In today’s Los Angeles Times, there is an article about Wilfred von Oven, a personal aide to Joseph Goebbels. He is currently still living in Argentina, writing articles and giving speeches to support the nazi cause. http://www.latimes.com/print/20000317/t000025594.html
Some selections from the article:
So how could he have been cleared of war crimes? Does this man that Goebbels would not have been convicted either? How did the Allies choose which people to put on trial in Nuremberg (and other wwII criminal trials?)
Just about any Nazi was elligable for the vague charge of “Crimes against humanity”. I tend to agree that most high ranking members of Hitler’s government and the SS were just plain evil and deserved punishment. However, the allies would never inflict that punishment if it ran counter to their national interests. For instance, many of the scientists brought back to the US after the war were rabid Nazis, most of whom saw slave labor and human guinea pigs as valid tools of their trade.
My guess is that von Oven convinced some occupation administrator that he was worth more outside of prison than inside. Maybe he had some dirt on Satlin’s sex life or maybe he sold out half a dozen other mid-level Nazis. To make it look good he had to pretend that he wasn’t a Nazi anymore. As soon as he was in pro-fascist Argentina he was able to once again be open about his true politics.
Expediency won out as Cold War started up during the early stages of the Nuremberg trials. Witness how the younger Krupp was not prosecuted although he was on an early list of indictees.
I suppose this person could have delivered information to the allies in exchange for being released. For those cases, I always think of scientists like Von Braun, but he might have had some other information valuable to the allies. It just seems strange that as big a fish in the party as he was could have been given a “get out of jail” card.
Von Oven may have been a Nazi, and no doubt served as a personal aide to Goebbels, but that hardly qualifies him as a war criminal. The Nuremburg trials were directed at those who were ‘in charge’ of activities defined as ‘war crimes.’ Von Oven was a lieutenant, not a rank associated with someone ‘in charge’ of very much. I’m not sure how being a ‘personal aide’ (basically a butler or valet) to Hitler’s propaganda minister could qualify as a war crime…
Association with the Nazi party was never declared to be a crime, and that is correct. Association with the SS (Schutzstaffel) WAS declared to be a crime – the SS was adjudged an ‘outlaw organization’ – and that was simply stupid. Sure, certain small groups within the SS did some pretty horrid things, but, in the historical perspective, the SS as a whole was not unlike our Marine Corps. To declare the entire SS to be a ‘criminal organization’ was just silly.
Patton caught a serious ration of shit when he agreed with a ‘journalist’s’ proposition that membership in the Nazi party was not much different from membership in our own Republican or Democrat parties. George was, as usual, spot-on, as the British say. But the politics of the time failed to allow for the concept of an average Joe (or an average ‘Johann’) freely joining and supporting what was so obviously becoming the dominant political party in his own nation.
As to the main question, “So how could he [Von Oven] have been cleared of war crimes?” Maybe, Arnold, he didn’t commit a war crime! Thinking that Hitler was cool is NOT a war crime! Polishing Goebbels’s shoes is NOT a war crime! Living in Argentina is NOT a war crime!
I mean, what are you saying that Von Oven did that qualifies him to be treated as a war criminal?
I don’t know why fortune smiles on some and lets the rest go free…
“For instance, many of the scientists brought back to the US after the war were rabid Nazis, most of whom saw slave labor and human
guinea pigs as valid tools of their trade.”
Ursa, who are (were) these terrible people? What are their names? If not all of the scientists recruited by the U.S. from Germany after the war were rabid Nazis, then I’m sure they would like the rabid Nazis among them identified so that their own names could be cleared.
Sorry to stray abit off subject. But if you want to read some harrowing shit, read about unit 731 of the Japanese army. Most of them got off scot free in exchange for their “data” on biological and germ warfare.
Do a search on Dora concentration camp. Not one of the rocket team that became the core or the American space program could honestly declare ignorance of what happened there. These men were not forced to do what they did in the name of science. They were all willing to accept the horrors of Nazism as a prerequisite to their dreams of reaching the Moon. No one forced von Braun to take a commision in the SS (which was NOT in any way analagous to the USMC!). He took it so he could get Himmler’s support for rocket research.
Like it or not the first two billion dollars worth of America’s race to the moon was paid for by Adolf Hitler and thousands of dead slave laborers.
You want names?
Wernher von Braun
Arthur Rudolf
Ebehard Rees
Hermann Oberth
Walter Dornberger
Very few of the 126 V-2 scientests that went with von Braun to the USA didn’t have occasion to visit the assembly facilities at Dora. Inmates were hanged with wire from cranes on a daily basis. There was no way a visitor could not know what was going on there. Yet these amoral men were able to put their dreams of the space age ahead of their own humanity. Two-thirds of these men were members of the Nazi Party. There may, as you say, have been some scientests that were guiltless. Most were not, and I’m sure that the innocent would be the first to admit that. http://members.aol.com/InfDiv104/CONCAMP.HTM
In the case of the first big trial, the Allies only tried who was immediately available and of no use elsewhere … The Germans had figured out early that surrendering to the US or UK was much better for them than being captured by the Reds, so in many cases they flocked to the West and gave themselves up. The die-hards ran away to places like Argentina etc., hence the OP.
So at the FIRST, BIG trial (of “Butcher’s Row”, starring Goering and featuring an empty chair to represent Hitler), you had in there some pretty motley characters indeed.
Like Krupp, the arms manufacturer, so senile that he didn’t even understand when he was read his indictment (it was too late to get his evil son in on the deal; HE had to be tried in the less-severe industrial trials) … Raeder, about the only high-ranking naval figure Germany had left … Fritscher, a radio personality controlled by Goebbles (smaller fry could scarcely be imagined, but he was the best prisoner the Russians could come up with and he was tossed in with the rest to placate the Reds - ultimately acquitted, because it was clear he was just a puppet and a loser) … Hjalmar Schacht, Germany’s Finance Minister (certainly an odious fellow but at heart merely a bean counter - at his indictment, he rose in protest to argue that he was only there to be acquitted so that the Allies could claim the trials were “fair” - he WAS acquitted, and a more self-righteous man never went free) … Speer, of course, also acquitted and who lived to a peaceful and philosphical old age in Heidelburg.
The popular conception that all the top Nazis were tried and hung at Nuremberg glosses over the nitty-gritty details which themselves are much more interesting.
Speer was not acquitted. He was convicted and sentanced to, I think, 15 years. After he was released, he managed some miraculous PR coups by coming clean in several books about the horrors of Nazi Germany. He was the only defendent in the first trial to admit his guilt.
Speer’s Spandau (correct title: Spandau: The Secret Diaries book is an odd bit, especially when it gets to the point when it’s just him and Hess and Doenitz left in the prison. Doenitz got out in 1956, and Hess was never released. Speer also wrote Inside the Third Reich.
Yes Von Braun, who developed the first cruise and ballistic missiles for the Germans (the dreaded V1 and V2) went on to become head of the American space program that put a man on the moon.
I understand he wrote a book called “I am at the moon” and I heard the joke that the full title should have been: “I aim at the moon (but I often hit London)”