The Nazi Hunters (30 page)

All of this was true despite the barrage of news stories that portrayed the defendants as monsters, a breed apart. As University of Toronto historian Rebecca Wittmann pointed out in her insightful account of the trial, this was no accident. “
In many ways, the press coverage simply reflected the legal strategy, especially since it satisfied the need for sensational headlines and lurid details,” she wrote. But nothing could completely quiet the sense of gnawing unease of the millions who instinctively felt implicated, even while they protested that they had nothing to do with the crimes committed by those who had found themselves in the dock.

• • •

“
It would be quite unfair to blame ‘the majority of the German people’ for their lack of enthusiasm for legal proceedings against Nazi criminals without mentioning the facts of life during the Adenauer era,” Arendt wrote after the trial. Specifically, she pointed out that “the West German administration on all levels is shot through with former Nazis.” This prompted a public perception that
“the small fish are caught, while the big fish continue their careers,”
she added, italicizing the phrase for emphasis.

No one symbolized the government’s failure to make a clean break with the Nazi past more than Hans Globke.
During the Third Reich, Globke had worked for the Ministry of the Interior and served as a commentator on the Nuremberg race laws that institutionalized Nazi anti-Semitic doctrine and practices, which meant explaining and justifying them. Yet he emerged as a state secretary under Adenauer, running the chancellor’s office and serving as his trusted advisor from 1953 to 1963, when Adenauer stepped down.

Bauer tried to investigate Globke’s role, particularly when his name came up in the Eichmann trial in 1961.
He requested documents about Globke from the East German authorities. But the Adenauer government viewed all the accusations from that quarter as a smear campaign, part of the ongoing Cold War battle between the two German governments. Soon, Bauer was forced to hand over his investigation to the Bonn public prosecutor’s office, which decided to drop the case.

In 1963, the East German Supreme Court proceeded to indict Globke for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The West German government spokesman dismissed it as a “show trial,” arguing that Globke had been investigated already and all the charges were “found to be untrue.” The spokesman added that there was evidence that Globke had helped shield some people from persecution in that period.

Of course East Germany was playing its usual propaganda game and ignoring the former Nazis in its ranks, but West Germany’s record on this issue was distinctly unimpressive. So was its record of prosecuting those who had served the Nazi regime.
From 1950 to 1962, the authorities investigated thirty thousand former Nazis. But of the 5,426 who were brought to trial, 4,027 were acquitted and only 155 were convicted of murder. Given the kind of tight constraints of West German law that Bauer frequently complained about, this was hardly surprising.

When the Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes was opened in Ludwigsburg in 1958, its staffers were only given the power to conduct the preliminary investigation of cases. If they turned up enough evidence to suggest that a case should be pursued further, they then had to turn it over to regional prosecutors, who might or might not be interested in following up and seeking an indictment. To this day, this frustrates the Ludwigsburg team. “
We do not have the possibility to bring [a case] to court,” Deputy Director Thomas Will pointed out in 2014. “We should have had it.”

But back in the 1950s, the Adenauer government wanted both to demonstrate that it was serious about investigating war crimes and to reassure its jittery citizens that such investigations would not be pushed too far. This led to the policy of deliberately limiting the powers of the
investigators. One measure of the popular mood was the hostility that the staffers of the Ludwigsburg office often faced. “In the first years, this office was not welcomed here,” Will explained. When staffers looked for apartments they avoided mentioning where they worked. Some even had problems getting a taxi driver to take them to the office, which is housed in a former nineteenth-century prison. All this would change over time, but very slowly. Today the office, which continues its investigations and also has accumulated an impressive historical archive about the Third Reich, is largely accepted and, to some extent, a source of local pride.

• • •

Despite the widespread dissatisfaction that the Auschwitz trial generated, both from those who were instinctively opposed to the prosecution of former Nazis and those who felt the proceedings did not go far enough, it qualified as a major breakthrough. First of all, the sheer magnitude of the coverage meant that many Germans who had routinely ignored earlier trials could not help but pay attention to the drama in the Frankfurt courtroom. And while the initial public reaction was largely negative, one indicator that some people began to reconsider their views about closing the book on the Third Reich was another poll that was conducted one year later. As compared to the 1965 poll that showed that 57 percent opposed any further trials of former Nazis,
the 1966 poll showed a drop in that figure to 44 percent.

Aside from exposing the public to a wealth of new evidence about the horrors of Auschwitz, the trial also enabled a rare display of cooperation across the Cold War divide. It was no accident that the two men responsible for that particular breakthrough were Fritz Bauer and Jan Sehn, the Polish investigating judge who had orchestrated his country’s earlier Auschwitz trial and the conviction of its commandant Rudolf Höss. Sehn had provided his German counterparts testimonies and other evidence he had gathered in Poland for use in their trial, and he traveled to Frankfurt to deliver such materials on more than one occasion.

Sehn was equally helpful when Frankfurt organized a special exhibition, “Auschwitz: Pictures and Documents,” which opened on November 18, 1964, during the trial. It was meant to teach young people,
in the words of Carl Tesch, “
that something like that can never happen again.” Tesch had organized the exhibit, but Bauer was both its catalyst and staunchest supporter. Sehn made sure that the Auschwitz Museum, situated in the remains of the concentration camp in Poland, provided the artifacts that the exhibition needed for its display.

During the trial, Sehn also played a critical role in arranging a visit by a West German delegation, which included a judge, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and government representatives, to Auschwitz in December 1964. This allowed them to examine the site and to check the accuracy of the testimony of witnesses based on such considerations as the actual distances within the camp. At a time when Poland still had not established diplomatic relations with West Germany as a result of lingering postwar tensions, this was a considerable feat. Sehn and Bauer worked with their respective governments to remove the barriers to the visit, with an eye to increasing cooperation beyond this particular case. “
May it smooth the way for closer relations between the two peoples,” Sehn declared.

The trial had an impact in other ways as well.
Playwright Peter Weiss wrote
The Investigation
, which was billed as “a dramatic re-construction of the Frankfurt War Crimes trials” and an “Oratorio in 11 Cantos.” It was staged simultaneously in thirteen theaters in East and West Germany on October 19, 1965, a mere two months after the conclusion of the trial. Directed by Peter Brook, the Royal Shakespeare Company also performed a reading of the work at the Aldwych Theatre in London that same evening.

The Investigation
consisted of compressed extracts of the testimonies at the trial. In Weiss’s version, a witness offers this account of his narrow escape from death at the hands of Boger, the camp’s particularly infamous sadist:

When I was taken down from the swing

Boger said to me

Now we’ve made you ready

for a happy trip to heaven

I was brought to a cell in Block Eleven

There I waited from hour to hour

to be shot

I don’t know

how many days I spent there

My buttocks were festering

My testicles were black and blue

and swollen to gigantic size

Most of the time I lay unconscious

Then I was led

along with a large group of others

into the washroom

We had to undress

and our numbers were written

on our breasts

in blue pencil

I knew that this

was the death sentence

As we stood there naked in a row

The Liaison Chief came and asked

how many prisoners he should register

as shot

After he left we were counted

once again

It turned out there was one too many

I had learned

To always place myself last

so I received a kick

and got my clothing back

I was supposed to be taken to my cell

to wait for the next batch

but a male nurse

who was also a prisoner

took me with him to the hospital

It just happened

that one or two were supposed to live

and I was

one of them

Born in 1944, Bernhard Schlink was part of West Germany’s postwar generation that eventually became known as the 68ers—the young people who began questioning their parents in the 1960s and just about all authority figures by 1968, the year when they took to the streets in protests that swept across Europe and the United States. While the protests elsewhere were sparked by the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, and other causes, West Germany had a special factor that contributed to its unrest. “
Nineteen sixty-eight cannot be understood without understanding that this was a worldwide thing, but in Germany it cannot be understood without [understanding] the Auschwitz trial,” Schlink pointed out.

For Schlink, who would go on to become both a law professor and a successful writer, there is no doubt about the impact of that trial. “The Auschwitz trial left a much bigger imprint on me and my generation than the Eichmann trial,” he said. “Of course the Eichmann trial was something that we registered and followed very closely. All the papers wrote about it. But the Auschwitz trial was much closer.” Since the defendants were not senior figures, he added, one of the immediate questions it raised in his generation’s mind was “who were the higher-ups?”

During the trial, Schlink tried to satisfy his curiosity on that point by reading the autobiography of Rudolf Höss, who had written his story at the urging of Jan Sehn before he was hanged in 1947. He still recalled “his absolute shock at the way he writes like a manager who is overwhelmed by a difficult task.” There was Höss fretting about the influx of Hungarian Jews, as Schlink put it, “Oh God . . . how can we house them, how can we burn them, how can we kill them?” He recognized that the commandant was “a technocrat” who “just solved the problems that this criminal regime created. This was frightening, frightening.” He found Höss’s account to have “an authenticity” that all the subsequent protestations of the defendants
in other trials, who desperately tried to spin their stories to seek absolution, never did.

The other question it raised for the postwar generation was what roles had their parents, relatives, and other older acquaintances played during the Third Reich, a subject that was so often passed over in silence when he was growing up. “Under the pressure of my generation, these things came out,” Schlink noted—and in many cases led to the discovery of dark secrets. But while the Auschwitz trial was the trigger for such discussions for students like Schlink, the broader self-examination of German society, including by their elders, did not come till a decade later. The trigger then was the showing of the 1978 NBC miniseries
The Holocaust
that riveted German viewers with its vivid portrayal of a Jewish family and an ambitious lawyer who turns into an SS mass murderer.

The process of discovering the past had no single eureka moment. As a law student, Schlink and many of his friends greatly admired Bauer for his efforts to prod that process along.
But Peter Schneider, another 68er who became a prominent writer, conceded that he only learned about Bauer and his role in the Auschwitz trial in the 1980s, when he was writing a novel about the son of Josef Mengele, the fearsome camp doctor. Nonetheless, Schneider was influenced by the Auschwitz trial in the 1960s, particularly when he read Peter Weiss’s dramatic rendition of it. It proved to be a part of his education that helped propel him to the forefront of the protest movement in 1968.

Schlink did not take a similarly vocal role in the protests of the 1960s, but the era left its mark on him in other ways, planting seeds that would only blossom decades later. The best-known result: his lyrical 1995 short novel
The Reader
, which rocketed to the top of bestseller lists after it was published in English and Schlink was invited to discuss it on
The Oprah Winfrey Show
. In the early postwar era, the fifteen-year-old narrator falls in love with a tram conductor who is twice his age. After a lengthy affair, she disappears—only to reappear as a defendant in a trial of concentration camp guards that he is obliged to observe as a law student. But the story is far from as simple or as morally unambiguous as the plot outline
suggests, and Schlink deftly navigates the terrain of personal guilt and betrayal.