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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
A gripping new approach to the Nuremberg Trial, told through the stories of the many great writers who came to witness it Nuremberg, 1945. As the trials of Nazi war criminals begin, some of the world's most famous writers and reporters gather in the ruined German city. Among them are Rebecca West, John Dos Passos, Martha Gellhorn, Erika Mann and Janet Flanner. Crammed together in the press camp at Schloss Faber-Castell, where reporters sleep ten to a room, complain about the food and argue in the lively bar, they each try to find words for the unprecedented events they are witnessing. Here, tensions simmer between Soviet and Western journalists, unlikely affairs begin, stories are falsified and fabricated - and each reporter is forever changed by what they experience. As Uwe Neumahr builds an engrossing group portrait of the literary luminaries at Nuremberg, we are taken to the heart of the political and cultural conflicts of the time - observing history at the very moment it was being written.
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The Writers’ Castle
Reporting History at Nuremberg
Uwe Neumahr
Translated from the German by Jefferson Chase
Pushkin Press
Contents
Foreword
Xiao Qian was amazed. Walking for the first time through the ruins of Nuremberg in October 1945, it was the only European city that reminded him of Beijing, not just because of its walls around the old town, the river that snaked through its midst or its many weeping willows, but also because of the calm it emanated. Xiao (1910–99) had crossed the river with British Armed Forces earlier that year as a Chinese correspondent during the Second World War. After a stop in defeated Berlin, he reached Nuremberg in the autumn. Xiao knew that the former home of the Nazis’ annual party rallies had once been a tourist destination. “But right now, the tourists aren’t here for the cultural and historical attractions, which are buried beneath rubble anyway, or Nuremberg’s famous gingerbread,” he told his readers on 9th October 1945. “Today, Nuremberg is the focus of the world’s attention because twenty-three of the biggest criminals of the Nazi regime are being put on trial… It is a great event.”1
The “great event” was the international response to an unimaginable horror, the moment when Germany’s war criminals would be held accountable for what they had done. People around the world longed for the Nazi dictatorship to be viiiunmasked to reveal the true faces of the men behind it. Some observers saw the Nuremberg Major War Criminals Trial* as the foundation for the enforcement of modern standards for crimes against humanity. The presence of famous Nazis in the courtroom dock, the judicial novelty of a tribunal carried out by the four victors in the war, and public curiosity about a country many people regarded as a mystery in fact made the trial a spectacular event. Large numbers of journalists were dispatched to Nuremberg, including the lone reporter from China, Xiao Qian, who later become the chairman of the Chinese Writers’ Association. These journalists were to serve as a window into a sealed enclave, so that the outside world would know what transpired there.
Taking the lead, US occupation authorities set about identifying a facility capable of handling the flood of reporters, but locating a building suitable for accommodating several hundred press representatives was no mean task in a city that had been so heavily bombed. In the end, they found what they were looking for in the nearby town of Stein, to the south-west of Nuremberg proper. It was there, in a latter-day mock castle seized from the pen and pencil manufacturing dynasty Faber-Castell, that the international “press camp” was set up. The castle was a place to both live and work.2 Correspondents slept there in rooms with up to ten beds and dutifully recorded events from the trial a few kilometres away, as men like Göring, Ribbentrop, ixStreicher and Hess waited in their cells to learn the verdicts of the International Military Tribunal.
Some of the world’s most important journalists and bestknown writers were deployed to Nuremberg to report for newspapers, news agencies and radio broadcasters. The list of names reads like the crème de la crème of the journalistic and literary scene of the day—Erika Mann, Erich Kästner, John Dos Passos, Ilya Ehrenburg, Elsa Triolet, Rebecca West and Martha Gellhorn, to name a few—but it also included men and women who would only later go on to achieve literary, media or political fame. Their ranks encompassed the German novelist Wolfgang Hildesheimer, who served at the trial as a translator; Augusto Roa Bastos, widely considered Paraguay’s leading author; Austrian writer and peace campaigner Robert Jungk; legendary US television news anchorman Walter Cronkite; and Walter Lippmann, regarded as the most influential political writer in the United States. Also on hand were later German Chancellor Willy Brandt; the head of state surveillance in Communist East Germany, Markus Wolf; and a bevy of other somewhat lesser-known authors, including Joseph Kessel, Peter de Mendelssohn and Gregor von Rezzori. Never before and never since had so many famous writers from all over the world come together as during this “zero hour”. In Schloss Faber-Castell, world literature encountered world history. It was a meeting point for returnees from exile or “inner emigration” and battle-hardened officers, for Resistance fighters and Holocaust survivors, Communists and Western media conglomerates, war correspondents from the trenches and star reporters with extravagant lifestyles. All were eager to find out how such a human catastrophe could have happened, what sort xof people the accused were and how they would seek to defend themselves.
Within the press corps, the body in which history was literally being written, opposites collided. Erika Mann, who was officially employed by the US Armed Forces, cohabitated with her female partner, an American journalist, even though homosexuality was prohibited by the US military. Brandt, then a correspondent for a working-class Scandinavian newspaper, came together with Wolf, the very man who would later, as the head of the Communist East German Foreign Intelligence Agency, bring him down as West German Chancellor. The legendary American military photographer Ray D’Addario, who was to remain in Nuremberg until 1949, would celebrate his wedding in the castle and have it catered by Hitler’s former head of household, Arthur Kannenberg.
Having officially undergone de-Nazification, Kannenberg ran the kitchen at Schloss Faber-Castell, but before the Second World War he had entertained the Führer with his singing and accordion-playing. He was envied for his proximity to Germany’s leader. “What is granted to only a very few mortals but is the wish of millions is your great fortune, you who are in His presence every day,” a friend once wrote to him in a mawkish letter.3 But Hitler’s “court fool on the squeeze box”, as Wolfgang Wagner once mockingly dubbed him, now served the representatives of the international press instead of the Führer and his entourage.4
The press camp, which remained open until the last of the subsequent trials in Nuremberg had concluded in 1949, was a hive not only of journalistic activity but of artistic creativity, the birthplace of drawings, cartoons, novels and short stories, along with countless articles, features and radio reports on the xilegal proceedings. Boris Polevoy’s novel The Story of a Real Man, upon which Prokofiev’s opera of the same name would be based, was written in the press camp—the composer called it the “most intense literary experience of recent times” and insisted on setting it to music. Wolfgang Hildesheimer, whose first love was the visual arts, also painted a number of abstract works in the castle.
The Schloss was essentially a multinational hostel with a variety of idiosyncratic mores and habits, as a correspondent for Pravda noted in his journal. Coexisting in such confined space generated tensions. Competition was fierce, particularly among American journalists. Reporters who had conversed pleasantly enough over breakfast could turn into fierce rivals by the afternoon. Everyone was after a scoop. Hermann Göring’s wife, Emmy, was inundated with interview requests, and aggressive press photographers also hounded the spouses of the other defendants. One famous Associated Press image showed journalist Wes Gallagher sprinting out of the court building to be the first reporter to pass on the news of the verdict via overseas telephone. Competition led some correspondents to exaggerate what they reported. False news—intended to boost circulations or serve propaganda purposes—was repeatedly reported. Even a respected author like the novelist Alfred Döblin, who covered the trial under a pseudonym for the French occupation authorities, pretended to be present in the courtroom although he wasn’t even in Nuremberg.
The international event attracted no shortage of would-be profiteers, and publishers working for large American conglomerates sensed the chance to earn small fortunes. Sometimes they met up for dinner in the press camp immediately after xiinegotiating with the lawyers of the war criminals on trial for the rights to their memoirs.
The growing mistrust between the victorious powers amid the incipient Cold War meant that Soviet and Western correspondents weren’t supposed to get too close to one another. Moscow kept its journalists on an especially short leash. They were given strict instructions on how to behave and risked being informed on if they disobeyed. The tiniest deviation or one false word might see them immediately recalled and their careers ended, with their families punished as well.
During the day, those present in the courtroom were confronted with the incomprehensible crimes of the defendants, documented by photos of the death camps and mass executions and testimonies from eyewitnesses and victims. In the evening, many of these people numbed themselves with alcohol. Inhibitions disappeared. There was lots of dancing and drinking. “The Americans drink as though they get paid for it, and it’s not uncommon for one of them to be recalled home because he (or she) is suffering from delirium tremens,” noted Hildesheimer. “Otherwise, they’re prudish, friendly and naive.”5
As a place where so many cultures converged, the press camp was a very progressive social experiment for its time. The Western media aimed to show the occupied Germans what the ideal of freedom of the press looked like in practice. In terms of women’s liberation, the microcosm of Schloss Faber-Castell was far ahead of mainstream German society, still informed by National Socialist ideology. One of the accused at the Nuremberg Trial, the Nazi ideologue and author of Der Mythus des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts (The Myth of the Twentieth Century), Alfred Rosenberg, had called for German women to be “emancipated xiiifrom women’s emancipation”, and the Nazi dictatorship had encouraged a patriarchal social order in which women were mothers first and working people second. Rosenberg and his fellow defendants must have been bewildered to see so many female correspondents in the courtroom. Only 13 per cent of the members of the Reich Association of the German Press in 1944 had been women, most of them employed by magazines and only a handful in political journalism,6 whereas the proportion of women within the international press corps was far higher. Although it would be too much to claim that there was gender equality, the international press corps did approximate that ideal. Female journalists were housed in a separate building, the Villa im Schlosspark. The New York Times alone sent two women to report on the proceedings: Kathleen McLaughlin and the Pulitzer Prize winner Anne O’Hare McCormick. Tullia Zevi, later the President of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, wrote for the Religious News Service. Among the many other respected female writers in Nuremberg were West, Nora Waln, Gellhorn, Dominique Desanti, Janet Flanner and Erika Mann.
Their interests went beyond politics. Some of the female reporters addressed feminist issues and criticized the main trial as an exclusively male affair. “There were no women among the defendants—was this perhaps the reason that there was no woman to be found among the judges?” asked Argentinian writer Victoria Ocampo. “Shouldn’t they have been represented, precisely here? If the results of the Nuremberg trials are to play a significant role in determining the future of Europe, wouldn’t it have been just to let women have a say, too?”7
Nuremberg was also the place where the future of Germany was decided, and most of the men and women who chronicled xivthe trials there resided in the press camp in Stein. The reports they produced included not only legal details and current affairs, political issues and individual life stories, but also their fair share of rumours and gossip. As a microcosm within what was already the microcosm of Nuremberg, the press camp provides a perfect setting to examine both political and cultural history and individual biographies. This book is the first attempt at a comprehensive narrative of this unique place and its temporary residents. In 2015, to mark the seventieth anniversary of the start of the trials, the culture editor of the Nürnberger Nachrichten newspaper, Steffen Radlmaier, published a fifty-page catalogue full of illustrations, titled “The Pencil Castle as Press Camp”, for an exhibition held at Schloss Faber-Castell. This book owes much to Radlmaier’s pioneering work, especially the collection he edited of reports on the trials by international correspondents.8
We will begin with a general introduction of the press camp, followed by examinations of some of the prominent personalities who lived and worked there. Each chapter will focus on one such extraordinary individual. Who were these people before they came to Nuremberg? How did their time there influence them? What impression did the trials make? No one was left untouched by the terrible deeds being adjudicated in the courtroom or by the ruins of the surrounding city. Some correspondents asked to be recalled because they could no longer take the horror. If we believe one of his peers, Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s increasingly apocalyptic view of the world as he got older could be traced back directly to his experiences in Nuremberg. Erika Mann’s lover stayed on in the city after the Nuremberg Trial and became an opponent of the death penalty and “victors’ justice”. xv
The Nuremberg trials did not just change the lives of those who witnessed them; they also altered the way they wrote. Janet Flanner, known for her “Flanner touch” of satirical punchlines and denouements, expressed herself very differently in the Franconian city. Her wit and sarcasm were no match for the horrific dimensions of the crimes in question. Erich Kästner, otherwise never at a loss for words, stated that, after viewing documentary film footage of the death camps, he was unable to write “a single coherent article about this unimaginable, infernal insanity”. The present volume is thus also a book about speechlessness and literary approaches to the unspeakable.
The central protagonist of this study is the main Nuremberg Trial itself. The dramaturgy of the chapters will conform to the chronology of the legal proceedings: from the start of the trial of the main defendants in November 1945 (Dos Passos) to the cross-examination of Göring (Flanner) and the rendering of the verdict in the autumn of 1946 (Gellhorn) to the subsequent trials (Hildesheimer.) We will take a detour to look at the aristocratic owners of the castle, and the book will conclude with how historian Golo Mann came to advocate for Rudolf Hess to be released from his military prison in Spandau. Together, these stories will form a literary chronicle of the Nuremberg trials and a collective biography of the reporters lodged in Schloss Faber-Castell.xvi
Notes
1 X. Qian in S. Radlmaier (ed.), Der Nürnberger Lernprozess.
2 Today Schloss Faber-Castell is used by the Faber-Castell company for high-profile events. It also contains a museum devoted to the history of the firm. On the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials Faber-Castell commissioned a multi-media permanent exhibit on the press camp.
3 See R. Boyes, “Der Fetteste überlebt”.
4 W. Wagner, Lebens-Akte, p. 75.
5 See Hildesheimer to his parents on 26th April 1947 in W. Hildesheimer, Die sichtbare Wirklichkeit bedeutet mir nichts, p. 296.
6 S. Kinnebrock, “Frauen und Männer im Journalismus”, p. 122.
7 V. Ocampo, Mein Leben ist mein Werk, p. 252.
8 The present book also benefited from the discovery of rich new source material, for instance the unpublished letters of Ernest Cecil Deane, the liaison officer between the press camp and the court. Other material has also emerged in the estates of Erika Mann, Peter de Mendelssohn and William Stricker. See also S. Radlmaier, Das Bleistiftschloss als PressCamp, and S. Radlmaier (ed.), Der Nürnberger Lernprozess. Together with filmmaker Reiner Holzemer, Radlmaier produced a documentary film titled IMT Press Camp, featuring Markus Wolf, Ray D’Addario and the translator Simone Herbulot speaking in original historic locations. The film is part of the permanent exhibition in the castle museum and can be viewed by visitors taking a tour of the building.
* The Nuremberg Major War Criminals Trial is the trial of Nazi leaders including Hermann Göring in 1945–46. For brevity’s sake, it will subsequently be referred to as simply the Nuremberg Trial. The other trials of war criminals, which went on in Nuremberg until 1949, will be referred to as the subsequent trials or individually by the groups concerned, i.e. The Doctors Trial.
I
A Castle Made of Pencils
“But such is the Press Camp—either very exciting or very dull, seldom mid-way between.”
ERNEST CECIL DEANE, LETTER TO HIS WIFE LOIS ON 9TH OCTOBER 1945
In November 1945, the eyes of the world were upon Nuremberg. For the first time in the history of humanity, a criminal regime’s wielders of political and military power were to be held to account before a court of law. The express will of the US occupation forces in charge of organizing the Nuremberg Trial was that they be an act of justice, not vengeance. The International Military Tribunal, which convened from 20th November 1945 to 1st October 1946, was formed with the purpose of rendering legal judgment upon leading representatives of the Nazi apparatus. Twenty-one men were to answer for themselves in the courtroom, while Martin Bormann would be tried in absentia—although Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach was deemed unable to stand trial, and Robert Ley, the director of the German Labour Front, hanged himself in his cell before the hearings could begin. Thus what took place was a trial of “Göring and associates”, as the files drily noted. The 2most major of Nazi war criminals, Adolf Hitler, had of course avoided responsibility by committing suicide, as had two of his main henchmen, Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler.
The trial officially opened in Berlin on 18th October 1945, but it was moved to Nuremberg because the Americans insisted that it be held in the US occupation zone. The city was chosen for both practical and symbolic reasons. The huge complex of the Palace of Justice on Fürther Strasse, inaugurated in 1916, had suffered only minor war damage and had a directly adjacent prison. But most importantly, Nuremberg was where Hitler had held his Nazi Party rallies. This was where the regime’s cruellest and most notorious laws had been proclaimed, including the “Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour”. Thus there was a special symbolism in making prominent Nazis face a tribunal in Nuremberg. The Nuremberg Trial was neither a court martial, as Winston Churchill had called for, nor a Soviet-style bit of legal theatre. The justice to be done in the Franconian capital was supposed to be worthy of the name, and the proceedings were intended to exemplify an ethical anti-pode to the brutal capriciousness of the Nazi regime. The trial was a historic chance to debunk the idea of the legal immunity of governments and establish a multilateral global system based on the rule of law and democracy.
The Americans, in particular, wanted the world to see the proceedings as just, which required measuring the culpability of each defendant individually. Nonetheless, along with individuals, prosecutors sought to prove that central Nazi organizations were fundamentally criminal in nature: the Reich government, the corps of Nazi Party political directors, the Gestapo, the SS and the Security Service (SD), and the Wehrmacht Supreme 3Command and general staff. Everyone involved knew that the trial would be a huge experiment. There were no laws on the books specifying what a marshal or minister of the Third Reich was and wasn’t allowed to do. In such uncharted judicial waters, improvisation would be crucial. Still, as US chief counsel Justice Robert H. Jackson put it in his opening statement, “The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.” The trial aimed at not only atonement and catharsis, but also deterrence.
Even before the end of the Second World War, amid constant reports of Nazi atrocities, the Allies had agreed that the leaders of the Third Reich had to be punished. The Charter of the International Military Tribunal, signed in London in August 1945, laid out the legal basis for trying the primary German war criminals, determining the procedure and defining what sort of offences could be adjudicated. A list of accused was drawn up. The committee of judges in the tribunal consisted of one representative from each of the four main Allies along with deputies. Each of the four powers also had a legal team with a chief prosecutor and assistants. The defendants were charged on four counts: crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity and conspiracy to commit those three categories of crimes. Since France and the Soviet Union had suffered so greatly under German occupation, it was logical for those two nations to lead the prosecution on the charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The British and Americans were responsible for the charges of having conspired to destroy peace and planned a war of aggression. 4
The Nuremberg Trial got under way in Nuremberg on 20th November 1945. For the first time in judicial history, proceedings were conducted in four languages. The American company IBM provided the court, free of charge, with special equipment for simultaneous translations. By flicking switches mounted on the courtroom seats, the prosecution could listen in via headphones in English, Russian, German or French. The tribunal was thus a truly international event. Reporters, too, could choose the language in which they wanted to follow the proceedings. Unfortunately, the new technology was prone to occasional untimely malfunctions, most prominently when the death sentence for Hermann Göring was announced on 1st October 1946.
The media presence in Nuremberg, encompassing journalists from all over the world, reflected the event’s enormous significance. This was a news spectacle of the first order. The publicly declared aim of the authorities who organized the trial was to leave not just a written but also a visual and aural record of the proceedings for posterity. Organizers saw it as both a history lesson and, in the words of Alfred Döblin, a “learning process” for generations to come. The courtroom was equipped with technologically sophisticated “radio boxes” attached to the ceiling like swallows’ nests. They allowed commentators to broadcast live from trial for the first time ever. For instance, one eyewitness reported for Radio Stuttgart: “250 journalists and radio reporters, as well as eleven photographers and cameramen from all over the world, follow the proceedings constantly. The American contingent is the largest, with 100 representatives, while the British Empire has 50, France 40 to 50 and Russia 25 to 30.”1 Journalist Madeleine Jacob later recalled the entire French press landscape being present, and in fact just about 5every well-known French publication—from the conservative Le Figaro and the Christian Democratic L’Aube to the Communist L’Humanité and the voice of the Resistance, Libération, to regional newspapers like L’Est républicain—covered at least parts of the trial.2 The press corps was a disconcerting sight for the defendants. “In the courtroom… we encountered only hostile faces,” Albert Speer wrote in his memoirs. “I was taken aback when the journalists began laying bets on the extent of our penalties, and their list of those slated for hanging sometimes included us too.”3
Flanked by US soldiers in white helmets and gloves, the defendants recognized some familiar faces among the correspondents, including William Shirer, Howard Smith, Louis Lochner and Frederick Oechsner, who had reported from Germany for various US media up until the early 1940s. Oechsner had been the Central European manager for the United Press in Berlin, where his underlings included later CIA Director Richard Helms. After the USA entered the Second World War, Oechsner and other journalists had been interned for five months in Bad Nauheim before being released as part of a prisoner exchange. Now they were back in Germany under completely altered circumstances. 6
The press section in the Nuremberg courtroom, with future German Chancellor Willy Brandt in the middle of the third row.
German reporters had a special task in Nuremberg. German journalism was starting over. After the war, the occupying powers had immediately banned all organs of the Nazi-controlled press, but during the summer of 1945, having discarded the practice of pre-censorship and initially publishing only news written by the military government, the occupiers issued the first licences for German newspapers. A new German press, it was felt, was needed to service the populace’s hunger for information and 7encourage a climate of reconciliation between the occupiers and the occupied. The first officially licensed, post-war newspaper, the Aachener Nachrichten, appeared on 20th June 1945, with the first issue of the Frankfurter Rundschau following on 1st August. By the time the Nuremberg Trial began, US authorities had licensed twenty newspapers, which, because of paper shortages, appeared only two to three times a week and had few pages. Ultimately, four super-regional papers established themselves as leaders in the four occupation zones: Die Welt in the British zone, Nouvelles de France in the French zone, Die Neue Zeitung in the American zone and the Tägliche Rundschau in the Soviet zone.
As part of their three-pronged strategy of demilitarization, de-Nazification and democratization, occupation authorities were particularly keen on keeping journalists with Nazi pasts out of the Nuremberg press corps. The correspondents reporting from the court building for the licensed German newspapers initially came almost exclusively from the victorious nations of the Second World War. Their articles were explicitly intended to re-educate the German people. But eventually authorities warmed to the notion of “Germans reporting to Germans”, and German journalists were also admitted to the Palace of Justice. They took turns occupying the seven seats they were allocated among 250 press spots. The Soviets also gave five seats from their contingent to German reporters—among the beneficiaries was Markus Wolf.4
For their part, German journalists insisted they had a right to report independently and form their own opinions. Theodor Heuss, the editor-in-chief of the Rhein-Neckar Zeitung and later President of West Germany, wrote in a remarkably self-confident 8editorial on 5th September 1945: “There is now a chance that German men, having freely accepted their responsibility towards the military government and the German people, begin to interpret Germany’s destiny themselves and serve as well as they know how the difficult and long process of convalescence. We have seized this chance in full knowledge of the psychological and objective difficulties. We welcome supportive engagement while remaining completely indifferent to derisive mockery.”5
American authorities didn’t always make the right calls when handing out accreditations, as the story of the fraudster Walter Ullmann shows. When US troops set the Vienna-born Ullmann free from a prison in Moosburg near Munich shortly before the end of the war, he claimed to have been persecuted by the Nazi regime. In the 1920s, under the pseudonym Dr Jo Lherman, Ullmann had run an experimental theatre in Berlin that had attracted the attention of no less than Erich Kästner. Now, having served jail time for a series of frauds, he changed his alias to Dr Gaston Oulmán and claimed to be the head of the Cuban press service. In reality, Ullmann had reported on the Spanish Civil War for various Austrian newspapers, but, using his new identity, he succeeded in gaining the trust of the American officials responsible for Radio Munich. Oulmán, kitted out in a self-designed uniform with a Cuban flag on his left shoulder, was made the official Bavarian radio correspondent in Nuremberg, in part because he spoke such excellent German.
Every day except Sundays, in the prime-time slot starting at 8.15 p.m., Oulmán commented on the proceedings. All told, until the conclusion of the trial, he delivered some 300 commentaries, composed in a controversially pompous, biting tone. Oulmán continually mocked witnesses, dismissing the 9Resistance fighter General Erwin Lahousen, for instance, on account of his appearance as being like a “postmaster”. Millions of listeners heard his critical opinions on the verdicts with their transparent sympathy for the defendants. When Göring was found guilty, Oulmán commented: “This verdict could be seen as exaggerated in its declaration that the trial had not uncovered one characteristic that spoke in his favour or could have served as moderating circumstance, and that his crimes had been almost without precedent.”6
Statements like that got him in hot water with the American authorities, and his contract with Radio Munich wasn’t extended. Ullmann’s deception was revealed when the American consulate in Munich wrote to Cuba requesting proof-of-identity documents, which he claimed to have lost, so that he could be issued new papers in Germany. No one in Havana had ever heard of the man. “We regret to inform you that we cannot issue you the requested papers since there is no proof of your Cuban citizenship,” the consulate wrote to Oulmán.7 But American authorities, wanting to avoid a scandal, kept the deception under wraps until the end of the trial. At most, Oulmán’s fellow correspondents in Nuremberg may have suspected that there was something fishy about their fluent-German-speaking Cuban colleague.
Another journalist accredited by American authorities was Ernst Michel, a Jewish-German born in Mannheim, who wrote for the Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung. With the backing of Theodor Heuss, in the spring of 1946 Michel was the only Holocaust survivor to report on the Nuremberg Trial. Several of the supplemental personal articles he wrote were attributed to “Special Correspondent Ernst Michel, Auschwitz Inmate Number 10 104995”. It was a miracle he had survived, having raised a finger at the right time in the barracks for ill prisoners when his captors asked if any of the prisoners had particularly neat handwriting. As a result he was made a scribe, responsible for drawing up the lists of sick captives. Both his parents were murdered in Auschwitz. Michel was able to escape from a death march in Saxony. After the war, he returned to Mannheim and began looking for surviving relatives. A recommendation secured him a meeting with Heuss, who hired him to work for the newspaper.
It is impossible to imagine what Michel must have felt in the Nuremberg court in March 1946 when he first shared a room with former Nazi grandees like Julius Streicher, the publisher of the anti-Semitic hate-rag Der Stürmer, “Deputy Führer” Rudolf Hess or the head of the Security Police and Security Service, Ernst Kaltenbrunner. When Göring learned that a survivor of Auschwitz was covering the trial, he wanted to meet the man and had his attorney invite Michel to his cell. “The meeting was arranged under the condition it remain off the record,” Michel would write in his autobiography. “I was nervous. What should I say? Should I shake hands? Ask questions? Since I couldn’t write about it, why did I want to go through such a painful experience? Goering [sic] stood up when Dr Stahmer and I entered his cell, which was constantly under guard. ‘This is the young reporter you asked me about,’ Dr Stahmer said, motioning to me. Goering looked at me, started to reach out to shake hands and, sensing my reaction, turned away for a moment. I stood frozen. What the hell am I doing here? How can I possibly be in the same room with this monster and carry on a conversation? How could I talk logically, unemotionally? Mr Goering, how does it feel to be here? What do you think of the proceedings? 11Are they treating you well? Should I shout at him, tell him that he was responsible for my six years in the camps? Should I blame him for my lost childhood? For the death of my parents? I did nothing of the sort. I stood there and stared while Dr Stahmer discussed the next day’s proceedings. Then, on an impulse, I bolted for the door and asked the MP to let me out. I couldn’t take it. I couldn’t remain. I had to get away. There was no discussion, not a word was exchanged, no comments or statements were made. I was there, and then I was gone. Period.”8
While Michel wrote for a German newspaper, Jewish correspondents reported on the trial for the Hebrew press in Palestine. One of them was Robert Weltsch, a journalist for Tel Aviv’s Haaretz. Weltsch shared a room in the press camp with Robert Jungk, who covered the proceedings for the Zurich newspaper Weltwoche. Meanwhile, Shabse Klugman wrote in Yiddish for the publication of the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in Bavaria, Undzer veg. At the start of the trial, many Jewish correspondents praised the Allies and were confident that the liberators would act on behalf of Jews everywhere in prosecuting the murderers. The summary of the charges presented at the beginning of the trial in Undzer veg indeed gave the impression that the genocide against European Jews would be the main issue. But this optimism would quickly be disappointed. Nine days later Klugman wrote: “The oceans of our blood have been squeezed into a small framework called ‘Crimes Against Humanity.’ Within it, there is a special section titled ‘Crimes against the Jews.’” Increasingly frustrated, he asked a short time later: “Where is our case, our enormous tragedy, at this tribunal?” And in fact, of the 139 witnesses invited to testify at the trial only three were Jewish. One of them, the Lithuanian 12poet Avrom Sutzkever, who testified on 27th February 1946, was introduced by the Russian prosecutor L.M. Smirnov as a Soviet citizen. When Sutzkever started speaking Yiddish, he was told that there was no interpreter for that tongue and that he would have to use Russian.
Since the French were responsible for “crimes against humanity” during the proceedings, they were the ones who should have focused on the Holocaust, but French prosecutors tried to marginalize the topic in favour of crimes against Gentile French people and Resistance fighters. The calling of a Gentile Auschwitz survivor, Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, as a witness was symptomatic of their insensitivity.9 On the other hand, psychological repression may also have been at play. The sheer unimaginability of the Holocaust probably hindered people from acknowledging the extent of the crimes. British judge Normal Birkett found the testimony of Soviet witnesses exaggerated, while US chief counsel Jackson worried that Jewish witnesses could be more vengeful and less reliable than others, potentially damaging the prosecution’s case.10
German journalists frequently complained about secondclass treatment in the courtroom and felt disadvantaged vis-à-vis correspondents from other countries. Articles in German were carefully scrutinized and censored, and in the Soviet occupation zone articles could not be published at all without pre-clearance. While the Allies explicitly promoted the idea of extensive journalistic coverage, critical analyses were unwelcome. The authorities responsible for the press in occupied Germany also required the newspapers covering the trial to feature reports from it prominently, and roughly a third of texts appeared on the front page and a further fifth in special supplements.11 The 13arrangement was intended to make it more difficult for readers to ignore the story. In the US occupation zone, the American-established German General News Agency (DANA) pre-edited reports and monitored trial coverage.12
Early on, German journalists were also physically marginalized. Because of strictures against fraternizing with the former enemy, reporters of other nationalities avoided them. Germans were only admitted to the courtroom with a yellow press pass via a separate entrance. Others had a blue pass that also granted them admission to the American PX (commissary). German reporters had to arrange their own accommodation in Nuremberg and were barred from the press camp. In a letter dated 9th April 1946 to General Robert A. McClure, the head of American Information Control Division, eight German journalists complained that “the physical and psychological conditions for the accredited German press representatives do not measure up to what we would wish for and expect in order to do the job”.13 After McClure intervened, the situation for German correspondents improved in the spring of 1946. They were given adequate workspaces and were allowed to communicate with reporters from Allied countries and eat in the court canteen, which had previously been prohibited. But accommodation and supplies remained problematic.
Press representatives of other nationalities were better off. Not only were they housed and fed in the international press camp in the well-protected confines of Schloss Faber-Castell, they also enjoyed a free shuttle to the court building in Nuremberg. The castle itself consisted of two sections, built in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the grounds encompassed a park, a villa and other buildings; seven were used for the press camp, with the castle proper serving as the 14main building with dining rooms and a bar. A sign hanging by the entrance read: “Off limits to Germans”.
Journalist Hans Rudolf Berndorff found out the hard way how strictly this prohibition was meant. Berndorff, formerly a leading reporter for the Ullstein publishing conglomerate, had come to Nuremberg with a certain Mr Forrest, a correspondent for the English German News Service. The likeable Englishman, who spoke only broken German, stood up for his colleague. “I got thrown out of the castle as quickly as I entered it,” Berndorff wrote; referring to himself in the third person, he continued: “But Forrest was an imaginative fellow. He said to me, ‘Herr Berndorff out on the street? Nonsense! I won’t go to bed until Herr Berndorff does as well.’ He drove to the local mayor and asked: ‘Who was a Nazi here?’ The mayor thought this over and answered: ‘As far as I know, everyone.’ Forrest pointed to a small house and asked if the man who lived there was a Nazi. ‘Yes.’ In the end, Forrest succeeded using gifts of butter and chocolate to convince the family who lived there [to take me in]. That was how Berndorff remained in Stein, if outside the press camp.”14
Trial authorities took care to divide up the court building by sex and profession—and also according to the political realities of the day. In a reflection of the polarization of East and West, Soviet correspondents were separately accommodated in the so-called Red House. Women and married couples were given the run of the villa in the castle park. Radio technicians stayed in the so-called Green House.15
The interior of the castle was impressive, but also stained and damaged from military use during the war, when flak artillery had been deployed in the tower. Jackson refused to have the 15prosecutorial staffs quartered there, but it was deemed adequate for the international press community. Several correspondents, including William Shirer, disagreed with that assessment. They were used to the greater comfort of places like the luxurious Hôtel Scribe in central Paris, which had served as the press camp when the French capital was liberated in 1944,16 and complained about the overcrowded, substandard and chaotic living conditions in Stein, where some reporters had to sleep ten to a room on army cots. Residents also often quarrelled over the intermittently functional telephone connections. There weren’t enough sanitary facilities, and long queues formed every morning in front of the few lavatories. Pyjama-clad journalists walked across the interior courtyard in icy temperatures, reported Peter de Mendelssohn, to use the bathrooms in the adjacent building.
It was virtually impossible for reporters to concentrate on their work in the castle. “Life here is so darned complicated and uncomfortable that I find it very difficult to do anything properly,” Mendelssohn wrote. “This place, the castle in which we are billeted, is so enormous and at the same time so over-crowded that it is almost impossible to find a quiet place to sit and write or think. We have a large ‘work room,’ for all the correspondents, and there are always up to 30 or 40 typewriters clattering away, in addition to a loudspeaker blaring announcements and a pianist outside the door playing for all his worth for the entertainment of those lounging round the bar which is just outside the workroom. It is a difficult atmosphere.”17
Willy Brandt, who though German was allowed to stay in the castle because he held a Norwegian passport, was more pragmatically accepting of his quarters. “When you think of castle life, you imagine something different than sleeping bags and 16field cots,” he wrote. “But they do suit the title war correspondent.”18 That was in fact how the correspondents were officially classified even many months after the war had ended.
Not all the inhabitants were fans of the massive castle’s architecture, which was described as an eyesore, an example of “German hideousness”, “a monumental example of bad taste” and a “complete nightmare”. Some blamed the Faber-Castells. “How many pencils and pens did it take for the Fabers to be able to build such a thoroughly ugly castle?” asked Elsa Triolet. Rebecca West also saw the exterior architecture and interior design of the building as reflecting negative German traits. Admittedly, many foreign correspondents rarely had anything good to say about anything German after the war, especially not in Nuremberg, as the full extent of crimes committed by Germany were being revealed for the first time. There was an imposing number of so-called Vansittartists—named after the hardcore anti-German Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, Baron Vansittart—among the ranks of the American and British correspondents. Some, including Janet Flanner and Martha Gellhorn, admitted in their private correspondence that they loathed Germans on principle. We should also recall that the journalists also saw the castle—considered today a “remarkable example” of Franconian historicism and art nouveau—in a state of urgently needed repair.19
Working conditions varied according to the technological infrastructure and the capacities of the nations they represented. Brandt, for instance, was unable to phone Oslo because there were no connections between Nuremberg and the Norwegian capital, so he was forced to send telegrams to his office via London or Copenhagen. Because it took so long to pass on news 17he had to take care, when writing his reports, that they wouldn’t become obsolete before they were published.20
Living and working conditions improved for the journalists who covered the subsequent trials between December 1946 and April 1949. Services and organization got better, and fewer reporters needed to be accommodated. The interpreters working for the occupation powers also lived in the castle and, as Wolfgang Hildesheimer, who was one of them, enthused, had “access at all times to huge en-suite rooms, fantastic food, drink, social spaces, and cars”.21 But even during the main trial, the reporters inhabiting the castle generally felt at home, as evidenced by surviving photos of representatives of the global press clearly enjoying intoxicated dinners in the ballroom or playing chess while seated in the building’s sumptuous armchairs.22
A Better Class of Accommodation
Some reporters’ dissatisfaction with Schloss Faber-Castell was fuelled by comparisons with the more comfortable accommodation reserved for VIPs: the Grand Hotel near Nuremberg’s central train station, which had served during the Second World War as an outpost of the Reich Chancellery. The US military administration had set it aside for reasons of prestige, and it was repeatedly the site of high-profile receptions. Located in the centre of the city, the hotel hosted short-term official visitors, including top members of the victorious powers’ delegations sent to the trial and renowned media guests. Children and those maimed in the war used to hurl themselves on the ground to claim the cigarette butts tossed away by the privileged guests. 18
Russian authors Ilya Ehrenburg and Konstantin Fedin and French Prix Goncourt winner Elsa Triolet stayed in the Grand Hotel, as did Marlene Dietrich, who served for a short time as a trial observer and who would later play one of the leads in the film Judgment at Nuremberg. In contrast to the field cots at the castle, hotel guests at least slept in repurposed hospital beds made no less comfortable by sometimes still having medical charts attached to them. More off-putting was the dining-room cutlery, which still bore Reich eagles and swastikas. Soviet journalists nicknamed the hotel the “luminarium” because so many luminaries resided there, while the latter mockingly referred to the press camp as the “Chaldeum” after the well-known press photographer Yevgeny Khaldei, who was housed in the castle.
Despite the serious damage the hotel had suffered in the war—power cables hung down from the ceilings of the hallways, and replacement toilets, bathtubs and sinks lay around waiting to be installed—it remained the centre of downtown Nuremberg social life. The city was subjected to a night-time curfew, but the main figures at the trial could still meet in the Grand Hotel after work to unwind. “The marble hall… is full to the rafters,” wrote Triolet. “Women and men in uniform and civilian dress. There you can see lawyers, secretaries, interpreters, the press and prosecutors dancing. Even the judges cut a rug there—that’s no myth.”23 Nor were the two residences for reporters by any means isolated from one another. Residents of one visited the other to amuse themselves or exchange information. Hotel guests regularly travelled out to the castle because of the atmosphere there, which, to the particular delight of the star Soviet correspondents, was far more relaxed and rustic. The castle’s 19expansive grounds were a welcome change of scenery for those depressed by the sight of the devastated city centre.
Graphic Artists
The press camp was also home to court illustrators and cartoonists who made drawings of the defendants for newspapers and magazines. These graphic artists played a major role in documenting the trials since photographers weren’t allowed in the courtroom. The spectrum of the illustrators’ work ranged from more or less lifelike pencil and ink portraits to spontaneous sketches to cartoons. One of the more realistic artists was Edward Vebell, who worked for the American Armed Forces newspaper Stars and Stripes. The cartoonists included David Low of the London Evening Standard, with his excellent eye for Göring’s physical demeanour, and the Soviet caricaturist Boris Yefimov, who often depicted the defendants with bird-of-prey beaks and surreally long, clutching fingers. 20
Laura Knight, The Nuremberg Trial (1946), oil on canvas.
One exceptional figure was the British Impressionist painter Laura Knight, who, in keeping with her status as a well-known fine artist, lodged as of January 1946 in a suite in the Grand Hotel. During the war she had painted scenes of the conflict for the War Artists’ Advisory Committee. Now she was sent to Nuremberg to capture the trial for posterity in an oil painting to be shown at the Summer Exhibition in London’s Royal Academy. Her work The Nuremberg Trial departed from the realism of her war scenes. Although it depicted the defendants sitting in the dock naturalistically, she wholly omitted the rear and side walls of the courtroom so that viewers looked out on the devastated 21city of Nuremberg, parts of which stood in flames. This horrid panoramic backdrop of destruction was a greater indictment than Knight’s depiction of the court itself. In a letter to the War Artists’ Advisory Committee, she explained: “In that ruined city death and destruction are ever present. They had to come into the picture, without them, it would not be the Nuremberg as it now is during the trial, when the death of millions and utter devastation are the sole topics of conversation wherever one goes—whatever one is doing.” But the painting received a rather cool reception at the Academy.24
Like Knight, caricaturist Günter Peis didn’t stay in Schloss Faber-Castell, although in his case that was due to nationality and not status. Born in Austria, Peis had been forced to join the Volkssturm militia at the age of seventeen as part of Nazi Germany’s last-ditch efforts to defend itself. After the war, he had attended an American re-education programme at a journalism school in Munich. From there he was sent to Nuremberg, where at nineteen he was the youngest correspondent and personally witnessed the execution of the convicted war criminals from an attic window. Peis, today considered a pioneer of investigative journalism, was a man of many talents, writing several articles about the proceedings but also reaching for his sketchbook to document the trial and capture the characteristics of the defendants. His caricatures, also made of the judges, prosecutors and witnesses, were a bit of light relief in the otherwise emotionally charged atmosphere. The Jewish-Austrian journalist William Stricker wrote of Peis’s illustrations in the Nürnberger Extra Blatt, a humorous, self-mocking brochure published by the correspondents themselves, saying they were “the expression of the right of a free press for people to make fun of themselves after their work was done”.2522
Günter Peis, caricature of Hermann Göring in the courtroom, October 1946.
23The Problem Solver: Ernest Cecil Deane
In October 1945 the press camp came under the command of General Lucian Truscott, Patton’s successor as military governor of Bavaria. Truscott delegated responsibility on the ground in the camp to US press officer Charles Madary, who started preparing the castle for the journalists’ arrival in August 1945 by rearranging and repurposing rooms, among other things. The imposing Gobelin hall became an open workspace in which correspondents typed away at their articles. Field cots were lined in rows in the once-luxurious private chambers. There was a salon, a game room and a library, and a cinema was set up in the stables. Residents took meals together with those housed in the other buildings in the former ballroom and the main dining room.
We have Madary’s assistant, Ernest Cecil Deane, to thank for some vivid descriptions of everyday life in the press camp. “Ernie Deane”, whose letters are preserved in the Stanford University archive, wrote home to his wife, Lois, several times a week. Because Madary was often absent from Germany for long periods Deane actually ran the camp, serving as a point of contact for the correspondents until June 1946. The thirty-four-year-old, who had studied journalism at the University of Arkansas, joined the US Army as a press officer in 1942 and arrived in Bavaria with advancing American troops in 1945. That October, he wrote to his wife from a spa town called Bad Wiessee about his new task: “The press will be housed and fed on the former Faber estate, a fabulous place with a small palace, and all of the works. Faber was the pencil magnate of Germany—you may know Eberhardt-Faber pencils, I used to 24use a lot of them. Anyhow, old man Faber built himself a beautiful place, marble stairways, mother-of-pearl decorative work along the walls, etc… My job is entitled ‘liaison officer’ between the press camp and the courthouse, which means I’ll probably be a trouble shooter trying to calm down irate correspondents who get griped over all sorts of things—transportation, food, communications, news, etc. It should be a lively assignment.”26
Deane’s job was indeed a challenging and varied one, since he not only had to serve as a troubleshooter and a liaison but as a maître de plaisir as well. Along with being a place to reside and eat, the camp was where journalists amused themselves. Guests were constantly showing up in search of a good time, not just from the Grand Hotel but also from Zirndorf, where the French delegation stayed, or Dambach, where the American chief counsel and his staff were housed in seven separate villas. Conversations were lively, and visitors interested in news beyond what they could get in Stars and Stripes eagerly snapped up information. Frequently, generals, ranking officers and US newspaper publishers enjoyed multi-course dinners in the castle’s imposing main dining room and other social spaces. Deane even put together a small women’s chorus consisting of German waitresses who regaled the international guests with native folk songs and, for comic relief, heavily accented versions of American popular ditties. On one occasion, he asked his wife to send him sheet music of Americans songs for the German piano player at the bar.
The game room was particularly popular. Markus Wolf, who was allowed in the castle as a Soviet passport holder, later recalled learning to play poker there. Visitors’ horizons were expanded not only by unfamiliar card games, previously unheard 25forms of music and a Babylonian variety of languages, but also by national cultural peculiarities. Wolf was dumbfounded the first time he saw a troupe of kilted bagpipe players booked for Burns Supper. Meanwhile, the canteen in the Nuremberg court building introduced the Russian-French Elsa Triolet to the idea of a cafeteria, inspiring her to write of a place “where you find a selection of food atop a long counter you approach in a synchronised march”. In addition, the press camp offered correspondents the opportunity to engage in sporting pursuits. Walter Cronkite, later the “most trusted man in America”, was very accomplished at table tennis.27 And representatives of East and West constantly faced off over the chessboards.
On 9th December 1945 there was a large ball attended even by Robert H. Jackson, but according to Deane, who organized it, the event was a flop: “All sorts of things went wrong—the justice and the general and their party arrived an hour and a half after they were supposed to show up, correspondents had occupied all of the tables we set up for the visitors and we had to set up more, and just as the justice seated himself to enjoy the evening the negro orchestra played one long blast and started packing its instruments. I dashed over to find out what the hell was going on, and the sergeant in charge told me that they were supposed to stop playing at 11 p.m.” Deane was able to convince the members of the orchestra to keep playing by offering them an extra ration of gin.28
According to various accounts, despite the obvious risks it entailed, alcohol was an essential component of the smooth running of the camp. Whisky, vodka and cognac helped to surmount language barriers and bring the various nationalities together. An amused Deane described a completely legless 26Soviet correspondent slurring “I luff you” to his American colleagues and new-found drinking buddies. After the defendants in the main trial were executed as war criminals, the international press corps threw a huge party in the castle to celebrate the conclusion of the proceedings. Great quantities of the national drinks of the correspondents’ home countries were flown in for the occasion. They did not go to waste.
