Masters of Death (51 page)

EPILOGUE

Twenty-four commanders and officers of Einsatzgruppen organizations were brought to trial in Germany by the U.S. military government after the war.
⁴⁹
The Einsatzgruppen trial,
United States of America v. Otto
Ohlendorf et al., was the ninth of twelve war-crimes trials before U.S. military tribunals held at Nuremberg following the well-known Trial of the Major War Criminals conducted there before the International Military Tribunal (IMT) beginning in late 1945.
Otto Ohlendorf et al.
was heard by a panel of three judges from 15 September 1947 to 10 April 1948 with Judge Michael Musmanno presiding.

According to the chief prosecutor, Benjamin Ferencz, no trial of the Einsatzgruppen had originally been planned. The Einsatzgruppen reports—one set, the only set that survived the war—had been scooped up among two tons of documents found on the fourth floor of Gestapo headquarters in Berlin in September 1945. They escaped prosecutor attention for more than a year; a thousand tons of documents captured throughout Germany had to be sorted. The Einsatzgruppen figured into the IMT Nuremberg trial—Ohlendorf notoriously admitted in open court that his Einsatzgruppe D had murdered 90,000 people—but the full range and scale of Einsatzgruppen activity did not emerge.

Ferencz, a tough, smart, compact graduate of the Hell’s Kitchen district of Manhattan and Harvard Law School, chief of the Berlin branch of the Office of Chief of Counsel for War Crimes, remembers seeing the Einsatzgruppen reports for the first time in late 1946 or early 1947. Having participated in the liberation of Buchenwald, Mauthausen and Dachau as a sergeant in George Patton’s Third Army, he was horrified by the extent of Einsatzgruppen atrocity. He carried the three folders of reports to Telford Taylor, the chief prosecutor at the IMT Nuremberg trial and chief of counsel for war crimes for the subsequent Nuremberg trials. Taylor agreed that the crimes of the Einsatzgruppen were appalling but pointed out that the trials he was preparing (intended to reveal the criminal participation of a representative cross section of German institutions, including medicine, the law, industry and government ministries) had already been scheduled and budgeted. Ferencz insisted that at least the leaders of the Einsatzgruppen had to be brought to trial. Whereupon Taylor appointed twenty-seven-year-old Ferencz, who had never tried a criminal case before, to organize
Otto Ohlendorf
et al.
and to serve as chief prosecutor.

Ferencz was up to the challenge. Brilliantly, he introduced the Einsatzgruppen reports as evidence in the first two days of the trial, authenticated them and rested his case. The remainder of the trial consisted of defense presentations and incisive cross-examination. Two defendants escaped conviction. Otto Rasch arrived in Nuremberg with such severe Parkinson’s disease and associated dementia that his trial had to be severed from the case; he died on 1 November 1948. Emil Haussmann, an SS-Sturmbannführer with Einsatzkommando 12, committed suicide. All twenty-two other defendants were convicted on at least one of the three counts of indictment (crimes against humanity, conventional war crimes, membership in an illegal organization). Fourteen were sentenced to death by hanging, two to life imprisonment, the remaining six to lesser sentences. After the trial Ohlendorf, one of those sentenced to death, told Ferencz, “The Jews in America will suffer for what you have done to me.” (Ferencz, one Jew in America, went on to a successful legal career in partnership with Taylor and became in the fullness of time one of the founding organizers of the International Criminal Court.)

All defendants except Gustav Nosske applied to the U.S. military governor of the American sector of occupied Germany, General Lucius Clay, for clemency, but Clay confirmed all their sentences in 1949. In January 1951 U.S. High Commissioner John J. McCloy confirmed some sentences but reduced others, including ten of the fourteen death sentences. On 7 June 1951 Blobel, Werner Braune, Erich Naumann and Ohlendorf were hanged at Landsberg Prison. By 1958 all surviving defendants had been freed. Four other Einsatzgruppen leaders were sentenced to death and executed after trials conducted by other nations.

The West German Central Prosecution Office of Nazi War Criminals initiated proceedings against more than one hundred Einsatzgruppen members, but between 1945 and 1992, West German courts convicted and punished only 472 defendants in total for involvement in the persecution and murder of Jews. It follows that most Einsatzgruppen, Order Police, Totenkopf, Waffen-SS and other SS members who perpetrated mass murder in the East during the Second World War were neither indicted nor convicted but have lived out their lives in freedom, unpunished, a liberty they summarily denied their victims.

The fate of other SS leaders involved in SS and Einsatzgruppen atrocities: Otto Bradfisch (Einsatzkommando 8), who conducted the 15 August 1941
Aktion
in Minsk that upset Himmler, was sentenced in 1961 to thirteen years, subsequently commuted to six years. Kurt Daluege, the head of the Order Police, was executed in Czechoslovakia in 1946. Oskar Dirlewanger was beaten to death by guards at the Altshauser Detention Center on 7 June 1945. Adolf Eichmann was brought to trial in Israel in 1960 and hanged in 1962. Hans Frank, the head of the General Government, was sentenced to death at the IMT Nuremberg trial and hanged on 16 October 1946. Odilo Globocnik committed suicide in a British prisoner-of-war camp on 31 May 1945.

August Häfner (Einsatzkommando 4a), who murdered the children at Belaja Cerkov, was sentenced in 1973 to eight years. Joachim Hamann (Einsatzkommando 3), who supervised the Arajs commando and supplied the victims for Karl Jäger’s charts, died on 13 July 1945. Albert Hartl (EG C), who saw the corpse gases bubbling at Babi Yar, was never tried. Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, was executed in Poland in 1947. Jäger, facing trial in West Germany, committed suicide in his cell at the Hohenasperg detention center on 22 June 1959. Friedrich Jeckeln was executed in the USSR in 1946. Wilhelm Kube, the Generalkommissar for Byelorussia, was assassinated in 1943. Heinrich Lohse, the Reichskommissar Ostland, was sentenced by a German denazification court to ten years in prison but released because of ill health in 1951. Heinrich Müller, the head of the Gestapo, disappeared. Arthur Nebe, implicated in the 20 July 1944 plot against Hitler, was executed by the SS on 2 March 1945. Alfred Rosenberg, convicted in the IMT Nuremberg trial, was hanged in 1946. Franz Walther Stahlecker died of wounds inflicted by Estonian partisans on 23 March 1942. Bruno Streckenbach was a prisoner of war in the USSR until 1955; he died in Hamburg in 1977. Max Thomas, commander of Einsatzgruppe C, committed suicide in 1945.

Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski managed to evade incarceration until late in life. He testified for the prosecution at IMT Nuremberg, denouncing Himmler and his fellow Higher SS and Police Leaders. In 1951 he was convicted in a Munich denazification trial and sentenced to ten years’ “special labor” but he did not report to prison and was not picked up; he worked as a night watchman during those years and lived at home. In 1951 he also identified himself to an American prosecutor as the person who had supplied Hermann Göring, awaiting hanging at Nuremberg, with the cyanide capsule with which Göring cheated the hangman. Bach-Zelewski was never prosecuted for murdering Jews, but in 1961 he was tried for his part in a Röhm Purge murder and sentenced to four and a half years. (“I was Hitler’s man to the end,” he testified boastfully in that forum. “. . . I am still convinced Hitler was innocent.”) Indicted again in 1962 for the 1933 murder of six Communists, he was sentenced to life in prison. He died in a German prison hospital in 1972.

The Einsatzgruppen mass killings were the direct predecessors of the so-called ethnic cleansing that bloodied the former Yugoslavia five decades later. Murder makes for long memories: Christian Serbs shot Muslim Serb men into mass graves in the recent war in Serbia; in 1941 Muslim Serbs had massacred Christians. Short on manpower, Himmler in 1943 approved the formation of Muslim SS divisions. The SS “Handschar” Division appeared in Yugoslavia in October 1943, writes historian Gerald Reitlinger:

It consisted of 20,000 Bosnian Muslims, the so-called “Mujos.” A further Muslim SS division, recruited in the Balkan countries in 1944 and known as the 23rd SS division “Kama,” was never brought to completion. These Muslims were traditional enemies of the Christian Serbs, and in 1941 their religious zeal had urged them to join in the massacres of Serbs, which were carried out by the Ustashe, the militia of the Croat leader Ante Pavelic. As pillage was followed by discipline, the energy of the Mujos was canalized into the
Waffen-SS.
The Mujos were organized on the lines of the Bosnian regiments of the old imperial Austrian army, with officers and even NCOs of German race, but they wore the Turkish fez with their SS runes and, in contrast with the “six godless SS divisions” of 1941, each battalion had a chaplain or Imam.

The history of the Einsatzgruppen supports a few general observations. The fundamental reason the Holocaust became possible—a reason that links it to other mass-killing regimes and other genocides—was that social, economic and political breakdown brought disorder that allowed Hitler and his criminal subordinates, a surprising number of them actual murderers, to parasitize and dominate the government of Germany, sweeping aside checks and balances (the essence of stable government) that would have limited their absolute power, coopting the police, coopting the bureaucracy, the military and the judiciary. Soviet Russia under Stalin and Communist China under Mao Zedong saw parallel developments with similarly lethal consequences totaling millions of privation deaths and murders. Without robust checks and balances, a leader’s appetite for domination—death being the ultimate domination—can become insatiable, since everyone without exception is potentially a threat to his power.

External checks also faltered. For the Nazis, the Jews were a nation unto themselves, but for the rest of the world the European and Eastern Jews were people of specific nationalities, citizens of other states, non-citizens of their own. In response to Franklin Roosevelt’s call for a conference at Evian in July 1938, Hitler sneered, “We, on our part, are ready to put all these criminals at the disposal of these countries, for all I care, even on luxury ships.” Germany was not prepared to allow Jews to emigrate with more than the clothes on their backs, however, and few countries that sent delegates to the Evian Conference were willing to admit impoverished immigrants. “As we have no real racial problem,” Australia announced, “we are not desirous of importing one.” Peru wanted no doctors or lawyers. Canada wanted only farmers. France was already saturated. The nations of Central America disdained “traders or intellectuals.” The United States grandly agreed to begin—in 1938!—accepting its full legal annual quota for Germany and Austria of 27,370 immigrants. The Jewish victims—someone else’s citizens and thus someone else’s problem—fell into the anarchic interstices of the nation-state system. “We see,” a German newspaper editorialized smugly, “that . . . no state is prepared to fight the cultural disgrace of central Europe by accepting a few thousand Jews. Thus the conference serves to justify Germany’s policy against Jewry.”

Even the victims inadvertently sent the wrong signals, offering a civil response to violent challenge when the violent consider a civil response to be cowardice and an open door to exploitation. Yehuda Bauer, the Israeli historian and former director of Holocaust research at Yad Vashem, underlines the normative regularity of the Jewish response:

The Germans did not know, until sometime in 1941, what they would do with the Jews: the decision to murder them was not taken until then. If the Germans did not know, the Jews cannot be expected to have known either. Their problem, as they saw it, was how to survive an occupation that would end one day. . . . That meant, to use Isaiah Trunk’s terminology, not “collaboration,” but “cooperation”—that is, yielding to the demands of the conqueror while trying to evade the worst excesses; cooperation did not mean agreement with the conqueror’s policies or war aims, and it was based on the assumption that the Germans would ultimately be defeated. . . .

Once it began to dawn upon the Jewish populations of Europe that the Germans had decided to murder them, the reaction was flight, hiding, armed resistance on the part of a small minority who were able to obtain weapons, attempts to seek employment that would be essential to the Germans, and a despairing but often dignified acceptance of inevitable death. Psychologically, Jewish responses to knowledge of impending destruction were no different from similar responses of other groups. Russian or Polish peasants on the point of execution by German troops, French resistance fighters caught and sentenced to death, Serb villagers confronting Croat or German murderers—people facing inescapable destruction behave in much the same way. The range of reactions extends from numbed fear and hysterical crying to heroic defiance. We value the latter, which was indeed quite widespread. But the other kinds of response are no less human, no less understandable or worthy of empathy.

The Germans like Eichmann and Blobel, who expressed wonder at seeing Jewish victims willingly jumping into killing pits, came from a nation whose sons, like the sons of other European nations, had followed orders to charge over the top of the trenches during the First World War and run directly into machine-gun fire. When there are (for whatever complex reasons of patriotism, military discipline or mortal threat) no other reasonable choices, people do what they are told. Did not Eichmann and Blobel walk unaided to the gallows when their time came? They at least deserved their deaths.