The Nuremberg Interviews (79 page)

54.
For an interesting account, see Norbert Frei,
Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration
(New York, 2002).

55.
In the American zone from October 1945 to August 1946, seven surveys of public opinion found that 79 percent of the people considered the trials were “conducted fairly,” and only 4 percent unfairly. A clear majority (75 percent in surveys from December 1945 to March 1946) considered those on trial were guilty, but that figure fell off to 52 percent by August 1946. See Anna J. Merritt and Richard L. Merritt, eds.,
Public Opinion in Occupied Germany: The OMGUS Surveys, 1945–1949
(Chicago, 1970), 33–35.

56.
For a brief introduction, see Harris,
Tyranny on Trial
, 571–94. For current information on the ICC — which changes almost daily — and how it differs from U.N. courts, simply search the Internet for “International Criminal Court.”

57.
For a clear account of the legal-philosophical positions and the attitude of the American government, see William J. Bosch,
Judgment on Nuremberg: American Attitudes Toward the Major German War-Crime Trials
(Chapel Hill, 1970).

  
1.
Francis Beverly Biddle (1886–1968) was U.S. attorney general from 1941 to 1945, and President Harry S. Truman appointed him a judge of the Nuremberg trial.

  
2.
Gen. Lucius Clay (1897–1978) was Gen. Dwight Eisenhower’s deputy and the American member of the Allied Control Commission. After the Allied victory he was appointed military governor of the U.S. zone of occupied Germany.

  
3.
The prosecution said that certain organizations (such as the Nazi Party, the Gestapo, and the SS) could be indicted, not just a few individual leaders. Such organizations would also be charged with being part of a criminal conspiracy, so that it would be necessary only to charge “representative individuals,” not every single person. Once the organization was tried and convicted, each member could be judged as a criminal coconspirator, and given a summary trial by the Allies. It is important to note, however, that contrary to what some of the defendants said, Article 10 of what became the charter of the International Military Tribunal did not simply declare certain Nazi organizations criminal; that decision was left to the tribunal to determine. Moreover, every member of those organizations that the tribunal eventually found to be criminal was not automatically deemed to be criminal, but had the right to a trial. The American position on the criminality of Nazi organizations was presented to the tribunal on February 28, 1946, and was later published separately. See Robert H. Jackson,
The Nürnberg Case
(New York, 1947), 95–119.

  
4.
Heinrich Himmler (1900–1945) was head of the SS, creator of the concentration camp system, and one of the key leaders who pushed for and carried out the mass murder of the Jews. He was captured by the British in May 1945 and committed suicide. For a good general introduction to Himmler and for a collective portrait of the Nazi leaders, including most of those tried at Nuremberg, see the
still useful Joachim C. Fest,
The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership
(New York, 1970); here, see 111–24.

  
5.
Grand Adm. Erich Raeder (1876–1960) was commander in chief of the German navy until 1943, when he was replaced by Doenitz. Raeder was tried as a major war criminal at Nuremberg and found guilty on the first three counts in the indictment, but not crimes against humanity. He was sentenced to life, but released for health reasons in 1955.

  
6.
Hitler’s “last testament” consisted of statements he dictated the night of April 29, 1945, in advance of his death the following day. See Adolf Hitler, “My Private Will and Testament” and “My Political Testament,” in Jeremy Noakes, ed.,
Nazism 1919–1945
(Exeter, 1998), 4:667–71.

  
7.
Martin Bormann (1900–1945) was head of the Party Chancellery after Hess’s flight to Britain in 1941. Historians suggest that behind the scenes and more or less anonymously, Bormann became the second most powerful man in the Third Reich after Hitler.

  
8.
Block leaders were the neighborhood party watchdogs who reported up the line. For a full examination, see Michael H. Kater,
The Nazi Party: A Social Profile of Members and Leaders, 1919–1945
(Cambridge, Mass., 1983). For a recent account of the social basis of the party, see Carl-Wilhelm Reibel,
Das Fundament der Diktatur: Die NSDAP-Ortsgruppen 1932–1945
(Paderborn, 2002).

  
9.
Doenitz refers to what happened in Germany on November 9, 1938, often called “the night of broken glass.” For a brief account and the literature, see Robert Gellately,
Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany
(Oxford, 2001), 121–50.

10.
For a brief account of the camps, including the statistics, see Gellately,
Backing Hitler
, 51–69. The last census (January 15, 1945) of the German concentration camps revealed 511,537 male and 202,674 female prisoners; see 243.

11.
Ernest Bevin (1881–1951) was a British Labor leader and in 1945 became secretary of state for foreign affairs in the new Labor cabinet of Prime Minister Clement Attlee (1883–1967).

12.
W. Rogge is described in the court documents in one place as a navy captain who was in charge of a postwar camp for marine officers. However, in the index to the trial he is described as a retired vice admiral.

13.
Doenitz is referring to the internment camp run by the Americans at Mondorfles-Bains, in Luxembourg.

14.
Doenitz scored 138, well above average, on the IQ test administered by Gilbert. For the results of the test given to Doenitz and the other defendants, see G. M. Gilbert,
Nuremberg Diary
(New York, 1947), 34.

15.
Clement Attlee defeated Winston Churchill in 1945 and, as prime minister, formed the first Labor government.

  
1.
Among other things, in lectures at several universities in summer 1942, Frank called for a return to some kind of constitutional law. Hitler soon took away all his Nazi Party offices and forbade him from speaking in public in Germany. Frank kept his position as governor general of Poland.

  
2.
It is likely this book is Frank’s
Im Angesicht des Galgens: Deutung Hitlers und seiner Zeit auf Grund eigener Erlebnisse und Erkenntnisse
(Munich, 1953).

  
3.
These figures are hardly exaggerations for the great inflation in Germany, particularly during 1923. The standard work on the subject is Gerald D. Feldman,
The Great Disorder: Politics, Economics, and Society in the German Inflation of 1914–1924
(New York, 1993).

  
4.
The full names of those mentioned by Frank include Towia Axelrod, Eugene Leviné, and Max Levien. According to historians, none of these men helped Kurt Eisner in the November revolt. For details see Allan Mitchell,
Revolution in Bavaria 1918–1919: The Eisner Regime and the Soviet Republic
(Princeton, 1965), especially 193 n. 80.

  
5.
Anton Drexler (1884–1942) was one of the cofounders of the Nazi Party.

  
6.
Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) attained infamy as the Reich minister for popular enlightenment and propaganda. He played a key role in the Third Reich and, after a period out of favor, had a comeback during the latter part of the war. He was with Hitler to the end and committed suicide on May 1, 1945. He was a compulsive diarist, and the final diary, much of it found in Moscow only in the last several years, is being published. It represents an important source for the history of the Third Reich. At present twenty-two large (German) volumes have appeared, edited by Elke Fröhlich, with more to come. For a brief introduction to Goebbels, see Fest,
Face of the Third Reich
, 83–97.

  
7.
See Feldman,
Great Disorder
.

  
8.
Oswald Spengler (1880–1936) was a well-known cultural historian, most famous for his book
The Decline of the West
(1918–22).

  
9.
Frank must mean his appointment as the minister of justice in Bavaria in 1933.

  
1.
Some prominent figures in the Bavarian revolution were Jewish, but the involvement of the Jews as a whole has been vastly exaggerated. For more on this, see Mitchell
, Revolution in Bavaria
.

  
2.
For a thorough account of the National Socialist Party, see Kater,
The Nazi Party
. For discussion of all the parties mentioned, see Thomas Childers,
The Nazi Voter: The Social Foundations of Fascism in Germany, 1919–1933
(Chapel Hill, 1983).

  
3.
American bankers Charles C. Dawes (in 1924) and Owen D. Young (in 1929) each put forward plans to make it possible for Germany to pay the reparations established at the peace conferences ending the First World War.

  
4.
Harold L. Ickes (1874–1952) served as secretary of the interior in the United States for the period 1933–46.

  
5.
This gazette was the
Reichsgesetzblatt
.

  
6.
On the Reichstag fire of February 27, 1933, and its consequences, see Gellately,
Backing Hitler
, 12–13.

  
7.
Reinhard Heydrich (1904–1942) was the influential founder of the SD and one of the key leaders in the establishment of the Gestapo and of the rest of the Nazi police system. He was assassinated in Czechoslovakia and died on June 4, 1942. For a brief introduction, see Fest,
Face of the Third Reich
, 98–110.

  
8.
Karl Hermann Frank (1898–1946) managed to reverse Hitler’s reprisal orders in response to the assassination (May 27, 1942) of Reinhard Heydrich. However, the village of Lidice was targeted. It was leveled to the ground and its inhabitants were either killed immediately (192 men, 71 women) or sent to concentration camps (another 198 women); the children (98) were sent away to “special schools.”

  
1.
See my general introduction to this volume. Compare Raul Hilberg,
The Destruction of the European Jews
, rev. ed. (New York, 1985), 3:1048. A general account by Yehuda Bauer,
A History of the Holocaust
(New York, 1982), 335, shows a “total of Jewish losses” to be 5,820,960. Franciszek Piper, “Auschwitz Concentration Camp: How It Was Used in the Nazi System of Terror and Genocide and in the Economy of the Third Reich,” in Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck, eds.,
The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed, and the Reexamined
(Bloomington, 1998), 327–86 (here, 376), estimates about 1 million Jews lost their lives in the camp; 140,000–150,000 Poles; 20,000 Gypsies; 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war; and between 10,000 and 25,000 people of other nationalities.

  
2.
For a brief account of the postwar era and the various transfers of population, see Philipp Ther and Ana Siljak, eds.,
Redrawing Nations: Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central Europe, 1944–1948
(Lanham, Md., 2001).

  
3.
Adolf Eichmann (1906–1962) is often considered the architect of the “final solution.” His infamous position was to be in charge of Office IV B4 in the RSHA, whereby he had control over the “resettlement” of the Jews. After the war he escaped to South America, and was captured by the Israeli secret service in Argentina in 1960. He was tried in Jerusalem and executed in 1962. The best account of Eichmann and of the process as a whole remains Hilberg,
Destruction of the European Jews
.

  
4.
For a recent examination of Versailles, see Manfred F. Boemeke, Gerald D. Feldman, and Elisabeth Glaser, eds.,
The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment After 75 Years
(Cambridge, 1998). See also Margaret MacMillan,
Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World
(New York, 2001).

  
5.
In fact, the brutality was planned beforehand. Hitler made it clear in July 1940 and again in March 1941 that in the forthcoming war in the East, Russia would be “utterly destroyed.” He insisted that the war would be a life-and-death struggle in which Germany would reject the idea of the foe as a comrade in arms. “We do not go to war to preserve our enemies.” For an introduction to the criminal orders given for the treatment of POWs in the East, see Hans-Adolf Jacobson, “The
Kommissarbefehl
and Mass Execution of Soviet Russian Prisoners of War,” in Helmut Krausnick et al.,
Anatomy of the SS State
(London, 1968), 505–35.

  
6.
For a short account of “night and fog,” see Gellately,
Backing Hitler
, 225–26. Special courts began in February 1942 to sentence foreign nationals, but though many went to their deaths, on Hitler’s orders their fates were concealed from friends and relatives.

  
7.
Often regarded as the Weimar Republic’s most brilliant politician during the
great inflation of 1923, Gustav Stresemann (1878–1929) was chancellor from August 13 until November 28, 1923, and Heinrich Bruening (1885–1970) was chancellor from March 29, 1930, until May 30, 1932, the immediate predecessor in office to Papen.

  
8.
For a recent account of why and how Russia won, see Richard Overy,
Russia’s War
(Harmondsworth, 1998).

  
9.
Kurt Dittmar (1891–1959) was a well-known German radio commentator on military affairs.

10.
A German submarine sank a British passenger liner,
Athenia
, on the first day of the war in 1939. Many lives were lost, including a hundred or so Americans. The event reminded many of the sinking of the
Lusitania
in the First World War. The Germans denied sinking the
Athenia
, with Goebbels going so far as to claim the British did it to bring the United States into the war. For a brief account and the context, see Robert E. Conot,
Justice in Nuremberg
(New York, 1983), 418–19.

11.
These “protocols” were a well-known forgery going back in Europe well into the nineteenth century. For a brief account and excellent background, see George L. Mosse,
Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism
(New York, 1978), 117–20.

12.
For an excellent account of the many and varied research institutes on Eastern Europe in Nazi Germany, see Michael Burleigh,
Germany Turns Eastward: A Study of
Ostforschung
in the Third Reich
(Cambridge, 1988).