On the morning of 1 October 1946 seven men in the Nuremberg dock heard the International Military Tribunal sentence them to terms of imprisonment ranging from ten years to life. They were taken from the prison gymnasium to civilian holding cells and, in the months that followed, transferred to the Allied Military Prison at Spandau in West Berlin. They had escaped the rope. The bench that had spared them had assumed, in some cases reasonably, that the sentences would be served in full. Most of them were not. The seven men sentenced to terms of imprisonment by the IMT served, between them, less than half of the time the bench had ordered. Two committed suicide before release; one, Hess, served his full sentence and died at Spandau at the age of ninety-three; the others were released on grounds of ill health, often well before the schedule the court had set. By the late 1960s only Hess remained in custody. The unmaking of the IMT sentences is a story largely separate from the sentences themselves. It is a story of the Cold War rearrangement of European politics, of the West German state’s slow campaign to retrieve its own elite, and of the limits of what the courts of 1946 could do to bind the politics of 1955.
The seven defendants
Rudolf Hess (life). Convicted on Counts One and Two. Hess had flown to Scotland in May 1941 on a personal peace mission and had been held in British custody for the rest of the war; he had not been physically in Germany after May 1941 and had played no role in the operational decisions of the regime after that date. The IMT sentenced him to life on the basis of his pre-1941 role in the conspiracy to wage aggressive war. He was transferred to Spandau in July 1947. After the release of Speer and Schirach in 1966 he was the prison’s only inmate. The Soviet government refused all requests, including in private from the British and American governments, for his release on grounds of age or compassion. He committed suicide in the prison’s reading room on 17 August 1987 at the age of ninety-three by hanging himself with an electrical cord. The forensic question of whether the suicide was assisted has been argued since; the consensus position is that it was not. Hess was the longest-serving prisoner of the IMT verdict.
Walther Funk (life). Convicted on Counts Two, Three and Four. Funk had served as Reich Minister of Economics from 1938 and as President of the Reichsbank from 1939. The Reichsbank under his administration had run the special account named Max Heiliger into which gold and dental fillings from the killing centres had been credited. Funk’s defence had been that he had been a weak administrator who had not known the substance of what was being deposited; the bench had not accepted the defence but had been moved by his apparent ill health and had imposed life rather than death. He was transferred to Spandau in July 1947. The Allied Control Council medical board released him on grounds of failing health in May 1957. He returned to Düsseldorf, lived in a small apartment paid for by his wife’s family, and died in May 1960 at the age of sixty-nine.
Erich Raeder (life). Convicted on Counts One, Two and Three. Raeder had served as Commander-in-Chief of the German Navy from 1928 to 1943, presiding over the rearmament of the Kriegsmarine and the planning of the war in northern waters. The IMT convicted him principally on the conspiracy and aggressive-war counts. He was transferred to Spandau in July 1947 and released on grounds of ill health in September 1955. He lived for five years in Lippstadt in Westphalia and died in November 1960 at the age of eighty-four. His memoir Mein Leben, published posthumously in 1956 and 1957 in two volumes, gave the orthodox naval officer’s defence of his career.
Konstantin von Neurath (fifteen years). Convicted on all four counts. Neurath had served as Foreign Minister from 1932 to 1938, before Ribbentrop, and as Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia from 1939 to 1941. The IMT sentenced him to fifteen years. He served at Spandau from July 1947 until his release on grounds of ill health in November 1954, after seven years and four months of his sentence. He retired to his family estate at Leinfelden, near Stuttgart, and died in August 1956 at the age of eighty-three.
Karl Dönitz (ten years). Convicted on Counts Two and Three. Dönitz had succeeded Hitler as Reich President for the eight days between Hitler’s suicide on 30 April 1945 and the unconditional surrender on 8 May 1945. The IMT convicted him on the unrestricted submarine warfare counts and on the failure to provide for the survivors of torpedoed merchant ships. He served his full ten years at Spandau, the only one of the seven non-life prisoners to do so, and was released on 1 October 1956. He retired to a small house at Aumühle near Hamburg, wrote two volumes of memoirs, and died in December 1980 at the age of eighty-nine. His funeral was attended by approximately five thousand people, including over a hundred former Wehrmacht and Kriegsmarine officers and a substantial press contingent. Several of the speeches at the funeral defended his pre-1945 conduct in terms that drew formal protests from the Israeli and Polish governments.
Albert Speer (twenty years). Convicted on Counts Three and Four. Speer had served as Hitler’s chief architect and from 1942 as Minister of Armaments and War Production, in which role he had run the German war economy on the labour of approximately seven million foreign workers, prisoners of war and concentration-camp inmates. His defence at the trial had been that he had served his country as a technocrat and had lost his moral way; he had accepted what he called collective responsibility while denying personal knowledge of the killing. The IMT had accepted the defence in part. He served his full twenty years at Spandau, was released on 30 September 1966 at the age of sixty-one, and embarked on a successful postwar career as an author. His memoirs Inside the Third Reich (1969) and Spandau Diaries (1976) were international bestsellers. The journalist Gitta Sereny conducted nine years of interviews with him in the 1980s and published the resulting book, Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth, in 1995. Sereny established that Speer had known far more than he had admitted at Nuremberg, including that he had attended the first Posen speech in October 1943 in which Himmler had described the killing in detail. Speer died of a stroke in London in September 1981 while in the city for a BBC interview, at the age of seventy-six.
Baldur von Schirach (twenty years). Convicted on Count Four. Schirach had served as Reich Youth Leader from 1933 to 1940 and as Gauleiter of Vienna from 1940 to 1945, in which role he had supervised the deportation of approximately 65,000 Viennese Jews to the killing centres in the East. He served his full twenty years at Spandau, was released on 30 September 1966 the same day as Speer, and lived a quiet retirement in southern Germany. His memoir Ich Glaubte an Hitler (1967) was published the year after his release. He died in Kröv on the Mosel in August 1974 at the age of sixty-seven.
What the early releases meant
The release of Funk, Raeder and Neurath in 1954 to 1957 was decided by the Allied Control Council prison medical board on submissions from the prisoners’ physicians. The medical evidence was real; the men were elderly and unwell. The releases were nevertheless widely understood at the time, and have been understood since, as part of the wider Cold War rearrangement that brought the West German state into the western alliance and produced the clemency of the Subsequent Proceedings prisoners at Landsberg under John J. McCloy. The Federal Republic had been founded in 1949. By 1954 it was a member of the Western European Union and on the threshold of NATO membership; the political pressure on the Allied powers to release the remaining IMT prisoners on humanitarian grounds was sustained and, by 1955, effective. The release of Neurath in November 1954 came two months before the Federal Republic joined NATO. The release of Raeder followed the next year. Funk’s release in 1957 closed the file on the men sentenced at Nuremberg to life imprisonment short of Hess.
The Soviet Union opposed every release. The Soviet position throughout the four-power administration of Spandau was that the IMT sentences were to be served in full. The opposition contributed to the choice of Spandau as the location: the Soviet zone administration had a veto on releases, which is why the prison continued to operate, and why Hess remained in custody, until his suicide in 1987. The Soviet veto did not prevent the release of the prisoners on medical grounds, which under the four-power agreement could be approved by majority. It did prevent the release of Hess, who outlived Speer and Schirach by twenty-one years and Dönitz by seven, alone in a prison built to hold six hundred.
What the unmaking of the sentences shows
The IMT had handed down sentences calculated on what was then understood to be the seriousness of the crimes. By the political logic of 1946 a life sentence for Funk’s role in the Reichsbank gold operations and a fifteen-year sentence for Neurath’s foreign ministry signed off on the deportations of the Czech Jews looked moderate. By the political logic of 1955 the same sentences looked, to the new West German government and its Allied sponsors, like an obstacle to the political reintegration of the country. The men who had stood in the dock and heard their sentences were almost all released within a decade. The court that had sentenced them had no power to require its sentences be served. The sentences had been the product of a moment of postwar moral clarity. The releases had been the product of a longer political return.
This is not a complaint about the releases as such. The Cold War made the rebuilding of West Germany an urgent priority for the Western powers, and that rebuilding could not be done while the country’s prewar elite was sitting in prisons under four-power administration. The historians of the Subsequent Proceedings clemency, particularly Frank Buscher and Kim Christian Priemel, have established that the political logic of the releases was real and that the alternatives were genuinely bad. What the unmaking of the sentences shows is a more limited point. The IMT had set the legal record. It had not, except in the case of the men hanged on 16 October 1946, set the political record. The political record was for the politicians of the next decade to write. They wrote it as they saw fit.
See also
Sources
- Eugene K. Bird, The Loneliest Man in the World: The Inside Story of the 30-Year Imprisonment of Rudolf Hess, Secker and Warburg, 1974
- Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, Macmillan, 1970
- Albert Speer, Spandau: The Secret Diaries, Macmillan, 1976
- Gitta Sereny, Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth, Macmillan, 1995
- Karl Dönitz, Memoirs: Ten Years and Twenty Days, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1959
- Frank M. Buscher, The U.S. War Crimes Trial Program in Germany, 1946 to 1955, Greenwood, 1989
- Kim Christian Priemel, The Betrayal: The Nuremberg Trials and German Divergence, Oxford University Press, 2016