Two committed suicide – Dr Lange (February 1945); Dr Meyer (May 1945).
Two were executed – Dr Schöngarth (March 1946); Dr Bühler (August 1948).
Three were interned, and then released – Dr Leibbrandt, Dr Stuckart and Dr Klopfer.
For the five who survived the war, their differential treatment and sentencing reveals a profoundly disturbing imbalance between judgement about the criminal responsibility involved in ‘direct’ killing and judgement regarding ‘desk’ killing. Schöngarth was clearly a mass murderer, a ‘direct’ killer (though, bizarrely, he was convicted and executed not for being the commander of Einsatzkommando zbV, responsible for the murder of thousands in eastern Galicia, nor for his senior role in the barbarities of Bad Rabka, but for his order to shoot a single Allied pilot, a POW who had crashed in the Netherlands in 1941).
But the desk killers were treated very differently. Dr Stuckart – co-author of some the most antisemitic laws in modern European history, and a key figure in designing the ‘legal’ framework for the deportation and extermination of the Jews (and who you’ll also remember proposed compulsory sterilisation of the Mischlinge Jews at Wannsee) – at his trial in 1949, was sentenced to only three years ten months’ imprisonment, and then immediately released because of ‘time already served’. Even allowing for his poor health, this seems a staggeringly lenient sentence, especially given the fact that the judges specified in their verdict that
Without a doubt,13 the laws and decrees drafted or approved by Stuckart himself were a cornerstone of the plan to almost completely exterminate Jews … [he was one of the men] who participated from the peace and quiet of their ministry offices [but] are just as criminal.
Even after the full import of the Wannsee Conference had emerged, in 1950 a denazification court in Hanover merely declared him a Mitläufer (fellow traveller) and fined him 50,000 DM. Afterwards, he worked in local government, becoming treasurer for the town of Helmstedt, and then took a position in an institute to develop the Lower Saxony economy. He died in a car accident in 1953, and received a glowing obituary in the Frankfurter Zeitung, written by former colleagues from the Reich Interior Ministry: ‘The deceased was an upstanding and selfless man of exceptional talent who worked tirelessly …’
Dr Leibbrandt – Rosenberg’s deputy, who in October and November 1941 had met Heydrich and Himmler to discuss how more Jews could be included in the extermination programme and who, immediately after Wannsee, hosted a meeting to widen the definition of Mischlinge Jews in the occupied Eastern Territories – was interned at the end of the war. When interrogated, he initially claimed that he ‘could not remember the Wannsee Conference’. Charges against him were eventually dropped in 1950 and he was released from internment. A year later a denazification court in Kiel declared him ‘not incriminated’ and he returned to civilian life, working as a lobbyist for the city of Wilhelmshaven. Later in life he also was a representative for the steel company Salzgitter (set up by Goering in 1937, still going strong today, with sales of £7 billion in 2016), and, in his spare time, he also became an active member of the American Cultural Institute in Munich. He died peacefully in Bonn in June 1982, having lived to the ripe old age of eighty-two.
And the extreme antisemite Dr Klopfer, one of the most influential of all Nazi bureaucrats and Martin Bormann’s deputy, what became of him? He was arrested in 1946, having changed his identity to ‘Otto Kunz’, and was then interned in various camps for four years. When interrogated about his participation at Wannsee, he claimed that Heydrich had only talked about the ‘emigration of the Jews’, to which his investigator tartly replied, ‘Then you must have slept through the meeting.’ But again, in the growing Cold War of the post-war period, no war-crimes charges were brought against him by the US prosecutors, and his case was handed over to a denazification court in Nuremberg. Again, the verdict of this court was shockingly lenient, finding Klopfer to be a Minderbelastete (lesser offender), fining him 2,000 DM and giving him a probation period of three years. He was released in 1950, two years later he was working as a tax advisor and, by 1956, he’d resumed his career in law – opening a practice on Zinglerstrasse in Ulm.fn10 He continued to practise until his retirement, prospering and buying a farm in Langenburg. He was eighty-one when he died in January 1987, peacefully at home. A notice in the local Ulm newspaper marked the passing of the last participant of the Wannsee Conference with this sentence: ‘In memory of Dr Gerhard Klopfer, who passed away after a fulfilled life in the service of all those in his sphere of influence.’
The fact that two of these men – who had sat around the table with Heydrich and Eichmann discussing how genocide could be more efficiently organised – were able to live out their post-war lives, not in prison cells but in freedom, without any real sanction, is an insult towards any notion of justice. It demonstrates, in the most vivid possible terms, the way that desk killers, those who kill by decree and orders, who never see the eyes of their victims, have often been able to evade all responsibility – just as they continue to do today.
*
By a curious coincidence, in March 1987, only a few weeks after Dr Klopfer had been buried in Ulm, J. and I were hitch-hiking past that city. I looked at my journal from that trip and was intrigued to read that we’d got a lift outside Ulm that day with two US servicemen, working at a nearby American army base, both of them ambitious young officers, already fast-tracked for promotion. Although grateful for the lift, we were not impressed by their hawkish jingoism, or by the Voice of America that they listened to uncritically. I noted at the end that I’d written that these two men seemed ‘both perfectly banal and perfectly dangerous’.
Banal and dangerous. Not disimilar to our men of Wannsee. The lawyer of Ulm being buried. And for a moment I wonder whether this seeming banality isn’t partly responsible for their historical invisibility. Books on Hitler, Himmler and Mengele still sell in vast quantities. Perhaps it’s simply more engaging to read about perpetrators who are seen to be ‘evil’. Or is it because learning that lawyers and civil servants, educated graduates, have played central roles in genocide is too disturbing, too close to our own societies? Those words of C. S. Lewis come back again – ‘the greatest evil is … done … in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars … who do not need to raise their voices.’ The offices of Kurfürstenstrasse 116, the offices of Wilhelmstrasse, the offices of Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8, the offices of IG Farben, the offices of Bayer, the offices of Shell, the offices of Halliburton, the offices of the Pentagon, the offices of Whitehall. And the terror, the destruction which has been set in motion from these buildings. Why have we, as yet, not been able to understand this phenomenon?
In Cleansing the Fatherland, the authors Götz Aly, Peter Chroust and Christian Pross investigate some of the medical personnel who ran the ‘euthanasia’ programme from Tiergartenstrasse, where we walked two days ago. They look at the way that many of the men who worked there later transferred their skills to administrating aspects of the Holocaust. They also reflect upon the limitations of the legal judgement of these bureaucratic perpetrators after the war, and make the following observation: