From the DW:
“Nuremberg
Trials: An important step for Germany to confront its Nazi past”
Germany is
marking the 75th anniversary of the first Nuremberg trial. Initially, the
trials, military tribunals by occupying powers, were barely respected in a
country that wanted to forget. But that attitude changed. "Guilt is always
something personal," says 81-year-old Niklas Frank. It's a thought that
touches Germany's fundamental problem after the war: How can a nation's trauma
be worked through in individual's people's heads? How do you take your parents'
guilt personally? Though many Germans
treated it as an abstract problem that could be suppressed in silence, the question
cut into Niklas Frank's life like a knife. He was the son of Hans Frank, the
governor-general of the occupied Polish territories during World War II, who
directly oversaw four Nazi extermination camps. The 6-year-old Frank can still
remember his family's refusal to acknowledge his father's guilt as he was being
tried in the first Nuremberg trial, which began 75 years ago on November 20,
1945. Hans Frank was hanged the following October.
The burden
of punishing criminals In 1945, most Germans were not yet ready to
acknowledge their guilt. They were bent on survival at the end of the war. The
country's infrastructure and economy were in ruins, and millions of hungry
German refugees were pouring in from lost territories in the East, driven out
by the Soviet Union. The population was facing four years without a government
in the limbo of military occupation. Amidst this, the first and most
important Nuremberg trial — the only one to be organized by all four Allies –
was to last 11 months, hear 240 witnesses, and read some 300,000 statements.
The verdicts were not foregone conclusions: Of the 24 defendants — powerful
figures in the Nazi regime — the court handed out 12 death sentences, seven
prison sentences (ranging from 10 years to life), and three outright
acquittals. But despite the care that was taken, most of the German
population in those early years after WW2 dismissed the trials as
"victor's justice." "That was the dominant opinion: Total
rejection of these trials. People believed they were one-sided. The newspapers
at the time were full of that opinion," said lawyer and legal scholar Ingo
Müller, author of the book Terrible Jurists, which explored the Nazi legacy in
the German judiciary. "The Nazis still had influence in the heads of
German people, and the Nuremberg trials didn't change that at all." There
was some support for the victor's justice argument in the US: Associate Supreme
Court Justice William Douglas argued that the Allies had created laws "ex
post facto" to suit the crimes. And it didn't exactly look promising that
the main Soviet judge, Iona Nikitchenko, had presided over some of Joseph
Stalin's notorious show trials in the 1930s.
'End the
sniffing out of Nazis' That all helped the German public to deny the
legitimacy of Nuremberg for decades. Müller remembers international law
professors years later teaching that the Allied bombings of German cities were
crimes against humanity equal to the Holocaust, and should have been punished
too — an opinion that is only acceptable now in far-right groups. After
the new West German nation was born in 1949, the emphasis under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was largely: forgive and
forget. The Federal Republic's first chancellor, never a Nazi himself, did not
object to accepting powerful party members back into the country's leadership.
This was most visible in his choice of chief-of-staff from 1953 to 1963: Hans
Globke, a senior official from Hitler's Interior Ministry who had helped create
the infamous 1935 Nuremberg Laws, which enshrined the Nazi party's anti-Semitism
and racism into law. That was partly out of necessity, as the new
country needed experienced officials. "But I think he also took on Globke
as a symbolic figure," said Müller. "He was saying: Look, you old
Nazis, if you join our democracy, and stop with the 'Sieg Heils' ['Sieg Heil'
was a Nazi greeting, Eds.] and the anti-Semitism, then nothing will happen to
you." And not much did: No Nazi-era judge, for instance, was ever punished
by a German court for the tens of thousands of unjustified death sentences they
handed out during the Third Reich (though a handful were convicted in the third
Nuremberg trial, which ended in 1947.) Adenauer was aware of the
sentiment in the country: In 1951, thousands of people demonstrated in
Landsberg, Bavaria, against the executions of 28 war criminals at the US POW
prison there, who had been convicted in Nuremberg. And in a Bundestag debate
about former Nazis being allowed into official positions in October 1952,
Adenauer was applauded when he said, "I think we should stop this sniffing
out of Nazis. Because you can be sure: If we start that, you won't know where
it will end."
Nazis in the
communist East The situation was much the same in East Germany, though
under very different circumstances. The Soviet Union initially sent tens of
thousands of former Nazis to imprisonment or death, and the GDR's communist
government made anti-fascism into one of the central pillars of its state
ideology. To that end, the Ministry for State Security, the Stasi, kept a vast
archive of Nazi files about German citizens. But very few East Germans
were tried in court — the archive's main purpose was to expose Nazis in
official positions in West Germany, and so to embarrass Adenauer's new
government, which the GDR never tired of portraying as a direct
capitalist-imperialist descendant of the Third Reich. The Allies,
meanwhile, had turned their attention to new enemies by the 1950s: Each other,
which provided an incentive for the US to give up what Müller calls their
"illusions" about re-educating the Germans. "I think the Allies
just made their peace with Germany at the start of the 50s: They said, ok: the
swastika won't be shown anymore and no one will shout out Sieg Heil, the
Germans are a normal people again," he told DW. "They were glad they
slowly grew out of those Nazi tendencies — but that took decades."
Slow
progress It's a peculiarity of German law that, while denying the Holocaust
is illegal, participating in it has never been formally recognized as a crime
in itself. That meant individuals could be charged with murder or accessory to
murder — but only if they could actually be proven to have been involved in
individual murders. But the Holocaust was an entirely different order of
crime: If an entire system is murderous, how do you prosecute the cogs in the
machine who may never have even seen the victims? How do you prosecute the
train drivers, the camp guards, or the "desk perpetrators," as
Germans have come to call the administrators who organized the mass killing?
After the Nuremberg trials ended in 1949, it took nearly a decade for
Germany to begin reckoning with its own crimes in court. The first German trial
of Nazi perpetrators began in the southern city of Ulm in 1958 when ten members
of an SS commando unit were charged over a massacre of 5,502 Jews at the
Lithuanian border. But since no witness could identify a single perpetrator
among the defendants, the convictions were limited to accessory charges. The
Ulm case was nevertheless a milestone. It provided the spur for Germany's state
governments to set up the Central Office of the State Justice Administrations
for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in the town of Ludwigsburg,
which began to gather records on perpetrators. That helped to bring the cases
against 22 defendants in the famous Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt in 1963 when
survivors testified against men who had sadistically tortured them.
Still, it took
until the 21st century for the German judiciary to get round to prosecuting
people for knowingly taking part in the Holocaust. That was only after the
landmark conviction in Munich in 2011 of John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian
collaboratorwho stood guard at the Sobibor concentration camp. That precedent —
that anyone working at a concentration camp in any capacity could be charged with
accessory to murder — sparked a late flurry of new investigations in
Ludwigsburg, which in recent years has brought the convictions of a few
nonagenarians, including Oskar Gröning in 2015 and most recently Bruno D.* in
July 2020, whose trial in Hamburg had to take place in a young offenders'
court, because he was 17 when he began serving as a guard at the Stutthof
concentration camp. For Müller, who considers the Nuremberg trials a historic
achievement, the most damning legacy is that after the Federal Republic was
founded, the judicial system never recognized the legitimacy of the verdicts
passed there. German law, Müller says, mandates that convicted public officials
are supposed to be stripped of their jobs and lose their pension. But that did
not happen to those convicted in Nuremberg, and some even received thousands of
Deutschmarks in back-salaries and pensions on their release from the Allied
prisons.
Perpetrators
are old and dying Historian Efraim Zuroff, the director of the Simon
Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, told DW in an interview in 2015 that although
Germany had been slow to deal with its guilt, it had come a long way. "In
the beginning, there was tremendous opposition to the prosecution of Nazis in
Germany. They couldn't completely stop it, but some of the verdicts were just
ridiculous," said Zuroff, an American-born Israeli who coordinates the
center's research on Nazi war crimes. "People who served in [German
death camps] Sobibor or Treblinka were given only a couple of years [in
prison]," he said. But since then, he said, the country had come a
long way. "We are light years away from those days in the 60s and 70s in
terms of knowledge about the Holocaust, in terms of sensitivity and in terms of
understanding of what a horrendous atrocity it was," according to Zuroff.
"Had they applied the same criteria 40 years ago as they do today, the
number of cases would have been multiplied by 40 or 60." "Nazi
hunter" Zuroff pointed out that Germany compares well to other countries
that were aligned with it in the Nazi era: "There is an enormous change.
And this enormous change came very late - but it came. Germany is a country
where they do prosecute Nazis. Compare that to Austria - they haven't done
anything significant in the last 30 or 40 years. In Germany, there is the
political will to prosecute Nazis," he said.
The actual
prosecution of Nazis in Germany, which started with the Nuremberg trials 75
years ago, is reaching its final phase. This also means that the future of
Germany's judicial "Nazi hunter" agency is up for discussion. "Like
public prosecutors' offices and courts, the Central Office can only work as
long as defendants are still alive and able to stand trial," senior
prosecutor Jens Rommel, who ran the Ludwigsburg Center for five years until
early 2020, told DW in an interview. “We do not have a comprehensive historical
mandate to solve crimes. And I am sure that in the remaining years we will not
be able to process everything by legal means," he said. Outside the legal
system, however, Germany will remain committed to remembrance — especially at a
time when right-wing extremism and anti-semitism are on the rise again across
Europe.
^ The Nuremberg
Trials was a good start by the Americans, the Soviets, the British and the
French but did not do enough to bring the Nazis directly involved in war crimes
(the Holocaust and the murder of non-Jews around Europe and North Africa.) The East
Germans did a little better then the West Germans in dealing with their Nazis,
but that is because the Soviets made the East Germans. The West Germans weren’t
made to go after their Nazis (by the Americans, the British or the French) and
so other than a handful of trials for the cameras the majority of Nazi War
Criminals were allowed to live in the open for decades. There was hope in the
1960s that the West German youth would really bring about change when they
questioned their Parents and Grandparents, but in the end it was swept under
the rug as it always was. It was only really in the 1990s-2000s that the
current German Government and Legal System actively sought to punish the Nazis
and by then the vast majority were either dead or 80-90-100 years old. ^
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.