Dönitz: The Last Führer (74 page)

A doctor was called, but von Friedeberg was dead by the time he arrived; he confirmed suicide by poison, then the body was carried
into the bedroom and laid out on the bunk beneath a picture of Dönitz.

Late that afternoon Dönitz and his ministers were ordered aboard a freighter aircraft and, sitting on crates along the sides with their cases between them, were flown off, they knew not where. Arriving eventually at Luxembourg, they found their plane surrounded by a cordon of US soldiers armed with machine pistols; they were taken under close guard to army trucks, as Speer described it like desperadoes in a gangster movie, then driven through the countryside to a hotel at Bad Mondorf, where they saw through the glass doors like a spectral vision of the Third Reich, Göring and most of the Party and SS leaders, Army chiefs and ministers they had last met in the bunker in Berlin.

If any had previous illusions about their fate, they could have retained them no longer. The allies had announced in October 1943 that those who had committed war crimes would be pursued if necessary ‘to the uttermost ends of the earth’ to be delivered to their accusers ‘in order that justice may be done’;
⁵⁷
for weeks the western press had been baying for this promise to be honoured, and there could be no doubt why the leadership—or what remained of it—had now been gathered together again; the only questions concerned the nature of the trials and punishment ahead.

These questions also exercised the allies; there was no problem for Stalin: managed trials and executions were staples of Communist policy, but there were serious scruples and differences of opinion in the western camp. This is not the place to argue the ‘legality’ of the War Crimes Trials, but since this is challenged, particularly by apologists for Dönitz and the military leaders, some of the criticisms must be touched on. First, of course, any trials of Germans by the allies took the character of condemnation of the vanquished by the victors, hence were wide open to the charge of being simple retribution, not law, or as Dönitz claimed ‘a continuation of war by other means’. According to his defence Counsel,
Flottenrichter
(Captain, legal branch) Otto Kranzbühler, his attitude about this remained unchanged throughout.
⁵⁸
This could have been
predicted; there is no reason to pay attention to his opinion or to Kranzbühler’s since he had publicly endorsed the nauseating mockeries of the Nazi Peoples’ Courts after the 20th July attempt, and Kranzbühler had practised law for a regime that knew no law but might. Their attitude is revealing, however, in its self-justificatory tone and failure to accept a morsel of responsibility, even after hearing and seeing the terrible evidence produced at the trials.

The criticism has validity on other grounds, for of course none of the victorious powers was free from war guilt. Stalin’s hands were red with the blood of millions, including all the Polish officers massacred in the Katyn Forest; Churchill and Roosevelt had sanctioned the slaughter of civilians by endorsing the euphemistically-termed ‘area bombing’, and before the trials began Truman, Roosevelt’s successor, had ordered the wholesale immolation of the citizens of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Should they and their military advisers have been charged as well? More interestingly, perhaps, were these means justified by the ends because they had been victorious, Nazi means not justified because they had failed? This was Nazi doctrine. Dönitz could not in logic complain of his treatment.

Another criticism that exercised many legal minds was that the political charges on which the German leaders were to be arraigned, for instance conspiring to wage aggressive war, had not been recognized crimes in any formal sense at the time they were committed, hence the law would have to be retrospectively enacted to enable them to be tried. This cut across the most fundamental principle of law in the western democracies, one that is enshrined in the constitution of the United States. They also strained definition; what was ‘aggressive war’? All nations have to plan to take war to their enemies to defend their own interests.

These criticisms do not seriously concern Dönitz’s case, since although he was charged on the count of waging aggressive war, the most serious charges against him related to ordering the slaughter of survivors from torpedoed ships, promulgating Hitler’s ‘Commando order’, thereby the killing of prisoners who had surrendered, and by virtue of his position in the highest leadership being an accessory to the policy of exterminating the Jews. These were crimes in the laws of all nations and in international law, and there was nothing remotely
ex post facto
about them.

Yet another objection heard endlessly was that he—like everyone bar the Führer—was simply obeying orders. Dönitz applied this particularly
to himself as a military man; if soldiers weighed every order on moral and legal grounds—without in most cases having sufficient information—the military profession would quite obviously be impossible. This objection was valid for his campaign of unrestricted U-boat warfare—naturally he had to obey higher authority—but again it did not and could not apply to the more serious charges against him; even a German Court in the highly-charged atmosphere of 1921 had ruled that ‘superior orders’ were no defence for acts that were plainly criminal. As for the argument that Germany was a totalitarian state, the judgement of the US Military Court in the case of General Milch disposed of it in short time: those who ‘abjectly placed all power in the hands of one man’ had to accept the bitter with the sweet. By accepting attractive and lucrative posts under a chief whose power they knew to be unlimited, they ratified in advance every act, good or bad; they could not say at the beginning ‘The Führer’s decisions are final’ then exculpate themselves from barbarous inhumanities by saying, ‘Oh, we were never in favour of those things.’
⁵⁹
Dönitz’s inflammatory outbursts against ‘the Jewish spirit and filth’ made him a high accessory to genocide; they were not made on the orders of the Führer, but sprang from his own convictions.

There were other doubts about the constitution and validity of any Court set up to administer international law. On the other hand were the positive arguments for setting a precedent. Horror at the extent, variety and brutishness of the crimes that had been committed was genuine; to western minds brought up on justice and fair play in a democratic, humanitarian tradition, what had occurred in Nazi Germany was simply incomprehensible. Whether or not ‘humanitarianism’ was a hypocritical cover for exploitation, as German professors had been arguing for decades, it moulded opinion; the British crusade against the slave trade during the nineteenth century had been as genuine an expression of idealism as Abraham Lincoln’s speech at Gettysburg. Yet Speer and Himmler had reintroduced slave labour into Europe on a scale and with a cruelty defying the imagination.

Elements of vengeance there were too in the call for justice; was that wrong? ‘Lord, how long, how long shall the wicked triumph?’ the Psalm runs, ‘They break in pieces thy people, O Lord … they slay the widow and the stranger and murder the fatherless. Yet they say the Lord shall not see … O God, to whom vengeance belongeth, show thyself …’
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There were however stronger deeper longings even than vengeance—a heartfelt desire for a better ordering of international relations and an
end to the curse of war; as one of the British prosecutors, Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, put it, ‘most men at the close of the war wanted a better world’.
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The movement to try the Nazi war leaders was closely related to the movement to establish new instruments of international law and justice through a United Nations Organization. It was widely felt that Germany, Italy and Japan had deliberately sabotaged the United Nations’ predecessor, the League of Nations, and that precedents and law had to be established to render a repetition of the events of the 1930s impossible for the future. It may be argued that this was naïve, or even another example of
vae victis
—an attempt to propagate the stupidly sentimental doctrines of the western victors at the expense of the
Realpolitik
of the vanquished—but it should never be dismissed as hypocrisy, least of all by those who held office under the Nazis.

Undoubtedly the chief reason the Nazi leaders were tried was founded on common sense: to let them go free after what had occurred would have been a greater dereliction and offence than to enact retrospective laws or upset other principles of the western legal system; as
The Times
put it as recently as 1983, ‘There are times when a higher law must override the details of man-made law.’
⁶²
This was such a time; the allies could feel confident they were representing the collective conscience of mankind.

In addition the testimony and evidence produced at the trials provides a huge body of irrefutable documentary proof to deter Nazi apologists and nationalist historians—although it has failed to do either completely—and direct mankind to an appreciation of what even the most civilized human beings are capable of under totalitarian rule.

Nuremberg, once venue of the Nazi orgies of militarism, where regiments shouted ‘We are strong and shall grow stronger!’, was chosen as a symbolic setting for the trials of the major war criminals. The town itself had been reduced to rubble by mass air-raids; an occasional statue, the bell tower of a church, the prison building were virtually all that remained intact of the once lovely, winding medieval streets.

The prisoners, Göring, Hess, Ribbentrop, Ley, Frank, who had imposed the reign of terror in Poland, Seyss-Inquart, his assistant who had been transferred to do the same for Holland, and Fricke, ex-master of Bohemia and Moravia, Speer and his chief recruiter of slave labour, Sauckel, the Gestapo chief Kaltenbrunner, who appeared later, the anti-Jewish pornographer, Streicher and his ‘intellectual’ equivalent,
Rosenberg, Fritsche, Goebbels’ Minister for Radio Propaganda, the former conservative politicians, von Papen, von Neurath, and the economist Schacht, his successor Funk, whose Ministry had accepted the gold extracted in the death camps, von Schirach, who had exploited the idealism of youth, and the military men, Keitel, Jodl, Raeder and Dönitz who had served the
Nibelungen
and spoke of honour—all were held in individual small cells on the ground floor of the jail.

Each cell was furnished with a steel cot at one side of the door, a lavatory bowl without seat or cover at the other side, a straight chair and a small table, on which the prisoners could keep writing materials, family photographs and toilet articles; the other few personal possessions they retained had to be laid out on the floor. Natural light was provided by a high, barred window, artificial light by a bulb and reflector fitted into a grille in the door; this remained alight all night, although turned to a dim position, so that the guards stationed around the clock at each cell door could observe their charges, who had to sleep in such a way that hands and face could be seen at all times. No ties, belts, braces, shoe-laces or string were permitted, and the prisoners had to shuffle as they walked in unlaced shoes. Cell inspections were carried out frequently, the prisoners being forced to strip and stand in a corner while bedding and belongings were searched. Once a week they bathed under supervision.

Their reactions to this tumble to the status of criminals were observed by two US psychiatrists, Douglas Kelley and G. S. Gilbert, assigned to study them—for there was so little understanding in the western democracies of the nature of the enemy they had been fighting that the German leaders were widely regarded as deranged. Dönitz, Kelley wrote, ‘got along quite well’ with the rigours of his new life ‘through his own sense of humour. Everything—the seatless toilet, K-rations, even an occasional bad night’s sleep—was twisted into some sort of a joke’.
⁶³

He impressed both psychiatrists as a man of intelligence, integrity and ability. While Raeder and the two military men retained their habitual ‘cold formality’ towards the Americans Dönitz exercised the adroitness and flexibility in relationships that had served him well throughout his career; he was soon on friendly terms with them, and working hard at his task of distancing himself from the Party, playing the plain salt who had known nothing of the nasty businesses going on under the stones in other corners of the
Reich
! With Kelley, who had to conduct his interviews through an interpreter, he succeeded completely: ‘Dönitz’, he wrote, ‘was bitter in pointing out that his seven days of Führership netted
him nothing except an opportunity to hang with the other German criminals—a situation not humorous even to him.’
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The Americans served to break the monotony and tension of the prisoners’ solitary conditions, and amused them with games called Rorschach inkblot tests; these consisted of asking each one individually what he saw in various shapes looking as though they had been made by spilling ink on a prep-school exercise book and folding the page over, then quizzing them on their answers. It must have added to the Germans’ puzzlement that they had lost the war. The games continue to provide amusement; a recent replay of the results revealed to the psychologists analysing the inkblots no difference between the Nazi top brass and average middle-class Americans; two thought the Nazis were civil rights’ leaders, one thought they were psychologists! Dönitz’s results seem to have been lost, but surely he could have seen only U-boats.