THE GERMAN TRIALS
By WILLIAM R. HUGHES
THE verdict of the Nuremberg trial declared that certain Nazi organisations were criminal in character and, further, that an individual member of any of these bodies, if he entered it or remained in it with a knowledge of its criminal character, became thereby a war criminal himself. He would not be condemned as such, how- ever, except by the decision of a court, which would give him a personal trial and full rights of legal defence. On conviction he would become liable to a punishment of imprisonment up to ten years, forfeiture of property, or fine, or all three. The organisations condemned were the Party Leadership (all ranks down to District Leaders), the executive part of the Gestapo, together with the associated Security Service and the S.S. A general exception was made for those who had been conscripted into these services or who had left them before the outbreak of war.
At the end of last year it was announced that the trials in the British zone would be entrusted to special German courts to be set up for this purpose. These would be known as Spruchkarnmern. About 120 would be set up, and it was intended that the trials should begin early in 1947 and be completed by the end of that year. Owing to many organisational delays no trials began before July, when the first few courts were opened. Meanwhile many of the accused had been interrogated by a public prosecutor, and all of them had been very busy preparing defences.
The accused men have been held, with other Nazis, in internment camps, most of them for well over two years. The conditions of internment were at first very strict and uncomfortable, but have been continuously improved and are now reasonably good. The "war criminals," those, that is, who are accused of having been personally concerned in some atrocity, about two thousand in number, have recently been removed to a special camp under military control. Internees who did not belong to a condemned organisation have by now mostly been released, though some hundreds have been awarded an additional term of internment by a British Review Board. These men are transferred to a "community settlement" which has recently been established near Bremen. The number who remain until they come before a Spruchkammer is estimated at less than 15,000. If the Nuremberg verdict had been applied strictly to all S.S. men the number would have been nearer half a million, but it was decided to proceed only against officers and N.C.O.s.
It is perhaps natural to think of these internees as a rather uniform set of hard, brutal and dangerous fanatics. There are such hard men among them, but there are also, of course, many weak men who would alw'ays swim with the tide. But there are also a very large number who joined the party with a genuine desire to help their country and who often did good work in their own localities and formations. Many are men of real ability and useful profes- sional qualifications. They might have been safely released long • before this, to take a humble part in the rebuilding of their shattered land, or they might well have been helped, during the two years, to be trained for a new type of citizenship. It is unfortunate that a scheme for such educational help is only just being introduced now, when it is doubtful how much headway it can make against the sense of depression and injustice which has become almost an obsession among many of the internees.
The aim of the Nuremberg tribunal and of these innumerable trials which will now follow its decisions is to record the verdict of world opinion on the Nazi crimes against humanity and to punish the criminals. It is obviously impossible to. assess the degree of responsibility and guilt attaching to eyery German who supported the regime and to award appropriate punishment. The Germans themselves usually agree that those who personally took part in atrocities should be tried. The War Crimes Commission is attend- ing to that. But when we go a step further and pick out certain organisations and certain members of them who believe that their own hands are clean and that they in general merely performed a national duty, and give these men a personal criminal conviction, with its consequent civil disabilities, then it is by no means clear that justice is being done in such a way as to be evident justice. It may even be that the effect of these trials will prove to be the reverse of that intended, owing to the amount of sympathy evoked among the friends and relations of the accused.
A very common type of case is the following. A young man volunteered to serve in the " Waffen S.S.", which was the part of the German army organised under Hirnmler. He did this because he believed it was an elite corps which would give him special opportunities of honourable and dangerous service. He accepted what he was taught about the greatness of the Fuehrer and his mission. He trained and served well and became a corporal. He had heard of concentration camps and of anti-Jewish action, but those matters had nothing to do with his service. After war and wounds came the shock of the capitulation and the realisation that he had been deceived and made use of. Then he was interned, not as a prisoner of war, but as a suspected criminal. He was kept over two years behind barbed wire, without the chance of seeing or helping his family (perhaps a wife with young children) during a time of desperate need. And now the trials have begun, but he may have yet to wait many months before his turn comes round. He is charged with one offence only, that he continued to serve the S.S. after he knew that it was a criminal body. He is being tried, in effect, for a lack of clear insight and of moral heroism. A defence that he only obeyed orders, or that he could do nothing effectually to right what was wrong, or that protest would merely have meant martyrdom, is not allowed to him. He cannot prove how much or how little he knew, nor whether he had had twinges of conscience.
He believes that his three judges (or at least the two laymen among them) have been chosen from the ranks of political opponents and that he is not receiving a trial based on legal principles alone. During his internment he has seen high-ranking S.A. men and diplomats released, while he, the little man, is kept prisoner. He has been interrogated by British security officers and provisionally passed for release, with or without conditions. After his release he has still to be finally graded by a de-nazification committee. It is true that he may expect a light sentence, say three or six months, but this brings little comfort, for he has already served two years and is now to be made an officially convicted criminal. He may receive a " Strafbescheid," offering a short sentence without trial, if he will plead guilty and accept it. His reaction is to refuse to acknowledge a guilt he does not feel, but the temptation of a speedy release may be too strong to resist.
What holds for this type of prisoner is also true in its degree for the large numbers of decent men to be found among the Allgemeine S.S. and the local officials. In all, thousands of men will be sent home convinced that they have not had real justice. Men who might have been won over to a new and co-operative outlook will tend to be hardened into opposition. It may be that we have given these German courts a task which it is impossible to carry out fully and fairly. In the first score of cases, tried the sentences ranged from a few months to as much as eight years, and one can only assume that they were being given roughly in proportion to the responsibility of the position held. There have been a few acquittals, and perhaps a speedier procedure may be evolved after . some cases have been to appeal.
I attended two Spruchlc.ammer trials. The first lasted for three. hours and the man was sentenced to two and a half years' imprison- ment; the second took six hours and the sentence was two months. In both cases the time was largely occupied by a long series of questions from the judge as to how much the accused knew about the Jewish persecutions, the ill-treatment of foreign workers and so forth. The answers admitted knowledge of disabilities pu
upon the Jews, but not of the extermination measures. An obvious difficulty was to confine the issue to the matter of knowledge of atrocities, and to convince the accused that he was not being tried for any misdeeds of his own. A second difficulty was to prove that he knew that his own organisation was responsible for the admitted crimes. It was clear how hard a task had been given to the court.
What can be done to alter the slow course of thts difficult and doubtful form of justice? A good solution would be to amnesty forthwith all men below a certain rank, the "small try," with some security exceptions where necessary, on the ground that they have already been interned for far longer than the duration of any sentence they are likely to receive, and may therefore be held to have expiated their alleged offence. They would remain still subject to any disabilities imposed by British Review Boards or by de-nazification committees. If this is held to be impossible, then this class of accused should be sent home on parole until their cases are called for hearing, and not kept confined for a further long indefinite period. This would help them towards becoming normal citizens again more than anything that could be done for them In the camps, and would diminish the number of personal and family tragedies that are taking place. Experience has shown that such parole is very well observed.
Previous page
