Jeff
- To help 'celebrate' the upcoming 70th Anniversary of the end of the
“Good War” and the beginning of the “Good Peace,”
I offer the following from my books, Hellstorm—The Death Of Nazi
Germany, 1944-1947, and Rape Hate—Sex & Violence In War &
Peace. - Tom
And
so, with the once mighty German Army now disarmed and enslaved in
May, 1945, and with their leaders either dead or awaiting trial for
so-called “war crimes,” the old men, women and children who remained
in the dismembered Reich found themselves utterly at the mercy of
the victors. Unfortunately for these survivors, never in the history
of the world was mercy in shorter supply.
Soon
after the Allied
victory in Europe,
the purge of Nazi Party members
from government, business, industry, science, education, and all other
walks of German life commenced. While a surprising number of Nazis were
allowed—even compelled—to man their posts temporarily to enable a smooth
transition,
all party members, high and low,
were sooner or later excised from German daily
life. In theory, “de-Nazification”
was a
simple transplanting of
Nazi officials with those of democratic, socialist or communist
underpinnings.
In practice,
the purge became
little more than a cloak for
an orgy of rape, torture and
death.
De-Nazification
Because their
knowledge of the language and
culture
was superb, most of the intelligence
officers accompanying US and British forces into
the Reich were Jewish refugees
who had fled Germany in the late 1930s. Although their American and
English “aides” were hardly better,
the fact that many of these “39ers”
became
interrogators, examiners and
screeners, with old scores to settle, insured that Nazis— or any German,
for that matter—would
be shown no mercy.
One man opposed to the vengeance-minded
program was George Patton. “Evidently the virus started by Morgenthau
and [Bernard] Baruch of a Semitic revenge against all Germans is still
working ... ,” wrote the general in private. “I am frankly opposed to
this war-criminal stuff. It is not cricket and it is Semitic....I can’t
see how Americans can sink so low.”
Soon after occupation, all adult Germans
were compelled to register at the nearest Allied headquarters and complete
a lengthy questionnaire on their past activities. While many nervous
citizens were detained then and there, most returned home, convinced
that at long last the terrible ordeal was over. For millions, however,
the trial had but begun.
“Then
it started,”
remembered Anna Fest, a
woman who had registered with the Americans six weeks earlier.
Such
a feeling of helplessness, when three or four heavily armed military
police stand
in
front
of
you. You just panic. I cried terribly. My mother
was
completely beside herself and said,
“You
can’t do this. She registered just as she was supposed to.”
Then she said, “If only you’d gone somewhere else and had hidden.”
But I consider that
senseless,
because I did not
feel
guilty. . . . That was the way it went with everyone, with no reason
given.
Few
German adults,
Nazi or not, escaped the dreaded knock on the door. Far from being dangerous
fascists, Freddy and Lali Horstmann were actually well-known anti-Nazis.
Records Lali from the Russian Zone:
“I
am sorry to bother you,”
he
began,
“but
I am simply carrying out my orders. Until when did you work for the
Foreign Office?”
“Till
1933,” my husband answered.
“Then
you need fear nothing,”
Androff said....
“We accuse you of nothing, but we want you to accompany us to the
headquarters of the NKVD, the secret police, so that
we
can take down what you said in a protocol, and ask you a few questions
about the working of the Foreign Office...
.”
We
were stunned for a moment; then I started forward, asking if I could
come along with them. “Impossible,”
the interpreter
smiled.
My heart raced. Would Freddy answer satisfactorily? Could he stand
the excitement? What sort of accommodation
would
they give him?
“Don’t
worry,
your husband has nothing to fear,”
Androff
continued. “He will have a heated room. Give him a blanket for the
night, but quickly, we must leave. ..
.”
There
was a feeling of sharp tension, putting the soldier on his guard,
as though he were expecting an attack from one of us. I took first
the soldier, then the interpreter, by their hands and begged them
to be kind to Freddy, repeating myself in the bustle and scraping
of feet that
drowned
my words. There was a banging of doors. A cold wind
blew in. I felt Freddy kiss me. I never saw him again.
“[W]e were wakened
by the sound
of tires screeching, engines stopping abruptly, orders yelled, general
din, and a hammering on the window shutters. Then the intruders broke
through the door, and we saw Americans with rifles who stood in front
of our bed and shone lights at us. None of them spoke German, but their
gestures said: ‘Get dressed, come with us immediately.’ This was my
fourth arrest.”
So
wrote Leni Riefenstahl, a talented
young woman who was perhaps the world’s greatest film-maker. Because
her epic documentaries— Triumph of the Will and Olympia—seemed
paeans to not only Germany, but National Socialism, and because of her
close relationship with an admiring Adolf Hitler, Leni was of more than
passing interest to the Allies. Though false, rumors also hinted that
the attractive, sometimes-actress was also a “mistress of the devil”—that
she and Hitler were lovers. “Neither
my husband nor
my mother nor any of my three assistants had ever joined the Nazi Party,
nor had any of us been politically active,” said the confused young
woman. “No charges had ever been filed against us, yet we were at the
mercy of the [Allies] and had no legal protection of any kind.”
Leni
Riefenstahl
Soon after Leni’s
fourth arrest,
came a fifth.
The
jeep raced along the autobahns until, a few hours later ...I was
brought to the Salzburg Prison; there an elderly prison matron rudely
pushed me into the cell, kicking me so hard that I fell to the ground;
then the door was locked. There were two other women in the dark,
barren room, and one of them, on her knees, slid about the floor,
jabbering confusedly; then she began to scream, her limbs writhing
hysterically. She seemed to have lost her mind. The other woman
crouched on her bunk, weeping to herself.
As Leni and
others quickly discovered, the
“softening up” process began
soon after arrival at an Allied
prison. When Ernst von Salomon, his Jewish girl friend and fellow prisoners
reached an American holding pen
near Munich, the men were promptly led
into a room and brutally beaten
by military police. With his teeth knocked out and blood spurting
from his mouth,
von Salomon moaned
to a gum-chewing officer, “You
are no gentlemen.”
The remark brought
only a roar
of laughter from
the attackers.
“No, no, no!” the GIs grinned.
“We
are Mississippi boys!”
In another
room,
military policemen raped
the women at will while
leering soldiers watched from
windows.
After
such savage treatment, the
feelings of despair only intensified once the captives
were crammed
into cells.
“The
people had been standing there for three days, waiting to be interrogated,”
remembered a German physician
ordered to treat prisoners in
the Soviet Zone. “At
the sight of us a pandemonium
broke out which left
me helpless....
As far as I could gather, the
usual senseless questions were being reiterated: Why were they there,
and for
how long? They had no water and hardly anything to eat. They wanted
to be let out more often than
once a day....
A great
many of them have dysentery so badly that
they can no longer get up.”
“Young
Poles made fun of us,”
said a woman from
her cell in the same
zone.
“[They] threw bricks through
the windows, paperbags
with sand, and skins of hares filled with excrement.
We
did not dare to move or offer resistance, but huddled together in the
farthest corner, in order not to be hit, which could not always be avoided.
. . . [W]e were never free from
torments.”
“For
hours on end I rolled about on my bed,
trying to forget
my surroundings,”
recalled Leni Riefenstahl, “but it was
impossible.”
The
mentally disturbed woman kept screaming—all through the night; but
even worse were the yells and shrieks of men from the courtyard, men
who were being beaten, screaming like animals. I subsequently found
out that a company of SS men was being interrogated.
They
came for me the next morning, and I was taken to a padded cell where
I had to strip naked, and a woman examined every square inch of my
body. Then I had to get dressed and go down to the courtyard, where
many men were standing, apparently prisoners, and I was the only woman.
We had to line up before an American guard who spoke German. The prisoners
stood to attention, so I tried to do the same, and then an American
came who spoke fluent German. He pushed a few people together, then
halted at the first in our line.
“Were
you in the Party?”
The
prisoner hesitated for a moment,
then
said: Yes.”
He was slugged in the face and spat blood.
The
American went on to the next in line.
“Were
you in the Party?”
The
man hesitated.
“Yes
or no?”
“Yes.”
And
he too got punched
so
hard in the face that the blood ran out of his mouth.
However,
like the first man, he didn’t dare resist. They didn’t even instinctively
raise their hands to protect themselves. They did nothing. They put
up with the blows like dogs.
The
next man was asked: “Were you in the Party?”
Silence.
“Well?”
“No,”
he
yelled, so no punch. From then on nobody admitted that he had been
in the Party and I was not even asked.
As the above case illustrated,
there often was no rhyme
or reason to the examinations; all seemed designed to force from the
victim what
the inquisitor wanted to hear, whether true or false.
Additionally, most such “interrogations”
were structured to
inflict as much
pain
and suffering as possible. Explained
one prisoner:
The
purpose of these interrogations is not to worm out of the people what
they knew—which would be uninteresting
anyway—but
to extort from them special statements. The methods resorted to are
extremely primitive; people are beaten up until they confess to having
been members of the Nazi Party....
The authorities simply assume that, basically, everybody has belonged
to the Party. Many people die during and after these interrogations,
while others, who admit at once their party membership, are treated
more leniently.
“A young commissar,
who was a great hater of the Germans, cross-examined me...
,” said Gertrude Schulz. “When he put the question: ‘Frauenwerk [Women’s
Labor Service]?’ I answered in the negative. Thereupon he became so
enraged, that he beat me with a stick, until I was black and blue. I
received about 15 blows ... on my left upper arm, on my back and on
my thigh. I collapsed and, as in the case of the first cross-examination,
I had to sign the questionnaire.”
American
torture pen
“Both
officers who took our testimony were
former German Jews,” reminisced a member of the women’s SS, Anna Fest.
While vicious dogs snarled nearby, one of the officers screamed questions
and accusations at Anna. If the answers were not those desired, “he
kicked me in the back and the other hit me.”
They
kept saying we must have been armed, have had pistols or so. But we
had no weapons, none of us....I had no pistol. I couldn’t say, just
so they’d leave me in peace, yes, we had pistols. The same thing would
happen to the next person to testify.... [T]he terrible thing was,
the German men had to watch. That was a horrible, horrible experience....
That must have been terrible for them. When I went outside, several
of them stood there with tears running down their cheeks. What could
they have done? They could do nothing.
Not surprisingly, with beatings, rape,
torture, and death facing them, few
victims failed to
“confess”
and most gladly inked their name
to any scrap of
paper shown them. Some, like
Anna, tried to resist. Such recalcitrance
was almost always of short duration, however. Generally, after enduring
blackened eyes, broken
bones, electric shock to breasts—or,
in the case of men, smashed testicles—only those who died during torture
failed
to sign confessions.
Alone,
surrounded by
sadistic hate,
utterly bereft of law, many victims understandably escaped by taking
their own lives. Like tiny islands in a vast sea of evil, however, miracles
did occur. As he limped painfully back to his prison
cell, one Wehrmacht
officer
reflected on the insults, beatings,
and tortures
he had endured
and contemplated suicide.
I
could not see properly in the semi-darkness and missed my open cell
door. A kick in the back and I was sprawling on the floor. As I raised
myself I said to myself I could not, should not accept this humiliation.
I sat on my bunk. I had hidden a razor blade that would serve to open
my veins. Then I looked at the New Testament and found these words in
the Gospel of St. John: “Without me ye can do nothing.”
Yes.
You
can
mangle this poor
body—I
looked down at the running
sores
on my legs—but myself, my honor, God’s image that is in me, you cannot
touch. This body is only a shell, not my real self. Without
Him,
without the Lord, my Lord, ye can do nothing. New strength seemed to
rise in me.
I
was pondering over what seemed to me a miracle when the heavy lock turned
in the cell door. A very young American soldier came in, put his finger
to his lips to
warn
me not
to
speak.
“I saw it,” he said. “Here are baked potatoes.” He pulled the potatoes
out of his pocket and gave them to me, and then went out, locking the
door behind him.
***
Horrific as de-Nazification was in the
British, French and, especially the American Zone, it was nothing
compared to what took place in
Poland, behind Soviet lines. In hundreds of concentration camps sponsored
by an apparatus called the “Office of State Security,”
thousands of Germans—male and female, old and young,
high and low, Nazi and nonNazi,
SS, Wehrmacht,
Volkssturm,
Hitler
Youth,
all—were rounded
up and imprisoned. Staffed and
run by Jews, with help from Poles, Czechs, Russians, and other concentration
camp survivors, the prisons were
little better than
torture
chambers where dying was a thing
to be prolonged, not hastened.
While
those with blond hair, blue eyes
and handsome features were first to go, anyone who spoke German
would do.
Moments
after arrival, prisoners were
made horrifyingly aware of their fate. John Sack, himself
a
Jew, reports on one camp run
by twenty-six-year-old Shlomo Morel:
“I
was at Auschwitz,” Shlomo proclaimed, lying to the Germans but, even
more, to himself, psyching himself like a fighter the night of the
championship, filling himself with hate for the Germans around
him.
“I was at Auschwitz for six long years, and I swore that if I got
out, I’d pay all you Nazis back.”
His eyes sent spears, but the “Nazis” sent him a look of simple bewilderment.
. . . “Now sing the Horst Wessel Song!” No one did, and Shlomo, who
carried a hard rubber club, hit it against a bed like some judge’s
gavel. “Sing it, I say!”
“The
flags
held high . . . ,”
some Germans began.
“Everyone!”
Shlomo said.
“The
ranks
closed tight. . . .”
“I
said everyone!”
“Blond!”
Shlomo
cried to the blondest, bluest-eyed person there.
“I
said sing!” He swung his rubber
club
at the man’s golden head and hit it. The man
staggered
back.
“Our
comrades,
killed by the Reds and Reactionaries...
.”
“Sonofabitch!”
Shlomo cried, enraged that the man was defying him by not singing
but staggering back. He hit him again, saying, “Sing!”
“Are
marching
in
spirit with us...”
“Louder!”
“Clear
the street for the Brown Battalions...
.”
“Still
louder!”
cried
Shlomo,
hitting
another
shouting
man....
“Millions
of hopeful people...
.”
“Nazi
pigs!”
“Are
looking
to
the swastika...
.”
“Schweine!”
Shlomo
cried. He threw down his rubber club, grabbed a wooden stool, and,
a leg in his fist, started beating a German’s head. Without
thinking,
the man raised his arms, and Shlomo, enraged that the man would try
to evade his just punishment,
cried,
“Sonofawhore!” and slammed the stool against the man’s chest. The
man
dropped
his
arms, and Shlomo started hitting his now undefended
head
when snap! the leg of the stool split off, and, cursing the German
birchwood, he grabbed another stool and hit the German with that.
No one was singing now, but
Shlomo,
shouting, didn’t notice. The other
guards
called out, “Blond!”
“Black!”
“Short!”
“Tall!”
and as each of these terrified people came up, they wielded their
clubs upon
him.
The brawl went on till eleven o’clock, when the sweat-drenched invaders
cried,
“Pigs!
We will fix you up!”
and
left the Germans alone.
Some
were quite fixed....
Shlomo and his subordinates had killed them.
The
next night it was more
of the same . . . and the next night and the next and the next. Those
who survived the “welcoming committees” at this and other camps were
flung back into their pens.
“I
was put with 30 women into a cell, which
was intended to accommodate
one person,”
Gerlinde Winkler recalled. “The narrow
space, into
which we were rammed,
was unbearable and
our
legs
were all entangled together.
. . . The women, ill with dysentery, were only allowed to go out once
a day, in
order to relieve themselves. A
bucket without
a cover was pushed into
the cell
with the remark: ‘Here you have
one, you
German sows.’
The stink was insupportable,
and we were not allowed
to open the little window.”
“The
air in the cells became dense,
the smell of the excrement filled
it, the heat was like
in Calcutta, and the flies made the ceiling
black,”
wrote John Sack. “I’m choking,
the Germans thought, and
one even took the community
razor blade and, in despair,
cut his throat open
with it.”
When
the wretched inmates were at last pried
from
their
hellish tombs, it was
only for interrogation.
Sack continues:
As
many as eight interrogators, almost all Jews, stood around
any
one German
saying,
“Were you in the Nazi Party?” Sometimes a German said, “Yes,”
and the boys shouted, “Du schwein! You
pig!” and beat him and broke his arm, perhaps, before sending him to
his cell. . . . But usually a German said, “No,”
and the boys ...
told him, “You’re
lying. You
were a Nazi.”
“No,
I never was.”
“You’re
lying!
We know about you!”
“No,
I really wasn’t—”
“Du
lugst! You’re
lying!” they cried, hitting the obstinate man. “You
better admit it! Or you’ll get a longer sentence! Now! Were you in
the Nazi Party?”
“No!”
the
German often said, and the boys had to beat him and beat him until
he was really crying, “I was a Nazi! Yes!”
But
sometimes a German wouldn’t confess. One such hard case was a fifty-year-old....
“Were
you in the Party?”
“No,
I wasn’t in it.”
“How
many people work for you?”
“In
the high season, thirty-five.”
“You
must
have
been in the Party,”
the boy deduced.
He
asked for the German’s wallet, where he found a fishing license with
the stamp of the German Anglers Association. Studying it, he told
the German,
“It’s
stamped by the Party.”
“It’s
not,”
said
the German.
He’d
lost
his left arm in World
War I and was using his right arm to gesture with, and, to the boy,
he may have seemed to be Heiling Hitler. The boy became violent. He
grabbed the man’s collar, hit the man’s head against the wall, hit
it against it ten times more, threw the man’s body onto the floor,
and, in his boots, jumped on the man’s cringing chest as though jumping
rope. A half dozen other interrogators, almost all Jews, pushed the
man onto
a
couch, pulled off his trousers, and hit him with hard rubber
clubs
and hard rubber hoses full of stones. The sweat started running down
the Jews’
arms,
and the blood down the man’s naked legs.
“Warst
du
in der Partei?”
“Nein!”
“Warst
du in der Partei?”
“Nein!”
the German screamed—screamed, till the boys had to go to Shlomo’s
kitchen for a wooden spoon and to use it to cram some rags in the
German’s mouth.
Then
they resumed beating him. . . . The more the man
contradicted
them, the more they hated him for it.
Shlomo
Morel
After undergoing similar sessions on
a regular basis, the victim was brought
back for the eighth time.
By
now, the man was half unconscious due to his many concussions, and he
wasn’t thinking clearly. The boys worked on him with rubber
and
oak-wood clubs and said, “Do you still say you weren’t in the Party?”
“No!
I didn’t say I wasn’t in the Party!”
“You
didn’t?”
“No!”
said the punch
drunk
man.
“I never said it!”
“You
were in the Party?”
“Yes!”
The
boys stopped
beating
him. They practically sighed, as if their ordeal were over now. They
lit up cigarettes....
“Scram,”
one
said to the German. The man
stood
up, and he had his hand on the doorknob
when
one of the boys impulsively hit the back of his head, and he fell
to the floor, unconscious.
“Aufstehen,
du
Deutsches schwein. Stand up, you German pig,”
the
boys said, kicking him till he stood up and collapsed again. Two boys
carried him to his cell and dropped him in a corner....
Of
course, the boys would beat up the Germans for “Yes”es as well as
“No”s. In Glatz, the Jewish commandant asked a German policeman, “Were
you in the Party?”
“Of
course! I was obliged to be!”
“Lie
down,”
the
commandant
said,
and six weeks later the boys were still whipping the German’s feet.
Some torture sessions lacked even the
pretense of an examination. Remembered Eva Reimann:
My
cell door opened. The guard, who, because of the foul smell, held
a handkerchief to his nose, cried,
“Reimann
Eva! Come!”
I
was led to a first-floor room.
He
shouted
at
me, “Take
off your shoes!” I took them
off.
“Lie down!” I lay down. He took a thick bamboo stick, and he beat
the soles of my feet. I screamed, since the pain was very great. .
. . The stick whistled down on me. A blow on my mouth
tore
my lower lip, and my teeth started bleeding violently. He beat my
feet again. The pain was unbearable....
The
door opened suddenly, and, smiling obligingly, a cigarette in his
mouth, in came the chief of the Office, named Sternnagel. In faultless
German he asked me, “What’s wrong here? Why do you let yourself be
beaten? You just have to sign this document. Or should we jam your
fingers in the door, until the bones are broad. . . ?
A
man picked me up by the ankles, raised me eight inches above the floor,
and let me fall. My hands were tied, and my head hit hard. . . . I
lay in a bloody puddle. Someone cried,
“Stand
up!”
I
tried to, and, with unspeakable pain, I succeeded. A man
with
a pistol came, held it to my left temple, and said, “Will you now
confess?” I told him, “Please shoot me.” Yes,
I hoped to be freed from all his tortures. I begged him, “Please pull
the trigger.”
After barely surviving his “interrogation,”
one fourteen-year-old was taken to the
camp infirmary. “My body was green, but
my legs were fire red,”
the boy said. “My wounds were
bound with
toilet paper, and I had to change the toilet paper every day. I was
in the perfect place to watch what went on....
All the patients were
beaten people, and they died everywhere: at their
beds, in the washroom, on
the toilet. At night, I had to
step over the dead as if that
were normal
to do.”
When
the supply of victims ran low, it was
a simple matter
to find more. John Sack:
One
day, a German in pitch-black pants, the SS’s color, showed up in Lola’s
prison. He’d been spotted near the city square by a Pole who’d said,
“Fascist! You’re wearing black!” At that, the German had bolted off,
but the Pole chased him a mile to the Church of Saints Peter and Paul,
tackled him by a gold mosaic, hit him, kicked him, and took him to
Lola’s prison. Some guards, all girls, then seized the incriminating
evidence: the man’s black pants, pulling them off so aggressively
that one of the tendons tore. The man screamed, but the girls said,
“Shut up!” and they didn’t recognize that the pants were part of a
boy scout uniform. The “man” was fourteen years old.
The
girls decided to torture
him
[with]. . . . fire. They held down the German
boy,
put
out
their
cigarettes
on
him,
and, using gasoline, set his curly black hair afire.
At
the larger prison camps, Germans died by the hundreds
daily.
“You
pigs!” the commandant
then
cried, and he beat the Germans with their stools, often killing
them. At dawn many days, a Jewish guard cried, “Eins! Zwei! Drei!
Vier!”
and
marched the Germans into the woods outside their camp. “Halt! Get
your shovels! Dig!” the guard cried, and, when the Germans had dug
a big grave, he put
a
picture of Hitler in. “Now cry!” the guard said. “And
sing All the Dogs Are Barking!” and all the Germans moaned,
All
the dogs are barking,
All
the dogs are barking,
Just
the
little hot-dogs,
Aren’t
barking
at all.
The
guard then cried,
“Get
undressed!” and, when the Germans were naked, he beat them, poured
liquid
manure
on
them, or, catching a toad, shoved the fat thing down a German’s throat,
the German soon dying.
Utterly
unhinged by
years of persecution, by the loss
of homes and loved ones, for
the camp operators, no torture,
no
sadism, no
bestiality,
seemed too monstrous
to inflict on those now in their
power. Some Germans were forced to crawl on
all fours and
eat their
own excrement
as well as that
of others. Many were drowned
in
open latrines. Hundreds were
herded into buildings and burned to death or sealed
in caskets and buried alive.
Near
Lamsdorf, German women were forced to disinter bodies
from a Polish burial site.
According to John Sack:
The
women did, and they started to suffer nausea as the bodies, black
as the stuff in a gutter, appeared. The faces were rotten, the flesh
was glue, but the guards—who had often seemed psychopathic, making
a German woman drink urine, drink
blood,
and eat a man’s excrement, inserting an oily five-mark bill in a woman’s
vagina, putting
a
match to it—shouted at the women . . . “Lie down with them!”
The
women did, and the guards shouted, “Hug them!”
“Kiss
them!” “Make love with them!”
and,
with their rifles, pushed on the backs of the women’s heads until
their eyes, noses and mouths
were
deep in the Polish faces’ slime. The women who clamped their
lips
couldn’t scream, and
the
women
who screamed had to taste something vile. Spitting,
retching,
the women at last stood up, the wet tendrils still on their chins,
fingers, clothes, the wet seeping into the fibers, the stink like
a mist around
them
as
they marched back to Lamsdorf. There were no showers there, and the
corpses had all had typhus, apparently, and sixty-four women . . .
died.
Not surprisingly,
the mortality rate at the concentration
camps was staggering and relatively
few survived. At one prison of eight thousand, a mere 1,500 lived to
reach home. And of those “lucky” individuals who did leave with their
lives, few could any longer be called human.
When a smattering
of accounts began to leak from
Poland of the unspeakable crimes
being
committed, many in the West
were stunned. “One would expect that after
the horrors in Nazi concentration
camps, nothing like
that could
ever happen again,”
muttered
one US senator, who then
reported
on beatings, torture
and “brains splashed on the ceiling.”
“Is
this what our soldiers
died for?” echoed a Briton in the House of Commons.
Added
Winston Churchill:
“Enormous numbers
[of Germans]
are utterly unaccounted
for. It is not impossible that
tragedy on a prodigious scale is unfolding itself behind
the Iron
Curtain.”
While
Churchill and others in the West
were expressing shock and surprise over the sadistic slaughter taking
place in the Soviet Zone,
precious little was said about the “tragedy
on a prodigious scale” that was
transpiring
in their own backyard.
***
Among the millions imprisoned by the
Allies were thousands of Germans accused of having a direct or indirect
hand in war crimes. Because the victorious powers demanded swift and
severe punishment, Allied prosecutors were urged to get the most damning
indictments in as little time as possible. Unfortunately for the accused,
their captors seemed determined to inflict as much pain as possible
in the process.
“[W]e were thrown into small cells
stark naked,”
Hans Schmidt later wrote.
“The
cells in which
three or four persons were incarcerated
were six and
a half by ten feet in size and had no windows or ventilation.”
When
we went to the lavatory we were forced to run between a line of Americans
who struck us with straps, brooms, cudgels, buckets, belts, and pistol
holders to make us fall down. Our head, eyes, body, belly, and genitals
were violently injured. A man
stood
inside the lavatory to beat us and spit on us. We returned
to
our cells through
the
same ordeal. The temperature
in
the cells was 140 Fahrenheit or more. During the first three days
we were given only one cup of water and a small slice of bread. During
the first days we perspired all the time, then perspiration stopped.
We were kept standing chained back to back for hours. We suffered
terribly from thirst, blood stagnation and mortification
of
the hands. From time to time water was poured
on
the almost red-hot
radiators,
filling the cells with steam, so that
we
could hardly breathe. During all this time the cells were in darkness,
exceptWhen
we went to the lavatory we had to run through a lane
when the American soldiers entered and switched on electric bulbs
...
which forced us to close our eyes.
Our
thirst became more and more cruel, so that our lips cracked, our tongues
were stiff, and we eventually became apathetic, or raved, or collapsed.
For
thirteen days and nights we received the same treatment, tortured
by
heat and thirst. When we begged for water, our guards mocked us. When
we fainted we were revived by being drenched with cold water. There
was dirt everywhere and we were never allowed to wash, our
inflamed
eyes gave us terrible pain, we fainted continuously.
Every
twenty minutes
or
so
our
cell
doors
were
opened
and
the
soldiers insulted and
hit
us.
Whenever the doors were opened
we
had to stand
still
with our backs to the door. Two plates of food, spiced with salt,
pepper, and mustard to make us thirstier, were given us daily. We
ate in the
dark on the floor. The thirst was the most terrible of all our tortures
and
we could not sleep.
In
this condition
I
was brought
to
trial.
During the Nazi war crimes trials and
hearings, almost any method that would obtain a “confession” was employed.
Eager to implicate high-ranking German officers in the Malmedy Massacre,
American investigator Harry Thon ordered Wehrmacht sergeant Willi Schafer
to write out an incriminating affidavit:
Next
morning Mr. Thon appeared in my cell, read my report, tore it up,
swore at me and hit me. After threatening
to
have me killed unless I wrote what he wanted, he left. A few minutes
later
the door
of
my cell opened, a black hood encrusted with blood, was put over my
head and face and I was led to another room. In view of Mr. Thon’s
threat
the
black cap had a crushing effect on my spirits....
Four men of my company ...
accused me, although later they admitted to having borne false testimony.
Nevertheless I still refused to incriminate myself. Thereupon
Mr.
Thon
said
that
if
I continued
to
refuse this would be taken as proof
of
my Nazi opinions, and . . . my death was certain. He said I would
have no
chance
against four
witnesses,
and
advised
me for my own good to make a statement
after
which I would be set free. . . . I still refused. I told Mr. Thon
that although my memory was good, I was unable to recall any of the
occurrences he wished me to write about
and
which to the best of my knowledge had never occurred.
Mr.
Thon
left
but
returned
in
a little while with Lieutenant [William] Perl who abused me, and told
Mr. Thon that, should I not write what was required within half an
hour, I should be left to my fate. Lieutenant Perl made it clear to
me that
I
had the alternative of writing and going free or not
writing
and dying. I decided for life.
Another
German soldier unable to resist the pressure was Joachim Hoffman:
[W]hen
taken for a hearing a black hood was placed over my head. The guards
who took me to my hearing often struck or kicked me. I was twice thrown
down the stairs and was hurt so much that blood ran out of my mouth
and nose. At the hearing, when I told the officers about the ill treatment
I had suffered, they only laughed. I was beaten and the black cap
pulled over my face whenever I could not answer the questions put
to me, or gave answers not pleasing to the officers....I was beaten
and several times kicked in the genitals.
Understandably, after several
such sessions, even the strongest submitted and signed papers incriminating
themselves and others.
“If
you confess you will go free,”
nineteen-year-old Siegfried Jaenckel
was told. “[Y]ou need only to say you had an order
from your superiors. But if you
won’t speak you will be hung.”
Despite the mental and physical
abuse, young Jaenckel held out
as long as he could: “I
was beaten and I
heard the
cries of the men being
tortured in
adjoining cells, and whenever I was taken for a hearing I trembled with
fear....
Subjected to such duress I eventually gave in, and signed the long statement
dictated to me.”
Far
from being isolated or extreme cases, such methods
of extorting confessions were
the rule rather than the exception. Wrote author Freda Utley, who learned
of the horror after
speaking with
American jurist Edward van Roden:
Beatings
and
brutal
kickings;
knocking-out
of
teeth
and
breaking
of jaws; mock trials; solitary confinement; torture with burning splinters;
the use of investigators pretending
to
be priests; starvation; and
promises
of acquittal. . . . Judge van Roden said: “All but two of the Germans
in the 139 cases
we
investigated had been kicked in the testicles beyond repair. This
was standard
operating
procedure
with
our
American
investigators.” He told
of
one German who had had lighted matchsticks forced under his fingernails
by the American investigators to extort a confession, and had appeared
at his trial with his fingers still bandaged from the atrocity.
In
addition
to
testimony
given under
torture,
those
who might have spoken in defense
of the accused were prevented. Moreover, hired “witnesses” were paid
by the Americans to parrot the
prosecution’s charges.
When
criticism such as Utley’s and van Roden’s surfaced, and even as victims
were being hung by the hundreds, those responsible defended their methods.
“We
couldn’t have
made those birds talk otherwise...
,” laughed one Jewish “interrogator,” Colonel A. H. Rosenfeld. “It was
a trick, and it worked like a charm.”
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