Post-war Europe!
Chapter IX: The Nuremburg Trials and Werwolf, 1946-1950.
The Wehrmacht withdrew to Germany’s 1937 borders as ordered (the intention was to re-establish Austria as a separate country). Demobilization commenced, albeit at a painfully slow pace, which is commonly attributed to obstructionism. Allied soldiers streamed into the country unopposed and an Allied Control Council started to administrate the country, but quickly discovered they still needed Rommel. Only a few months ago hundreds of thousands of people had still been cheering at the executions of supposed defeatists and traitors and generally agreed with the harsh treatment of so-called “enemies of the Reich.” These people hadn’t changed into friends of the Anglo-Americans overnight and certainly not of the Soviets, who occupied East Prussia. Agitators propagated the idea that the Allies had only won the war through “cheating” by using the atomic bomb instead of fighting the Wehrmacht fairly on the field of honour. Still others espoused the idea that new wonder weapons would have turned back the tide, but that Germany had been robbed of its chance by the September Coup. Remaining diehard Nazis even considered Himmler the hero and Rommel the traitor rather than the other way around. Latent anti-Semitism remained, as returning German Jews discovered when they tried to return to their homes in Germany, which were now often occupied by others.
The Allied administration was seriously hampered by various forms of passive resistance, civilian disobedience in particular. Rommel as a war hero had the moral authority to convince most to carry on with their lives, work with the Allies and help rebuild Germany. Rommel remained a public figure by helping the Americans with their campaign to win the hearts and minds of the German people, which soon replaced plans to de-industrialize Germany and reduce it to a medieval economic state. The so-called Morgenthau Plan was rejected because only 60% of the population could live off the land, meaning that 40% would die. Moreover, Secretary of State Byrnes told Truman that Germany was the beating heart of Europe’s economy, making its resuscitation the cornerstone of European reconstruction. Additionally, if Europe didn’t recover quick enough then it could very well fall to communism. In 1947, a massive aid plan known as the Marshall Plan was launched and 15 billion dollars worth of aid (150 billion in current dollar value as of June 2016) was delivered to Europe.
Germany became the second largest recipient after the United Kingdom, receiving about 3.5 billion dollars worth of aid and it was highly needed. In early 1947, Germany was still a country in ruin, with only few of its major cities left intact and most industrial areas in shambles. Transportation infrastructure such as railways, bridges, docks, highways as well as Germany’s fuel producing capacity had been especially hard hit. Destroyed bridges also blocked a lot of river traffic which meant coal and wood, the most basic of fuels, couldn’t be transported very easily. It was much the same for food. Tens of thousands of Germans died of cold or hunger in the winter of 1946-’47 (the Nazi regime’s Winter Help that had largely prevented this in previous years had collapsed along with the Third Reich). Smaller towns hadn’t been destroyed, but due to the lack of transportation they were now economically isolated. Additionally, outbreaks of anthrax were still taking place in parts of the country and threatened to turn into an epidemic again because the loss of central authority meant quarantine measures were no longer being enacted. Outbreaks of typhoid, cholera and dysentery took place too, which was facilitated by the fact that the immune systems of hundreds of thousands of people had been compromised by varying degrees of radiation poisoning.
In general, with the civil war in September and October seriously weakening central authority and the removal of the severe repression mechanisms following the fall of the Nazis, maintaining law and order became a problem. Bands of refugees wandered around, looking for food, shelter and medical help. Given that 35 cities had been destroyed by nuclear weapons and several more by conventional bombings or had suffered indirectly from biological attack, there were millions of them. Worse were former Hitler Youths, former Volkssturm militiamen and ex-Waffen SS. They had military training, and in some cases were still armed, and they had nothing to do but make sure they stayed fed and warm. They became lawless gangs that plagued the countryside and the much depopulated ruins of the cities during those winter months of 1946-’47, robbing and beating up people. Some of the more ideologically driven bands took the effort to string up perceived traitors, defeatists and others they blamed for their current predicament. The murder rate peaked in December 1946. A handful of attacks took place against American and British patrols, though an organized campaign didn’t take off anywhere (except in East Prussia, where the Soviet occupiers were despised). Many German men were seriously frustrated when they saw how many German women entered relations with American and British soldiers. This included women, often desperate war widows with dependent children, who prostituted themselves to Allied soldiers, who paid them with cigarettes and chocolate (these replaced actual currency since the Reichsmark had become virtually worthless). Some of these men joined such gangs or practiced other forms of non-violent resistance. Communist agitation against the “capitalist parasites aiming to pillage Germany and exploit its working class” took place as well, sponsored by the Soviets.
By early 1947, the occupational authorities got a hold of the situation. Improvised airfields had been built and rivers had been cleared of collapsed bridges (and estuaries of remaining mine fields). Consistent deliveries of bread, dairy products, vegetables, fruit, meat, fish as well as medicine and medical equipment commenced, all of it Made in the USA. Bridges and railroads were rebuilt and roads were cleared of debris by the US Army Corps of Engineers, which allowed for an ever more systematic distribution by the spring of 1947. By then, families across Germany were being provided with rations of coal and/or wood to keep warm and cook food. Over the course of that year, the reconstruction of urban areas and key industries took off and the tensions between occupying Allied soldiers and the population lessened. The notable exception was East Prussia, where every German woman could still become victim of rape by Soviet soldiers if she ventured out into the streets. The remaining sympathizers turned that into their main theme in anti-Allied litanies, for as far as they weren’t in and out of jail for sedition.
Most Germans carried on with their lives and ignored remaining pro-Nazi firebrands, but the Allies nonetheless considered it unacceptable that questionnaires came in which said “National Socialism was a good idea that had been carried out badly.” Denazification had already begun by removing remaining Nazis from positions of power and influence and by disbanding or rendering impotent organizations associated with the Nazis. The Americans upped the ante in their occupation zone, the largest of them all, by criminalizing “Nazi apologism” and applying censorship. They also started to show documentaries with actual footage about the crimes of the concentration camps in cinemas to make it clear there was nothing good about Nazism. Attendance was compulsory for all German civilians aged 18 and above.
To set a final example the Allies organized the Nuremburg trials, officially known as the International Military Tribunal, to prosecute former members of the political, military, judicial and economic leadership of Nazi Germany who had planned, carried out or otherwise participated in the Holocaust and other war crimes and crimes against humanity. The 26 defendants were Martin Bormann, Karl Dönitz, Hans Frank, Roland Freisler, Wilhelm Frick, Walter Funk, Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Goering, Rudolf Hess, Reinhard Heydrich, Alfred Jodl, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Wilhelm Keitel, Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, Robert Ley, Konstantin von Neurath, Franz von Papen, Erich Raeder, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Alfred Rosenberg, Fritz Sauckel, Hjalmar Schacht, Baldur von Schirach, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Albert Speer and Julius Streicher (Heydrich was still at large and the tribunal planned to try him in absentia). The trial commenced on Monday 21st April 1947 (one day after what would have been Hitler’s 58th birthday).
Proceedings were slow because Goebbels loudly interrupted the judges and the prosecution innumerable times with statements that he didn’t recognize this court, that proceedings were a farce directed by the Jews, that Nazi Germany would have been a bulwark against Bolshevism if the Anglo-Americans had been wise enough to accept Hitler’s offers of alliance, that the Anglo-Americans had fallen under the spell of Jewish finance capital and that the Nazis had done the world a favour by carrying out the Final Solution. When testifying Goebbels also made irrelevant and longwinded statements about the genius of his idol, the Führer. He commented in his diary how he wanted to defend Hitler’s legacy and he mentioned how he despised most of the other defendants, who now attacked the Führer they had once faithfully served and minimized their own involvement. Goebbels often countered their testimonies and he proudly owned up to his involvement in various Nazi crimes. The attention and publicity the trial gave him fed into his narcissistic, egomaniacal personality and diary notes reveal he fantasized about becoming a martyr for the National Socialist cause, which would one day get the recognition he thought it deserved. One favour he did do this co-defendants was that he denied that the Nazis were responsible for the Katyn Massacre. Much to the outrage of the Soviets, the American, British and French judges found Goebbels’s testimony credible (after all, why would the former minister of propaganda lie after de facto owning up to pretty much everything else he’d been accused of).
Another defendant who caused serious trouble was former Nazi judge Roland Freisler, who used his mastery of legal texts, mental agility, dramatic courtroom verbal dexterity and verbal force (he had been put on trail for his involvement in the Wannsee Conference, for the political nature of his own trials as a judge, and for the trial against the B-29 crew that had dropped the bomb over Munich, leading to their execution). Freisler repeated, ad nauseam as far as the judges were concerned, that the charges against the defendants were only defined as crimes after they had been committed and that therefore the trial was invalid as a form of victors’ justice. He also pointed out several times double standards associated with that, particularly how no one from the Soviet Union was charged with “conspiracy to commit aggression” in the case of aggression against Poland. In that regard he also mentioned the Winter War and the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran as examples of conspiracies to commit aggression. As far as crimes against humanity went, he recited a large number of examples of such crimes committed by the Red Army from memory. Lastly, Freisler stated that if he was to be put him on trial for presiding over show trials, then Soviet judge Iona Nikitchenko might as well join him in the dock (Nikitchenko had presided over some of the most notorious of Stalin’s show trials, sentencing both Kamenev and Zinoviev to death). At one point he interrupted Nikitchenko, calling him a “hypocrite beyond compare.” He even went so far as to conclude that the sentences, whatever they would be, had already been decided on before the trial. Regardless of the crimes he had committed, many of the points he raised are now considered valid.
The trial was suddenly interrupted during its tenth session on Wednesday June 18th 1947. A truck driven by a fanatical Nazi who was a part of Heydrich’s “Werwolf” resistance movement, a former SS member capable of speaking flawless English to be precise, had managed to get past several checkpoints in Nuremberg even though his vehicle was laced with half a tonne of TNT. He parked it right in front of the Palace of Justice and a timer triggered the explosion. It shattered all of the windows in the complex and abruptly ended proceedings for that day. American judge Francis Biddle was killed and a few other judges were injured. Soviet judge Nikitchenko, completely cut up by glass splinters and debris, was injured most severely and had to be hospitalized for two months. Goering got a heart attack and died two days later (unsurprising considering how massive he had become). Bormann, Goebbels, Kaltenbrunner, Sauckel and Seyss-Inquart had all suffered injuries that hospitalized them, from a couple of days in Sauckel’s case to five weeks in Goebbels’s (despite his injuries, Goebbels approved of this terrorist attack). Proceedings were adjourned until September 1st.
After that, remaining Nazi supporters under the command of Reinhard Heydrich, the self-appointed head of the Werwolf partisan movement, launched an insurgency against the Allies. He portrayed himself as humble by refusing to assume the title of Führer, instead assuming the title of
Reichsprotektor (Reich Protector). The tactics they used included illegal radio broadcasts, pamphlets, posters, kidnappings, hostage takings, sabotage, assassinations, car bombings, anti-tank rocket attacks, drive-by shootings and suicide bombings. As the campaign picked up, people seen as collaborators of the Allies were murdered and the preferred method used was hanging, specifically hanging them where their bodies would be seen (usually with signs around their necks specifying this person’s crime). The murder rate in Germany spiked once more in August 1947. Rommel and his family were put under constant protection because Nazi terrorists considered him to be the ultimate traitor because he was the leader of the plot that killed Hitler and made Germany surrender. Thousands of Allied servicemen as well as many more German civilians were killed in the insurgency, influencing public opinion in the US and the UK since the war was supposed to be over.
The search for Heydrich was stepped up, but he kept moving around in the mountains and forests of southern Germany and usually accepted the most primitive accommodations to avoid the attention of the Allies. He spent many nights sleeping under the starry sky in the woods and in caves, or in shacks, sheds and barns in little southern German towns. Whenever he did sleep in a proper bed, it was because true believers of the Nazi cause took him in. Regardless of comfort, Heydrich never stayed in one place for more than two or three days. Moreover, he had changed his appearance by shaving his head and growing a beard and used fake identification papers to get past Allied checkpoints (as it later turned out, he was close to ground zero in the case of the Nuremberg attack to make sure it was successful).
The Allies and the German police, despite attacks against police officers, kept looking for him and he stayed ahead of the authorities. A second terrorist bombing in Nuremberg killed some court personnel and it was followed a few days later by a drive-by that killed some on leave American soldiers that had nothing to do with the trial at all. Nonetheless, this was sufficient to convince the Allies to relocate the entire trial to York, Great Britain, far out of reach of the Werwolf insurgents. Meanwhile, of course, there were the other attacks taking place all over Germany and the Allies had difficulty dealing with them because their material superiority didn’t mean anything to an adversary that practiced asymmetric warfare.
By trying to kill and injure as many Allied servicemen as possible the Werwolfs tried to decrease Allied domestic support for the continued occupation of Germany to the point that public opinion would demand a withdrawal. Once this was accomplished, Heydrich planned for a resurgence of the Nazis. In response to the insurgency, the Americans and the British simply continued their reconstruction program and scaled back parts of the denazification program that the German people resented, particularly forced attendance of “educational movies” in the cinema (these depicted the horrific crimes of the Nazi regime uncensored, including but not limited to lampshades made of human skin for example). With more and more people getting roofs over their heads and food on the table while infrastructure and basic amenities were being restored, most people were soaked off of their initial sympathy for the Werwolfs (apart from the remaining diehard Nazi believers that is). Many people found new jobs after the war precisely because of the massive post-war reconstruction program.
In Britain people were very war weary after seven years of war, especially after the last eighteen months of it, which had seen chemical and biological attacks. The American people, who hadn’t even seen a single bullet hit the continental US, were a lot less weary. However, in both countries the people were confronted by the fact that their countrymen were being killed and injured in a country that was supposed to be vanquished. The casualty rate was in fact a lot less than the number of men that had died fighting the Germans on the battlefield over the years. But it was just demoralizing that an enemy that had been defeated and had signed an official instrument of surrender was still inflicting casualties. In their occupation zone in East Prussia the Soviets responded with terror, organizing reprisal executions against German civilians. The insurgency flared up the strongest there, lasting until 1960 in the wooded lands around East Prussia’s lakes on a small scale. The direct result was that Truman, though he stayed in the White House in the 1948 elections, lost the House and became a lame duck president. Meanwhile, Churchill lost the UK general election of 1946, the first general election in Britain since 1935. His successor Attlee, however, continued Churchill’s policies vis-à-vis the occupation of Germany and Britain’s cooperation with the US.
In the American, British and French zones the attacks of the insurgents, after peaking in size and frequency in 1947, decreased in number more and more because support dried up. Werwolf propaganda continued to spew vitriol against the Allies, but the response was lacklustre across Germany, with the exception of East Prussia where most people hated their Soviet occupiers. Even in the Western Allied occupation zones, however, the Werwolf insurgency continued to simmer at a low intensity, too low to influence Anglo-American public opinion. The few remaining diehard Nazis led by Heydrich, however, vowed to continue. The Allied authorities issued a deck of playing cards with pictures of Nazis still at large on the cards and in that deck Heydrich was the ace of spades. His arrest, in other words, was top priority and of course he couldn’t stay lucky forever: he was arrested on June 18th 1948 while trying to board a train to Berlin and the Allies intended to carry out his sentence (he’d been tried to death in absentia). Heydrich appealed his conviction, primarily to use the trial as a podium for Nazi propaganda and to immortalize himself, (he is one of the most popular senior Nazis in neo-Nazi circles today, but outside those circles he’s a Nazi criminal). The outcome was predictable. He was sentenced to death and hanged on February 6th 1950. With the exception of East Prussia, no more Werwolf attacks took place after 1952.
Meanwhile, the British and the Americans planned to fully reintegrate Germany into the international community as an accepted, normal and civilized country. One reason was that relations between the Western powers on one hand and the Soviet Union on the other hand had fallen apart. Even during the war, the Soviets had put Moscow trained cadres in crucial power positions to fulfil orders regarding socio-political transformation. Elimination of the bourgeoisie’s social and financial power by expropriation of landed and industrial property was accorded absolute priority. These measures were publicly billed as “reforms” rather than socioeconomic transformations. Activities by political parties had to adhere to “bloc politics”, with parties eventually having to accept membership in an “antifascist bloc” obliging them to act only by mutual “consensus.” The bloc system permitted the Soviet Union to exercise domestic control indirectly. Crucial departments such as those responsible for personnel, general police, secret police and youth, were strictly communist run. Moscow cadres distinguished “progressive forces” from “reactionary elements”, and rendered both powerless. Such procedures were repeated until communists had gained unlimited power, and only politicians who were unconditionally supportive of Soviet policy remained. The results were confirmed by elections in which the communists won with results anywhere between 80% and 99%. After losing nearly half its population, Poland now saw a new totalitarian regime imposed on it, along with East Prussia, Finland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania (Czechoslovakia had been split up because the Czech part had been reached by the Western Allies before the Red Army would march in, ensuring that the Czech Republic became a part of the Western camp). The liberation of Poland, the reason why WW II had started in the first place, would have to wait since nobody was willing to fight the Soviets over it.