Landsberg and the Executions of Nazis
Christopher Jones writes: The Landsberg Historical site says that 284 war criminals were put to death at that prison until June 7, 1951. Although the dates are very confusing (I have seen later dates) Daryll DeBell is right that seven were hanged on that last day, so technically I should have said that the largest mass execution in US history ended on June 7, 1951. (Again, I have seen later dates.) Most of my recollections about this terrible event come from a Bayerischer Rundfunk documentary DOKUMENTATION LANDSBERG: Weichen für die junge Republik that aired on March 23, 2002 on German television. In it, future Hollywood producer Eric Pleskow described his part in the executions; as a young film officer he was detailed to film the executions ,nd his testimony was very moving. WAISers may remember his film, The Silence of the Lambs which won 14 Academy Awards.
Here is the web site for the Landsberg site:
http://www.buergervereinigung-landsberg.org/english/warcriminals/warcriminals.shtml
I think that we have hit yet again upon a "sacred American idol": that somehow, the US conducted itself with perfect impartiality and respect for the law and human rights after the destruction of the Nazi Reich. Although I have the highest respect for Jim Tent's scholarship and his opinions regarding Germany, I cannot underscore just how much I, and most other Germans who I know for that matter, dsiagree with his statements because we believe that imposition of the death penalty after 1949 was a complete violation of the spirit of the German constitution that the same victorious power helped to draft. I am including excerpts from a site dedicated to the memory of SS Lt. Col Jochen Peiper who was spared at Landsberg and left the prison in 1958. In it, It becomes perfectly obvious that the world community is perfectly justified to be concerned over the events at Abu Ghraib and the upcoming GITMO trials
In February 1949, an article entitled "American Atrocities in Germany," which was allegedly written by Judge Van Roden, was published in The Progressive. In his article, Van Roden wrote as follows:
American investigators at the U. S. Court in Dachau, Germany, used the following methods to obtain confessions: Beatings and brutal kickings. Knocking out teeth and breaking jaws. Mock trials. Solitary confinement. Posturing as priests. Very limited rations. Spiritual deprivation. Promises of acquittal. Complaints concerning these third degree methods were received by Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall last Spring (1948).
The statements which were admitted as evidence were obtained from men who had first been kept in solitary confinement for three, four, and, five months. They were confined between four walls, with no windows, and no opportunity of exercise. Two meals a day were shoved in to them through a slot in the door. They were not allowed to talk to anyone. They had no communication with their families or any minister or priest during that time. This solitary confinement proved sufficient in itself in some cases to persuade the Germans to sign prepared statements. These statements not only involved the signer, but often would involve other defendants. Our investigators would put a black hood over the accused's head and then punch him in the face with brass knuckles, kick him, and beat him with rubber hose. Many of the German defendants had teeth knocked out. Some had their jaws broken. 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 American investigators. Perl admitted use of mock trials and persuasive methods including violence and said the court was free to decide the weight to be attached to evidence thus received. But it all went in.
Van Roden also mentioned in his article that the accused in the Dachau proceedings could not be re-tried because the American Army had accepted the Russian idea that "the investigators determine the guilt or innocence of the accused, and the judge merely sets the sentence." By the time his article was published, 100 of the 139 men whose trials had been investigated were dead, including 5 of the 29 men whose sentences they had recommended to be reduced. As the military governor of the American occupation in Germany, General Clay answered to no higher authority; he continued to order executions to be carried out, although he delayed the executions of the Malmedy Massacre convicted men because of the ongoing controversy. Like Everett, General Clay was a southern gentleman from Atlanta, and like Everett, he had become a hero to the German people when he ordered the Berlin airlift in 1948.
Judge Van Roden ended his article with these words:
The American investigators who committed the atrocities in the name of American Justice and under the American flag are going scot-free. At this point there are two objectives which should be aimed for:
1. Those prisoners whose death sentences have not been commuted and who have not yet been hanged should be saved, pending full judicial review.
2. American investigators who abused the powers of victory and prostituted justice to vengeance, should be exposed in a public process, preferably in the U. S., and prosecuted.
Unless these crimes committed by Americans are exposed by us at home, the prestige of America and American justice will suffer permanent and irreparable damage. We can partially atone for our own misconduct if we first search it out and publicly condemn and disavow it. If we wait for our enemies to blazon our guilt abroad, we can only bow our heads in shamed admission.
On February 22, 1949 Everett petitioned the International Court at the Hague, alleging that the United States of America had violated international law. Although he knew that his petition would probably be rejected because only a state, not a person, was allowed to petition the International Court, Everett was desperate to delay the scheduled executions of his "Malmedy boys." His reasoning was that Germany was not a state at this point, so he was petitioning on behalf of the German people. He again submitted his report with the accusations of brutality against the prosecution, but his petition was nevertheless rejected.
Meanwhile, in February 1949, Republican Senator William Langer of North Dakota introduced Senate Resolution 39, calling for a Senate investigation of the US military justice system in occupied Germany. He then inserted Everett's petition to the Supreme Court, with its sordid accusations against the Jewish prosecutors, In March 1949, about a month before Baldwin's subcommittee began its hearings, General Lucius D. Clay commuted 6 more of the death sentences to life in prison, but not the death sentence of Col. Jochen Peiper, who was the main person in the Malmedy Massacre case. Peiper did not personally shoot any American Prisoners of War, but he was the one who had allegedly ordered his armored unit not to take prisoners.
The subcommittee was presented with post-trial affidavits from the SS men which were consistent in alleging that they had been beaten and coerced into making confessions. A dentist signed an affidavit that the SS men had suffered broken teeth and fractured jaws. According to Weingartner's book, Herbert Strong, the German-born Jewish civilian attorney, who had assisted the defense team at Dachau, testified that "Colonel Rosenfeld had been prejudiced against the defense, having ruled too often against it when the law seemed to be on its side." Another witness, court reporter James J. Bailey, testified that he had seen Jewish interrogator Lt. William Perl strike the German prisoners. Kurt Teil, an interpreter for the army, testified that both Perl and another Jewish interrogator, Harry Thon, had spoken approvingly to him about violent methods of interrogation, and claimed that Thon showed him one of the SS men who was lying motionless in his cell with a hood still over his head after he had been interrogated. When a member of the committee asked why a medical examination of the SS men had not been conducted to determine if they had been beaten, an examination was ordered three years after the fact, and the results showed that none of the men had scars or damaged testicles. On October 13, 1949, the subcommittee published its proceedings, including its final report. According to Weingartner in his book A Peculiar Crusade, the final report concluded, in Weingartner's words, that On the basis of the medical examinations, allegations that physical force had been employed to induce confessions were rejected as being without foundation. That mock trials had been employed, albeit in only a handful of cases, could not be denied and was condemned in the report, but less as an illegitimate device than as an unnecessary complication of the investigative process that could be misinterpreted or misrepresented by critics. The German defendants, in the subcommitte's view, had been abnormal human beings, a condition that had both necessitated and justified the use of creative investigative techniques.
General Clay was replaced by General Thomas T. Handy as the highest military authority in Germany. In September 1949, the Federal Republic of Germany was set up under the leadership of Konrad Adenauer, although West Germany was still under American occupation. The Simpson Commission had recommended a clemency and parole board for convicted German war criminals and this was implemented at the end of 1949.
According to Weingartner, the last 6 death sentences of the men convicted in the Malmedy Massacre proceeding were finally commuted by General Handy in 1951, after the fledgling Federal Republic government demanded a halt to the execution of German war criminals as a necessary precondition to rearmament and their cooperation with the Allies in the Cold War against the Communist Soviet Union. In 1955, a Mixed Parole and Clemency Board was set up with 3 Germans and one representative each from the US, Great Britain and France, and as a result, General Sepp Dietrich was paroled in October 1955.
Eventually all 73 of the convicted German war criminals in the Malmedy Massacre case were released from Landsberg prison, including Col. Peiper who was freed on December 22, 1956, the last of the accused to finally walk out of Landsberg. Peiper had been born on January 30, 1915, so he was just short of his 30ieth birthday when the Malmedy Massacre happened. If Germany had won the war, Peiper would have been showered with praise and honored as one of his country's greatest heroes, a soldier who fought honorably for his country. Instead, he ended his military career as a war criminal; he spent 11 of the best years of his life in prison, including 55 months on death row. After he was freed, he could not overcome the stigma of being a convicted war criminal. He took a series of jobs, but was unable to keep any of them. Finally, in 1972, he moved to the French village of Traves. Just as he was starting to write a book on the Malmedy Massacre, Peiper was killed on July 14, 1976 when his house was firebombed. Peiper had been warned to leave, but he refused; he died as he had lived, with a weapon in his hands, refusing to be driven out of his home. His charred body was found in the ruins of his burned home. The date of July 14th was the French Bastille Day, the equivalent of the American 4th of July. A group of Frenchmen, wearing ski masks were photographed as they announced "We got Peiper." This photo was published on November 7, 1976 in the New York Times Magazine.
RH: "None of the men had scars or damaged testicles"??? I thought the text said they had.
Cameron Sawyer writes: I find it very hard to get worked up about the executions of 284 Nazi war criminals, including such scum as death camp commandants and SS killers. The U.S. is indeed guilty of unjustifiable atrocities -- Hiroshima, the fire bombing of Dresden, the strategic bombing campaign against German cities, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of perfectly innocent people. The trial, conviction, and execution of 284 guilty Nazis, however, was not an atrocity, nor even an injustice. In fact, I would argue the opposite -- due to our haste to rearm Germany to lend support in the Cold War, I think we let the Nazi war criminals off rather too easy. How is it that it took a private citizen to find and bring to justice Adolph Eichman, for example? The CIA couldn't find him?
WAISers wishing to know a little about the mentality of these Nazis might read Eichman's confession:
http://www.einsatzgruppenarchives.com/trials/profiles/confession.html
RH: I would go further: The US brought to this country Nazi military experts like like Werner von Braun (who incredibly claimed that he did not know his V-2s were hitting British cities) and made heroes of them.
Istvan Simon says: http://www.buergervereinigung-landsberg.org/english/warcriminals/warcriminals.shtml
documents the executions of war criminals at Landsberg prison, and also describes the revisionism that I alluded to in an earlier post. I quote: "The Bavarian justice system maintains graves of honor for people such as the SS-Standartenführer Wolfram Sievers who headed the office for Ahnenerbe (preservation of ancestry) and oversaw human genetic experiments, and for SS-Sturmbannführer Martin Gottfried Weiss, who was the Kommandant of the concentration camps Neuengamme, Dachau, and Majdanek. The State of Bavaria even maintains an honorable memorial for the epitome of inhumanity, the SS-Hauptscharführer Otto Moll because the state pays for the upkeep of his grave with public funds. The Polish State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau recently wrote about Otto Moll: "This is just a quick note to confirm your suspicion - SS-Hauptscharführer Otto Moll, head of the crematoria department of Birkenau, was sentenced to death during the trial of [ concentration camp ] Dachau staff and executed in Landsberg in 1946." Despite Moll' s extreme cruelty and perversity, the parties responsible for the maintenance of his grave do not feel it necessary to distance themselves from him."
RH: There is a similar problem in Japan
Istvan Simon writes: John Heelan expressed a desire to get an apology from me, saying he simply stated facts without expressing an opinion, in response to a question by Randy Black, when he had brought up the execution of German war criminals at Landsberg prison. If that WAS his intention, I apologize to Mr. Heelan.
However, I am afraid that my apology will have to be somewhat backhanded, because his intention was far from clear from what he actually posted. He not only endorsed what Mr. Jones had said about it, ( Mr. Jones had called the War criminals executed at Landsberg "Martyrs"), but even praised Mr. Jones. While Mr. Heelan did not himself call the criminals executed at Landsberg "martyrs", as Mr. Jones had done, he failed to point out that they were War criminals, and appeared to fully agree with Mr. Jones' posting. So far from not expressing any opinions on the matter, by the choice of the facts that he posted and even more significantly, the choice of facts that he omitted from his post, he aligned himself with those comments.
RH: This exchange has gone far enough, and nothing more will be posted about it.
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