Abstract
In the aftermath of the Second World War, the Allies prosecuted several thousand former Nazis for war crimes and crimes against humanity. By 1949, 5,025 convictions had been secured in the Western occupation zones of Germany alone, with around 500 men and women subsequently executed by Britain, France and the United States.1 Much of the existing literature on these cases has focused on the organisation of the trials, points of procedure and legal precedents; or the failure to prosecute even more war criminals.2 There is also a growing canon of literature exploring the impact of war crimes trials on popular understanding of the Holocaust.3 However, aside from graphic descriptions of the actual moment of execution within contemporaries’ diaries and memoirs, the posthumous history of these war criminals has been hitherto neglected.4
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See, for example: Shlomo Aronson, ‘Preparations for the Nuremberg Trial: The OSS, Charles Dwork and the Holocaust’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 12 (1998), 257–81;
Donald Bloxham, ‘British War Crimes Trial Policy in Germany, 1945–1957: Implementation and Collapse’, Journal of British Studies 42 (2003), 91–118 and idem, ‘”The Trial that Never Was”: Why There Was No Second International Trial of Major War Criminals at Nuremberg’, History 87 (2002), 41–60;
George Ginsburgs, Moscow’s Road to Nuremberg: The Soviet Background to the Trial (The Hague, 1996);
Erich Haberer, ‘History and Justice: Paradigms of the Prosecution of Nazi Crimes’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 19 (2005), 487–519;
Mark E. Spica, ‘The Devil’s Chemists on Trial: The American Prosecution of I. G. Farben at Nuremberg’, Historian 61 (1999), 865–83;
Paul Weindling, ‘From International to Zonal Trials: The Origins of the Nuremberg Medical Trial’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 14 (2000), 367–89;
Robert Wolfe, ‘Flaws in the Nuremberg Legacy: An Impediment to International War Crimes Tribunals’ Prosecution of Crimes Against Humanity’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 12 (1998), 434–53.
On the impact of the Nuremberg Tribunal, see Donald Bloxham, Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory (Oxford, 2001). On the resonance of subsequent Nazi war crimes trials, see
Lawrence Douglas, The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust (New Haven, 2001);
Devin O. Pendas, The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial 1963–1965: Genocide, History and the Limits of the Law (Cambridge, MA, 2006);
Rebecca Wittman, Beyond Justice: The Auschwitz Trial (Cambridge, MA, 2005);
Caroline Sharples, West Germans and the Nazi Legacy (New York, 2012).
Accounts of the Nuremberg executions can be found in Airey Neave, Nuremberg: A Personal Record of the Trial of the Major Nazi War Criminals in 1945–6 (London, 1978), pp. 348–9;
Telford Taylor, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir (London, 1993), pp. 609–11;
Whitney Harris, Tyranny on Trial (1954), pp. 485–8.
There are distinctions between the treatment of Nazi war criminals in western and eastern Europe. High-ranking figures such as Rudolf Höss, the former Commandant of Auschwitz, and Arthur Greiser, former Gauleiter of the Reichsgau, were hanged publicly in Soviet-occupied Poland. On the subject of ‘show trials’ and public executions in the USSR, see Alexander Victor Prusin, ‘”Fascist Criminals to the Gallows!” The Holocaust and Soviet War Crimes Trials, December 1945–February 1946’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 17 (2003), 1–30.
On the denazification of German towns and cities, see Gavriel D. Rosenfeld and Paul Jaskot (eds), Beyond Berlin: Twelve Cities Confront the Nazi Past (Ann Arbor, 2008);
Rudy Koshar, From Monuments to Traces: Artifacts of German Memory, 1870–1990 (Berkeley, 2000);.
Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, Munich and Memory: Architecture, Monuments and the Legacy of the Third Reich (Berkeley, 2000);
BillNiven and Chloe Paver (eds), Memorialization in Germany since 1945 (Basingstoke, 2009);
Brian Ladd, The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape (Chicago, 1997).
The ten executed individuals comprised of Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Alfred Jodl, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Wilhelm Keitel, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Alfred Rosenberg, Fritz Sauckel, Arthur Seyss-Inquart and Julius Streicher. Martin Bormann was tried and sentenced to death in absentia. For a detailed overview of the Nuremberg tribunal see: Bloxham, Genocide on Trial; Michael Biddis, ‘The Nuremberg Trial: Two Exercises in Judgement’, Journal of Contemporary History 16 (1981), 597–615;
Michael R. Marrus, ‘The Holocaust at Nuremberg’, Yad Vashem Studies 26 (1998), 5–41;
Joseph E. Persico, Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial (London, 1995);
Bradley F. Smith, Reaching Judgement at Nuremberg (London, 1977);
Christian Tomuschat, ‘The Legacy of Nuremberg’, Journal of International Criminal Justice 4 (2006), 800–29;
Ann Tusa, The Nuremberg Trial (London, 1983).
For further discussion of the use of executed corpses for medical research in Nazi Germany, see Michael Viebig, ‘”…the Cadaver can be Placed at your Disposition Here.” Legal, Administrative Basis of the Transfer of Cadavers in the Third Reich, its Traces in Archival Sources’, Annals of Anatomy 194 (2012), 267–73.
The Prussian Penal Code of 1851 had stated that ‘the body of a criminal who commits suicide to escape the execution of a sentence pronounced against him is to be buried at night by the common executioner at the usual place of execution for criminals’—R. S. Guernsey, Suicide: History of the Penal Laws relating to it in their Legal, Social, Moral and Religious Aspects in Ancient and Modern Times (New York, 1875). However, by the time of Ley’s death, this legislation would have been superseded by that of the Kaiserreich, Weimar Republic and, of course, the Third Reich, none of which directly addresses the fate of suicides in prison. In Britain, there had also been incidents of prison suicides being buried in the same manner as executed prisoners. See Trevor James, Prisoners of War at Dartmoor: American and French Soldiers and Sailors in an English Prison during the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812 (Jefferson, NC, 2013), p. 221; ‘Newgate Prison and Tyburn’, Famous Outlaws, http://www.criminals.lt/page.php?al=newgate_prison_and_tyburn (accessed 28 February 2014).
The executed Belsen personnel comprised Juanna Bormann, Wilhelm Dörr, Karl Franzische, Irma Grese, Franz Hössler, Fritz Klein, Josef Kramer, Ansger Pinchen, Franz Stofel, Elisabeth Volkenrath and Peter Weingärtner. All were hanged in Hameln prison, 13 December 1945. For an overview of the Belsen trial, see John Cramer, Belsen Trial 1945: Der Lüneberger Prozess gegen Wachpersonal der Konzentrationslager Auschwitz und Bergen-Belsen (Göttingen, 2011);
Raymond Phillips, Trial of Josef Kramer and Forty-Four Others (The Belsen Trial), (London, 1949);
A. P. V. Rogers, ‘War Crimes Trials under the Royal Warrant: British Practice, 1945–1949’, International and Comparative Law Quarterly 39 (1990), 780–800.
Corpses left unclaimed in the American zone were buried in Spöttingen cemetery, Landsberg am Lech. For further details see: Thomas Raithel, Die Strafanstalt Landsberg am Lech und der Spöttinger Friedhof, 1944–1958 (Oldenbourg, 2009). In 1988, the cemetery was declared a protected historical site and the upkeep of the war criminals’ graves is thus paid for by the taxpayer.
Daniel Siemens, The Making of a Nazi Hero: The Murder and Myth of Horst Wessel (London, 2013), pp. 155–63.
Mats Burström and Bernhard Gelderblom, ‘Dealing with Difficult Heritage: The Case of Bückeberg, Site of the Third Reich Harvest Festival’, Journal of Social Archaeology 11 (2011), 266–82.
On the history of Hameln prison during the Third Reich, see Bernhard Gelderblom, ‘Der Zuchthaus Hameln in der NS-Zeit’, http://www.gelderblom-hameln.de/zuchthaus/nszeit/zuchthausnszeit.html (accessed 1 July 2013). Hameln also witnessed anti-Semitic violence, especially between 1933 and 1935: 74 per cent of its Jewish population had perished by the end of the Third Reich—a total based on figures provided in Shmuel Spector and Geoffrey Wigoder (eds), The Encyclopaedia of Jewish Life Before and After the Holocaust (New York, 2001), p. 492.
Another 47 people were executed for crimes committed after the end of the war but buried in the same manner—see TNA, FO 1060/4122, Bonn Telegram No. 133, 6 March 1954. Precise details on all the individuals executed at Hameln can be found in TNA, FO 1060/239–243 and Peter Krone (ed.), ‘Hingerichtetengräber’ auf dem Friedhof Wehl, Hameln: Historische Dokumentation (Hameln, 1987).
Monica Black, Death in Berlin: From Weimar to Divided Germany (New York, 2010). For more on post-war German attitudes to the dead, see
Alon Confino, Paul Betts and Dirk Schumann (eds), Between Mass Death and Individual Loss: The Place of the Dead in Twentieth-Century Germany (New York, 2008).
On the theme of German victimhood see: Bill Niven (ed.), Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany (Basingstoke, 2006);
Robert G. Moeller, War Stories: the Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley, 2003);
Neil Gregor, ‘”Is He Still Alive, or Long Since Dead?”: Loss, Absence and Remembrance in Nuremberg, 1945–1956’, German History 21 (2003), 183–203;
Michael L. Hughes, ‘”Through No Fault of our Own”: West Germans Remember their War Losses’, German History 18 (2000), 193–213.
On this theme, see: Alon Confino, Germany as a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits of Writing History (Chapel Hill, 2006);
Ceila Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley, 1992).
Victor Gollancz, ‘Letter to The Times’, 6 March 1954.
Paul Elek, ‘Letter to The Times’, 9 March 1954.
On these events, see, for example: Geoffrey Hartman (ed.), Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective (Bloomington, 1986);
Geoff Eley, ‘Nazism, Politics and the Image of the Past: Thoughts on the West German Historikerstreit, 1986–1987’, Past and Present 121 (1988), 171–208;
Richard Evans, In Hitler’s Shadow: West German Historians and the Attempt to Escape from the Nazi Past (London, 1989).
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Sharples, C. (2015). Burying the Past? The Post-Execution History of Nazi War Criminals. In: Ward, R. (eds) A Global History of Execution and the Criminal Corpse. Palgrave Historical Studies in the Criminal Corpse and its Afterlife. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137444011_10
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