Read Online The Nazi Hunters by Andrew Nagorski - Free Book Online
Authors: Andrew Nagorski
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reporter for a growing number of outlets, including the German News Agency and Reuters. While much less known than the main Nuremberg trial, the Dachau proceedings provided remarkable details about what the Third Reich meant in practice.
Those were the kind of details that Truman had in mind when long after his presidency he spelled out the original purpose of all the trials: “to make it impossible for anyone ever to say in times to come, ‘Oh, it never happened—just a lot of propaganda—a pack of lies.’ ” In other words, the postwar trials were meant not just to punish the guilty; they also were critical to establishing the historical record.
• • •
Unlike many of his contemporaries, William Denson had not served on the battlefields of Europe.The Alabama native—whose great-grandfather fought in the Civil War on the side of the Confederacy, whose grandfather was a state Supreme Court justice who had risked ostracism by defending black Alabamans, and whose father was a respected local lawyer and politician—graduated from Harvard Law School and went on to teach law at West Point. But in early 1945, he was tapped for duty as one of the judge advocate generals, or JAGs, in Germany. At thirty-two, Denson found himself—minus his wife, who had no intention of joining him in a devastated country—preparing to prosecute cases in an occupied land he was encountering for the first time.
Stationed with other JAG staffers in Freising, a short distance from Dachau, he was initially skeptical about the horrifying reports comingfrom camp survivors. “I thought here were some people who had been mistreated in the concentration camps and they were seeking revenge, and that they were really doing a job drawing on fantasy rather than reality,” he explained decades later. But he was soon convinced by the consistency of the testimony he was gathering. Since the witnesses “related substantially the same things, then I knew the events had occurred, because these witnesses did not have a chance to get together ahead of time and fabricate their stories.”
Any lingering doubts were swept away by the grisly accounts provided by the liberators of Dachau and other camps. At the same time, those accounts rekindled the debate about whether those responsible for mass murder and torture deserved anything more than summary execution.When General George S. Patton rushed to see Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald that was a nightmarish spectacle of death worthy of a Hieronymus Bosch painting, he screamed from his jeep: “See what these sons of bitches did? See what these bastards did? I don’t want you to take a prisoner!”
But Denson and his colleagues in the JAG office were convinced that trials were absolutely necessary—both to punish the guilty and to lay out the gruesome facts for everyone to know, then and in the future. Hearing the details of what U.S. troops had seen at Dachau and the stream of other testimonies, “I finally reached a point where I was ready to believe most anything,” Denson declared. And he was more than ready when he was told to start moving on the cases against the perpetrators as quickly as possible. The argument about summary executions vs. trials was over.
Denson’s main interrogator was Paul Guth. Born into a Jewish family in Vienna, Guth was sent to school in England; afterward, he went to the United States and was promptly picked for intelligence training in Camp Ritchie, Maryland, the training ground that had a large contingent of Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria. After graduating first in his class, Guth received further training in England and then ended up in Freising. He would prove to be one of the Army’s most effective interrogators.
But when Guth went to address the prisoners who were held in the camp barracks that had until recently housed their victims, he hardly made an intimidating impression—quite the opposite. The SS men had expected they would be executed;
Those were the kind of details that Truman had in mind when long after his presidency he spelled out the original purpose of all the trials: “to make it impossible for anyone ever to say in times to come, ‘Oh, it never happened—just a lot of propaganda—a pack of lies.’ ” In other words, the postwar trials were meant not just to punish the guilty; they also were critical to establishing the historical record.
• • •
Unlike many of his contemporaries, William Denson had not served on the battlefields of Europe.The Alabama native—whose great-grandfather fought in the Civil War on the side of the Confederacy, whose grandfather was a state Supreme Court justice who had risked ostracism by defending black Alabamans, and whose father was a respected local lawyer and politician—graduated from Harvard Law School and went on to teach law at West Point. But in early 1945, he was tapped for duty as one of the judge advocate generals, or JAGs, in Germany. At thirty-two, Denson found himself—minus his wife, who had no intention of joining him in a devastated country—preparing to prosecute cases in an occupied land he was encountering for the first time.
Stationed with other JAG staffers in Freising, a short distance from Dachau, he was initially skeptical about the horrifying reports comingfrom camp survivors. “I thought here were some people who had been mistreated in the concentration camps and they were seeking revenge, and that they were really doing a job drawing on fantasy rather than reality,” he explained decades later. But he was soon convinced by the consistency of the testimony he was gathering. Since the witnesses “related substantially the same things, then I knew the events had occurred, because these witnesses did not have a chance to get together ahead of time and fabricate their stories.”
Any lingering doubts were swept away by the grisly accounts provided by the liberators of Dachau and other camps. At the same time, those accounts rekindled the debate about whether those responsible for mass murder and torture deserved anything more than summary execution.When General George S. Patton rushed to see Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald that was a nightmarish spectacle of death worthy of a Hieronymus Bosch painting, he screamed from his jeep: “See what these sons of bitches did? See what these bastards did? I don’t want you to take a prisoner!”
But Denson and his colleagues in the JAG office were convinced that trials were absolutely necessary—both to punish the guilty and to lay out the gruesome facts for everyone to know, then and in the future. Hearing the details of what U.S. troops had seen at Dachau and the stream of other testimonies, “I finally reached a point where I was ready to believe most anything,” Denson declared. And he was more than ready when he was told to start moving on the cases against the perpetrators as quickly as possible. The argument about summary executions vs. trials was over.
Denson’s main interrogator was Paul Guth. Born into a Jewish family in Vienna, Guth was sent to school in England; afterward, he went to the United States and was promptly picked for intelligence training in Camp Ritchie, Maryland, the training ground that had a large contingent of Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria. After graduating first in his class, Guth received further training in England and then ended up in Freising. He would prove to be one of the Army’s most effective interrogators.
But when Guth went to address the prisoners who were held in the camp barracks that had until recently housed their victims, he hardly made an intimidating impression—quite the opposite. The SS men had expected they would be executed;
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