The Nazi Hunters (15 page)

As Germans dutifully filled out the
Fragebogen,
the occupiers could hardly keep up with the mounting paperwork.
The Americans were particularly ambitious at first, ordering everyone over eighteen to fill out the questionnaires and seeking to do as thorough a review as possible. They did get through nearly 1.6 million questionnaires by the end of 1946, leading to the dismissal of 374,000 Nazis from their jobs. But the backlog of cases was in the millions and there was no way for U.S. personnel to handle it all. As General Lucius Clay, the military governor of the American zone, put it: “
We couldn’t have tried [all of] them in a hundred years.” He concluded that denazification had to “
to be done by the Germans.”

This fit in with his desire to encourage Germans who were considered relatively untainted by the Nazi era to gradually take responsibility for local affairs. The
Spruchkammern
, the local denazification tribunals in the American zone, were not technically courts, but they did have prosecutors and defendants—and they were charged with determining who were the “
major offenders,” “offenders,” “lesser offenders,” “followers,” or “persons exonerated.”

The process was riddled with problems from the start.
Many former Nazis claimed to be
Muss-Nazis,
compelled to take party membership but in reality harboring anti-Nazi views. As the victors never tired of joking, Hitler clearly never had any followers. While some tribunal members tried to carry out their mandate, others were only too happy to clear former Nazis on the basis of highly dubious testimony. Germans soon popularized a term for the widespread whitewashing of reputations:
Persilschein
, a certificate named after the laundry detergent Persil. Nonetheless, there was initial support for the process among Germans:
in 1946, 57 percent of those polled in the American zone approved of it. But confidence in its fairness kept dropping. By 1949, only 17 percent approved.
In some cases, tribunal buildings and the vehicles and homes of their members were vandalized.

Clay later conceded that both the questionnaires and the tribunals were largely a failure. “
But I don’t know what else you could have done,”
he declared, making a legitimate point. In a society that had been so dominated by Hitler and his movement, no one had a recipe for success when it came to denazification. Nonetheless, Clay also argued that the Germans who handled denazification, for all their evident shortcomings, did succeed in exposing many Nazis and excluding them from leadership positions. “
They may not have cleaned their own houses thoroughly, but they at least removed the major dirt,” he wrote.

All of the occupying powers were quick to make exceptions to the rules, as in the case of the rocket scientists that the Russians and the Americans were particularly intent on pursuing. The British and the French found ways to quickly undo decisions that backfired.
In June 1946, 179 executives and employees of the Volkswagen factory in the British zone were dismissed. But the factory was producing vehicles mainly for the British; by February 1947, 138 of that number were back at work.
The French had initially fired three quarters of the teachers in their zone. But they reconsidered when the school year was to begin in September, inviting them all back to their classrooms.

The Soviet authorities repeatedly accused the Western powers of collaborating with former Nazis and allowing them to occupy a large number of key posts. Once the occupation officially ended in 1949 and East and West Germany were formed, the Kremlin continued to portray West Germany as a Nazi haven. While there is no doubt that many former Nazis emerged unscathed from the denazification process in the Western zones of occupation and quickly embedded themselves in comfortable positions in the new democratic state, the Soviet record was far from exemplary either.

To be sure, the Red Army had inflicted brutal retribution during its final push to Berlin, and the last surviving German POWs imprisoned in the Soviet Union were not released until 1956. And in 1949, new East German courts handled many cases in true Stalinist fashion, condemning defendants with breathtaking speed:
during a mere two and a half months, they convicted 3,224 former Nazi officials in proceedings that took an average of twenty minutes each.

But just like the Western powers, the new Soviet masters were faced
with the practical question of how to fill a huge number of positions in their zone and then the new East German state. And just like the Western powers, they were ready to overlook past affiliations when it suited their purposes—in some cases, even more so. Former Nazi Party members found it easy to switch their allegiance to the newly formed Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED), as the German Communist Party was called.
Already in 1946, 30 percent of the members in local SED groups were former Nazis. As General Clay caustically noted, “
joining the SED erased the ‘Nazism’ of the joiner.”

German historian Henry Leide, who combed through massive volumes of East German files to produce a detailed study of that country’s record in dealing with the Nazi past, pointed out that such statistics were no anomaly. “
Along with the many innocent people who were convicted, almost all the seriously accused Nazi criminals were released and they could (wrongly) claim that they had repented for their crimes,” he wrote.

Repentance and redemption, in the form of embracing the communist cause, offered a fast track to careers in all parts of East Germany’s new society—universities, medicine, politics, the security services, among others. The real enemies, as far as the Soviet zone’s new masters were concerned, were those Germans who were suspected of anticommunism in any form. They were considered far more dangerous than former Nazis.

• • •

In June 1948, the Kremlin launched its blockade of West Berlin, cutting off all road, railroad, and canal routes to the city from Western-controlled parts of Germany. Its goal was to isolate and effectively swallow this Western enclave in the middle of the Soviet zone, driving out the Americans, the British, and the French.
The Western Allies responded by mounting the massive Berlin Airlift, with a continual stream of cargo planes making 270,000 flights to deliver more than two million tons of essential supplies until the Soviet Union lifted the blockade on May 12, 1949. It was a spectacular show of resolve that saved West Berlin and accelerated the momentum toward the formal creation of two German states right afterward. The Cold War had started in earnest.

It was no accident that 1948 was also the year when Western governments were visibly losing interest in the further prosecution of war criminals and began the process of reducing the sentences of those who had already been convicted. The secret telegram that the Commonwealth Relations Office sent around the world on July 13, 1948, offered very specific instructions on how “to dispose of the past as soon as possible.” While urging the conclusion of any cases awaiting trial by August 31 of that year, it added that “
no fresh trials should be started” after that date. “This would particularly affect cases of alleged war criminals, not now in custody, who might subsequently come into our hands,” it concluded.

The atmosphere was changing in Washington, too. The critics of the war crimes trials had received additional ammunition when lawyers for many of those convicted argued for commutation of sentences. In the case of the Waffen SS troops who were convicted for carrying out the Malmedy massacre of American POWs, there were charges that incriminating statements had been obtained through a variety of ruses and threats of violence. No such accusations were made in the broad range of cases handled at Dachau by William Denson, but the prosecutor—who had already returned to the United States—would also soon find his record under new intense scrutiny.

The U.S. Army set up five review boards to examine the sentences to date and then provide recommendations to General Clay. In theory, this was merely a routine measure to ensure that justice was served, but the political atmosphere of the times certainly encouraged the notion that leniency would be a positive signal. By accepting many of the recommendations for leniency of the review boards that examined all the Dachau trials, Clay acted in the spirit of the times—although he vehemently rebuffed accusations that he had in any way gone soft on war criminals.

The Dachau trials had led to convictions of 1,416 of the 1,672 defendants. “I set aside 69 convictions, commuted 119 sentences, and reduced 138, leaving 1090 sentences,” Clay pointed out. Citing doubts about the reliability of the testimony of some concentration camp survivors in the trials, he commuted 127 of the 426 death sentences to life imprisonment. But it was Clay’s decision to reduce the life sentence of the most notorious
Dachau defendant—Ilse Koch, “the Bitch of Buchenwald”—to four years that stunned Denson, who was back in Washington, and generated an immediate backlash in the capital.

Clay later explained that Koch was “
a sordid, disreputable character” who had earned “the bitter hatred” of the prisoners who testified against her by “flaunting her sex,” but that the evidence did not convince him that she was “a major participant in the crimes of Buchenwald.”
The stories that she had lamp shades made of the human skin of prisoners, he added, were discredited when it became apparent that they were made of goatskin.

Denson called Clay’s action a “
mockery of the administration of justice.” The Koch case generated new headlines and triggered an investigation by a Senate subcommittee headed by Homer Ferguson of Michigan. At the hearing, Denson stood by his original portrayal of Koch as an exceptionally sadistic tormentor of countless prisoners. He explained that the allegations that she had picked out prisoners to be skinned and then used that material for lamp shades, while generating the most lurid news reports, were not central to his case. “
I did not feel that this skin business was of so much importance,” he declared. “The gravamen of her action was in beating prisoners and causing them to be beaten so that they died. That was the real basis for that sentence, I am sure.”

Asked if Koch was less culpable than the other Buchenwald defendants, Denson responded by alluding to her role as the wife of the camp’s first commandant, which meant that she had no official duties. “I think she was more culpable. This was gratuitous on her part,” he said. “There was no reason for her exercising the authority she exercised . . . the people I talked to felt the only reason she was sentenced to life imprisonment instead of death was because she was pregnant.” Denson also argued that Clay’s decision would draw criticism in Germany, despite the growing calls there for an end to punitive measures by the Allies. “Decent German people are also shocked by the reduction of sentence,” he declared.

Among the subcommittee members, there was no sympathy for Koch, even if some of them raised questions about the handling of the Dachau trials. “
From what I know so far about the case, the woman should have
her neck broken,” Arkansas Senator John McClellan declared. The subcommittee concluded that there was no justification for the reduction of Koch’s sentence. Echoing Denson, Senator Ferguson wrote in his final report: “
Every act committed by Ilse Koch as shown by the evidence was that of a volunteer. Such voluntary action, contrary to every decent human instinct, deserves utter contempt and denies mitigation.”

Stung by the sharp criticism of his decision to reduce Koch’s sentence, Clay suggested that he may have reached a different conclusion if he had seen more of the evidence against Koch. He pointed out that the Senate subcommittee “
which unanimously criticized this action heard witnesses who gave testimony not contained in the record before me.”

Denson would be vindicated in another way as well. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, the first leader of the newly created West German government, quickly backed efforts to introduce some form of amnesty for many of those who had faced prosecution. “
In view of the confused times behind us, a general tabula rasa is called for,” he declared in one of his first cabinet meetings.
But after Koch had served her four years as mandated by Clay, a West German court convicted her for incitement of murder and physical mistreatment of German prisoners, sentencing her to life imprisonment—exactly the sentence that Denson had won when he had prosecuted her. As he had predicted, the Germans were no happier about her going free than the Americans were.

Peter Heidenberger, the young German reporter who had covered the Dachau trials, later interviewed Koch in her new prison. He confessed to feeling almost sorry for the then dumpy-looking woman who had once been seen as an erotic monster of mythic proportions. For all her former putative allure, she came across as “
a small town secretary, a little bit oversexed, but somebody you wouldn’t want to associate with,” he declared. Discussing her case decades later, he pointed out that she, too, fit the definition of “the banality of evil,” throwing in the term that would only be coined long after Koch’s conviction.

In 1963, largely forgotten by everyone else, Koch received a visit in prison from her teenage son, Uwe, who had just learned about his mother—the woman who had been pregnant with him when she first
stood trial in Dachau. Uwe began visiting her periodically. In 1967, he arrived at the prison only to learn that Koch had hanged herself. His mother had left a note for him. “
I cannot do otherwise,” she wrote. “Death is for me a liberation.”

• • •

While popular sentiment was clearly behind Denson in the Koch case, there was far less consensus about the Dachau trials in general. Denson had won conviction after conviction by demonstrating that the defendants played a role in the “common design” of the concentration camps, which meant that they were part of the “community of intention” to commit criminal acts. Critics charged that this categorization was too broad, and that other aspects of the Dachau trials fell far short of providing due process.

Among the harshest critics was none other than Benjamin Ferencz, the young Nuremberg prosecutor who won convictions against twenty-two top leaders of the Einsatzgruppen. The Dachau trials were “
utterly contemptible,” he declared. “There was nothing resembling the rule of law. More like court-martials. . . . It was not my idea of a judicial process. I mean, I was a young, idealistic Harvard law graduate.”