The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (63 page)

January 1945, when it was evacuated; she was then sent to Ravensbrück again and finally Belsen for the last month of its existence.
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Throughout the trial, the press commented on the “defiant, contemptuous look that marred her undeniable good looks.” The WJC’s representative, Alex Easterman, reported that “the attention of all in court has been riveted on her” and commented on her “savage beauty—she has the cruel- est eyes and tightly drawn mouth ever seen in woman.” At Auschwitz and Belsen, Backhouse said, Grese was known as “the worst woman in the camp.” Raymond Phillips in his account of the trial seemed unable to comprehend how so “striking” a young woman “with her youth, her blond hair, broad forehead, firmly mod- eled nose, and blue defiant eyes” could have carried out such atrocities.
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During the first eighteen days of the trial, the prosecu- tion laid out their case using witnesses and previously gathered depositions. There were a few star witness- es, such as Brigadier Llewelyn Glyn Hughes, who gave precise and detailed descriptions of the medical crisis in the camp upon its liberation, as did Captain Derek Sington. Sington, who had been among the very first British soldiers in the camp, told the court that when he encountered Kramer, the commandant was wholly unmoved by the death around him, and merely “sat

back in his arm-chair, tilted his hat back, and was gen- erally confident. He expressed no emotion about the camp.” Sington said that Kramer described the prison- ers of Belsen as “habitual criminals, felons and homo- sexuals.”
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In addition to watching a film made by the British army that showed the state of the camp in April, the court also toured the camp grounds. There was moving testimony from a number of Jewish survivors; the courtroom was electrified by the testimony of Dr. Ada Bimko (who later married Josef Rosensaft), a Pol- ish doctor who had survived both Auschwitz and Bels- en. On September 20, she recounted—with tears run- ning down her face—how her father, mother, brother, two sisters, husband, and six-yearold son were among the dead of Auschwitz. Given the chance to identify her tormentors, she walked slowly along the dock, point- ing out fifteen of the defendants by name, and said she had seen Kramer and Grese both participate in beat- ings and selections in Auschwitz.
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Two dozen other witnesses gave similar testimony alleging Kramer and the others to have participated in beatings, deliberate starvation, selections, and murder.

The defense strategy was predictable. First, they ques- tioned the charges, bringing in a professor of interna- tional law from London University, one Colonel H. A. Smith. He argued that concentration camps in Ger-

many had existed before the war and were legal under German law; therefore what went on in them could not be considered a war crime. He also suggested that many of those who were killed or mistreated in these camps were not, strictly speaking, Allied nationals, be- cause once parts of Poland and various other swaths of Europe had been annexed to the Reich, the citizens there fell under German law, and the competence of the court did not reach into internal German affairs. Fi- nally, Colonel Smith pointed out that all the defendants were acting under superior orders. These points carried little weight with the court, and indeed the prosecu- tion dismissed the first two as “nonsense” and assert- ed that superior orders alone was no defense for acts of inhuman cruelty. Thus, the defense was obliged to pick apart the various allegations piece by piece, look- ing for factual inaccuracies in the affidavits, of which there were many, and trying to raise reasonable doubts about the charges. It was a difficult task, especially in the case of Josef Kramer. Major T. C. M. Winwood, who had the unenviable task of defending Kramer, made a rather ham-fisted effort. He asserted that at Auschwitz, it was Hoess, not Kramer, who gave orders; Kramer was merely a supernumerary “confined to the administra- tion of people inside” the camp—he had no involve- ment with gas chambers. Yes, there may have been beatings, Winwood said, but “the Court should take

into account the many difficulties there were and the scarcity of personnel to cope with them.” After all, he said, “the language of a concentration camp is blows.” At Belsen, Winwood contended, Kramer encountered a tragic situation not of his own making, and no evidence had been produced to show that he pursued a deliber- ate plan to starve and mistreat prisoners. The mess at Belsen was laid at the doorstep of Kramer’s superiors in Berlin, Richard Glücks and Oswald Pohl, for it was they who ordered the transports of ill prisoners to Belsen in the first place. And after all, Belsen was simply “an example of what was happening to Germany as a whole country—order changing into disorder, disorder into chaos.” In short, Kramer bore no personal responsibil- ity for the circumstances either at Auschwitz or Belsen. Much the same defense was used for other defendants, although in the cases of alleged specific acts of cruelty, the defense tried to raise doubts about the use of un- corroborated affidavits.
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The prosecution had something of an easier time of it. No one disputed that the accused were present in Auschwitz and Belsen, or that they played a role in the administration of the camps. Kramer himself did not deny his membership in the SS, or his career history in the camp system. Naturally, many of the accused dis- puted specific allegations of brutality or murder. Kram-

er said he never beat anyone or mistreated anyone; he also denied that there was a gas chamber at Auschwitz, or that there were mass executions or beatings. The only people who died in Auschwitz, Kramer said, did so from natural causes. Kramer acknowledged that prisoners at Belsen were dying in large numbers, but was unable to show that he did anything to ameliorate the conditions.
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Others, like Klein and Grese, were unrepentant. Klein admitted his role in the selections at Auschwitz and acknowledged that he thereby con- demned thousands to death. Grese too admitted using her specially made whip on prisoners at Auschwitz. At Belsen, she said, “although I carried a whip and beat people at Auschwitz, for some reason I never did it at Belsen. I always used my hands at Belsen.” Colonel Backhouse tried to avoid the question of precisely who did what to whom; instead, he asserted that the ac- cused knew that the camps were wrong and contrary to every law and custom of war. In his closing summary, he went carefully over the details of what happened in Auschwitz: the transports, beatings, shavings, tattoo- ing, forced labor, starvation, selections, gassings, cre- matoria. He asserted that Belsen, though it had no gas chambers, was an extension of the same horrors and indifference toward life as was evident in Auschwitz. The accused, he said, took part in this world of brutal- ity and murder, and so “participated in a conspiracy to

ill-treat the persons who were under their care.” How- ever small their part, they must be found guilty if they played any role at all in contributing to this machinery of death.

Backhouse could certainly have done more to frame the trial around the determination of the Third Reich to destroy Europe’s Jews. In his emphasis on Allied na- tionals, he seemed unnecessarily constrained by the need to link German actions to violations of specific laws concerning treatment of POWs and civilians. Yet it would be wrong to suggest that Backhouse ignored the Jewish catastrophe altogether. He stressed that “in Auschwitz alone, literally millions of people were gassed for no other reason than that they were Jews.” In his closing argument, he made a point of emphasiz- ing that, while he as a prosecutor had to be concerned “with minor matters” about “whether this person did this or that,” he urged jurors to consider the larger picture: those on trial had knowingly participated in “an attempt to destroy the whole Jewish race.” Using language quite unusual in official British parlance, he stated that “the martyrdom of the Jews…was a war crime which has never been equaled.”
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What appears to have most angered contemporary Jewish observers was not chiefly the absence of Jewish victimization at the trial, but rather the callous manner in which the

defense was obliged to make its case. When Major Winwood said that the concentration camps contained merely “the dregs of the ghettoes of Central Europe,” his statement was denounced by the Board of Deputies of British Jews as “besmirching the memory of millions of men, women, and children who died amid unspeak- able horrors or were murdered for no fault but that they were Jews.” (Remarkably, Winwood apologized to the court during his closing arguments for making offensive statements; he had been merely the “mouth- piece of the accused,” he said.) Major Cranfield, the defense counsel appointed to Irma Grese, also came in for sharp criticism because he made the argument that his client could not be aware that her actions were wrong because concentration camps were common in Europe during the war; and Cranfield went on to draw parallels between the Nazi genocide and the forced de- portations from Poland of ethnic Germans then being undertaken by Britain and its allies, and of the use of chain gangs of prisoners in the United States. These were the laws in place in Germany, Cranfield argued, and it was normal that they would be obeyed by the defendants. These sorts of lawyerly pirouettes were la- beled “cowardly slander against the dead” and eroded support among Jewish observers for the whole trial.
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On November 16, 1945, the court adjourned; a mere six

hours later, it reassembled and delivered the verdicts. Thirty of the forty-four defendants were declared guilty on one or both counts of mistreating Allied nationals at Auschwitz and Belsen. The degree of their personal responsibility was indicated by the varying sentences they received. Eleven defendants—Kramer, Klein, Hoe- ssler, Grese, Bormann, Volkenrath, and five others were sentenced to death, and were hanged on December 12, 1945. Nineteen others received sentences ranging from life in prison to a mere one year of jail time. Kramer evidently went to his death feeling much aggrieved. As he wrote to his wife while in prison, “all the time I am asking myself why this misfortune came over me. How have I deserved this? What have I done that one has to treat me like a criminal? That so many people died in Belsen—I could not alter that anymore. It is all fate and maybe I shall even be punished for that. My father used to say sometimes I was not lucky. Today I believe it only too well.”
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The press reports of the verdicts reflected a sort of weariness with the whole thing. The London Times concluded that the trial revealed “an almost exagger- ated desire to accord fair play to the accused,” but took some pride that in the end British justice had triumphed over mere vengeance. By late November, many Jews had lost interest in the trial. Bevin’s speech on Pales-

tine had seized the headlines, and Jewish fury toward the British had reached a boiling point. And survivors themselves expressed reservations about the very idea of a trial. Hadassah Rosensaft, who had testified at the trial (as Dr. Ada Bimko), “was glad the trial was over,” and later refused to testify at the Nuremberg trials or at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. “I just couldn’t take part in any more ‘fair play’ for the Nazis. At that point in my life, I couldn’t understand why someone caught in flagrante committing the most brutal acts of mur- der and torture could possibly be found innocent, or why he would be entitled to what was considered a ‘fair trial.’”
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As if reflecting the same sentiment, the Jewish Chronicle devoted only a single paragraph of an inside page to the conviction of Kramer and the others. His death by hanging was allotted one sentence.
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For the Jews of Belsen, like the Jewish DPs elsewhere in occupied Germany, liberation did not arrive in 1945. The year that had begun with such tragedy in the death marches of the east had of course seen the soaring joys of the arrival of Allied armies in the camps in Western Europe; it had seen the extreme kindness and devo- tion of humanitarian interventions by soldiers and civilians alike in the care and treatment provided to Jewish survivors, and certainly 1945 had brought about an end to that awful era in which Jewish lives across

Europe could be snuffed out by the merest whim of a German officer or functionary. The year closed out with a sober, careful judicial proceeding against the Belsen guards that completely repudiated and defied the Nazi worldview. Yet this vexed year of 1945 had not marked in any sense an endpoint or a coda to Jewish travails. To the Jews of Europe, 1945 was only one stop in a passage away from the daily struggle for survival and toward a new struggle to build a future. The later months of 1945 brought profound disappointment, bit- ter recrimination against the liberating armies, confu- sion and frustration over the question of emigration, and repeated denials of what seemed to be the true meaning of liberation: the freedom to live and to settle in one’s homeland, free of fear, of hunger, of persecu- tion. The triumph of Allied arms in 1945 did not fulfill these long-cherished hopes of European Jewry. Such rewards lay in the distant future, across a long stretch of anxious years and the roiling backwash of war.

Conclusion: The Missing Liberation

I

T HAS LONG been a habit in the United States to narrate the history of the liberation of Europe in a heroic register, stressing the selfless sacrifice of or- dinary soldiers as well as the talented generalship of American military leaders. The story is usually told in three acts. It opens with the daring cross-channel inva- sion of France in June 1944, the stalwart fighting from the beachheads, and the bold breakout and pursuit of August; in this initial stage, the world dares to hope that the war might be over by Christmas. In act two, the Allied forces are briefly thrown back on their heels by a still lethal German war machine; a chastened alliance girds itself for the bitter struggles of the winter of 1944. In act three, dogged soldiering and the preponderance of American power finally break the German defenses; with spring comes the dash into central Germany and, at the end, the total victory of May 8, 1945. It is a story that places Americans and their military achievements