The Nazi Hunters (29 page)

For all his attempts to portray the proceedings as an ordinary criminal trial that would be handled as dispassionately as any other case, even Hofmeyer could not avoid betraying an occasional flash of emotion, precisely on the subject of individual responsibility. “
I have yet to meet
anyone who did anything in Auschwitz,” he caustically remarked as the defendants and their lawyers kept protesting their innocence.

• • •

The defendants in the dock in Frankfurt immediately created a different impression than Eichmann did when he sat alone in his glass booth in Jerusalem. According to the writer Robert Neumann, “
As they all sit close together in their seats, you can’t tell them apart anymore. . . . Each prosecutor is a potential defendant. . . . Each defendant your mailman, bank clerk, neighbor.”
Newsreel footage of that period also showed five of them walking the streets of Frankfurt during a break in the court sessions, looking indistinguishable from the other pedestrians except for the fact that a policeman saluted as one of the defendants tipped his hat to him.

The German authorities had hoped to have at least one defendant who was unquestionably a senior figure.
As the prosecution pursued its lengthy investigation, it scored a major breakthrough: after launching a nationwide manhunt, the police found and arrested Richard Baer, the last commandant of Auschwitz, in December 1960. Höss, the first commandant, and Arthur Liebehenschel, his immediate successor, had been executed in Poland in 1947 and 1948. Baer had managed to disappear and, using an assumed name, found work as a forester on the estate of the great-grandson of the Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck. When his photo ran in
Bild
, the country’s largest tabloid, a co-worker recognized him and tipped off the police. But on June 17, 1963, Baer died in prison, six months before the start of the trial.

Deprived of the defendant they had expected to garner the most attention, the prosecution focused even more intently on the individual actions of the remaining defendants. That reinforced Judge Hofmeyer’s contention that this was a criminal trial despite its whole backdrop, not the kind of broader educational-political exercise that Bauer envisaged. Yet, in the end, some elements of both approaches were visible in the proceedings.

What attracted the most attention of the media and the packed audiences, which included many concentration camp survivors, were the
harrowing descriptions of wanton brutality. Auschwitz was not simply a mechanized killing machine that operated according to impersonal rules; it was also very much the product of the personal actions, idiosyncrasies, and sadism of those who were charged with running that machinery. As the Frankfurt proceedings demonstrated, there were many ways to die or live—and an almost infinite range of suffering that could be inflicted on anyone at any time, depending on the whims of the defendants and others like them.

As the prosecution presented its case, some of the defendants stood out from the others, precisely because of the devastating testimonies against them. SS Staff Sergeant Wilhelm Boger was one of the camp’s most feared interrogators because of his frequent use of the “Boger swing.” As explained by Lilly Majerczik, a former prisoner who had served as a secretary in the political department where Boger worked, “
the victims were tied by their wrists to a stick on this apparatus and then worked over with a whip.” In fact, the apparatus was a trestle and prisoners found themselves hanging upside down during those torture sessions. She and other prisoners who worked in the office could not see the procedure but they heard “the piercing wails of the victims. While being forced to testify loudly, the prisoners would then have their nails ripped out and have to undergo other tortures.”

Another witness described how Boger shot prisoners with his pistol as they were brought into a courtyard and lined up against the “Black Wall”; on one occasion, he shot fifty to sixty of them as they were brought in two at a time.
But perhaps the most chilling testimony came from survivor Dounia Wasserstrom. She described seeing a truck full of Jewish children stop in front of the political department. A four- or five-year-old boy jumped out, with an apple in his hand—and at that moment Boger came to the door. “Boger took the child by his feet and smashed his head against the wall,” she recounted. Wasserstrom was ordered to wash the wall and later called in to do some translation for Boger. “He was sitting in his office eating the boy’s apple,” she added.

While the gas chambers consumed the largest number of victims, there were many forms of murder.
Medical orderly Josef Klehr, another
SS staff sergeant, may have injected as many as twenty thousand prisoners with phenol, killing them instantly.
Dr. Victor Capesius, a Romanian SS major in charge of the Auschwitz pharmacy, had supplied the deadly poison to Klehr.
Then there was SS Corporal Oswald Kaduk, who tortured and killed with a fury that made him stand out in a dock filled with brutal murderers. When he drank, he often shot prisoners at random. And, like Boger, he was associated with a special type of torture: in his case, placing a cane over his victim’s neck and standing on it until the prisoner died.

Such testimony underscored the prosecution’s contention that there was nothing automatic about how the guards and officers behaved in Auschwitz.
Dr. Ella Lingens, an Austrian physician who had helped several Jews hide or escape before she was arrested and sent to Auschwitz, was especially emphatic in her testimony about the broad range of individual behavior of the officers and guards, arguing that the accused were not forced to act the way they did. Incredulous, Judge Hofmeyer asked: “
Do you wish to say that everyone could decide for himself to be either good or evil in Auschwitz?” Lingens, who along with her husband was later honored by Yad Vashem for her efforts to save Jews, both before and during her imprisonment, responded: “That is exactly what I wish to say.”

This corresponded to the argument that U.S. Army Prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz had made during the Nuremberg trial of the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen. At the Frankfurt trial,
Hans-Günther Seraphim, an expert witness from the University of Göttingen, referred to those earlier proceedings when he testified that SS officers who decided for whatever reason not to participate in those massacres were never punished. During ten years of research, he testified, he had “not found one case that resulted in ‘damage to life and limb’ when an SS officer refused to carry out an ‘annihilation order.’ ” But he acknowledged that such officers could be sent off to fight on the Eastern Front instead, which many of those serving in the camps wished to avoid at all costs.

The defendants and their lawyers did everything possible to counter such testimony. “
As a little man in Auschwitz, I did not have a voice over life and death,” Klehr maintained, alluding to his murders by injection.
“I only carried out the orders of the doctors and only with deep inner reluctance.” Capesius portrayed himself as just a helpful pharmacist: “In Auschwitz I did no harm to anyone. I was polite and friendly toward all and ready to help wherever I could.” He added that his wife was half Jewish, and that it was only “unfortunate circumstance” that led to his assignment to the camp’s pharmacy.

Then there were the purely surrealist touches inside and outside the courtroom. Interviewed by a film crew, the wife of Boger—of “Boger swing” fame—insisted that the couple had led “a very harmonious life” during their twenty-four years of marriage. This included the time she lived with him at Auschwitz. “I can’t imagine him doing all the things he was supposed to have done,” she said. She conceded that he was strict, “but the accusation of killing children, when he himself had children, just to come back home and be a good, loving father, that’s unimaginable to me.” And survivor Lingens, who had worked as a doctor, recalled that the wife of Höss, the first commandant, had once sent “a pink sweater and fond regards into this hell,” apparently seeking to display her compassion for the prisoners.

• • •

The press coverage of the Auschwitz trial focused on the most horrifying charges against the defendants, portraying them as “monsters,” “devils,” and “barbarians,” with Auschwitz itself depicted as Dante’s Inferno or hell on earth. A cursory sampling of the headlines leaves no doubt about their tone: “
The Torture Swing of Auschwitz,” “The Devil Sits on the Defendants’ Bench,” “Women Thrown Alive into the Fire,” and “Deathly Ill Gnawed on by Rats.”

Quoting such headlines, the writer Martin Walser, a frequently controversial commentator about Germans and their struggle to deal with the Nazi past, warned of the dangers of demonizing the Auschwitz defendants. “
The more horrible the Auschwitz quotations, the more pronounced our distance from Auschwitz becomes,” he wrote. “We have nothing to do with these events, with these atrocities; we know this for certain. The similarities [with the defendants] aren’t shared here. This trial is not about us.” Like Arendt, who maintained that demonizing Eichmann
allowed others who served the Third Reich to dismiss him as an aberration, Walser attempted to drive a similar point home. “Auschwitz was not Hell, but a German concentration camp,” he pointed out.

This was Bauer’s argument as well. Even if the defendants were justifiably singled out for especially vicious behavior, he did not want to create the impression that others who had served there—those who operated the machinery of death without any distinctive displays of sadism—were not guilty, too. This was not what most of his countrymen wanted to hear; nor did they want to read the occasional coverage in the press that suggested that the defendants were not so different from everyone else.
In the
Suddeutsche Zeitung,
Ursula von Kardorff sounded like she was echoing Arendt’s “banality of evil” theme when she wrote of the defendants: “Grey haired men with small mouths and average faces. Is this the way the accomplices to murder look?”

In his presentation of the court’s verdict, Judge Hofmeyer continued to insist that the trial was about the criminal guilt of the individual defendants, not a broader political indictment of all those who had carried out the Nazis’ murderous policies. At the same time, however, he rejected the notion that lower level functionaries could elude responsibility for criminal acts, pointing out that “
it would be a mistake to say that the ‘little people’ are not guilty because they did not initiate things.” He added: “They were just as vital to the execution of the extermination plan as those who drew up this plan at their desks.”

The verdict itself satisfied almost no one. Five of the defendants left the courtroom as free men, with three of them acquitted and two released on the grounds that they already had served enough time in pretrial detention. Boger, Klehr, and Kaduk received life sentences, but the pharmacist Capesius only received nine years; most of the others were given lighter sentences, as low as three years in one case.

Bauer considered those sentences far too lenient. But, as he saw it, the greater failure of the judges in Frankfurt and other courts handling Nazi-era cases was their insistence on treating the perpetrators as ordinary criminals. As he put it, this encouraged “
the residual wishful fantasy that there were only a few people with responsibility in the totalitarian state
of the Nazi period and the rest were merely terrorized, violated hanger-ons or depersonalized, dehumanized characters who were compelled to do things that were completely contrary to their nature. Germany was not, as it were, a society obsessed by Nazism, but a country occupied by the enemy.” Then he pointedly added: “But this had little to do with historical reality.”

Bernd Naumann, the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
reporter who published his meticulous accounts of the trial in a book shortly after the proceedings concluded, offered another sobering assessment. “
The criminal facts, the guilt of Auschwitz, and the attempt at expiation are not commensurable,” he wrote. “Neither the planners, the assistants, the murderers, nor the victims can hope to find ultimate justice in a regular court of a legal state.”

Hannah Arendt wrote the introduction to Naumann’s volume, allowing her to expand on her earlier views. In one key respect, she voiced her agreement with Bauer. “ ‘
Mass murder and complicity in mass murder’ was a charge that could and should be leveled against every single SS man who had ever done duty in any of the extermination camps and against many who had never set foot into one,” she wrote. As for the import of the whole proceedings that Naumann described, she concluded: “Instead of
the
truth . . . the reader will find
moments of truth
, and these moments are actually the only means of articulating this chaos of viciousness and evil.”

Many Germans had no desire to follow the trial or to glimpse any moments of truth. For them, the extensive media coverage was a growing source of irritation. One reader wrote to the Frankfurt tabloid
Abendpost
: “
Damn it! Give it a rest with your reporting about Auschwitz already. Do you seriously think that you can convince the world that you are interested in the truth? No, you and your dear compatriots are only interested in cheap thrills.”
A poll taken at the beginning of 1965 when the trial was still in full swing indicated that 57 percent of Germans had concluded that they did not want any more such trials, which represented a huge jump from the 34 percent who responded that way in a 1958 poll.

Emmi Bonhoeffer—the widow of Lutheran pastor and theologian
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who paid with his life for his staunch anti-Nazi views—was not surprised by the popular mood. “
Naturally the Auschwitz Trial is unpopular,” she wrote in a letter to a friend. “This makes it all the more peculiar that the press corps provides daily coverage, if not always very thoroughly. They write stories that nobody actually wants to read, certainly not those most in need of it.” The theologian Helmut Gollwitzer echoed her thoughts when he explained that the trial made their countrymen uncomfortable, since it left the impression that many of them could be “in the same boat as the defendants.”