Ernest Michel
Holocaust survivor saw justice served as Nuremberg correspondent
BOWLING GREEN, O.-On Nov. 20,1945, Ernest Michel joined dozens of newspaper and radio correspondents from around the world in the press gallery in Nuremberg's Palace of Justice, where 21 Nazi defendants were about to be tried for crimes against humanity.
He had been forced out of school in his native Mannheim, Germany, at 13 and had never held a full-time job, but the 22-year-old Michel brought a singular perspective to the trial he was covering for the German news agency DANA. Only seven months before, he had escaped from Berga, one of several concentration camps where he spent nearly six years as a slave laborer.
When he entered the gallery on the trial's opening day and caught sight of Gestapo chief Hermann Goering and the other defendants below, "I had to pinch myself," Michel (pronounced mich-ELLE) recalled Friday (March 24) at Bowling Green State University.
"This is real," he remembered thinking. "Here they are. They are sitting in front of me.
"I could not believe that I was sitting here in the Palace of Justice at Nuremberg and witnessing the end of the Third Reich," said Michel, a speaker at BGSU's "Trajectories of Memory" conference on the Holocaust.
He remained at Nuremberg until the following June, writing stories under a byline that included the words "Auschwitz Survivor #104995."
"Sometimes I lost myself, and I wanted to jump down and grab them. 'Why did you do this?' 'Why did you kill my parents?'" Michel said. But he knew he couldn't because of his job, which had come about as an extension of the Allied military government's search for workers at newly licensed newspapers in postwar Germany. Among his most vivid memories of the trial, he said, is the opening statement before the International Military Tribunal by Robert H. Jackson, U.S. Supreme Court justice and chief American prosecutor at Nuremberg. Quoting Jackson, Michel read: "The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated. That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason."
Michel also recalled testimony by Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz, that two and a half million people-mainly Jews-were gassed at the infamous camp. "He exaggerated," said Michel, questioning still why Hoess did it. "The total number was one and a half million."
Michel briefly related his experience at Auschwitz, where he arrived in March 1943. "It was an inferno," he said, remembering the armed soldiers, dogs and "peculiar smell" in the air. "I knew this was not another labor camp. I knew this was something else."
The arriving prisoners received either a thumbs up or thumbs down from an SS officer, whose disapproval sent a prisoner to the gas chamber immediately. He didn't know it then, but the officer was Josef Mengele, said Michel, who was later forced to help with the doctor's experiments with electric shock.
"Slaves were treated better than we were," he said, although he and fellow prisoners were once reminded they were "the lucky ones" by another detainee. Explained the prisoner, in German: "The others are already up the chimney."
"To this day, I don't understand how I survived," admitted Michel, "but I never, never gave up hope."
Chief among the Nazi oppressors was Goering, who, after reading Michel's stories about the trial, asked his attorney to arrange a meeting with the correspondent. An intrigued Michel agreed, but when he reached Goering's prison cell and the war criminal stood and extended his hand, Michel, in his words, "couldn't handle it."
"What the hell am I doing here? I'm going to shake hands with the top Nazi left?" he recalled thinking. Leaving at that moment, he added, is something "I have never regretted."
Now the retired executive vice president of the United Jewish Appeal-Federation of New York, Michel went to Berlin last fall for a conference marking the 60th anniversary of Nuremberg and its lessons.
Those lessons, he said, revolve around doing whatever possible to prevent genocide anywhere in the world. "Genocide is a product of evil, of hate, of indifference, or moral bankruptcy," he said. "It's up to us, in whatever way we can, to do something about it."