Europe: A History (215 page)
It is untrue that I, or anyone in Germany, wanted the war in 1939. It was desired and instigated solely by those international statesmen who were either of Jewish descent or who worked for Jewish interests … I die with a happy heart, aware of the immeasurable deeds of our soldiers at the front… Above all, I charge the leaders of the nation … to scrupulous observation of the laws of race, and to merciless opposition to the universal poisoner of all peoples, international Jewry.
121
The last remains of the Führer and his wife were buried by the KGB in east Germany, and eventually incinerated by them in 1970. Two fragments of a skull said to be Hitler’s were produced from the ex-Soviet archives in 1993.
‘Victory in Europe’, or VE Day, followed in the second week of May. For the Nazis it meant annihilation, the vengeance of their gods; for the German nation it spelled total defeat. General Montgomery accepted the submission of a German delegation in his tent on the Lüneburg Heath; General Eisenhower accepted the formal capitulation at his base near Reims; Marshal Zhukov did the same at his HQ at Karlshorst. The moment of Germany’s unconditional surrender was fixed for midnight on the 8th (GMT). This was 5 a.m. on the 9th (Moscow Time).
As always, the declaration of peace did not quite match the reality. The Allied Powers were still at war in the Pacific. In the desert of New Mexico, the scientists were still working feverishly for the first atomic test. In Europe, pockets of fighting continued. A German army cornered in Prague was finished off by elements of Vlasov’s RLA, who had vainly changed sides in the hope of a reprieve. Pockets of local resistance against the Soviet takeover continued in Eastern Europe and the western USSR until the 1950s.
KEELHAUL
I
N
February 1945, Major Denis Hills, an officer of the British Eighth Army I in Italy, was given command of a POW camp at Taranto containing 8,000 men of the 162 Turkoman Infantry Division, classified as ‘repatriates’. His charges had been conscripted into the Red Army, been captured on the Eastern Front by the Germans, and had endured starvation and cannibalism under arrest before volunteering for service with the Wehrmacht. Having sailed with them to Odessa, whither they were transported under the terms of the Yalta Agreement, he had no doubts that all such Soviet repatriates were being sent home to be killed.
1
In subsequent assignments, Hills repeatedly faced the age-old dilemma of a soldier whose conscience did not match his order. In the case of the SS
Fede
, which was trying to leave La Spezia for Palestine with an illegal shipload of Jewish emigrants, he advised his superiors that regulations should be waived to let them sail—which they did. ‘I had wished to extinguish a small glow of hatred before it grew into a flame.’
2
During Operation Keelhaul (1946–7), Hills was given 498 ex-Soviet prisoners for screening in a camp at Riccione. His orders were to repatriate to the USSR (1) all persons captured in German uniforms, (2) all former Red Army soldiers, and (3) all persons who had aided the enemy. By inventing spurious categories such as ‘paramilitaries’ and by privately urging people to flee, he whittled down the number of repatriates to 180. When they left, the Russian leader of the group told him: ‘So you are sending us to our deaths … Democracy has failed us.’ ‘You are the sacrifice’, Hills replied; ‘the others will now be safe.’
3
In the case of Ukrainians from the Waffen-SS Galicia Division held at Rimini, Major Hills was one of several British officers who personally rebuffed the demands of the Soviet Repatriation Commission. When the Division was reprieved, he was sent a letter from the division’s CO, thanking him ‘for your highly humane work … defending the principles in the name of which the Second World War has been started’.
4
According to international law, the Galicians were Polish, not Soviet citizens.
Hills admitted that he ‘bent the rules’.
5
Shortly afterwards, he was court-martialled and demoted on a charge of unseemly conduct, having been caught doing cartwheels and handsprings at dawn in the city square of Trieste.
The Allied policy of forcibly repatriating large numbers of men, women, and children for killing by Stalin and Tito has been called a war crime. In the Drau Valley in Austria, where in June 1945 British troops used violence to round up the so-called Cossack Brigade and their dependants, it provoked mass suicides. But it was well hidden until a report written by Major
Hills came to light in the USA in 1973, and the opening of British archives. Solzhenitsyn called it ‘The Last Secret’. It only reached the wider public through books published thirty and forty years after the event.
6
More recently, an unusual libel trial in London awarded £1.5 million damages against Count Nikolai Tolstoy, author of
The Minister and the Massacres
, who had written of an official British conspiracy and cover-up. The plaintiff was not the minister accused of ordering the handover of the Cossacks, but a British officer who, faced with the same problem as Hills, had pursued a different policy. He did not receive a penny of his award, as the defendants fought on in the European courts.
7
Individual responsibility is always hard to prove. But the moral principle is unequivocal. If ‘obeying orders’ could be no defence for Adolf Eichmann, it can be no defence for Allied officers.
Six weeks later, at Potsdam, from 17 July to 2 August, the Big Three met for the last time. Of the wartime leaders Stalin alone survived, suspicious that the capitalist powers might turn against him. Contrary to all predictions, Churchill was defeated in Britain’s post-war election, and replaced in the middle of the conference by the socialist Clement Attlee. Roosevelt had died before the fall of Germany; he was succeeded by his no-nonsense Vice-President, Harry Truman. Differences among them were so great that the original idea of organizing a Peace Conference was shelved. When Truman arranged for a melodramatic announcement of the successful American A-bomb test, Stalin did not even blink.
So Potsdam stuck to practical matters. Germany was to be given an Interallied Council to co-ordinate the administration of its four occupation zones. Austria was to be restored to its independence. France was to be given back Alsace-Lorraine, and Czechoslovakia the Sudetenland. Poland was to be given a frontier on the Oder-Neisse line, whether the Poles wanted it or not. All Germans living east of the new frontiers were to be expelled. All the Nazi leaders who had fallen into the Allied net were to stand trial before an International War Crimes Tribunal. Beyond that, the Allies could agree on little; and they did not try.
By which time, the processes of reconstruction and forgetting were in full swing:
After every war
someone has to clear up.
For things won’t find their right place
on their own.
Someone has to heave
the rubble to the roadsides
so the carts piled high with corpses
can pass by.
Photogenic it certainly isn’t;
and it takes years.
All the cameras have gone off
to other wars.
Those who knew
what this was all about
must make way for those
who know little, or less than a little,
or simply nothing.
122
Friday, 19 October 1945, Nuremberg.
123
The city was occupied by the US Army. An American colonel had taken command of the city prison which stood immediately behind the Palace of Justice on the Fürtherstrasse. Of the 24 named defendants in the ‘Trial of German Major War Criminals’, 21 were locked in their cells. It was the day when they were due to be served with their indictments.
The task of serving the indictments had fallen to a young British major, a former prisoner of war, who spoke fluent German. As he entered the cell-block just before 2 p.m. he saw three tiers of cells, each with a small window grille in the door. A guard was lolling at every door, peering through the grille. On the upper floors the open balconies were covered with wire netting. The twenty-second defendant had recently committed suicide. The event was to be witnessed by a dozen men. The major was shown into the block by the commandant of the prison and by a master-sergeant who carried the keys. Behind them walked the General Secretary of the International Military Tribunal with his interpreter, two American soldiers carrying documents, an officer of the US security staff, the prison psychologist, notebook in hand, and the prison’s Lutheran chaplain. A handful of ‘snowdrops’—American military policemen in their characteristic white helmets—brought up the rear.
The indictments, freshly translated from English into German, were bulky documents. The cover-page read: ‘The United States of America, the French Republic, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics against …’, followed by a column of 24 names, headed by that of Goering. There were four counts—conspiracy in common, crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity. Each of the accused was to receive two copies, which outlined both the general charges and the particular counts on which he was accused. Anglo-American practice required that the indictments be served in person.
The young major, though a law graduate, had no particular experience of such duties. When he saw the wire netting his thoughts turned to one of his wartime companions, a Belgian airman captured by the Gestapo, who had leapt to his death from exactly such a balcony in the prison at Suresnes. Though he had been working for the Tribunal for several months, the major had only just arrived in Nuremberg, and he had never met any of the prisoners face to face:
Map 27.
Post-War Germany, after 1945
‘I looked towards the high window at the far end of the prison. The spiral stairs to the upper rows of cells were in silhouette against the bright autumn sun. There was that eternal silence, only the menacing sound of keys…
The silence continued until we reached a cell near the end of the row. The guard on duty saluted. I noticed that he was armed with a revolver and a blackjack … As the cell was unlocked, I braced myself to meet [the prisoner, who] rose unsteadily to his feet….
I was surprised to find my voice.
‘Hermann Wilhelm Goering?’
‘Jawohl.’
‘I am Major Neave, the officer appointed by the International Military Tribunal to serve upon you a copy of the indictment in which you are named as a defendant.’
Goering’s expression changed to a scowl, the look of a stage gangster, as the words were interpreted. I handed him a copy of the indictment which he took in silence. He listened as I said, ‘I am also asked to explain to you Article 16 of the Charter of the Tribunal.’
A copy in German was handed to him.
‘If you will look at paragraph (c). You have the right to conduct your own defence before the tribunal, or to have the assistance of counsel.’
My words were correct and precise. Goering looked serious and depressed as I paused.
‘So it has come,’ he said…
‘You can have counsel of your own choice, or the tribunal can appoint one for you.’
It was evident that Goering did not understand … Then he said, ‘I do not know any lawyers. I have nothing to do with them.’…
‘I think that you would be well advised to be represented by someone.’…
He shrugged his shoulders.
‘It all seems pretty hopeless to me. I must read this indictment very carefully, but I do not see how it can have any basis in law.’…
Some hours after I left Goering’s cell, Dr. Gilbert, the prison psychologist, asked him to autograph a copy of the indictment. Goering wrote, ‘The victor will always be the judge and the vanquished the accused.’
124
In this way, the fundamental dilemma of the Nuremberg Trials found expression even before the trials began.
Europe in the autumn of 1945 was functioning at the lowest level of subsistence. The victorious Allies had divided a devastated Germany into four zones of occupation, and were struggling to maintain a united front. The Western countries liberated by the Anglo-Americans—France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands—were picking up the strands of their pre-war existence. The Eastern countries liberated by the Soviets were finding that liberation was joined to a new form of subjugation. Great Britain, the only combatant country to have avoided occupation, had recently chosen a socialist government which was realizing that victory was no safeguard against a marked decline in status. There was no single state in Europe, like the USA, which was both victorious and unscathed. A handful of neutrals, from Spain to Sweden, were free to exercise a degree of real independence.
Several countries had already staged trials to punish wartime acts that were now considered criminal. In Oslo, Quisling was tried and executed in September: in Paris, Laval suffered the extreme penalty on 9 October. In Moscow, the trial of
Polish underground leaders had taken place in June; public opinion in the West was not fully aware that the defendants in this case were neither fascists nor collaborators, but heroic allies whose only crime had been to fight for their country’s independence. Western governments had preferred to press privately for lenient sentences rather than protest publicly.