telling statements about the Nuremberg 'trials'

[Hannover]

Some food for thought:

- American judge, van Roden said: "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..The investigators would put a black hood over the accused's head, punch him in the face with brass knuckles, kick him and beat him with rubber hoses"

- Judge van Roden's allegation of torture to gain "confessions" is confirmed by Texas Supreme Court Judge, Gordon Simpson. He confirmed that savage beatings, smashing of testicles, and months of solitary confinement occurred. Congressional Record, appendix v. 95, sec.12, 3/10/49.

- "I think the Nuremberg trials are a black page in the history of the world...I discussed the legality of these trials with some of the lawyers and some of the judges who participated therein. They did not attempt to justify their action on any legal ground, but rested their position on the fact that in their opinion, the parties convicted were guilty...This action is contrary to the fundamental laws under which this country has lived for many hundreds of years, and I think cannot be justified by any line of reasoning. I think the Israeli trial of Adolf Eichmann is exactly in the same category as the Nuremberg trials. As a lawyer, it has always been my view that a crime must be defined before you can be guilty of committing it. That has not occurred in either of the trials I refer to herein."
--Edgar N. Eisenhower, American Attorney, brother of President Dwight D.
Eisenhower. Thompson and Strutz ed., p.168.


Hannover

[Hebden]

Some food for thought:

- American judge, van Roden said: "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..The investigators would put a black hood over the accused's head, punch him in the face with brass knuckles, kick him and beat him with rubber hoses"

Judge van Roden's investigations concerned trials which took place in Dachau, not Nuremberg.

We present some pertinent extracts from the 1971 book Massacre at Malmedy:

Then, according to [Corporal Heinz] Friedrichs, Thon grabbed him by the throat and beat him about the face. In the end he gave in. According to his statement: 'After they had treated me like that for an hour so I could hardly stand, I confessed to the untruth with which they accused me. I didn't care anymore. In my apathy I wrote everything they told me to. I had to write a statement which was dictated to me by a First Lieutenant whose name I don't know. This statement was used as the only piece of evidence against me in the Malmedy case.'

Twenty-four-year-old Private First Class Edmund Tomczak, who was to be sentenced to life imprisonment at the trial, also met First Lieutenant Perl and Mr Thon for the first time that January [1946]. He was told by the latter that if he didn't confess to shooting a surrendered American he would be hung together with his company commander, First Lieutenant Heinz Tomhardt, who was to receive the death sentence at the Dachau trial. At the end of the cross-examination Mr Thon wagged his finger under the ex-SS man's face and cried, 'If you don't confess, you'll be hanged at sunset!'

During the ten days that followed Tomczak was imprisoned in what he called the 'death cell'. Just before midnight on the first night he spent there, Lieutenant Perl opened the door and said in a solemn voice: 'Get ready. You are to be hanged immediately.'

Ten minutes later he came back and said: 'You've got another twenty-four hours'. With that he left.

On the following morning, according to Tomczak's statement, Mr Thon appeared and told him that his mother had had her ration card withdrawn and that she had arrived in Schwabish-Hall to see him hanged.

So it went on, day after day until, after ten days, Thon and Perl appeared and said 'Get ready. Now you're finally going to be hanged'.

As Tomczak described it two years later, 'Someone pulled a black hood over my head so that I couldn't see anything. I was then taken out of the cell. By the changes in direction (I was guided by two men) I noted that I was being led hither and thither. When we finally stopped, I was told, "You are now at the place of execution. There are already several men hanging on the gallows." Thereupon I was cross-examined again, with the hood still over my head. All the same I couldn't confess about events in which I didn't participate or know anything about. Lieutenant Perl or Mr Thon then said, "I'm going to count up to three. If you don't confess now, you're going up!" By "going up", he meant hanging. A few moments later I was really hanging in the air and when I began to choke from lack of breath, they let me down and began to ask me again whether I was ready to confess. These attempts at hanging, which were always signalled by the command "Hangman - up!", were repeated several times'.

In the end Thon and Perl gave up. One of them told Tomczak: 'A major has taken pity on you. We're going to give you another twenty four hours.' He was then taken to a cell in which he found five of his former comrades.

[...]

Thus it went on, as January gave way to February and February to March, with the old people dying on the streets outside and the young ones selling their bodies for a pack of cigarettes. Ex-SS Captain Otto Ebele was told by the 'priest who wasn't a priest' that he'd better make his last confession. He replied that he'd not confessed for ten years and that the whole farce was an attempt at blackmail. Thereupon he was tied up and a noose placed over his head. Then the soldiers strung him up. When he came to he was on the floor and soldiers were throwing cold water over him.

Former SS Sergeant Erich Maute was stripped naked in the 'death cell' on 6 March, 1946. Thereupon Lt Perl and two American soldiers entered. 'They hit me with their fists and kicked me. Later they used a wooden board.' After working him over they left, to return later in the afternoon to enquire whether he was prepared to speak. 'When I asked what I was supposed to say, since I hadn't done anything, they began to beat me again. They kicked me in the stomach and genitals so that I had to be sick. I collapsed in the corner and was dragged to my feet by the hair!"

Some were beaten, some were simply threatened, especially those who had families in the territories occupied by the Russians, others were given mock trial treatment, complete with judge, prosecutor, defence lawyer and invariably the mock, sad-eyed priset who always asked the accused to 'make his last peace with God before it was too late'. But as the months passed and the date of the trial grew closer, the men who had once been the elite of the Nazi elite formation began to break. Privates started to accuse NCOs and NCOs in their turn accused their officers. A confusing case of accusation and counter-accusation was rapidly built up which turned that once loyal and inward-looking formation, the Leibstandarte, into bitterly divided factions. Suicides among the prisoners were reported. Former SS Sergeant Max Freimuth, who carried his arm in a dirty sling because of a war wound, hanged himself with it in Cell 63 from the iron bars which covered the window. By the spring of 1946 the prosecution's case was ready.

Who were the men who had broken these veterans of years of war, soldiers who had met and beaten nearly everything the Allied world had been able to throw at them? The War Crimes Commission set up to deal with the Malmedy Case varied in its composition in the first year of its investigation, but for most of the time during 1945 and 1946 it was made up of Captain (later Major) Felton, First Lieutenant Perl, Captain Schumacher, the two civilian officials, Mr Thon and Mr Ellowitz, and the Interpreter Kirschbaum.

Most of these men were German Jews who had experienced the full weight of what it had meant to be Jewish in a country which had succumbed in the thirties to a kind of anti-semitism never known elsewhere in the world. [...] Now a few years later these Emigranten, as the Germans called them, had returned with the victors, their personal hate strengthened and increased daily by the ever-mounting details of what had happened to their kindred who had remained behind to be taken to the concentration camps. They wanted their revenge and they wanted it most of all from those Germans who bore the double stamp of having been in the SS and having belonged to the Leader's elite division - the Adolf Hitler Bodyguard


For these few men with long and bitter memories, ed by the GIs who, a year before, had fought the Germans and now slept with their women and gave their children candy, no method was too extreme to stamp the prisoners of Schwabish-Hall as what they knew in their hearts they were - Hitler's hired killers. Let their American comrades say what they like; they had never suffered the terrible indignity of living as a Jew in Hitler's Germany.

For the Emigranten, the investigation went far beyond the shootings at Malmedy and Stavelot. The names of the Belgian towns were just milestones in the total post-war discrediting of the whole German nation, and no method was too harsh or to underhand to achieve that aim.

[Hannover]

Thanks for the references, however the quote below should read:

"daily, ever mounting propaganda" and "what allegedly happened".

Now a few years later these Emigranten, as the Germans called them, had returned with the victors, their personal hate strengthened and increased daily by the ever-mounting details of what had happened to their kindred who had remained behind to be taken to the concentration camps.

- Hannover