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Postwar Germany

~ 1945-1949

Postwar Germany

Category Archives: Crime

Free book: The German Heiress

27 Sunday Oct 2019

Posted by Anika in Books, Crime, Culture, general, Hunger, Media, postwar, Women

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Anika Scott, germany, Goodreads giveaway, postwar, The German Heiress

Final Cover_German Heiress

Published by HarperCollins in April 2020

If you’re in the United States and like free stuff, especially stuff related to postwar Germany, head over to Goodreads and enter a chance to win one of 100 advanced reader copies of my debut novel The German Heiress.  (It’s called Finding Clara in the UK).

It’s set in the ruins of Essen, Germany in December 1946 at the start of what the Germans call the “Hunger Winter,” one of the hardest on record. It stars Clara, a woman on the run and struggling with her conscience; Jakob, a black marketer determined to get his family through the winter; and Willy, a boy soldier who refuses to believe the war is over.

You can learn more at my author website.

A lot of information on this blog sprang from my research as I wrote this book. It’s been a labor of love, and I’m excited for it to get into the hands of readers.

Good luck!

Nuremberg Trials: Fair? Dangerous?

22 Thursday Mar 2018

Posted by Anika in Allies, Americans, Crime, postwar

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germany, nazis, nuremberg trials american international law, postwar

The Nuremberg Trials are generally seen as a landmark in international law. When I first learned about the trials in school, I took for granted that they were a good thing, that the big wig Nazis got their due, and that the trials were fair, maybe even more than fair considering the men (and some women) they prosecuted and the severity of the crimes.

Digging deeper, especially into sources from the time period, a different picture develops. Nuremberg was controversial right from the beginning. Even as the trials were running, the world media was debating whether they were fair at all. Nothing quite like it had ever been done. How could the Allies be sure they were not committing an act of revenge on Nazi Germany cloaked in a legal process?

That’s one of the topics in the fascinating article Nuremberg: A Fair Trial? A Dangerous Precedent by Judge Charles E. Wyzanski Jr., published in the US magazine of political analysis The Atlantic from April 1946. It’s not easy reading, but if you give it a chance, you get a deep look at how the trials worried legal experts, especially in the United States, the driving force of most of the trials. What were the long-term implications of trying people for acts that were not crimes under their own laws? What about trying them for breaking laws “invented” after the fact, solely in order to investigate and punish those people? Was it fair to try them under a legal system from another country? In the end, was Nuremberg mostly a political act?

I’m not a legal expert and can’t go deeply into these issues myself, but I recommend reading the article and then thinking about the relationship of the United States to today’s International Court of Justice at the Hague. (The US no longer accepts the court’s jurisdiction when it comes to alleged US violations of international law). The article about Nuremberg from 1946 discusses how sincere America’s conviction was that “all wars of aggression are crimes,” one of the beliefs that underpinned Count 2 of the indictment (crimes against peace).

In the end, the Nuremberg Trials were murkier than they seemed. They weren’t just about punishing Nazis, but about legal concepts and precedents that apply (or not) today.

For some additional reading and transcripts about Nuremberg, try Yale University’s the Avalon Project and the National Archives Collection. And if you’re interested in how Wyzanski’s view of the trials evolved, he wrote an update in The Atlantic in December 1946, Nuremberg in Retrospect.

 

Gladow, boy gangster of postwar Berlin

22 Wednesday Mar 2017

Posted by Anika in Crime, Everyday life, Personalities, postwar

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berlin, criminal, gangster, germany, postwar

His name was Werner Gladow, and his hero was Al Capone.

He reflected just about the worst of postwar Germany. As became clear later when he was on trial for murder, he was only interested in getting rich, and it didn’t matter how he did it — or who he had to hurt. It could be argued any sense of morality had been kicked out of him by the war and Germany’s defeat; he was 14 when the Russians took Berlin. But it was just as likely he was a sociopath to begin with. His short and violent criminal career ended with him being one of the first people to be executed in the new East Germany.

Born in 1931, he bounced from one school to another (11 by the age of 15), and landed after the war in the criminal elements around Alexanderplatz and Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse, where he did what many teenagers did — tried to make a quick profit in the black market. During one of his first attempts at swindling customers, he landed in prison for a few months, where he recruited some of the first members of what would become the Gladow Gang. Between 1947 and 1949 he committed 375 robberies in banks, markets, shops and jewelry stores.

He was a smart kid and knew how to use the political situation in the divided Berlin to his advantage. His gang would commit robberies in West Berlin, then flee back into East Berlin (it was easy to go back and forth in the years before the Berlin Wall was built). The western police had no authority in the east, and couldn’t pursue them. The eastern police wouldn’t pick up the chase since the crime had been committed in the west. The next time, Gladow committed his robbery in the east and fled to the west. After awhile he got cocky, leaving visiting cards at the scene of robberies and playing up to the press.

He also got more violent. His gang acquired firearms any way they could, including mugging police. They killed the driver of a chic car and stole it, only to get it stuck in the sand near Müggelsee. They tortured a businessman and his wife for the key to their safe.

Betrayed by one of his gang, the police caught him in a gun battle worthy of a Chicago gangster. (Here’s a 1950 Spiegel report on Gladow’s arrest). He was lightly wounded on the chin, and at the sight of his own blood, he fainted. He was convicted of murder, attempted murder and assorted other crimes. When he was hanged, he was only 19.

 

 

Slave labor and living history

09 Wednesday Mar 2016

Posted by Anika in Crime, general, Soviets

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

germany, history, nazi, postwar, Russians, slaves, students

Here in Germany, my kids aren’t old enough to learn about the Nazi era in school yet. So I recently jumped at the chance to see what high school-age students were doing. It’s hard enough getting young people interested in all that old stuff. And anything short of virtual reality probably wouldn’t impress them, right?

So off I went to what the press was calling a “lecture performance” of 12th graders from the Burggymnasium in Essen. The venue piqued my interest too; the performance took place in the wartime air raid bunker under the city archive.

Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-B25447 / CC-BY-SA 3.0

Soviets deported to Germany, June 1942. Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-B25447 / CC-BY-SA 3.0

But first we crowded into the archive’s foyer in front of a table where two students in blouses and braided hair sat working. Cheerful period music was echoing in the hall, and it made me feel a little uneasy. We were there to learn about forced labor in wartime Germany – hardly cheerful. In clipped tones, the students called for us to get in line. It was dawning on some of us that the performance had already started.

When we entered the building, we were handed a card with a number and had been told it would be used to divide up the groups since the bunker space was so small. But once we got to the table in the foyer, we gave up the first number and were given another — mine was 721 — written on white tape. “Wear it in a visible place,” they told us. I slapped mine on my coat without asking what the number was for. I had a pretty good idea.

Numbered, I had to walk alone between two students in white shirts and dark pants. They stood at the foot of the stairway leading down to the basement. They held file folders, and as each of us walked by, they said in a bland tone, “Follow the directions.” Always this firm, impersonal tone. I was impressed and a little uneasy the students managed it so well.

In the narrow basement hallway, more students in white ordered us to go right or left. I joined the group waiting quietly in the right-hand hall. Maybe the others felt the same way I did, caught off balance by how quickly we obeyed what seemed like random orders.

Ukrainian women examined by German officials for work. May 1942. Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-B19880 / Knödler / CC-BY-SA 3.0

A door opened. This wasn’t the bunker yet, but a medium-sized room where thirty of us crowded inside. The windows were covered for the blackout. There were students in white shirts at a table with a scale, some bread and a cooking pot. There were students in baggy or shabby clothes lined up, their heads bowed. The “man in charge” talked to us then, complained about how hard it was to feed these people — the shabby ones, the Ukrainians dragged to Germany to work. When he had a question for us, he barked, “How much did a slave worker eat per day, number 721?” We looked down at the numbers on our coats, trying to remember who (what?!) we were. He talked about duty, and how if he wasn’t firm, if he failed in his duty, his own family would suffer. At which point he gave one of the student-slaves a mock kick and walked off.

The slaves spoke too — at first about home. How much they missed it, how their home gave them strength to endure. One scrubbed the floor as she talked about her fear of getting sick, of not being able to work anymore. It was uncomfortable having to look down on her the whole time. An air raid and sudden darkness, and we were evacuated out of the room.

To the bunker. Through a narrow door, we climbed into a nest of rooms with bare and dusty walls. Here and there, someone had stenciled the capacity the rooms had — 25 people, for instance, in a space too small to be comfortable. As we wandered from room to room, students acting as slaves told their stories of being snatched from their villages in the Ukraine or Russia. The journey to Germany in freight trains and the yearning for fresh air, space and freedom. Their work — sometimes with German families who treated them kindly; more often in factories, especially in Essen, where they were worked to exhaustion or death. Two students were closed into a replica of the famous steel locker used as an isolation cell and punishment for forced labor. There was poetry and artwork and period photos beamed on the walls. A group of students sang about home in German and Russian to a guitar accompaniment.

When we left the claustrophobic nooks and crannies of the bunker, the performance was over. My first thought was — these 12th graders put together one of the most informative and moving bit of living history I’d ever experienced. They had studied the testimony of forced labor and the Germans in charge of them to understand what went on in their own words. Students who spoke Russian translated some documents fully into German for the first time. But it was the performance itself, creating it, writing it and performing, that brought the students closer to the tens of thousands of slave workers forced to come to Essen more than 70 years ago.

An excellent performance and a great experience. Bravo.

 

War criminals move in

15 Friday Jan 2016

Posted by Anika in Allies, Crime, Personalities, postwar

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

germany, nuremburg, postwar, prison, spandau, war crimes

6th_Inf_Regt_Spandau_Prison_1951

Spandau Prison 1951, public domain

I’ve always considered Spandau Prison a bit like something in “news of the weird.”

On July 18, 1947, the seven top German war criminals to survive World War 2 moved into their new prison in the Spandau district in Berlin. Rudolf Heß, odd bird and formerly Hitler’s favorite, had a lifetime sentence. So did the economic minister Walther Funk and the head of the navy, Erich Raeder. The wily Albert Speer got twenty years, not for being Hitler’s architect, but for feeding the Third Reich’s armaments factories with slave labor from occupied lands. Baldur von Schirach got 20 years for his role in the Hitler Youth. Konstantin von Neurath got 15, and Karl Dönitz, Reichspresident after Hitler’s death, got 10.

The Allies weren’t taking any chances. The criminals were locked into individual cells in the former fortress prison with guards from all four victorious powers, who rotated the duty every month.

If there was any sign of how dangerous the Allies considered these men, this was it. An entire prison for 7 people in isolation as if they were a cancer – which they were. Still, it’s amazing how much time, effort, resources and money the Allies poured into that prison for so few men for thirty years.

I’m not sure if the special treatment helped these men maintain a certain status that it would’ve been best to wipe out right away via keeping them in a normal prison. In isolation, but a run-of-the-mill one, same as any other max security prisoner would get. It would’ve been nice to see these war criminals cut down to size.

The prison isn’t there anymore, and here’s why. Rudolf Heß, 93 and the last inmate, killed himself in 1987. With that, the prison had fulfilled its purpose. It was torn down so that neo-Nazis who revered Heß couldn’t use it as a shrine.

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