The Nazi Hunters (8 page)

But the strain of that pace—and of the unremittingly gruesome facts
that he had to reconstruct on a daily basis—took its toll on Denson.
His weight had dropped from 160 to less than 120 pounds. “
They said I looked more like an exhibit out of the concentration camp than anybody I put on the stand,” he recalled later. In January 1947, he collapsed and spent two weeks in bed. Nonetheless, it seemed as if each new case made him more determined to carry on.

Denson’s wife, Robina, who had stayed in the United States, filed for divorce. According to his biographer, she had thought “
that she was gaining a social partner from an aristocratic family, not a legal missionary who would run off to prosecute Nazis.”

Heidenberger, who had become increasingly friendly with Denson and the other Americans at Dachau, claims this was not the only catalyst for his wife’s decision. “Hell, what ruined his marriage were all those German fräuleins,” he said. “Americans had it all, they had the nylons and got the women. We were a bit
schockiert
about the honorable German fräuleins. Bill told me about the parties he went to in Munich. It must have been very wild.” Robina Denson found out about such escapades, Heidenberger maintained, prompting her to end what was already a largely defunct and childless marriage.

Soon, Denson found himself particularly attracted to a young German woman who was also in a loveless marriage.
A genuine countess, Huschi, as she was called by her friends, had fled her family’s Silesian estate on a horse-drawn cart with her six-month-old daughter before the Red Army arrived, and then survived the bombing of Dresden. At the end of the war, she was in a Bavarian village, and greeted the first American tank to show up there with the announcement, delivered in perfect English: “
We surrender this village to you!” Hearing such stories, Denson was charmed and intrigued. But it wasn’t until much later, when he discovered that Huschi had also divorced and moved to the United States, that they reconnected—and married on December 31, 1949. By all accounts, it was a happy marriage in every way.

Later in life, Denson looked back at his time in Germany as “
the highlight of my career.” But it wasn’t without controversy. After the Dachau camp trial, he found himself prosecuting cases that triggered both the
most sensational headlines and the most heated debate. This was particularly true of the trial of the Buchenwald defendants in the spring of 1947.

The record of that camp, Denson told the tribunal, was “
a chapter of infamy and sadism unparalleled in recorded history.” And no case was as lurid as the one against Ilse Koch, the widow of Buchenwald’s first commandant. Even before the trial started, Heidenberger recalled, some of those eager to testify spread “the wildest stories about her as a sex monster.” Under questioning from Denson, former inmates testified that she had delighted in provoking the prisoners with her sexuality—and then had them beaten or killed.

Digging ditches for cables one day, ex-prisoner Kurt Froboess recalled looking up to see Koch. “
She was wearing a short skirt, standing with her legs straddled over the ditch without any underwear,” he said. Then she demanded to know what the prisoners were looking at and beat them with her riding crop, he added.

Others testified that she possessed lamp shades, a knife sheath, and book covers made of human skin. “
It was common knowledge also that tattooed prisoners were sent to the hospital from work details where Ilse Koch had passed by and seen them,” said Kurte Sitte, who had been a Buchenwald prisoner during the entire war. “These prisoners were killed in the hospital and the tattooing stripped off.”

Heidenberger, who covered all these testimonies, has no doubt that Koch was guilty of systematic brutality, but was also the subject of unconfirmed rumors. Her reputation as an “oversexed” sadist preceded her trial, and she was particularly hated by the inmates because of the way she flaunted her sexuality and power. When she showed up to testify in her case, the fact that she was obviously pregnant—even though she had been imprisoned since her capture—only added to the inflamed passions in the court. This prompted a scramble among the journalists to find the right nickname for her. According to Heidenberger, a
Stars and Stripes
reporter rushed into the press room to announce: “
I’ve got it. We call her the Bitch of Buchenwald.”

The name stuck and she became the she-devil of the trials.
It didn’t help
her cause that the prosecution also brought in the shrunken head of a Polish prisoner who had reportedly escaped from the camp, and then was captured and executed. According to one of the witnesses, it had been displayed to visitors by the camp authorities. Although the prosecution pointed out that there was no demonstrated connection to Koch, it was admitted as evidence.

Soloman Surowitz, one of the American lawyers on Denson’s team in the Buchenwald case, became convinced that the uproar over Koch was undermining the whole notion of due process—and he resigned from the case. “
I can’t stand it,” he told Denson. “I don’t believe our own witnesses—it’s all hearsay.”

The two men parted without acrimony, and Denson remained convinced that he had to present the evidence he had, which was strong enough to convict her with or without confirmation of some of the most sensational claims. Koch was sentenced to life imprisonment, but her case would take several more twists and turns as the atmosphere around the war crimes trials began to shift. And, back in the United States later, Denson would find himself on the defensive about Koch, particularly when the stories about lamp shades made of human skin looked increasingly questionable.

Heidenberger admitted his misgivings about his own role in playing up some of the unverified stories in his articles, contributing to the sensationalized atmosphere around the trial. But he has no doubt that Koch and the other defendants in the Buchenwald case fully merited their guilty verdicts. And despite their flaws, those trials convinced him that he was wrong in his initial belief that the major perpetrators should have faced summary execution instead of a judicial process. “
In spite of the legal issues raised by the war crimes trials, they furnished the best and most reliable evidence of what actually happened during the Holocaust,” he concluded.

In 1952, Heidenberger immigrated to the United States with his wife and two sons. As one of the first German reporters in Washington after the war, he found himself attending Truman’s press conferences in the White House. But he had already studied law in Germany and soon enrolled
in George Washington University Law School. After graduating, he launched his legal career in Washington, sometimes representing victims who were seeking reparations from the German government and later as an advisor to the German government on Holocaust cases. Among his early colleagues and mentors was his old friend William Denson.

“
His voice was excellently modulated, his hands well-shaped and carefully groomed, and he moved gracefully and self-confidently. The only blemish in the perfection of his personality was that he had killed ninety thousand people.”

Judge Michael Musmanno, describing defendant Otto Ohlendorf during the trial of the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen, the special execution squads deployed on the Eastern Front

W
earing a sailor cap, a short-sleeve blue shirt, and navy pants held up by black suspenders, Benjamin Ferencz sat on a lounge chair outside a modest one-bedroom bungalow in Delray Beach, Florida, looking like a typical retiree when I visited him there in early 2013.

But there was nothing typical about this ninety-three-year-old who stood just barely five feet tall when he got up to flex his biceps, showing off the results of his daily workouts at the gym. Or, more significantly, when he recounted his memories of going from Harvard Law School, where he was a scholarship student from New York’s rough neighborhood aptly known as Hell’s Kitchen, to getting off his landing craft at Omaha Beach, finding himself in water that came up to his waist while for most others it came up to their knees.

And, especially, when he described how, through a combination of luck and persistence, he ended up, at age twenty-seven, in Nuremberg as the chief prosecutor in what the Associated Press called, without any hyperbole, “
the biggest murder trial in history.” Yet, even more than the Dachau trials, it was a trial that was so overshadowed by the International Military Tribunal’s headline-grabbing proceedings against the major Nazi leaders that it usually gets at most passing mention in the history books.

Born in Transylvania into a Hungarian Jewish family that came to the United States when he was an infant, Ferencz was always a scrapper, driven by his passions and not intimidated by any challenge. Living in the basement of one of the apartment buildings in Hell’s Kitchen, where his father worked as a janitor, he was initially rejected by the public school both because, at six, he looked too small and because he spoke only Yiddish. But after attending various schools in other parts of the city, he was singled out as one of the “gifted boys,” became the first person in his family to go to college, and then went on to get his law degree at Harvard, never having to pay tuition.

When Corporal Ferencz was transferred from the infantry to the Judge Advocate Section of General Patton’s Third Army at the end of 1944, he was thrilled, particularly when he was told that he would be part of a new war crimes team. As U.S. troops were fighting their way into Germany, there were numerous reports of Allied fliers who had parachuted into German territory and then were murdered by local residents. Ferencz was assigned the task of investigating such cases and carrying out arrests as needed. “
The only authority I had was the .45 caliber gun around my waist and the fact that the U.S. Army was swarming all over town,” he noted. “Under such circumstances, Germans are very obedient and I do not recall ever encountering resistance.”

Despite his size, Ferencz brought with him more than his share of New York–style chutzpah. Later, when General Patton’s headquarters was located on the outskirts of Munich, he was on latrine duty on the day Marlene Dietrich showed up for a performance for the troops. As the junior member of the team, he was told to make sure that she was not
disturbed in her room as she took a bath first. “After waiting a reasonable time—to be sure that she was at least in the tub—and eager to do my duty, I simply walked into the room where she sat calmly immersed only in her splendor,” he recalled. He must have been rattled a bit by his own audacity, since, while retreating, he said: “Oh, pardon me, Sir.”

Dietrich was merely amused when he apologized, laughing particularly at his use of “Sir.” When she learned he was a Harvard-trained lawyer, she invited him to join her for lunch with the officers. Since Ferencz was an enlisted man, he suggested that she explain that he was an old friend from Europe, which she happily did. As a result, he went from latrine duty to sitting opposite the superstar at lunch. Before she was ushered out by Patton, she gave Ferencz her calling card.

As he investigated more of the downed flier cases, Ferencz was intent on doing his job—but he wasn’t vindictive in the process. On occasion, he even had ambivalent feelings about the results of his actions. Investigating the beating and bludgeoning of a downed pilot after a bombing raid near Frankfurt, he questioned a young woman who had joined the mob attacking the pilot. She admitted her participation but, in tears, explained that her two children had been killed in the bombing. Sensing a degree of remorse, Ferencz only put her under house arrest. “The truth is, I felt sorry for her,” he recalled. But he had no such feelings for a fireman who had reportedly struck the fatal blow and then boasted that he was covered with American blood.

Months later, Ferencz went to see the war crimes trial where both of them were among the defendants. The fireman was sentenced to death. When the young woman was sentenced to two years, she fainted. Ferencz asked a medic who came to check on her whether she was all right. The medic assured him that she was, but also threw in the information that she was pregnant; the father was one of the U.S. soldiers guarding her. “Strange things happen in times of war,” Ferencz noted.

But the young investigator’s mood changed drastically when he was assigned to enter just liberated concentration camps and gather any evidence that could be used against those who had been in charge of these charnel houses. Initially, what he saw in camp after camp—the bodies
strewn everywhere, the skeletal survivors—prompted near disbelief. “My mind would not accept what my eyes saw,” he wrote later. “I had peered into Hell.” At Buchenwald, he collected two shrunken heads of prisoners that had been kept by SS officers on display. They would be entered into evidence by Denson in the subsequent trial.

Ferencz felt a mounting fury, which translated into a burning desire to take swift action or, at times, no action at all when he witnessed the victims turning against their tormentors. Arriving at the Ebensee camp, he ordered a group of passing civilians to collect and bury the bodies. When some enraged inmates captured an SS officer, possibly the camp commandant, while he was trying to flee, Ferencz saw them beat the man and then tie him to one of the metal trays used for sliding bodies into the crematorium; they slid him back and forth over the flames until he was roasted alive. “I watched it happen and did nothing,” Ferencz recalled. “I was not inclined to try.”

At Mauthausen, he found piles of human bones at the bottom of a quarry, the remains of slave laborers who had been thrown off a cliff once they no longer were capable of working. Driving to nearby Linz, he picked an apartment to appropriate from a Nazi family, ordering them out so that he and his men could stay there. Before returning to Mauthausen the next morning, he emptied the dressers and closets in the apartment of clothing, taking it all to the camp to give to the nearly naked prisoners. That evening, a young woman who had lived in the apartment returned and asked if she could retrieve some of her clothing. “
Help yourself,” Ferencz said. When she saw the empty closets, she started shouting that her clothing had been stolen.