by LARS H. OTTOSON
February 12, 2002
Ladies and Gentlemen:
Thank you for inviting me to your longjohn part of the world. I am very honored
to be here on what must be holy ground for many researching jurists and the
memorial to one of the finest legal brains in the U.S., Robert H. Jackson.
And I am very pleased that this evening is also part of an American Scandinavian
Heritage Foundation event, as I devote much of my time researching Scandinavian,
and especially Swedish, roots south of the Georgia border. I live close to
a road called Oslo Road in a part of Indian River County that was once known
as Viking County.
Within these walls I figure there isn’t much I can tell you from the
Nuremberg trials, that hasn’t been told and volumed here before. I was
in Nuremberg only around the time of the sentencing and that didn’t
get me especially deep into the preceding court events. I knew about Robert
Jackson from his work in London to get a prosecurial team together.
I remember that when I returned to London I did a program, dealing primarily
with the work of the judge, Lord Lawrence, and Robert H. Jackson whom I remember
calling a pioneer in war crimes jurisdiction and the one who laid the ground
rules for war time trials and the fact, widely recognized today, that obedience
to a supervisor, whether civilian or military – under war conditions
is no escape clause from justice.
I came to England towards the very end of World War II, in a darkened Lincoln
Bomber who made a secret landing in Sweden to pick me up and unload me among
some corrugated sheds that was all that Heathrow airport was in those days.
The doodlebugs were still falling over London and when I heard them I started
to run for shelter until someone told me that as long as you hear them, you
are all right. It’s when you don’t hear them any longer that you
have to watch out.
I was a young and green journalist who had just been promoted from sports
editor to night editor of Ostergotlands Dagblad in Norrkoping and now recruited
by the BBC as a reporter and a feature writer for the Scandinavian Region.
I guess they could not find anyone older and more experienced who wanted to
come and live in war torn London.
So here I was on my way to the Freedom Building as we called Bush House between
Strand and Fleet Street where BBC piped out programs to 48 countries around
the clock. I can still almost feel the chills down my spine when I remember
sitting there at the mike for the first time in one of the news studios. Then
“boom boom boom. This is London, Här är London, Lars Ottosn
med vad som hänt.”
It was a remarkable blend of people in Bush House. You never knew if the guy
sitting next to you in the cafeteria was a technician, just another journalist,
the prime minister or the king of some country.
BBC in those days was a school tie institution, Eton, Harrow, Oxford, Cambridge,
plenty of bomber command moustaches and expressions like “press on regardless
old chap.”
Of course we in Bush House were just a war necessity, a bunch of bloody foreigners.
Now one day a security guard from the fine Broadcasting House, smitten of
course by the snobbishness of being a BBC guard, was “deported”
to Bush House for duty. So one day arrives King Hakon of Norway
(Etcetera story)
Anyway, the last doodlebugs fell. My landlady shuffled off in curlers and
slippers to the ladies room and the pub and I went to watch Piccadilly Circus
go ballistic. With ruins around you it felt more real than I think Times Square
could ever.
To pay for cigarettes and an extra pint I took a night job over at the Swedish
daily Svenska Dagbladets office in the Times Building. That was my first encounter
with how much better the Gis were off compared to the British soldiers who
constantly grumbled over being outspent for the girls.
Of course I couldn’t care less about that. However, it was very inconvenient
to walk seven miles to get home at night because there wasn’t a taxi
driver in London who would pick up anything but GIs for double fare at night
after the Underground shut down at 11 pm.
In Sweden all I actually worried about professionally was how to get the front
page together looking good. As a night editor you don’t get your mind
into what a story is about, but how to present it. In London I got involved
– too young still to perhaps understand everything.
We had now tumbled into 1946. Robert Jackson had been in London for some time
preparing for the trial together with Robert Falco and Russia’s Nikitchenko.
It was to be against 21 Germans who sort of were to represent in a first round
the very essence of the German military and civilian war machinery, and meant
to be adequately punished setting a warning example for future human rights
violators, mike Milosevic today. It was of course not a fair trial –
it was a fair Victor’s Tribunal.
It became clear to me that I wanted to go to Nuremberg in time for the sentencing,
to experience world history in the making. My boss at the BBC said “go
ahead if you can get there and if you can get in.” Yes, how the heck
should I make it happen.
In every big bureaucratic institution, there are always some employees a step
or two below management who are experts on fixing things effectively and anonymously.
Among the 20,000 BBC employees one of them was Miss Peacock, tucked away in
a basement office in Bush House and responsible for transportation, event
passes and ticketing. So I made it a point to find her in the cafeteria and
talking to her. When she said what a shame it was for the family not having
had a decent Sunday steak because of the rationing since before the war I
went to see my friend Nils Bjork, PR manager for Swedish Lloyd that anchored
its flagship Saga by Tower Bridge every week. He extracted a steak from the
ship’s chef and I put it on Miss Peacock’s desk.
“So where do you want to go luv?”
I said “Nuremberg.”
She said “Oh dear dear, then I guess I have to take the Turk off the
list.”
She found transport for me in a car belonging to a French reporter and his
wife. A Peugot two seater with a back “pocket” meant for luggage
but it had an auxiliary narrow seat. Of course it started to rain right after
crossing the channel and kept raining all the way to Nuremberg. I lived under
a rubber canvas and was bounced around with the luggage as we plowed through
and over destroyed roads, provisiory bridges and into a Germany where nothing
you saw of a city rarely was more than three feet high. People lived like
rats under the rubble. When there was a stray roadhouse left you could have
a meal for 3-4 cigarettes and a room for half a bar of soap.
How come that the Allies chose Nuremberg over Munich for the trials? After
all, Munich was the birthplace of the Nazi party and to try its leadership
there would be like sticking a knife into the Nazi soul.
Nuremberg, the big Nazi showplace was surprisingly unscathed by the war. It
was the place where Hitler had showed off his rhetorics in front of several
hundred thousand Sieg Heil screaming Nazis. And downtown there were enough
buildings still standing that could accommodate the tribunal and its officials.
It is almost like faith had left town to show off the Nazis in their decline
and death.
We journalists were housed on camping beds three or four to a room in Schloss
Farben in Leverkusen, the castle of the Farben Bayer company then the world’s
largest producer of chemicals and drugs.
Thinking back in today’s security stricken world, it is almost unbelievable
that all I needed to get into the very sanctum of the trial, was a simple
pass, with only my name on it and a guy who checked off my name on a list.
I could easily have walked in there with an automatic and shot a lot of people
before the guards would catch up with me. But of course in those days that
wasn’t done.
I could easily have concealed a couple of guns and ten sticks of dynamite
in my briefcase – but as I said, in those days that wasn’t done.
Something struck me as I sat there, only about 30 feet from the accused. How
miserable they all looked when stricken of power and uniforms. These were
men whose sole bearing, like that of von Ribbentrop and von Papen dominated
every room they entered – they ozzed the power of the Vaterland. Stripped
of their uniforms, better tailored than any uniforms in the world, field marshals
like Jodl, Keitel, Raeder, looked like old men who would fit into a rocking
chair on Miami Beach. And wouldn’t that be a punishment for a Nazi!
And there was Goering, who had lost so much weight that his jacket was numbers
too big. But contrary to the other sorrow lot he kept some dignity and cool.
He might have been the worst of the worst put to trial, but he was the only
one to gain any respect and even sympathy by totally admitting his guilt –
no ifs and buts, “I did it.”
We all know that he committed suicide just hours before he was to hang. To
this day there is a mystery about how he acquired the cyanide capsule. Among
us journalists there was widespread speculation. Most of us seemed to thing
that one of the U.S. guards supplied the capsule – a guard who have
been seen having many conversations with Goering.
Goering was liked among his handlers. One of Germany’s flying aces during
the first world war, prior to the Nazi years he spent a lot of time in Sweden
and married a Swedish woman. I found that he was given many privileges –
like often no handcuffs when everyone else had to wear them. Here was the
man who created Gestapo and organized the concentration camps given these
privileges. Maybe it was because he remained a soldier.
Goering was the only one that I found looked totally relaxed during the trial.
He sat there by the low siderail of the defendants enclosure, lower arm resting
on it and his body sort of turned halfway towards the prosecutor. Hess sat
next to him looking like a wreck, hollow eyes like a ghost and always fiddling
with something. The day before the sentencing Goering brought an apple. He
offered Hess a bite, but Hess didn’t want any and Goering shrugged his
shoulders.
The rest of the accused didn’t do much. They sat there stonefaced with
clasped hands and looked just like a bunch of miserable old men. I understand
that back where they were housed several of them were just bickering old farts
– especially the Field Marshal Raeder and Admiral Doenitz.
Aderton times in a row you heard the words “death by hanging”
repeated until it almost kept circulating in your brain. But even here Goering
put up a show. When he came out of the elevator between the two guards, the
only one not handcuffed, he raised his hand a bit as if to greet someone in
the audience. They put the headphones on him so he could listen to the German
translation of his death sentence.
Apparently something went wrong and Goering pointed to his headphones that
he could not hear. He was given a couple of other headphones. With a smile
and making a ring of thumb and index finger he signaled that he could near
Lord Justice Lawrence again dooming him to death.
Twenty-one went to trial. Eighteen were sentenced to death: Goering, von Ribbentrop,
Keitel,Kaltenbrunner, Rosenberg, Franch, Frick, Streicher, Sauckel, Jodl Seyss-Inquart,
and Bormann who never turned up.
Raeder and Hess were given life. Baldur von Schirach and Speer got twenty
years, von Neurath got fifteen years and Doenitz ten years. Schacht, Fritzsche
and that old fox von Papen were acquitted. Over here professional soldiers
disagreed with jackson’s prosecution of Jodl and Doenitz.
In a victories tribunal, only losers get punished of course. But there is
one loser I am surprised was not punished – Albert Krupp, Germany’s
leading industrial who kept the German war machine going with slave labor
to the end. Maybe it was because the allies needed Krupp for rebuilding the
Germany he had helped to make a war and hate machine.
At the Nuremberg trials of course none of the prosecutors asked the defendants
how this could happen. That was not their job. And in all that has been written
about the rise and fall of the Third Reich, it has always amazed me that no
one really came up with an answer to why the rest of, at least Western Europe,
let all this happen, believing that a man who promised peace in our time to
old fooled Chamberlain, would keep that promise just like he had kept promises
in Austria, Saarland, Sudetenland, etc.
One answer is of course that no one had the military machinery to stop him
plus he had an amazing following in Europe. Europeans loved military uniforms
and parades. It goes back hundreds of hears when you basically were nothing
in the society unless you wore a uniform. The imperial courts were crowded
with overdressed officers who all wanted a war to play with. In England the
oldest son became an officer and hopefully found a post somewhere in a colony
where he could prove himself. It built on a past filled with little men who
got to play out their perverted war; lusts like Napoleon and Charles XII.
After Napoleon, Europe took a deep breath and then the military build up started
all over again into a first world war. Then to punish each other for the mistakes
of that war, a second world war was a German necessity.
Europe was sort of ready for Nazism. People thought that Mr. Hitler must be
quite a guy for he made the trains run on time and everyone had a job after
the dismal Weimar Republic. And Mussolini made his trains run on time and
so did Franco in Spain. And they didn’t bother much about civilians.
The best military tailors in Europe gave their government halls a grandeur
not seen since Kaiser Wilhelm or Franz Joseph’s days in Vienna. Then
they put uniforms on the young ones and made them parade. And the young ones
loved it.
This was Sweden 1937 with two Nazi parties one under a veterinarian from Karlstad,
Birger Furugård, and another under a Mr. Nothing Sven Olof Lindholm.
Their ranks were filled with military officers. Ninety percent of the Swedish
officers corps admired Adolph Hitler.
Squarely on Hitler’s side was of course the swelling Norwegian Nazi
party under who else but Quisling. The Danish army was nazified too. The Nazis
were strong even in England under Mosley.
All the royal families in Europe stemmed from German aristocracy and the name
of their German castles and burgs are still reflected in names like Mountbatten
for Battenberg. Edward of England was a great friend of Herman Goering and
the British thanked God when He found Mrs. Simpson giving them a chance to
send him into obscurity in the Bahamas spending most of his leisure time with
Axel and Marguerite Wennergren, founder of Electrolux, who stayed there since
their yacht was not allowed to anchor in the U.S. because of the owner’s
German ties.
Now most of that you probably already know, but maybe you have not reflected
on how Hitler would see that as an endorsement of his work to return Germany
to European dominance until he buried it in Nuremberg.
That all came to my mind when I sat there and looked at this sorrowful uniform
stripped ensemble of old and middle-aged former pompous asses.