After Nuremberg

American Clemency for Nazi War Criminals

De: Robert Hutchinson

Narrado por: Christopher Douyard

After Nuremberg is about the fleeting nature of American punishment for German war criminals convicted at the twelve Nuremberg trials of 1946-1949. Because of repeated American grants of clemency and parole, ninety-seven of the 142 Germans convicted at the Nuremberg trials, many of them major offenders, regained their freedom years, sometimes decades, ahead of schedule. High-ranking Nazi plunderers, kidnappers, slave laborers, and mass murderers all walked free by 1958. High Commissioner for Occupied Germany John J. McCloy and his successors articulated a vision of impartial American justice as inspiring and legitimizing their actions, as they concluded that German war criminals were entitled to all the remedies American laws offered to better their conditions and reduce their sentences.

Based on extensive archival research (including newly declassified material), this book explains how American policy makers' best intentions resulted in a series of decisions from 1949-1958 that produced a self-perpetuating bureaucracy of clemency and parole that "rehabilitated" unrepentant German abettors and perpetrators of theft, slavery, and murder while lending salience to the most reactionary elements in West German political discourse.

©2022 Robert Hutchinson (P)2022 Tantor

Lack of Resolve

The fact that American officials lacked resolve to stick to the sentences originally handed down at Nuremberg is a disgrace. The fact that some of these leaders who were appointed to positions of oversight neglected to review all the original cases is abhorrent. Justice was not served and some of families of these officials should be ashamed. I commend the author for bringing this travesty to print. Unfortunately the story was laborious told.

The fall of man

I have read many books about Nazi atrocities. Books recounting acts so unspeakable and singular in their sheer brutality and inhumanity that the mind struggles to even comprehend them. It writhes and recoils and feigns misunderstanding, wraps itself in a fog and tries to resort to sheer disbelief that such things can happen.

These books are hard to read. Sometimes you have to take a break just to prevent yourself from hyperventilating from the sheer horror of it. But, what ultimately gets you through these accounts is the belief that this is pure evil at work. The men who performed these acts were not men, but animals, completely removed from the rest of humanity. They were on the other side of history, the Bad Guys. And while all this was happening, the Good Guys were coming. And once they arrived, it would end. And they would show the world what happened and the world would say: this is not us. We are not like them.

What makes After Nuremburg harder to read than any of these other books is that it shatters this last illusion. The world saw what happened, what the Nazis did. The Allies arrested hundreds and thousands of those who committed these atrocities. They tried them. Convicted them. Many were sentenced to death, and the rest spent decades in prison for their actions. Germany shunned these people, carried their shame.

This, at least, more or less what I thought. In all my reading I had assumed that the war criminals mostly got what they deserved, as Goring and co. did at Nuremberg. The truth, unfortunately, is worse. So much worse.

The final Nuremburg tribunals had not even wrapped up when the calls for clemency started. From the prisoners themselves to politicians and the church, Germans from every walk of life railed at the unfair tribunals and the victors' justice they meted out. These were good Germans just following orders in service of the fatherland. Or so many believed.

Until 1950, these pleas went unheeded. But when John J. McCloy was appointed as the new Commissioner, he decided all the sentences needed to be reviewed. The reasoning behind this decision, the massive subsequent sentence reductions and the domino effect it would have on all detainees held by each Allied nation, is laid out in detail in this book. And the devil, I fear, is literally in the details in this case.

Consider these excuses offered by some of the condemned when appealing for clemency. One commander protested that he had made a mistake in his confession, and that he had overseen only 2000 civilian executions, not the 3000 he had originally reported. For this he demanded mercy. Another, and I weep to even say it, claimed that he murdered two female children because they "looked like they were about to form a resistance group." He was therefore only engaged in the lawful suppression of partisans.

That such nonsense was offered up as grounds for mercy would be amusing if it were not accepted, almost wholesale and without question, by the appeals panel. No follow-up or questioning took place, no input from the original prosecutors was sought and, unbelievably, the original case records and evidence were not consulted in any way. The panel relied entirely on the summaries of each case, and routinely ruled on multiple cases each day. Cases that took months when originally tried, were sometimes dismissed in half an hour.

A decade after the end of the war, nearly every German prisoner had been released.

Throughout the book Hutchinson is methodical, clear and above all measured. While I wanted to throw my phone out the window in disbelieving rage, Hutchinson lays out the facts with calm language and clear logic. His work is exemplary, and this text deserves to be as widely studied as any other on the period.

But be warned, this is a soul-crushing endeavor. The reader is confronted not only by the men who stared into the devil's soul and embraced all they found there, but by the ones who ultimately decided their fate for doing so. They, too, stared into that soul, and declared: "nothing to see here." That, I am afraid, is so much worse.