Heinrich Himmler: The SS, Gestapo, His Life and Career

Appendix B: The Frankfurt Trial 1964-5

By the time this book is published, the Auschwitz Trial at Frankfurt will have been in session for almost a year, and yet be nowhere near its end. Similar trials (such as that of Eichmann’s associates, Hunsche and Krumey, in Budapest) have been or are running concurrently in Frankfurt and elsewhere, while others are being prepared.

The long delay in holding these trials by the German Public Prosecutors is due to the fact that the relevant files have only been handed over in recent years by the Allies, who took possession of them after the war. The Public Prosecutor’s Office specially set up to deal with German war crimes only began to function round 1957 in Ludwigsburg, near Stuttgart. Another cause of delay has been that many of the men now being indicted have lived in hiding using false names: others have fled abroad, and negotiations for their extradition have been prolonged — some, like those concerning the notorious Dr Mengele, with little hope of success.

Twenty-three men finally stood in the dock at Frankfurt in 1964. Evidence has been produced which shows that they have been guilty of the most appalling crimes. The character of the men employed by Himmler and his staff is revealed, for example, in the behaviour of Oswald Kaduk, whose noted fondness for children extended to issuing Jewish children in the camp with toy balloons (an ‘organized’ issue, to quote from the terms of the evidence) before they were ‘squirted’ (abspritzen) with a phenol injection in the heart at the rate of ten children a minute. ‘Papa Kaduk’, as he was later known because of his love for children, had worked as a male nurse after the war until his identification and arrest.

When a former S.S.Judge was heard as a witness, he appeared both elegant and at ease as he enunciated his slick, evasive answers to the questions put to him by the President and the Prosecutor, reviving once again the verbiage of death: ‘special treatment’, ‘desettlement’, ‘the general line’ and even ‘sovereign acts beyond the reach of the judiciary’, all S.S. terms for murder. Then suddenly one of the less intelligent men in the dock, Stefan Baretzki, asked leave to speak. It was obvious he could no longer stand this evasion of the truth. The President gave him leave to come forward. We had to do the dirty-work, said Baretzki in effect, while these men talked, and when we complained about being ordered to kill children we were told to be silent about something we could not understand, and obey our orders. He then walked back to his seat.

This outburst reveals the process of Nazi genocide. The men who carried out the killings were encouraged not to think what they were doing, but to accept it as a necessary mission for the Führer and the German people. After this, the readiness to be tough, ruthless and efficient in the destruction of people regarded as subhuman was the virtue most to be valued in those chosen to carry out their Führer’s orders.