Nazi War Crimes Trials: Not Just Nuremberg
Two years ago, My Own True Love and I spent Christmas with family members in Nuremberg. It was a fascinating mixture of Christmas markets, the city’s glory days in the medieval period, gingerbread, and Nazis.* It was a perfect history nerd holiday, with lots of new perspectives on things I thought I knew something about.
One of the real eye-openers for me was the fact that the Allies conducted hundreds of war crimes trials. The Nuremberg trials attracted the most attention at the time and are the most well known today. And rightly so. These are the trials that went after the big names in the Nazi leadership. (They were also the trials in which the legal parameters of war crimes were hashed out. )
Twenty-two German leaders were tried at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. Another 177 leading figures in the Nazi administration were tried under the umbrella of the International Military Tribune in a series of twelve trials known as the Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings. The four Allied powers occupying Germany and Austria tried hundreds more for crimes committed in their zones of occupation. (Much of what we known about the concentration camp system comes from testimony at these trials.) Together, these tribunals tried more than 1500 Nazi war criminals. That is a lot more than twenty-two.
By 1950, international support for continuing the war crimes trials evaporated in the face of new Cold War concerns. As a result, thousands of Nazi officials and collaborators never faced trial. Many returned to the professions they had practiced during the Third Reich. A large number of those who had been convicted for war crimes were released long before the end of their sentences.
These days I’m taking a close look at one set of trials: the Bergen-Belsen trials, which took place in the British sector slightly before the major trials in Nuremberg. The trial focuses on Joseph Kramer, known as the Beast of Belsen, and other Nazis who staffed the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. It’s pretty grim stuff.
* If you want to read more about our explorations of Nuremberg’s history, you can find them here, here, and here .
Weird History
Let me make it clear from the beginning that Desert Oracle is very different from the books I generally share with you here on the Margins. It is not a work of narrative history, but history is woven throughout it. Weird history, true, but history nonetheless.
Desert Oracle is the outgrowth of a more-or-less quarterly “field guide” to the deserts of the American southwest of the same name, written and published by culture writer and former Wonkette editor Ken Layne. Following the publication of its first issue in 2015, the periodical established a cult following for its quirky and passionate exploration of the desert’s landscape, history, myths, and inhabitants (human and otherwise).
Desert Oracle’s new incarnation is an expansion of the periodical, combining previously published pieces with new material. Beginning with a piece titled “Try Not to Die,” Layne introduces readers both to the desert’s beauty and to its danger. He talks about missing hikers, ancient desert cultures, the rise of Western swing, colorful characters from the recent past, UFO and Yucca Man sightings, and the impact of Edward Abbey on the desert conservation movement.
Written in a matter-of-fact style that belies their contents, which are anything but matter-of-fact, the pieces run in length from short to very short. At first the collection appears to be a disjointed collection of fascinating pieces: a musing on ravens is juxtaposed to the story of a medical con man, which is followed by a complicated essay that begins with the Goldstone Deep Space Antenna Station and ends with occultist and rocket scientist Jack Parsons. In fact, the book is held together by what Layne has described in interviews as the “weirdness of the desert:” the cruel, the terrible, the sublime and the inexplicable. With an emphasis on the inexplicable.
I found it fascinating.
Most of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
In Which I Read the 1932 Sports Pages
Anyone who knows me In Real Life knows that I am not much of a sports fan. If there had been a “least likely to read the sports pages” category in my high school yearbook, I would have won it hands down.
Left to my own devices, I might not have turned to the Chicago Tribune’s sports pages in 1932. But one of the facts about foreign correspondents in the years between the World Wars is that their beats were large. In addition to covering stories like the fall of the German economy, the rise of the Nazis, and the threat of Soviet Russia, Sigrid Schultz and her counterparts were expected to cover major sporting events, the arts, crime, human interest stories and above all, the American angle in foreign news.*
The fact that a term of German boxers was traveling to the International Golden Gloves tournament in Chicago was a natural for Sigrid Schultz to cover. If Schultz reports on it, I’m reading it, so July, 1932, finds me in the unlikely position of reading international boxing coverage. It’s been a nice change from reading articles about the Nazi rise to power.
In fact, I have found Schultz’s approach gripping. She treats sports coverage as human interest rather than giving the reader play-by-play accounts of qualifying bouts. She does profiles on each of the eight team members. The ones who have been jobless for months. The ones who work in a factory to support widowed mothers and young siblings. The middleweight boxer who is a precision lens crafter for an instrument making company. The featherweight who was told he was too weak to learn to box.The near-sighted shipbuilder who is studying an English phrasebook because there might be things he wants to ask about in Chicago. She describes their training regimens. She tells us about the local groups who club together to buy them gear for the trip and throw them farewell parties.
And then there was this story, which choked me up:
Campe Studies Tribune to Learn About Chicago
Erich Campe, welterweight champion who will fight in the International Golden Gloves bouts in Chicago, July 26, called at THE TRIBUNE office in Berlin today to read recent editions of THE TRIBUNE and admired photos of Tribune Tower,
The police cadet was somewhat downcast when asked how his departure is being celebrated. “I don’t even know whether anybody will accompany me to the station,” he said. “I don’t expect my parents will, but maybe my sister Gretchen will be there.”
Campe has done little traveling. He is in the police school at the little town of Brandenburg and boys being trained there do not have much chance to make friends. It is almost impossible for their friends to visit them should they feel like it. Visitors must submit to long-cross-examinations before they can call on your police cadets in the barracks.
Campe has been granted leave until Aug. 2, which is the day the boat on which he scheduled to return to Germany lands at Hamburg. A shadow of anxiety crossed his face at the idea that he might miss the train and not get back in time to resume duty in the school at Brandenburg.
He momentarily forgot his worries to discuss the prospects of his first crossing. This reminds him of his packing. He managed to borrow a suitcase only to find it so large that it would block an entire stateroom. There he departed to try to find a really cheap suitcase. **
In her boxing coverage, Schultz gave me a glimpse of Germany outside the worlds of art and politics that dominate my reading these days. The specter of nationalism appears in the edges of some of the stories, but for the most part she is focused on the young athletes and their grand adventure, even if the next day’s article returns to the scary politics of the time.
*If there was a single truth that news editors in all media hold to be self-evident it is that the further away the news is happening, the less people are interested. In the 1920s the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle summed this up in a sign over his desk that read: “A DOG FIGHT IN BROOKLYN IS BIGGER THAN A REVOLUTION IN CHINA.” As a result, foreign correspondents were encouraged to find the point at which foreign news intersected with local interest.
**In a brief piece two days later, Schultz reported that Campe’s sister and sweetheart surprised him on the train platform in Berlin, where members of the team were boarding for the port of Bremen. I choked up again. At this point, I don’t know whether or not he wins. But I’m rooting for him!