The Nazi Hunters (7 page)

Asked about her role in the league, she “lied,” as Padover wrote, that
she was “forced” to be one of its leaders. What did she think should be done with the top Nazis? “For me, you can hang them all,” she replied.

The young woman was hardly alone in her willingness to see some of the Nazi bigwigs pay with their lives, which at the same time helped her distance herself from what had happened. Like many Germans, she maintained that she had not even known about most of the horrors of the Third Reich.

Peter Heidenberger, who had spent the final period of the war with a German parachute division in Italy and then a brief period as a POW, arrived in the town of Dachau shortly after the concentration camp there had been liberated. He was looking for his fiancée, who had fled from their hometown of Dresden after it was bombed on February 13, making her way to friends there. “You know, Dachau is a very nice town; they have a castle there,” he declared, summoning his memories decades later. Walking up the hill to the castle, he was questioned by an American sentry whether he knew what had happened in the camp below. “I told him I hadn’t been there, didn’t know anything [other than] it was a prison camp,” he said. “He didn’t believe me.”

But soon Heidenberger found himself learning much more—more than enough to share the sentiments of the young woman from the League of German Girls. “They should have all been put up against the wall and we would have had more justice,” he said, recalling his initial reaction to what he heard.

Heidenberger’s views would change over time because of his exposure to the other set of trials that was taking place parallel to those in Nuremberg. Dachau was the setting for the U.S. Army prosecution of the people who implemented the policies of the top Nazi officials, including those
who were hanged at Nuremberg. These were the on-the-ground perpetrators, the SS officers and others who ran not just Dachau but also other concentration camps. The Americans were looking for a stringer—a freelance journalist—who could report on the Dachau trials for Radio Munich, a new station the victors had set up. A local official recommended Heidenberger as a well-educated German with no Nazi background.

The young German had to learn what a stringer was and he had zero reporting experience, but he readily agreed. “The nice thing was that we got fantastic food in the camp,” he noted. He would soon prove to be a valuable reporter for a growing number of outlets, including the German News Agency and Reuters. While much less known than the main Nuremberg trial, the Dachau proceedings provided remarkable details about what the Third Reich meant in practice.

Those were the kind of details that Truman had in mind when long after his presidency he spelled out the original purpose of all the trials: “
to make it impossible for anyone ever to say in times to come, ‘Oh, it never happened—just a lot of propaganda—a pack of lies.’ ” In other words, the postwar trials were meant not just to punish the guilty; they also were critical to establishing the historical record.

• • •

Unlike many of his contemporaries, William Denson had not served on the battlefields of Europe.
The Alabama native—whose great-grandfather fought in the Civil War on the side of the Confederacy, whose grandfather was a state Supreme Court justice who had risked ostracism by defending black Alabamans, and whose father was a respected local lawyer and politician—graduated from Harvard Law School and went on to teach law at West Point. But in early 1945, he was tapped for duty as one of the judge advocate generals, or JAGs, in Germany. At thirty-two, Denson found himself—minus his wife, who had no intention of joining him in a devastated country—preparing to prosecute cases in an occupied land he was encountering for the first time.

Stationed with other JAG staffers in Freising, a short distance from Dachau, he was initially skeptical about the horrifying reports coming
from camp survivors. “
I thought here were some people who had been mistreated in the concentration camps and they were seeking revenge, and that they were really doing a job drawing on fantasy rather than reality,” he explained decades later. But he was soon convinced by the consistency of the testimony he was gathering. Since the witnesses “related substantially the same things, then I knew the events had occurred, because these witnesses did not have a chance to get together ahead of time and fabricate their stories.”

Any lingering doubts were swept away by the grisly accounts provided by the liberators of Dachau and other camps. At the same time, those accounts rekindled the debate about whether those responsible for mass murder and torture deserved anything more than summary execution.
When General George S. Patton rushed to see Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald that was a nightmarish spectacle of death worthy of a Hieronymus Bosch painting, he screamed from his jeep: “See what these sons of bitches did? See what these bastards did? I don’t want you to take a prisoner!”

But Denson and his colleagues in the JAG office were convinced that trials were absolutely necessary—both to punish the guilty and to lay out the gruesome facts for everyone to know, then and in the future. Hearing the details of what U.S. troops had seen at Dachau and the stream of other testimonies, “
I finally reached a point where I was ready to believe most anything,” Denson declared. And he was more than ready when he was told to start moving on the cases against the perpetrators as quickly as possible. The argument about summary executions vs. trials was over.

Denson’s main interrogator was Paul Guth. Born into a Jewish family in Vienna, Guth was sent to school in England; afterward, he went to the United States and was promptly picked for intelligence training in Camp Ritchie, Maryland, the training ground that had a large contingent of Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria. After graduating first in his class, Guth received further training in England and then ended up in Freising. He would prove to be one of the Army’s most effective interrogators.

But when Guth went to address the prisoners who were held in the camp barracks that had until recently housed their victims, he hardly made an intimidating impression—quite the opposite. The SS men had expected they would be executed; instead, Guth read out forty names of those who were slated to go on trial before an American military tribunal. He also told them they were free to choose their defense lawyers, the tab would be picked up by their captors, and they could not be compelled to testify if they did not want to. As Joshua Greene, Denson’s biographer, wrote: “The Germans could hardly believe their ears.”

When the trial opened on November 13, 1945, the courtroom was packed. The International Military Tribunal would only begin its deliberations in Nuremberg a week later, so the room was heavy with top brass like General Walter Bedell Smith, Eisenhower’s chief of staff, and Senator Claude Pepper of Florida. Many journalists were in the room as well, including luminaries like Walter Lippmann and Marguerite Higgins. But Lippmann and Higgins did not even stay the whole first morning, and by the end of the week almost all their colleagues had followed them to Nuremberg, which was the big draw and would generate the major headlines. Soon, the only reporters who could be counted on to cover all the Dachau proceedings were Heidenberger and a
Stars and Stripes
correspondent.

Just as the forty accused were startled by the way they were put on trial, the spectators were taken aback by Denson as he made his presentation as the chief prosecutor. “
The German spectators, unfamiliar with American legal practice, were awed by the trial lawyer theatrics,” Heidenberger recalled. Denson approached the bench and started off his statements by declaring in his Southern accent, “May it please the court . . .” It wasn’t just the accent that captivated Denson’s audience. “He had a very pleasant way that was very effective presenting his case,” Heidenberger added.

The young German reporter was even more impressed when he walked into Denson’s office for the first time—and gratified that the American immediately accepted him as a full-fledged member of the journalistic community. “You know the American custom of having your
feet on the desk,” he mused decades later. “He had his feet on his desk and he treated me like a newspaper guy.”

But Denson’s soothing demeanor masked an iron determination to win convictions against all the defendants. Unlike the Nuremberg defendants, those on trial at Dachau were not the architects of the policies; they could not be charged with plotting crimes against humanity. Instead, Denson set out to prove that the personnel who operated the concentration camp knew exactly what its purpose was, and that it was enough to prove that they were part of the “
common design”—or “community of intention”—to commit those criminal acts. It was not necessary to prove what specific crimes had been committed by each of the accused.

In his opening statement, the lanky Alabaman spelled out the framework of his case:

May it please the court, we expect the evidence to show that during the time alleged a scheme of extermination was in process here at Dachau. We expect the evidence to bshow that the victims of this planned extermination were civilians and prisoners of war, individuals unwilling to submit themselves to the yoke of Nazism. We expect to show that these people were subjected to experiments like guinea pigs, starved to death, and at the same time worked as hard as their physical bodies permitted; that the conditions under which these people were housed were such that disease and death were inevitable . . . and that each one of these accused constituted a cog in this machine of extermination.

The defense attorneys argued strenuously against this “cog in the machine” accusation, but to no avail. Later, such a sweeping approach would be rejected, and most trials would focus on the particular deeds allegedly committed by individual defendants.

Unlike in Nuremberg where almost all the evidence produced by the prosecution was in the form of incriminating documents that the Germans had produced themselves, the Dachau trial relied on a steady procession of witnesses who provided Denson with chilling testimony about the workings of this machinery of extermination, including the last transport
of Jews from Dachau.
As Ali Kuci, an Albanian prisoner, testified, 2,400 Jews were ordered into the train wagons on April 21; on April 29 when U.S. troops liberated the camp, those were the wagons that were overflowing with dead bodies. Kuci and other prisoners dubbed the train, which never left the station, as the “Morgue Express.” Only six hundred of the prisoners survived, he added. The SS guards had not allowed anyone to approach it as the others inside starved to death.

Denson also relied on confessions obtained from some of the defendants by Guth and other interrogators, leading to allegations that they had used coercive methods. Guth strenuously denied such charges, but the speed and outcome of the Dachau trial would prompt lingering questions about how carefully legal procedures were observed. As Denson summed up his case, he declared: “
I wish to emphasize that these forty men are not charged with killing. The offense is in a common design to kill, to beat, to torture and starve.” In other words, it was the “common design” that was critical to the case against them, rather than individual acts of murder.

He also dismissed all pleas from the defendants that they were merely following orders, castigating them for “
failing to refuse to do what was obviously wrong.” He added: “The answer that ‘I was ordered to do it’ has no part in this case.” This helped establish a principle that would be followed in subsequent trials. Wrapping up his case, Denson declared: “These accused will have turned back the hands of the clock of civilization at least a thousand years if this court in any manner condones the conduct that has been presented to it.”

The conditions of the German masters-turned-prisoners had sometimes created the misleading impression that they were benefiting from the benevolence of the victors. Lord Russell of Liverpool, who served as the deputy judge advocate for the British Army of the Rhine, visited Dachau in this period and was startled by what he saw of the German prisoners. “
Each one of these lived in comfort in a light airy cell, had electric lighting, and in winter central heating, a bed, a table, a chair, and books. Well fed and sleek they looked, and on their faces was a look
of slight astonishment. They must indeed have wondered where they were.”

But on December 13, 1945, when the military tribunal announced its verdicts, any such misperception was banished. It found all forty men guilty, and thirty-six were sentenced to death. Of the thirty-six who were sentenced to death, twenty-three were hanged on May 28–29, 1946.

On his visit to the camp, Lord Russell emerged from one of its buildings and noticed something that struck him as particularly odd: “
Nailed to a pole on the crematorium roof, a little rustic nesting box for wild birds, placed there by some schizophrenic SS man.”

This prompted his final reflection on what he had just observed. “Then and then only was it possible to understand why the nation which gave the world Goethe and Beethoven, Schiller and Schubert, gave it also Auschwitz and Belsen, Ravensbrück and Dachau,” he wrote.

• • •

Unlike many of the other members of the Army’s legal team, Denson did not return to the United States when the first Dachau trial ended. He remained in charge of the prosecution teams in the subsequent trials that continued through 1947. Although those trials focused on the death machinery in such camps as Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, and Mauthausen, they also took place within the confines of the Dachau camp compound.
Denson personally prosecuted a record 177 cases against concentration camp guards, officers, and doctors, winning guilty verdicts in all of them. In the end, ninety-seven of them were hanged.

As he prepared to fly home in October 1947 to return to civilian life,
The New York Times
lauded his record: “
Colonel Denson has been outstanding for his intensive work on the prosecution staff of the War Crimes Commission at Dachau. Frequently taking one major case during the daytime and working far into the night on the preparation of another, he had become over a period of two years a symbol of justice among the SS men and women administrators in Adolf Hitler’s concentration camps.”