had the Führer’s total trust; by 1942 he was virtually his Deputy. He was hated and feared by everyone else.
When the Allied authorities started looking for Bormann in May 1945, most reports suggested he was dead. But how he died remained a mystery. He had left the bunker on 30 April. One witness swore he had then committed suicide and that his body had been seen in Berlin; another, Hitler’s chauffeur, claimed to have seen him killed by a Russian anti-tank shell as both men sheltered either side of a German tank trying to break through the Russian lines.
There were no such doubts about the fate of Heinrich Himmler, the man who had developed the SS from a bodyguard for Hitler of 200 men into a state within the state, controlling all police, concentration camps, and the Waffen-SS to rival the Wehrmacht. Himmler had died before many witnesses. He alone of Hitler’s inner circle had admitted the reality of defeat. His only hope was to save his skin. He abandoned Hitler and Berlin, tried to start peace negotiations with the Allies, hoped to curry favour by calling off the slaughter of the Jews. Hitler had denounced him in his last will and testament and stripped him of all offices. Once Germany surrendered, Himmler made pathetically feeble attempts to go to ground – he shaved off his moustache, wore a patch over one eye. But while he was trying to work through Allied lines into Bavaria on 3 May he was captured at a British control point. He remained at a British interrogation centre for several weeks without being recognized until he seemed to lose patience with his captors and decided to announce his identity. Soon afterwards Himmler bit on the cyanide capsule in his mouth and died.
The disappearance from the scene of the major figures still left a long list of Nazi leaders whom the Allies wished to capture and treat as war criminals. Few of them were found in Berlin; most had fled the city long since, while it was still possible to escape from the Russians.
Walther Funk, the president of the Reichsbank from 1939 and former Minister of Economics, was found there, though. An early interrogation report described him as ‘a tubby homosexual suffering from diabetes, and afflicted at the moment with bladder pains.’ (1) When he was moved to internment in Baden-Baden, Funk lived up to his name – sweating furiously and scared to death of his interrogator. (2) In Berlin too was Admiral Raeder, the commander-in-chief of the German Navy until 1943. He was captured by the Russians and kept under close house arrest. They moved to Moscow however, Hans Fritzsche – a subordinate of Goebbels at the Propaganda Ministry. His broadcasts during the War had earned him the title of ‘His Master’s Voice’. Since the Russians could not take Goebbels prisoner, they had to rest content with his dog. They put Fritzsche in the Lubianka prison and for the next few months gave him the customary Russian treatment for prisoners: deprivation of sleep, intensive interrogation, and standardized confessions to sign. (3)
There was no difficulty in finding one group of suspects on the Allied lists. They were known to have formed a new government under Admiral Doenitz at Flensburg in Schleswig-Holstein, near the Danish border. Hitler had named Doenitz as his successor in his will. This cabinet had no illusions about escaping military defeat; they defined their main task as staving off surrender while they pulled back as much as possible of the Germany Army and the civilian population in the East to save them from the Russians. They had sent Admiral Hans von Friedeburg and General Jodl to General Eisenhower’s headquarters in Rheims to stall, but within a week of taking office Doenitz had been obliged to accept unconditional surrender.
Even so, visitors to Flensburg then witnessed a ludicrous example of the muddle of Allied policy at the end of the War. Though the Allies occupied the city, though German sovereignty had been signed away, for a further fortnight Doenitz’s skeleton government still gave the impression of functioning. Every morning its members held cabinet meetings and solemnly discussed and voted on plans they had no power to implement. When J.K. Galbraith, the American economist, arrived there on 19 May as part of the American team investigating the effects of Allied heavy bombing of Germany, he boggled at the sight of the Allied officers scrupulously saluting German officers who were milling about the streets supervising the massive influx of their troops returning from Denmark and the east. When Galbraith’s survey team drove out of the town, they had to stop twice at German military control posts before reaching the moated schloss where Albert Speer was in residence and at leisure after cabinet meetings to help them with their investigations. The schloss and the minister were guarded by an SS detachment. The Americans reached the conclusion that the Allied authorities simply could not work out the correct protocol for taking the surrender of a government that had ceased to exist in consequence of its unconditional surrender. So for the moment they were leaving it some trappings while acting elsewhere as if it did not exist. Speer wished it did not. He suggested to Galbraith and his colleagues that they ‘arrest him and so spare him this opéra bouffe’ which with some pride in his mastery of the American idiom he called ‘Grade B Warner Brothers.’ (4)
The last act of the opéra bouffe was finally performed on the morning of 23 May. Galbraith stood on the upper deck of the Hamburg-America line vessel the Patria and watched Admirals Doenitz and Friedeburg as they ‘came smartly along the quay, saluted the ship and flag and marched up the gangplank’ to surrender the final tattered remnant of the Third Reich.
The capitulation of the Doenitz government resulted in the arrest of all its members; among them several of those who were to end in the dock at Nuremberg: Doenitz himself, Jodl, Speer, and Keitel who had previously escaped arrest by the Russians when he refused their pressing invitation to stay in Berlin when he took them a draft surrender.
Lurking in Flensburg was someone who had been refused a post in the Doenitz cabinet – Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi ideologue, Party member before Hitler, once the supreme authority in the Eastern Occupied Territories captured from the Russians, and Goering’s greatest rival as an art looter. His books had been the bibles of the doctrine of Aryan racial superiority. He would only allow them to be translated into the suitably ‘Aryan’ Scandinavian and Baltic languages (the Baltic states had to be Aryan – that was where Rosenberg himself was born). An interrogation report said that Rosenberg’s books had ‘assured him a place among the more unintelligible prophets’ but the interrogator complained: ‘It would take time and patience for an ordinary mortal to get a footing in the world of Alfred Rosenberg.’ (5) He had been found by British soldiers, who were actually searching for Himmler, in a hospital where he was recovering from a sprained ankle – the result of a drinking bout in which he had been drowning his sorrows, or his panic.
As panic had gripped so many of the Nazi leaders in the final weeks of the War, they had scattered – hoping to lie low, hoping above all to escape the Russians from whom they expected short shrift or a lingering death in a prisoner-of-war camp in the coming winter. It was a daunting task to track down those listed as major war criminals. For a start the Allied forces had so many other problems to tackle. Their military duties did not cease with Germany’s formal surrender: they were still on alert in case fanatics tried to continue the fight and they had to bring in and install the equipment needed for military occupation. Furthermore, the forces were now responsible for the entire administration of the country. That was a frightening challenge. The country was divided into Four Zones under each of the four major Powers. In the British zone alone there were something like a million wounded Germans, a million and a half prisoners-of-war, up to a million foreign workers who were unwilling or unable to go home. The occupying forces had to keep law and order, decide whether to shelter and feed the population which, thanks to the fighting, was now huddled in the ruins of cities and, thanks to the destruction of transport, virtually unable to obtain food unless the Allies provided it. They had to repair or construct from scratch basic services – water, electricity, sewage. They had to establish institutions for running their own Zones and coordinating with the others. Given the plight of Germany and the complexity of the problems the Allies faced, war criminals might well seem a secondary priority.
The physical problems of going out to find them were acute. Ivone Kirkpatrick, the newly-appointed British Political Adviser to General Eisenhower, witnessed some of them when he struggled to drive from British headquarters at Bad Oeynhausen to Frankfurt. “Everything which modern man considers necessary to the maintenance of life in a civilized society had disappeared,’ he wrote. “There was no government authority, no police. No trains, trams or cars; no factories working, no postal service, no telephones, no newspapers, no banks. No shop was open and it would have been impossible to buy a loaf of bread, a glass of beer or an aspirin. Every bridge was blown and the available rolling stock could be seen marooned between the ruins . . . In the countryside the sudden departure of the foreign labourers had halted agricultural work . . . The only sign of life was provided by hundreds of thousands of Germans on foot, trekking in all directions.’ (6)
Somewhere among those miserable crowds on the roads might be the leading Nazi war criminals. Where should anyone start looking for them when half the population seemed to be constantly on the move? The UNWCC lists gave the last known addresses of suspects – sometimes it was that of the official residence in Berlin, now deserted; sometimes it was that of the old home, not lived in for years, thanks to the exigencies of official life and the war. The military went to the addresses they had been given – time and again all they found was a pile of rubble. They looked too in their prisoner-of-war and internment camps. Sometimes they found they already held wanted men; sometimes prisoners gave them information on likely whereabouts. Given the vast number of such camps, not just in the Four Zones of Germany but in Austria and the liberated countries, all of which were constantly receiving new inmates, checking them was time consuming and frustrating. There was too little communication between the searchers and with the authorities who might hold their prey; up-to-date intelligence circulated haphazardly if at all. Under these circumstances it is hardly surprising that the roundup of many leading Nazi war criminals took months. It is amazing that they were found at all. Tip-offs, folly and fluke were as important as skill and determination in running them to ground.
One of those who evaded capture longest was Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s Foreign Minister. He was arrested by the British on 14 June in Hamburg where he had been denounced by an acquaintance from his former days as a champagne salesman. He was discovered in bed in pink and white pyjamas. A medical examination revealed a small tin of poison taped to ‘the lower part of his body’. (7) Clearly he did not expect to have to use it for when he was escorted from his flat he was carefully carrying a letter addressed to ‘Montgommery’ and asking for an interview with ‘Mr Vincent Churchill’ (sic). No doubt he hoped to show the British Prime Minister the paper he had been working on dealing with Hitler’s purported last wishes relating to German friendship with Britain. Churchill seems to have been anxious to prevent Russian suspicion of Western collusion with the last remnants of the dying Hitler regime. He immediately forwarded a copy of the Ribbentrop paper to Stalin, adding characteristically: ‘I thought you might be interested in some of its contents, though it is extremely lengthy and dull.’ (8)
The man Ribbentrop had succeeded as Ambassador to London and as Foreign Minister, Baron Constantin Neurath, was captured by the French. The Canadians caught Arthur Seyss-Inquart, who for four days had once been the Chancellor of Austria, but more recently had been Reichsprotektor of Holland.
Fritz Sauckel, who had run the Nazi forced labour schemes and been Governor of Thuringia, was unmasked by a young Austrian improbably called Rudolf Ripper. When Edgar Snow, the American journalist, snatched a brief interview with Sauckel in an internment camp, he found him at first ‘a dark little man, sullen and suspicious’. Sauckel soon became a little more relaxed and assured Snow that Hitler had understood the problems of unemployment, Jewish profiteering and the Red menace, and that Nazism had been supported by the entire nation – ‘only a few troublemakers opposed us’. He strenuously maintained that few people had been murdered by the regime, though ‘some enemies of the State had to be eliminated, of course’, and that all his foreign workers had been volunteers – they were so much better off in Germany than at home. Concentration camps? Sauckel himself had inspected them; he could promise Snow that they were models of hygiene and health. Having reviewed with some pride the achievements of the regime he had served, Sauckel suddenly broke into lachrymose bewilderment. ‘For two days now I have been kept here, and again and again I have asked myself why? Why? I swear by God that I am an innocent man who wronged no one. My only crime is that I loved Germany.’ Here Snow noted that Sauckel’s eyes filled with tears. ‘I love the German working people. Do you understand? I married a working woman, a good woman. She served me well. She gave me ten children – a good German wife.’ (9)
Others carried off arrest and detention with rather more aplomb and style than Sauckel. Franz von Papen, Reich Chancellor in 1932, who had negotiated the appointment of Hitler as Chancellor of Germany in 1933, and then served as his Deputy Chancellor before going as ambassador to Vienna at the time of the Anschluss, was run to ground by an American platoon in Westphalia. Papen had been constantly on the run since leaving his embassy in Turkey in August 1944, fearing arrest first by the Gestapo, then by the Allies. As he told the story, the Americans found him eating stew with his grandchildren in a lodge in the woods where he was living with his daughter. Papen asked them to sit and wait while he packed a few things in a rucksack. (10) A few Nazis had the forethought to pack sensibly at the moment of arrest, and they were to be grateful for it in the coming months. Many did not – according to temperament they either expected instant execution or immediate release. Changes of underwear, a spare shirt, warm woollens for the winter did not seem a major priority.
Papen’s arrest caused consternation at the Foreign Office. It raised in far more acute form than Ribbentrop’s the danger of Soviet misinterpretation of his presence behind Western lines. ‘I cannot imagine a more unwelcome prisoner,’ wrote a Foreign Office official. ‘More peace feelers have been associated with his name than almost any other prominent German.’ (11) The Foreign Office moved fast to head off any possible Allied misunderstandings. Within six days of his detention, Papen found himself at Eisenhower’s headquarters facing the senior British and American military intelligence chiefs in Europe – and two Soviet generals. He told them little of any military or political significance, but demonstrated an amazing self-confidence. ‘He was extremely well-dressed, beautiful silk suit etc., and it was clear that he had intended to fall into the hands of the Americans and had dressed up for the occasion,’ said the Foreign Office report on the meeting. He indicated his belief that he still had a role to play liaising between the Germans and the Allies. When Major General Strong, the British Head of Military Intelligence at SHAEF, asked the Foreign Office if he should seek a further, private, interview with Papen, he was put sharply in his place: ‘Such an interview must under no circumstances take place – Papen is as dangerous as a hamadryad snake – he could do us no good.’ (12) So he was moved to a chateau near Spa, where he found ‘comfortable accommodation’ and a ‘normal civilized life’ (13) chatting to old acquaintances like Admiral Horthy, the ex-Regent of Hungary.
The richest haul of prospective defendants of the Nazi regime fell to the Americans in the South. In Austria they found Dr Ernst Kaltenbrunner -with the death of Himmler and Müller, and the disappearance of Eichmann, the nearest who could be found as a Gestapo chief. Baldur von Schirach, the former Gauleiter of Vienna and leader of the Hitler Youth movement, was there too. For a long time he had been thought to be dead; indeed he heard a report of his own death on the BBC. It was assumed that either he had fallen in the last fight for Vienna or had been shot by Austrian patriots. In fact he was living in the Tyrol, posing as ‘Richard Falk the novelist’ and writing a detective story called The Secrets of Myrna Loy – it is not clear whether the title indicated an infatuation with the Hollywood filmstar. Perhaps he might have escaped detection, but on 4 June he heard on the radio about the arrests of Hitler Youth leaders and decided to give himself up and accept his responsibility for the movement. He tried writing to local American headquarters to announce his whereabouts and desire to surrender, but his letter was treated as a bad joke. Finally he came to the headquarters in Schwaz, announced in English ‘I am Schirach’, and was duly arrested. He wrote to his wife from prison: ‘I want to speak before a court of law and take the blame on myself. Through me the young have learned to believe in Hitler. I taught them to have faith in him, now I must free them from this error. Once I have had the opportunity to say this before an international court of law, then let them hang me.’ (14)
Much less co-operative was Wilhelm Frick, caught in Munich. He was the lawyer who had drawn up Hitler’s application for German citizenship, the Enabling Act which gave the Nazi Party its grip on Germany, and so much of the Anti-Jewish legislation. His pet scheme had been the euthanasia programme – the State-ordained killing of ‘useless eaters’. Up to 1943 Frick had been Minister of the Interior; he then went to Bohemia and Moravia as Protector. His interrogator sourly noted that: ‘the attempt to combine the character of an ardent Party member with that of an orthodox minister has resulted in Frick in a rather negative and defensive witness, with something of the expression of a cornered rat when he is pressed.’ (15) Frick was not to change in the coming months.
As the war ended, the Berchtesgaden area became a great magnet for leading Nazis. Here they were near their Führer’s favourite retreat, the Berghof. There may never have been a plan for a final stand in the mountain redoubt as the popular press believed, but at least they felt happy in the mountains, finding reassurance among the scenes of their former glory when in the early days of the War they had relaxed on Hitler’s terrace, eating chocolate cake, bullying foreign visitors and posing for Eva Braun’s home movies, their every wish catered for by particularly fine specimens of Aryan manhood in immaculate SS uniform.
Whatever their precise motives, Hans Frank, the lawyer and civil administrator of Poland, was picked up there in the course of a routine American round-up. He handed over to his captors the diary of his administration of Poland – 11,367 typed pages of it. Then he tried to sever his arteries, cutting his throat and both wrists, but only succeeded in paralysing his left hand and arm. When Edgar Snow visited him in 193 Evac Hospital near Munich, he reported that Frank’s neck and wrists were ringed with jagged festering sores where he scratched his wounds. Frank protested that he was a man of culture, not a gangster. After all, he had opened the first Chopin museum Cracow ever had. He added that the extermination camps at Maidanek and Auschwitz were Himmler’s work not his. ‘All Poles know that I loved their country,’ he claimed to Snow. ‘They are a fine people.’ (16) It was a praise that squared oddly with a reference in his diary: ‘If we win the war then as far as I am concerned the Poles and the Ukrainians and the rest can be turned into minced meat.’
Near Berchtesgaden, the Americans also found Dr Robert Ley – in a mountain hut, shaking from top to toe and dressed in blue pyjamas, a Tyrolese hat and climbing boots. Ley’s Labour Front had replaced the independent German trades union and been a mere instrument of the Nazi party: fixing wages, hours and working conditions. He had created the ‘Strength through Joy’ movement to control the workers’ leisure activities. Ley had once told the workers: ‘The Führer is always right. Obey the Führer.’ He now offered himself to the Americans as a brilliant leader of the working classes who could help them solve all their social problems. But they were far from impressed by this quivering alcoholic. An early interrogation report noted Ley’s speech impediment which appeared when he got excited, ‘as he is apt to do when, for example, he thinks of the attempt on the Führer’s life on 20 July 1944’, and the tears when he thought of his failure to get Anglo-German understanding or the implementation of all the social reforms he had planned. (17)
In the same area an American patrol stumbled on Julius Streicher, the Jew-baiter, the editor of the anti-Semitic paper Der Stürmer, a journal so obscene and repulsive that even many devoted Nazis could not bear to read it. He was sitting painting on the verandah of a farmhouse when the patrol’s commander, Major Blitt, came to ask for a glass of milk. Streicher explained that he was not the farmer but ‘Mr Seiler, an artist’. They began to talk; Blitt wanted to know why people had joined the Nazi party. They talked in Yiddish. But Streicher could not keep up his act for long. When Blitt commented on his resemblance to Julius Streicher he blurted out: ‘How did you recognize me?’ Off went Streicher in the jeep. (18)
Rather further from Berchtesgaden, 35 miles from Salzburg, was the biggest catch of all, Hermann Goering, a man who had held innumerable posts and for a long time had been second only to Hitler in military, economic, and diplomatic matters, a man who had looted Europe for his private art collection, but who by May 1945 had been sacked by the Führer for offering to take over the leadership of the Reich. He was refused any office in the successor government by Doenitz and was under SS house arrest at Mauterndorf. Always ready with the grand gesture, Goering had sent Field Marshal Brauchitsch to Eisenhower and the local American commander asking for protection from the Gestapo and the SS. Concerned too to be suitably dressed for the occasion, Goering had ordered a new uniform in the colour of his captors rather than of the Luftwaffe. When the Americans failed to provide the required assistance and welcome, Goering drove off to surrender, graciously waving from side to side and acknowledging German soldiers trudging to their prisoner-of-war camps.
The following day came closer to measuring up to his expectations. He was given a press conference at Army headquarters at Kitzbühel, with popping champagne corks and flashing cameras. It was just what he was used to and just what he had expected. But Goering’s little pleasures proved shortlived. He was moved from Kitzbühel to Augsburg the following day, where he lived with two aides in a working-class suburb. He was under house arrest again but this time in a dingy flat with no bath and no lavatory.
Perhaps the only man with any reason to welcome arrest was Hjalmar Schacht, once President of the Reichsbank, Minister for the Economy and Plenipotentiary for the War Economy. Since being accused of complicity in the 1944 Bomb Plot against Hitler, Dr Schacht had been in prison and concentration camps; guards at the Flossenburg camp had instructions to shoot him should the Americans arrive. Instead, he was moved to Dachau, to a special enclosure for distinguished prisoners called a ‘prominenten laager’. There Schacht joined an extraordinary collection of some of the more remarkable people to fall foul of the Führer, including Pastor Martin Niemoeller, the distinguished Lutheran theologian, Fritz Thyssen, the industrialist, Leon Blum, and the former Austrian Chancellor, Kurt Schuschnigg.
Finally Schacht did indeed fall into American hands and was interned in Kransberg Castle in the Taunus Mountains. He was taken off on one occasion for interrogation – against a receipt for ‘the live body of Dr Schacht’. His interrogator recorded that Schacht ‘appeared to be in excellent health if somewhat too querulous and disconcerted for a coherent discussion’. Schacht was in fact fizzing with rage. He could not understand why a man imprisoned by the Nazis should now be held captive by their enemies; he kept telling his interrogator that he had plotted against Hitler. He was most indignant that his captors had taken his watch and that he had too few clothes. When asked if he had ever tried to inform himself about conditions and policies under the Nazis by considering Allied versions of the facts – listening to the BBC for example – he dismissed the idea with characteristic contempt: ‘The BBC dealt only in rotten propaganda – Jewish if not in diction in style, of the kind no decent German would listen to.’ (19)
Then he was sent back to Kransberg. The castle had once been renovated and decorated by Albert Speer as a Luftwaffe headquarters for Goering. Appropriately enough, the architect himself arrived in August to join Schacht and the other civilian leaders interned there. Soon after Speer learned that he was to be tried as a war criminal he was visited by George Ball, another member of the American bombing survey still anxious to pick Speer’s brains. Speer was more interested in his trial than in bombs. ‘Will you be my lawyer, Mr Ball?’ Mr Ball thought not. ‘Well, you’re making a mistake,’ chided Speer. ‘Many young lawyers have made their reputations by representing notorious personalities and you’ll never get a better chance.’ (20) But Ball still refused the offer. Having missed this chance he had to make his reputation the hard way, as a politician and diplomat.
Men like Speer and Schacht had been classified by the Allies as ‘technicians’; Kransberg was known irreverently to the jailors as ‘Dustbin’. The leading politicians, diplomats and military figures were concentrated in another camp, equally sardonically called ‘Ashcan’. ‘How these creatures must loathe each other.’ commented a Foreign Office official as he mused on the list of the inmates of ‘Ashcan’. (21)
Fifty-two eminent Nazis, from whom fifteen would eventually be chosen as defendants before the Military Tribunal, were collected between May and August in Bad Mondorf – or Mondorf-les-Bains – in Luxemburg. Mondorf stands on a plateau about six kilometres from the dramatic gorge of the Mosel and the border with Germany. A tiny stream trickles along one side of the town and marks the frontier with France. The rolling countryside can be seen from almost every part of the town – mainly vineyards, but scattered with patches of light mixed woodland. It was a convenient place to keep such prominent prisoners. It was small (in 1982 its population was only 2,000) and stood at the T-junction of two roads going nowhere in particular, so the American military would have no problem in surrounding and guarding the area and suspicious visitors would be easy to spot. The town offered reasonable housing for a garrison in substantial, comfortable, mainly late-19th-century villas or in three or four small hotels. It also provided ideal accommodation for the prisoners – the Grand Hotel. Mondorf was a spa, promising that its two thermal springs would do wonders for rheumatism or complaints of the liver. The Grand Hotel had been its leading hotel and the centre for the cure. It was rather a graceless building – shaped like a boomerang, the entrance on the north side, a broad terrace facing the sun on the south. It was six stories high, with two additional tiers of attics, and its plain stucco façade was hardly cheered by crude art deco panels. It can never have been a delightful hotel; it made a reasonably suitable prison. Access to it along the only road could easily be barricaded. The hotel’s garden and park, with some fine old trees, were overlooked by slopes on three sides which gave a clear view of any activity in the grounds, and sight of all approaches from the countryside beyond.
Before the first prisoners arrived, the US Army stripped the Grand Hotel of any of its fading splendour and comfort. Out went the furniture and carpets to be replaced with camp beds and straw mattresses. Windows too were replaced, first with wire netting, then, as soon as available, with shatterproof glass and bars. A stockade with four watchtowers went up round the garden.
None of this was good enough for ‘Ashcan’s’ new commandant, who was to figure prominently in the months of the trial itself. Colonel Burton C. Andrus was once described in a Time profile as a ‘pompous, unimaginative and thoroughly likeable officer’, ‘a plump little figure looking like an inflated pouter pigeon . . . impeccably garbed in his uniform and highly shellacked helmet.’ (22) In his Memoirs, Andrus leapt to defend himself against the charge which hurt most: ‘My weight was 160 lb, height 5 feet 10 inches, chest 44 inches, waist 36 inches – kept trim by fresh campaigns in combat and active water polo matches against subordinates. A plump pouter pigeon?’ (23) Colonel Andrus had been a cavalry officer in the First World War; he had spent much of the Second in England as an observer, and then moved to Europe with the US Army at the time of the invasion. His qualification for the new job seems to have been the months in 1917 he spent as a military prison officer at Fort Ogelthorpe, Georgia.
Andrus looked at the Grand Hotel, sized up his prisoners, and evidently saw the position in a flash. ‘Mondorf,’ he wrote, ‘no one had to tell me, was a powder keg.’ (24) Did nobody realize these Nazis would try to commit suicide? (Goering had arrived carrying two cyanide capsules.) The fountain in the garden had to be drained – not much harm could be self-inflicted on a sundial. Braces, shoelaces, razors, watches, all had to be removed – they could all be used for suicide, for savage attacks on fellow prisoners, as weapons in a mass break-out. And the tables in the prisoners’ rooms had to go; only tables which collapsed at a touch would do – there was no limit to what a crazed Nazi could do with a table. And this was not all. Who had stopped to think of the hordes of SS fanatics, the Werewolf suicide squads? Any minute now they could storm the perimeter fence, hail down on the hotel roof in parachutes, rescue their heroes and charge off to restore the Reich. To prevent this possibility, everything had to be floodlit, machine gun posts put at every angle, and camouflage nets draped to fool daredevil Luftwaffe pilots. Had no one heard of Skorzeny, swooping down to rescue Mussolini from internment in 1943?
And Andrus spotted another threat wantonly ignored by others – lynching. Who would not want to lynch these evil Nazis? In Luxemburg alone, 160 people had just returned from Dachau. Europe was filled with hundreds of thousands of Nazi victims itching to tear Andrus’ prisoners limb from limb. And look at those trees in the park – gifts to snipers. Even by July, Andrus could not rest secure in the formidable defences he had created: day or night he had to be ready to ‘knock our allies back with guns’ to prevent lynching.
All too soon, Andrus lost a valuable element in his security arrangements – secrecy. The authorities did not want the whereabouts of the Nazi leaders known, but rumours spread. The newspapers began to print stories about top Nazis and their ‘life of luxury and ease’. By 14 July, the Chicago Daily News had identified the location as ‘The Palace Hotel, Mondorf. For Moscow Radio a few days later, this was easily translated into ‘a Luxemburg palace’ where Nazi War leaders were ‘getting even fatter and more insolent . . . These notorious war criminals rest in Luxemburg after their sanguinary carnage . . . Nothing but the finest vintages and finest foods will do for them. Servants noiselessly bring delicious wines on silver trays . . . and the latest model automobiles are theirs to drive around the grounds.’ (25) Given the general Press picture, it was little comfort to Colonel Andrus that a very few newspapers had already christened him ‘The Mondorf Monster’. He had to get the record straight.
On 16 July, representatives of the world’s Press were invited to visit Mondorf. They were followed in later weeks by many more – public curiosity about the Grand Hotel’s inmates was insatiable. Andrus made the situation clear to his visitors: (26) ‘We stand for no mollycoddling here. These men are in jail. We have certain rules and these rules are obeyed.’ He scotched the rumours about luxury. The reporters were given a briefing on the prisoners’ diet: breakfast at 7.30 a.m. – cereal, soup and coffee; lunch at midday – pea soup, beef hash and spinach; supper at 6.30 p.m. – powdered eggs, potatoes and tea. All standard prisoner-of-war rations, all eaten off glazed earthenware with one spoon. And – ‘they roll their own cigarettes.’ The reporters peered at the rooms, noted the sparse furniture, were duly impressed by the stockade, the floodlights, the machine guns. The Daily Telegraph expressed some surprise that Admiral Doenitz’s cupboard contained pink underwear (27) and the New York Herald Tribune recorded with interest that Ribbentrop’s room was said to be often untidy. An American captain had complained: ‘He is often lackadaisical in this respect and I have had him on the carpet several times.’ (28) There was no such problem with Keitel. His room was always spotless, his blankets perfectly boxed, everything constantly ready for kit inspection. Andrus approved of Keitel – he would have made an excellent First Sergeant, he would obey anything his commander ordered. He was a perfect prisoner – until the day that he wrote to General Eisenhower to complain that his Field Marshal’s baton had been taken from him by the prison authorities.
As Andrus’ charges arrived at ‘Ashcan’ he worried about how to lick them into shape. So many of them were obviously unhealthy. Frank in particular was deep in melancholia and needed constant attention. According to an American doctor who examined him on arrival: ‘his left elbow and wrist were severely cut, his right wrist was cut. The wounds have practically healed now but he will have a permanently crippled left hand.’ More luridly, the New York Times confided to its readers that on his arrival Frank was wearing ‘only lace panties’. (29)
There were several doctors at hand, including Dr Pfluecker, a fellow prisoner. But they needed watching, thought Andrus. Prisoners asked for sleeping pills, then hid them and started a collection. Andrus knew what that was for. Too many of these Nazis, he thought, did not yet seem to understand that the good old days were over. Ley had told a prison officer that he could do without food and drink but he must have female company. Perhaps he could provide the authorities with some really interesting statements, if only he could dictate them to a golden haired secretary. (30) When Streicher arrived, no one wanted to sit near him; no one ever did, especially at meals. ‘I fixed that,’ Andrus told the New York Herald Tribune. ‘I told them the Wehrmacht and Navy no longer existed, that even their state no longer existed and that they would eat with anybody I choose to place at the table.’ (31)
Andrus’s biggest problem, however, was Goering. (32) The Field Marshal had arrived at the Grand Hotel suitably equipped for his stay in a spa, with sixteen monogrammed suitcases, a red hatbox, a dazzling collection of rings, watches, medals, cufflinks, and his valet, Robert Krupp. Andrus looked at the luggage; during the medical examination, he surveyed the Field Marshal. Goering without clothes was surely more awful than with them. He had red finger nails – and red toe nails. And as if that was not bad enough, Goering had brought with him 20,000 paracodeine tablets, his substitute for his morphine addiction – he took twenty every morning and twenty every evening. Andrus was not going to have an addict in his prison. He contacted the Director of the FBI, the legendary J. Edgar Hoover, who replied with instructions from the Narcotics Bureau. Goering’s dose must be cut by one tablet at a time. It was a painful process. Goering whimpered, and complained of headaches and sleeplessness. But he was weaned by 12 August. In the opinion of Dr Kelley, an American psychiatrist who worked with the prisoners at Mondorf and later in Nuremberg, Goering’s pill taking was more of a habit than an addiction by now – he munched handfuls of what were in fact specially made paracodeine tablets of a very low dosage as others might munch sweets. Prison life proved to be good for his figure too. When he came to Mondorf, he weighed 270 lb. By the end of July, he was down to 240 lb and a doctor proudly told an Associated Press reporter: ‘We had to take a six inch tuck in his pants to keep him from losing them.’ (33)
As his health improved, so did Goering’s personality. At first he was frightened, saying accusingly to the guards: ‘You are going to kill me tomorrow.’ He was so nervous that Andrus appointed Field Marshal Kesselring to look after him. Even so, one night during a thunderstorm, Goering had a heart attack. ‘I was all by myself when the storm came. It worried me.’ (34) But soon the old Goering resilience, the vitality, the magnetism came back. He began to attract a circle of prisoners around himself – dominating them, cheering them up, giving them doses of his courage and determination to fight. Not all the prisoners were attracted. The old Flensburg group clung to Doenitz and retained their dislike for flashy Hermann. As the two rival social groups coalesced, only two men were left out – no one wanted anything to do with Ley or Streicher.
Colonel Andrus had tackled his security difficulties, solved his prisoners’ health problems, and tried to impose some good order and military discipline on men used to command. Yet Andrus was never satisfied; he worried incessantly. Others, however, noticed that his regime was beginning to have an effect. When Ivone Kirkpatrick came to the Grand Hotel, he found Ribbentrop, Rosenberg, Streicher, Doenitz, Neurath, Raeder and Funk sunning themselves in basket chairs on the terrace. There was a quickening of interest as they saw a visitor. A corporal called them to attention. All stood except Doenitz, who sat huddled and sulking in his chair. ‘Get up, that man,’ roared the corporal, and Grand Admiral Doenitz shuffled to his feet. (35)
Kirkpatrick like many others came to the Grand Hotel to interview the prisoners. He was glad to leave – he compared the place to a ‘criminal lunatic asylum’. When Galbraith came he, too, was far from impressed by the inmates. He shared the reaction of a man who escorted him: ‘Who’d have thought that we were fighting this war against a bunch of jerks?’ (36) ‘Ashcan’ was not just an internment camp; it became increasingly an interrogation centre where some of the preliminary spadework for the future trial was carried out. Sixteen booths were built; interrogations were carried out in them every day, often lasting several hours at a time. The prisoners encountered the usual tricks of the trade: the harmless questions to throw them off their guard, the constant harping back to check consistency in accounts, the alternating rough and friendly approaches. Everything was taken down in shorthand. It was an experience most of them looked forward to. When some Russian interrogators appeared on 24 July, Goering shouted: ‘I won’t see them. I won’t talk to them.’ (37) But he did – for two days. Interrogations were enjoyed. They offered a chance to relish former power and conquest, to fight old battles and produce the old political arguments – perhaps more effectively than last time. Sometimes the interrogations fed a sense of superiority. When Papen was interrogated by Thomas Dodd, ultimately a prosecutor at Nuremberg, at the beginning of September he noted that Dodd was ‘polite, correct, even kind’ but ‘in the course of our discussion it became clear that he had only a very superficial knowledge of events and internal developments in Germany.’ (38) No doubt – but Dodd and the others were learning fast, thanks to interrogating the very men who had controlled events and developments. So were the prisoners. Though they might not know it, the interrogations gave them a chance to rehearse their stories and excuses for later use in the trial.
In the case of Ribbentrop, he began as he was to continue – emphasizing his own ‘lack of importance and responsibility’. Before his American and British military interrogators, Ribbentrop’s once renowned public pose of cold austerity and aloofness was replaced by a rather desperate and unconvincing jocularity and affability. What struck the interrogators was Ribbentrop’s general vagueness – genuine, they assumed, not feigned – and what they could only describe as a ‘rather obvious lack of mental fibre’. On these grounds they cautioned that Ribbentrop’s interrogation report should be treated ‘with reservation’. What was clear was that Ribbentrop was already desperately anxious about the future. As the interrogation ended, he ventured the opinion that ‘he had not thought that the war would come to such proportions that governments were placed under arrest’. When his interrogators sat in stony silence, ignoring what was in effect a plea for reassurance, they noted that ‘Ribbentrop’s expression was one of nervous consternation and his exit less assured than his entrance.’ (39)
Yet, in general, interrogations made a welcome break in what became a dull routine: talking, walking under escort, playing chess, drafts, or Monopoly. The prisoners were cut off entirely from the outside world; they had no radio, no newspapers, they received no letters. Andrus made some attempt to relieve their boredom. General Warlimont and Vice Admiral Buerkner were persuaded to give English lessons every day. Other prisoners were timetabled to give lectures three afternoons a week – Count Schwerin von Krosigk, the former Finance Minister and later Prime Minister under Doenitz, treated them to his views on Shakespeare; Funk enlightened them as to the benefits of paper currency; and Ley staggered them with his plans to reconstruct Germany using prefabricated units and private enterprise. How his views had changed! They were given occasional film shows – but only Allied films of the concentration camps.
The prisoners at Mondorf took time to adjust to their confinement, and they remained puzzled as to exactly why they were there. No one told them about the fast-maturing plans for a trial. Some of them had shared Ribbentrop’s expectation on arrest: ‘I know that we are all on the list of war criminals and I can see that in the present state of world opinion only one verdict can be expected – sentence of death.’ (40) They had expected instant execution. Others, however, could hardly believe that persons of their eminence could conceivably be tried. At his post-surrender Press conference in Kitzbühel, Goering had been surprised at the question: ‘Do you know that you are on the list of war criminals?’ ‘No,’ he replied, ‘that question surprises me very much for I cannot imagine why I should be.’ (41) By July, he was still complaining about his imprisonment: ‘I don’t understand it at all. I have lots of affairs to settle in Germany.’ (42)
Doenitz too was all injured innocence and self-importance. ‘They cannot condemn me just because I assumed power in a country where everyone wanted me to take over. The Allies will end by regretting the passing of the old regime.’ (43) Most prisoners accepted that some of their colleagues were war criminals. Papen moved from an annexe into the Grand Hotel at the beginning of August. ‘To my horror,’ he wrote, ‘I found myself in the company of Goering, Ribbentrop, Rosenberg and their satellites.’ (44)
Unknown to all of them, this was to be the company in which they were to stand trial for their part in the Third Reich. Unknown to them, the plans for the trial were – despite difficulties – drawing to fruition. Typically, it was the canny Speer who first heard of the trial and his involvement in it. Radios were not allowed in ‘Ashcan’ but were permitted in the less strict ‘Dustbin’. A fellow prisoner rushed in at six in the morning to tell Speer that he had been named as a defendant in the planned war crimes trial. Speer was shocked: ‘I had never expected to be a defendant . . . I was dumbfounded. In the camp there was a chemist who was said to possess several capsules of poison such as Himmler had used for his suicide. I cautiously hinted to him that I was looking for such a capsule, but he refused me in evasive language.’ (45)
His co-defendants were to know soon enough. On Sunday 12 August, Colonel Andrus rounded up fifteen of his ‘Ashcan’ charges into two ambulances. They drove under escort to Luxemburg airport, then flew in two C-47s to Nuremberg. During the flight, Goering demonstrated a vigorous brand of gallows humour, continually pointing out to Ribbentrop geographical features such as the Rhine and urging him to take a look at them as he was unlikely to have another opportunity to do so. (46) Streicher was sick.
1 Jackson Papers, Box 210
2 Conversation with his interrogator, later a prosecutor, Dan Margolies
3 Fritzsche
4 Galbfaith
5 Jackson Papers, Box 210
6 Kirkpatrick
7 FO 371.48478
8 FO 371.46780
9 Saturday Evening Post, 28 July
10 Papen
11 FO 371.46780
12 Ibid
13 Papen
14 Heydecker
15 Jackson Papers, Box 210
16 Saturday Evening Post, 28 July
17 Jackson Papers, Box 210
18 Heydecker
19 Jackson Papers, Box 210
20 George Ball
21 FO 371.46777
22 Time, 28 October 1946
23 Andrus
24 This and many subsequent details of life in Mondorf from Andrus
25 Moscow Radio broadcast, 24 July forwarded by British Embassy to Foreign Office
26 New York Herald Tribune, 22 July
27 Daily Telegraph, 2 August
28 New York Herald Tribune, 22 July
29 New York Times, 29 July
30 Daily Telegraph, 2 August
31 New York Herald Tribune, 22 July
32 Details from Andrus’ memoirs
33 AP 28 July
34 Ibid
35 Kirkpatrick
36 Galbraith
37 New York Times, 25 July
38 Papen
39 FO 371.46786
40 Heydecker
41 Ibid
42 Daily Exprss, 18 July
43 Ibid
44 Papen
45 Speer Spandau Diary
46 FO 371.51035