The era of Nazi war crimes trials will soon be one of history’s closed chapters. More than 70 years after the end of World War II, the remaining cases like the current trial of the 94-year-old former Auschwitz guard Reinhold Hanning in Detmold, Germany, feature defendants who are near death’s door. Soon there will be no more perpetrators left to prosecute.
So why punish these old men and women?
The short answer is that living to an old age does not absolve a murderer of his or her crimes (and, yes, there are women perpetrators still alive, too). But the skeptics are also making the mistake of overlooking another key question: what do we learn from such trials?
An examination of that question leaves no doubt about their vital role regardless of their outcomes.
Lessons about human behaviour
While seeking to hold at least a small fraction of those responsible for the Holocaust and other forms of mass murder accountable for their deeds, the people who are referred to as Nazi hunters — both the freelance operatives and government prosecutors — have often pursued goals that had little to do with punishment. As I dug into their stories and motivations for my new book The Nazi Hunters, I was repeatedly struck by a consideration that often loomed larger than any legal verdict: the lessons about history and human behavior that such cases offer. Not just concerning how war criminals behaved then, but also what they should teach all of us about what principles we should live by now and in the future.
Even the earliest trials at Nuremberg and Dachau were as much about establishing the historical record as about punishment. In President Harry Truman’s words, “to make it impossible for anyone ever to say in times to come, ‘Oh, it never happened—just a lot of propaganda—a pack of lies.’” With many Germans and Austrians still in denial about the horrors that had been unleashed in their name, the revelations provided by the trove of documents, film footage and survivors’ testimonies at the trials constituted the first concerted effort to make them face the brutal facts.
But soon the war’s victors shifted their attention to the new rivalry of the Cold War, prompting them to largely abandon the push to convict Nazi criminals and dwell on their record. After all, both the Western powers and the Soviet Unionwanted their former enemies on their side in the new conflict, whether it was to make use of the expertise of German rocket scientists or to mobilize public opinion. Only a small group of determined Nazi hunters refused to go along with this new amnesia agenda.
As early as the 1950s when the Cold War was in full swing, there were two notable examples of how the hunters defied the prevailing trend and scored real breakthroughs.
The good Nazis
The first case was initiated by Fritz Bauer, a German prosecutor from a secular Jewish family who had spent most of the Nazi era in exile in Denmark and Sweden. Upon his return, the lifelong Social Democrat actively looked for ways to make his countrymen understand the lessons of their recent history. Soon he found the perfect case, focusing on the question how to view those German officers and civilians who attempted to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944.
Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg had placed a briefcase with a bomb under the conference table where Hitler and his senior officers were going over war plans. Because one of the officers happened to push the briefcase behind the leg of the table, Hitler survived the explosion. Were the conspirators heroes or traitors?
The key player in the drama that followed was Major Otto Remer, the commander of Guards Battalion Grossdeutschland in Berlin. During the confusion in the immediate aftermath of the blast, the conspirators told Remer that Hitler was dead and instructed him to arrest Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. Although Remer was a loyal Nazi, he accepted the order from what he believed were the new authorities.
When Remer showed up at the minister’s office with twenty men to arrest him, Goebbels informed him that Hitler was very much alive — and got him on the phone. The Führer promptly ordered Remer to arrest the plotters. They were subsequently hunted down and executed or forced to commit suicide. Remer was promoted to major-general before the war ended.
‘Traitors to their country’
In postwar West Germany, Remer helped launch a far-right party, the Socialistische Reichspartei, and mobilized supporters with vitriolic tirades against the country’s newly elected leaders. On May 3, 1951 during an election rally in Braunschweig, where Bauer was the director of the district courts, Remer not only defended his actions during the July 20 aborted coup but charged that the plotters were “traitors to their country and were paid by foreign powers.”
For Bauer, this was an opportunity to take a stand that embodied his approach to the question of how Germany should address its recent past. He was not interested in trying to punish Remer for his role in rounding up the plotters. Instead, by prosecuting a defamation case against him based on his characterization of the plotters as traitors, Bauer had a larger goal in mind. He wanted to educate the German public about what constituted patriotic behavior during Hitler’s rule.
During the trial that opened on March 7, 1952 with sixty German and foreign journalists in attendance, Bauer pointed out that there was no evidence to support Remer’s claim that the plotters were paid by foreign powers. He also offered a clear philosophical and political message. “Didn’t everyone who recognized the injustice of the war have the right to resist and prevent an unjust war?” he declared. “An unjust state like the Third Reich cannot be the object of treason.” He urged the court “to rehabilitate the heroes of the 20th of July…because of the eternal principles of law.”
Bauer was so intent on making his argument demonstrating the morality of the plotters that he forgot to ask for a specific sentence for Remer. The court found him guilty of defamation and sentenced him to three months imprisonment — but he promptly fled to Egypt.
For Bauer, though, this was a huge victory. The court agreed that the plotters had acted out of genuinely patriotic motives, thus redefining what constituted love of country. A poll taken before the trial showed that 38 per cent of Germans approved the actions of the German resistance; by the end of 1952, the year of the trial, 58 per cent expressed their approval. Bauer would become much more famous later for orchestrating the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial in the 1960s, but this was one of his proudest accomplishments.
The other most revealing example of the push for education more than punishment was provided by Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal, the famed Nazi hunter who operated first out of the Documentation Center in Linz and then out of a similar center in Vienna. While he was still living in Linz, the Landestheater there staged The Diary of Anne Frank. The production prompted open displays of anti-Semitism. Teenage hecklers shouted “Traitors! Toadies! Swindle!”
Austria in denial
This was the era when many Austrians were still in denial about the Holocaust, and Wiesenthal saw such protests as an effort by former Nazis and their sympathizers “to poison the minds” of the young generation. In a coffee house, he started a conversation with a high school boy who echoed the claims that Anne Frank was not a real person.
“But the diary?” Wiesenthal asked. The boy replied that it could be a forgery and offered no proof that Frank had existed.
Wiesenthal pointed out that Frank’s father, the only family member to have survived, had testified about how the Gestapo had arrested them, which led to their deportation to Auschwitz. The boy was still unconvinced.
Finally, Wiesenthal asked whether he would change his mind if could hear from the Gestapo officer who had arrested them. “Okay, if he admits it himself,” the boy replied, clearly convinced that this would never happen.
Wiesenthal took the boy’s statement as a challenge. He did not make any progress for years. But an appendix to the young girl’s diary mentioned that a former employee of her father had spoken to the officer who had carried out the arrest in an attempt to win their freedom. All he could recall was that the man’s named started with something like “Silver.”
With only that vague lead, Wiesenthal struggled to find someone whose name started with “Silber,” the German word for silver. But it wasn’t until 1963 that he obtained a copy of the wartime phone directory for the Gestapo in Holland. There he found the name “Silberbauer” under the department that dealt with Jews. Knowing that the personnel in that department were police officers, he discovered that Karl Silberbauer, the officer who admitted to arresting Anne Frank and her family, was still on duty in the Vienna police, which at first tried to hide that fact.
Personal responsibility
Wiesenthal tipped off a Dutch journalist who went to interview Silberbauer in Vienna. “Why pick on me after all these years?” the former SS officer complained. “I only did my duty.”
While Wiesenthal failed to get anyone to prosecute Silberbauer, he had ample reason to feel vindicated by the publicity his discovery generated. In the decades since then, Anne Frank’s diary has continued to serve as one of the most powerful personal testimonies about the Holocaust, educating successive new generations of schoolchildren. The efforts to discredit it fizzled out. Even the most ardent Nazi sympathizers could not contradict the testimony of the former SS officer who saw nothing wrong with what he had done — and, as a result, freely admitted his role.
Wiesenthal died in 2005, and now there are fewer and fewer Holocaust survivors or perpetrators still alive to provide testimony about their experiences. Which is why the last remaining trials offer such vital opportunities for both sides to have their say.
These are the last forums where the world can hear directly from those who lived through that era — and learn not just about what transpired but also about personal responsibility and the norms we should live by. Whether or not the aging defendants ever serve prison time is almost a secondary consideration at this point, as long as they are found guilty based on the evidence.
Without such personal testimonies, it will be all that much harder to both honor the millions of victims and prevent similar actions in current and future conflicts.
Andrew Nagorski is a former foreign correspondent and editor for Newsweek and the author of the newly released “The Nazi Hunters” (Simon and Schuster).
