The Holocaust: 18. War Crimes

**The Holocaust: 18. War Crimes**

G.M. Gilbert was one of the prison psychologists during the Nuremberg war crimes trial. On April 9, 1946 he had a brief conversation with Colonel Rudolph Hoess, who had been the commandant of Auschwitz. The following is an excerpt of his book *Nurember Diary*:

We discussed briefly his activity as the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp from May, 1940, to December, 1943, which camp was the central extermination camp for Jews. He readily confirmed that approximately 2 1/2 million Jews had been exterminated under his direction. 

The exterminations began in the summer of 1941. In compliance with [Hermann] Goering's skepticism, I asked Hoess how it was technically possible to exterminate 2 1/2 million people.

"Technicall?" he asked. "That wasn't so hard -- it would not have been hard to exterminate even greater numbers."

In answer to my rather naive questions as to how many people could be done away with in an hour, etc., he explained that one must figure it one a daily 24-hour basis, and it was possible to exterminate up to 10,000 in one 24-hour period. 

He explained that there were actually 6 extermination chambers. The 2 big ones could accommodate as many as 2,000 in each and the 4 smaller ones up to 1500, making a total capacity of 10,000 a day. I tried to figure out how this was done, but he corrected me.

"No, you don't figure it right. The killing itself took the least time. You could dispose of 2,000 head in a half hour, but it was the burning that took all the time. 

The killing was easy; you didn't even need guards to drive them into the chambers; they just went in expecting to take showers and, instead of water, we turned on poison gas. The whole thing went very quickly."

He related all of this in a quiet, apathetic, matter-of-fact tone of voice.

I was interested in finding out how the order had actually been given and what his reactions were. He related it as follows:

"In the summer of 1941, Himmler called for me and explained: 'The Fuhrer has ordered the *Endlosung* [Final Solution] of the Jewish question -- and we have to carry out this task. For reasons of transportation and isolation, I have picked Auschwitz for this. 

You now have the hard job of carrying this out.' As a reason for this he said that it would be done at this time, because if it was not done now, then the Jew woule exterminate the German people - or words to that effect. For this reason on had to ignore all human considerations and consider only the task -- or words to that effect."

I asked him whether he didn't express any opinion on the subject or show any reluctance.

"I had nothing to say; I could only say *Jawohl!* In fact, it was exceptional that he called me to give me any explanation. He could have sent me an order and I would have had to execute it just the same. We could only execute orders without any further consideration. That is the way it was. He often demanded impossible things, which could not be done under normal circumstances, but, once given the order, one set about doing it with his entire energy and often did things that seemed impossible. . . ."

I pressed him further for some reaction to the enormity of what he was to undertake. He continued in the same apathetic manner:

"At the moment I could not oversee the whole thing, but later I got some idea of its extent. -- But I only thought of the necessity of it, as the order was put to me."

I asked him whether he couldn't refuse to obey the orders.

"No, from our entire training the thought of refusing an order just didn't enter into one's head, regardless of what kind of order it was . . . Guess you cannot understand our world. - I naturally had to obey orders and I must now stand to take the consequences."

What kind of consequences?

"Why, that they will have a trial and hang me, naturally."

I asked whether he didn't consider the consequences at the time he started the job.

"At that time there were no consequences to consider. It didn't occur to me at all that I would be held responsible. You see, in Germany it was understood that if something went wrong, then that man who gave the orders was responsible. So I didn't think that I would ever have to answer for it myself."

"But what about the human-- ?" I started to ask.

"That just didn't enter into it," was the pat answer before I could finish the question. I asked him whether he didn't think he would hang for murder as soon as he started it.

"No, never."

"When did it first occur to you then that you would probably be brought to trial and hanged?"

"At the time of the collapse - when the Fuhrer died."

Even before the defeat of Germany, war criminals were being brought to trial.  Starting on November 27, 1944, and lasting for six days, the Polish authorities put on trial six SS guards from Majdanek.  They were found guilty of torturing and killing prisoners, and raping women, and were executed.

Hundreds of those who had acted during the war as if they would never be held to account were brought to trial when the war ended.  

Joseph Darnand, founder of the French Milice, whose men arrested several thousand Jews for deportation, was himself arrested when the war ended and brought to trial in France.  He was condemned to death on October 3, 1945, and executed.  

A month later, Josef Kramer, who had been Deputy Commandant at Auschwitz before being appointed Commandant at Belsen, was likewise executed, after being tried by a British military tribunal.

The twelve leading Nazis convicted of war crimes at the Nuremberg Tribunal were hanged on October 16, 1946.  Among them was Julius Streicher, whose pre-war newspaper Der Stuermer had been at the forefront of the Nazi Party's anti-Semitic campaign.  

In the American zone of occupation in Germany, which included Dachau, 462 war criminals were sentenced to death; in the British zone, 240; and in the French zone, 104.  Leniency, which the war criminals themselves had never shown, was, however, granted to them.  Of the 806 Allied death sentences imposed, only slightly more than half were carried out.

In 1946 the Czechoslovak government brought Kurt Daluege to trial.  An SS general, he had succeeded Heydrich as Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, and had ordered savade reprisals.  He was executed.  

Ammon Goeth, the sadistic Commandant of Plaszow concentration camp, was also brought to trial and executed in 1946, in Cracow.  

That year a British military tribunal in Germany sentenced and hanged both the owner and the manager of the company that had manufactured the poison gas Zyklon B, used by the SS in Auschwitz and other death camps.

In 1947 the former President of the Slovak Republic, Father Yosef Tiso, a Roman Catholic priest, was tried by a court in Bratislava, condemned to death and hanged.  

He had been the first Head of State allied to Germany who sent his Jewish population to slave labor and to the death camps in German-occupied Poland.  

Also in 1947, Juergen Stroop, who had brutally suppressed the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943, was sentenced to death by an American military court in Dachau for the execution of American airmen shot down over Poland.  He was then extradited to Poland, where he was sentenced to death again, for his crimes in Warsaw, and hanged.

In 1948 SS Major Dieter Wisliceny was executed in Bratislava.  He had been reponsible for the deportation of Jews from Slovakia, Greece and Hungary.  SS General Oswald Pohl, chief of the SS Economic-Administrative Main Office, was tried by an American military tribunal in 1951.  

He had organized the dispatch to Germany of the personal possessions of Jews murdered in the death camps -- including clothing, gold tooth fillings, wedding rings, jewelry and women's hair.  

At his trial he told the court: "Everyone down to the lowest court knew what went on in the concentration camps."  He was sentenced to death and hanged.

Adolf Eichmann, who had escaped to Argentina after the war, was captured in 1960 by Israeli agents, flown to Israel, tried, found guilty and hanged.  Two years later the Deputy Commander of the Gestapo in Lithuania, Heinrich Schmitz, was brought to trial in Wiesbaden, West Germany.  He committed suicide in his cell before sentence was passed.

From 1963 to 1965, twenty-one leading SS officers who had worked at Auschwitz were tried at Frankfurt-on-Main.  It was the longest legal case in German records.  

Three of the accused were acquitted.  Twelve were sentenced to 3 to 14 years in prison.  Six were sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labor, among them Wilhelm Boger, who was found guilty of 144 murders, ten murders committed with others, and complicity in the deaths of 1,000 inmates.  

Another Gestapo officer, Hans Stark, who was found guilty of taking part in murders on 41 separate occasions -- one of them involving 200 camp inmates -- was sentenced to ten years in prison.

More trials were held during the 1970s and 1980s.  Helmut Rauca, who had selected more than 10,000 Kovno Jews for execution on October 28, 1941, and had gone to Canada after the war, was charged in 1984 by a Toronto court with entering Canada under a false declaration, found guilty and stripped of his Canadian citizenship.  

Extradited to West Germany, he was charged by a court in Frankfurt with the murder of 11,500 Jews.  He died in the prison hospital while awaiting trial.

In the forty years following 1945, as many as 5,000 convicted war criminals were executed; 10,000 were imprisoned.  A further 10,000 -- a minimum estimate -- escaped being brought to trial.  

The search for them continued.  War crimes trials took place in the 1990s in Israel, France and Britain.  In 1992 the Canadian Supreme Court upheld a lower Candian court's acquittal of Imre Finta, who had been accused of confining and deporting thousands of Hungarian Jews in 1944.  

In his defense, Finta argued that he had believed wartime newspaper articles that the Jews must be deported because they were "dangerous to the state."

In the last year of the twentieth century -- in May 1999 -- the British government tried, convicted and imprisoned Anthony Sawoniuk, who had participated in the execution of Jews in the former Polish town of Domachevo in 1942.  

After the war, hiding the facts of his past, he had emigrated to Britain.  At the time of his trial he was eighty-eight years old.  He was sentenced to two terms of life imprisonment for the killing of eighteen Jews.  

As with each war crimes trial since 1945, this British trial produced detailed historical evidence -- some of it collected at the site of the killings, in what had become Belarus -- which added to public knowledge of the events of more than a half century earlier.