Exorcising Hitler (49 page)

It was not that the British did nothing. They were very determined, for instance, to find those Germans who had committed war crimes against British POWs or captured Allied aircrew.

Mobile investigation teams swept through the British Zone in the late spring and summer of 1945. In one particular case, meticulously recorded in British files and including word-for-word transcripts of statements and of the trial itself, a German reserve policeman, Hans Renoth, was tried and convicted by a British military tribunal for the murder of an RAF pilot. The airman had crash-landed his aircraft, a single-seater fighter-bomber, in the north-west German countryside, not far from the Dutch border, on 16 September 1944.

Although Renoth, a reserve constable, admitted shooting the airman, the case was not straightforward. Several other officials had been involved. They had come from the small town of Elten, near Emmerich, after Renoth had taken a phone call from a farmer, who telephoned the police station to report the crashed plane. They drove to the crash scene in a car belonging to two signals captains who were based in the town. A senior constable and two customs officials who were also Nazi political leaders came in the signals captains’ car, too, making six officials at the crash site. At first, Renoth reported in his statement to the British investigators in July 1945:

We saw the fallen aircraft but the pilot was not to be seen. During the search for the latter we had to take cover as other aircraft were flying over. After these aircraft had flown past, we continued our search for the pilot. The pilot was located about 50 metres from the aircraft in a ditch in the direction of the AA [anti-aircraft] site. I told him to come with me, which he immediately did. I searched him first but I found no weapons. I went with the pilot in the direction of the aircraft towards the captains. On the way the pilot was taken away from me by two soldiers, the two political leaders, and [Senior Constable] Pelgrim, with the remark ‘You want to be friendly with the dog who has murdered our women and children.’ I assume the soldiers came from the railway (or the main road). A beating ensued. The following were present: the two soldiers, the two political leaders and Pelgrim. The pilot was beaten nearly to death. I took no part in the beating, but withdrew and went to the captains. We conversed briefly; I can no longer remember the subject of the conversation. I saw that the rifle model 98 was broken in two pieces. (Pelgrim was in possession of the rifle.) It is my opinion that the pilot had been beaten so severely that the rifle broke. Captain Koerkes ordered me to give the pilot the coup de grace and I carried out this order. In accordance with my oath, I had to carry out the order. I made no protests but received a letter from Captain Koerkes. I passed this on to the Kreisführer of the Gendarmerie Harmann by name in Wesel at the office of the Landrat. I fired a shot into the pilot’s chest from a range of 5–7 metres. The pilot died immediately without uttering a sound.
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Four of the men present at the incident stood trial in January 1946. The two signals captains were not mentioned in the account of the proceedings. After a two-day hearing, only the hapless Auxiliary Constable Renoth was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. Pelgrim, who had apparently carried out the fatal beating with his service rifle, was given fifteen years in prison, and the two political leaders, as accessories and possible participants, got ten years each.

Renoth was hanged in 7 March 1946, despite his protests that the pilot was already dead when he fired the shot (which had been confirmed by medical tests carried out on the court’s behalf) and the prosecution’s acknowledgement that he had been obeying a superior order. The brigadier who forwarded the verdicts to the C-in-C Rhine Army for confirmation noted only: ‘I think there was justification for the death sentence on Renoth, but I should have felt happier about it had Pelgrim also been sentenced to death.’
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By this time, the usual executioner for the British Zone was the well-known British hangman, Albert Pierrepoint. Already involved in a busy career in England, he travelled to British-occupied Germany and Austria to carry out around two hundred hangings of war criminals between December 1945 and the end of 1947. These included several instances of individuals held responsible for killing downed RAF aircrew like the pilot who crash-landed near Elten. He also hanged the British traitor John Amery, and William Joyce, known as ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, an American-born British fascist who had broadcast propaganda for the Nazis from Berlin. In between these commissions, which made him something of a contemporary celebrity, Pierrepoint ran a public house in Lancashire called Help the Poor Struggler.
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The Elten trial counted as harsh justice – one example of many – but the forensic process itself, judging from the records of this and similar trials, was on the whole sound. In terms of jurisdiction, it was also straightforward enough. The RAF pilot was a lawful combatant who had been killed after surrendering to the enemy, and so, whoever was held responsible, a war crime had been committed.

But what about other, less clear-cut cases? Through the winter of 1944–5 there had been a debate about whether crimes committed by Germans, not against British or other Allied nationals (including French, Belgian, Dutch, etc., citizens), but by Germans against those who were technically German citizens (Jews, for instance), could be tried by Allied courts, and if so by what right. Could they be called ‘war crimes’? Apparently not.

In the first major trial of those involved in the mass murder of concentration-camp inmates – the so-called ‘Belsen trial’ – which began on 17 September 1945, at Lüneburg in the British Zone, the accused were not charged with crimes against peace or against humanity but with being involved in the murder of specific Allied nationals. In other words, they were held responsible in much the same way as the unlucky country policeman Hans Renoth. The accused were thought to have been responsible for thousands of deaths, but, in order to get around this legal problem, they actually stood trial for the murder of a small sample number of Allied nationals, whose deaths could be classified as war crimes. The short list of twenty victims, including three British nationals and others of Polish, Hungarian, Belgian, French, Dutch and Soviet nationality,
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who actually appeared on the charge sheet, stood in for unknown thousands of innocent dead of all nationalities, including Germans and Austrians.

As the introduction to the United Nations War Crimes Commission report on the Belsen trial put it: ‘Jurisdiction was asserted under the military law, which entitles the Court to punish war crimes, limited under the Royal Warrant to crimes against Allied nationals.’
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This also meant that the trial was carried out under British law, under its habitual adversarial conditions, which included the right for witnesses to be subjected to hostile cross-examination. The British lawyers appearing for the defence of Josef Kramer, formerly of Auschwitz-Birkenau and commandant of Bergen-Belsen in its last terrible months, and his fellow defendants, therefore took every opportunity to argue often obscure points of legal principle, to place their ‘clients’ in the best possible light, and to discredit the testimony of the prosecution witnesses – even if these were hollow-cheeked, still-traumatised camp survivors who had waited months in DP camps to tell their harrowing stories.

The adversarial nature of the trial led to horrors such as the assertion by Josef Kramer’s lawyer, Major T. C. M. Winwood, that his client’s behaviour might be explicable by the fact that he dealt with ‘the dregs of the ghettos of Eastern Europe’. The lawyer defending Ilse Grese, a sadist who had been in the habit of whipping prisoners to death at both Belsen and Auschwitz, maintained that she was not the ‘beast’ but the ‘scapegoat’ of Belsen, and that, since the camp was a prison, corporal punishment was ‘reasonable conduct in the circumstances’.
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The trial summing-up by the British Army’s Judge Advocate-General, C. L. Stirling, a civilian, erred to an extraordinary degree in the direction of ‘fair play’, reminding the five-man military tribunal who would judge the cases that much evidence was ‘vague’. The court, he added, ‘would have to be satisfied that a person on the staff of Auschwitz or Belsen concentration camp was guilty of deliberately committing a war crime; just being a member of the staff itself was not enough to justify conviction’.
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Stirling’s remarks caused international uproar, especially in France and Russia. A reminder from the bench regarding standards of proof in a trial at the Old Bailey of, say, a suburban murder suspect of hitherto blameless character, was one thing. To speak in this way under such circumstances was simply incomprehensible to millions awaiting justice for the crimes of the concentration camps.

When the trial finally reached its conclusion two months later, thirty of the accused were convicted and fourteen acquitted. Eleven prisoners – including Grese and two other women warders – were sentenced to death, one to life imprisonment and the rest to prison terms ranging from one to fifteen years. The hangings took place at Hameln prison, with Pierrepoint once again officiating.

By contrast, the Americans began their first concentration-camp trial on 15 November and concluded it on 13 December. Of the forty accused staff of the infamous Dachau camp, all were found guilty. Thirty-six were sentenced to death, and twenty-three death sentences were carried out.

Even the British Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, was moved to send a note to his Secretary of State for War, the Judge Advocate-General’s ultimate superior, expressing concern at the lack of ‘drive and energy’ being shown and citing the example of the Belsen trial. Sir Hartley Shawcross, the British Attorney General (and British Chief Prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trial of Major War Criminals), called for an ‘accelerated war crimes programme’, but he knew they would never find all those responsible for the numberless and often nameless cruelties committed during the Nazi occupation of Europe.

There are tens of thousands of Germans responsible for millions of murders. We must set ourselves an absolute minimum of prosecuting at least ten percent of those criminals in the British zone. That is about two thousand people. I am setting as an irreducible minimum that we try five hundred cases by 30 April 1946.
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Attlee was not pleased with this, pointing out that such a deadline meant that this ‘would surely have the effect of leaving a large number of criminals unpunished and at large’. The Prime Minister’s instinct was correct. Even this relatively modest target was never met. Just a year after the end of the war, the British Army in Germany stopped investigating any non-British cases. There would be no repeat of the Belsen trial. From then on, it would be up to the foreign nations whose people had been murdered to pursue the cases.

So far as general denazification in the British Zone was concerned, influential figures, especially in the London Foreign Office, had always opposed a wide-ranging purge.

John Troutbeck, head of the German section at the Foreign Office, had warned in 1943 that this would ‘lead us into incurring greater responsibility for administration than is wise or necessary’.
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He was backed by senior figures in the Treasury, too, including Edward (later Sir Edward) Playfair, who also fought the Morgenthau Plan and prophesied national bankruptcy if Britain dismantled the German government machinery and tried to run its zone alone.
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A
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magazine journalist gave a coyly bowdlerised version of a British official’s words: ‘We tell the bahstads what to do, you know, so their political beliefs make no difference really.’
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Traditions of realism clashed, in the British case, even more strongly with traditions of natural justice than in other zones, and as the drama of denazification played out after 1945, this battle turned into something of a tragicomic fiasco.

The situation was complicated by the fact that a left-wing Labour government had been elected in July 1945. Its ranks were packed with passionately anti-Nazi and in many cases idealistic souls, who looked forward to radical and positive change both at home and in defeated Germany.

Public opinion, war-embittered and appalled by the spectacle of the concentration camps as the Allied advance uncovered the full extent of Nazi atrocities, was also a factor in inhibiting the FO’s natural tendency to surreptitiously favour what might work and make life easier over what might be right but difficult. Churchill’s temporary (though, it seems, for a while genuinely enthusiastic) espousal of Morgenthau’s ‘Carthaginian Peace’ and the full force of the ‘Morgenthau boys’’ intervention in the planning process as the war ended caused problems for the Foreign Office mandarins. However, the punitive view did not quite manage to dominate planning as it did in Washington during 1945–6.

The British policy, admitted or not, was to dismiss all senior officials in occupied Germany, but to reinstate them if subsequent checks established that they were nevertheless ‘acceptable’ (a fine Foreign Office adjective). Various forms of words were also found to permit some discretion for British officials on the spot in Germany, while at the same time appearing severe, such as: ‘Germans who are permitted to remain in, or are appointed to, official posts (e.g. in the police or the administration) should understand that they hold office only during good behaviour.’ The Americans accepted this but at Potsdam, Molotov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, justifiably pounced on it as a possible loophole for the retention by the Western Allies of ‘useful’ Nazis.
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