The Writers' Castle, page 20
Brandt differentiated between guilt and responsibility. For him, even those found innocent of direct complicity in Nazi crimes shared in the responsibility of the collective. Moreover, he utterly rejected the common view that Nazi barbarism was akin to a natural catastrophe beyond human control.
Brandt spent several months in Nuremberg, staying until Christmas 1945, then again in the new year until February, and then again in the spring and late summer of 1946. In a letter to his journalistic colleague Olaf Solumsmoen on 27th November 1945 he wrote, “It is frantically interesting here,” although he also complained about feeling very isolated. He didn’t know whether his articles were reaching Oslo, nor whether they were being published. Contact was very difficult. There were no direct telephone connections, and Brandt’s articles couldn’t contain any breaking news because they were delayed for days before appearing. He had to adapt to these circumstances. It’s no surprise, then, that Arbeiderbladet only published six reports with his byline.13
Brandt mostly filed factual news reports and protocols that focused on events without a great deal of reflection. For example, his piece on 24th November 1945 ran under the headline “Yesterday the American prosecutor presented new, unknown documents revealing Hitler’s plans”; one the following day read “New important revelations are expected in Nuremberg”; and one in December was titled simply “Review of the Nuremberg Criminals”. As the last headline suggests, that article surveyed the defendants one by one: “Göring has lost a lot of weight. He seems in better health than in the past twelve years. The external indications of past power and grandeur have disappeared… There’s not much left of Ribbentrop, if indeed there was anything to him other than the external polish of a wine dealer… Sauckel, the former regional leader of Thuringia who had 12 million foreign labourers under him during the war, seems to be in a good mood. Often, he sits there grinning. In terms of his repulsive external appearance, he’s not far behind Streicher.”14 Brandt didn’t specify what he found so repulsive, and he avoided any form of analysis or intellectual engagement with the trial, strictly confining himself to descriptions.
Like other correspondents, Brandt built up emotional armour to defend himself against the horrors made public in Nuremberg, which would have led even the strongest personalities to the brink of a nervous breakdown. Later he would recall that on more than one occasion he had been close to following the lead of an American colleague who had sent a telegram home reading: “I can’t take it. I have no words any more.”15
Criminals and Other Germans was unlike his articles, which depicted the trial’s daily revelations with journalistic distance. Brandt devoted most of his attention as a writer to the book and worked on it obsessively, wanting to publish it as soon as possible. It was in this forum that he strove for intellectual depth.16 Brandt forewent the extensive external descriptions of the defendants he included in his articles. Instead, he showed himself to be a precise political observer and an exacting researcher. The book was his attempt at “describing clean-up operations between the ruins”, both “on the streets and in people’s minds”. During his time in Nuremberg Brandt undertook several trips through what remained of his former homeland, and he combined his impressions of the trial with accounts of his travels. He explored the question of whether there had been a German Resistance movement and shone a spotlight on the policies of the Western Allies and the Soviets. On the basis of conversations conducted with Germans, he discussed post-war living conditions in the country. He was keenly interested in the situation in the four different occupation zones and the future of Germany in Europe. The book was divided into seven chapters, only two of which dealt with the Nuremberg trials. One of those consisted of a record, akin to the minutes of a meeting, of the four prosecutors enumerating their evidence at the trial. But Criminals and Other Germans is not a straightforward account of the trial from beginning to end. In fact, Brandt departed Nuremberg months before the verdicts were announced.
Katyn
Given the fact that, as Chancellor, Brandt advocated aligning Germany with the West, as well as anti-totalitarianism and anti-Communism, it’s surprising that his book optimistically predicted that there would be no break between the Soviet Union and the Anglo-Saxon Allies “because it’s not in the interest of either side”. In 1945 and 1946, he treated the Soviet Union with kid gloves. In February 1945, six years after the Red Army had attacked Finland, Brandt wrote that “experience in the Balkans, in Finland and in Poland” didn’t suggest that “any comprehensive and brutal interventions in the forms of social life in these countries are intended by the Russian side”.17 Brandt was also still convinced that the Soviet Union represented no threat to Polish freedom. Indeed, he envisioned peaceful cooperation with the Soviet Union—although he himself had seen how the Soviet secret police had helped the Spanish Communists eliminate their rivals during the Spanish Civil War. In 1944, he wrote from Scandinavian exile: “As socialists we have a vested interest in close, friendly relations with the Soviet Union.” Such relations, he added, were “one of the crucial conditions for the future of the German people and the stabilization of peace in Europe”.18
This stance influenced Brandt’s reporting from Nuremberg. In both his articles and his book, he studiously ignored the Stalin-ordered massacre of Katyn, even though it was the subject of one part of the trial. In the spring of 1940, 4,400 Polish POW officers were killed in the forest of Katyn near Smolensk. On several occasions since 1943, also during those weeks in which the disputes surrounding Katyn had attracted international attention, Brandt had met with representatives of the Polish Socialist Party. But he failed to mention Katyn in anything he published during or immediately after the war. He would first broach the topic in his 1989 memoirs.19
Between 22,000 and 25,000 Poles were murdered on Soviet territory during the Second World War. The mass executions of Katyn were followed by numerous other killings of Polish military officers, police officials and intellectuals. In the spring of 1943 German troops who were occupying the area exhumed the bodies in Katyn, and the Nazi regime publicly blamed the Soviets for the massacre. The intent was, on the one hand, to celebrate the Nazi “liberation” of the people of the Soviet Union from the yoke of Bolshevism and, on the other, to confront the Western Allies with Soviet atrocities. Above all, Goebbels and his fellow propagandists wanted to drive a wedge through the anti-Nazi alliance.
Moscow reacted by blaming Germans for the murders. Stalin feared that the Katyn massacre could discredit the Soviet Union internationally and insisted it be added to the list of charges against the major war criminals in Nuremberg. The other prosecutors urged General Rudenko to forgo this accusation since it would give defence lawyers the opportunity to reject the charge and to accuse one of the powers responsible for conducting the trial of a horrific crime. But Rudenko stood his ground and propagated the falsehood that Katyn was another Nazi atrocity. He deliberately overstated the number of dead as 11,000 and blamed the killings on a pioneer battalion code-named “Staff 537” under the leadership of an officer called Arne.
The Neue Zeitung passed on this version of events, but a former officer named Reinhardt von Eichborn, who had served in “Staff 537”, read it and instantly recognized Rudenko’s charge as a lie. In reality, what was actually known as “Unit 537” had been an intelligence group, the officer in charge was a man named Friedrich Ahrens, and the unit had been quartered from December 1941 to January 1943 in barracks some kilometres from Katyn. Eichborn travelled to Nuremberg to testify and refute the accusations levelled against his unit. The court also heard from Friedrich Ahrens, who testified on 1st July 1946. Ahrens and Eichborn were joined by a further exonerating witness, while three Soviet witnesses immediately swore to the contrary.
One evening, a putative representative of the Soviet press approached Ahrens, who was quartered in the building on Novalisstrasse for witnesses not suspected of war crimes and was allowed to move freely about Nuremberg. As he made his way back to his quarters, he thought he was being watched. The next day, when he reported his suspicions that the Soviet secret service was threatening him to the general secretariat of the court, he was promptly prohibited from leaving the witness house.20 The matter increasingly became a source of embarrassment and confusion for the court since the Western Allies had a good idea, thanks to Polish evidence among other things, that the Soviets were actually responsible for the massacre. Ultimately, Judge Lawrence ordered the charge dropped. It wasn’t until 1990, under Mikhail Gorbachev, that the Soviet Union took responsibility for the massacre, acknowledging it as a Stalinist atrocity and apologizing to the Polish people.
In 1946 Soviet commentators on the Nuremberg Trial not only propagated the idea that German soldiers had carried out the killings. They also made a great show of their outrage at the accused who testified to the contrary, including the former Nazi radio journalist Hans Fritzsche. One of the most vocal critics was Markus Wolf, whose dramatic words surely earned him the approval of his superiors. “Attributing their own crimes to others has always been and remains among the most popular methods of these defamatory muckrakers,” Wolf proclaimed in his daily radio commentary for Berliner Rundfunk on 3rd July 1946. “As chance had it, directly after Fritzsche, attention turned to Katyn, the lowest Nazi provocation of this kind. I would advise you, dear listeners, to read through the Nuremberg reports on the Katyn massacre very carefully in order to acquaint yourselves with the entire repulsiveness of the methods with which Fritzsche works. While he bellows in front of the microphone about the alleged crimes of others, Fritzsche knows only too well that the Polish officers in Katyn were murdered by the [German] Security Service, acting on direct orders from above.”21 Sixty years after the start of the Nuremberg Trial, the Tagesspiegel newspaper asked him about his reporting on the Katyn massacre. “Back then I thought it was a German crime,” he claimed. “I didn’t have any information [to the contrary] from the Soviet prosecutors.”22
Stalinist Media Work
In Nuremberg, the twenty-two-year-old Wolf rigorously adhered to the Stalinist dictum “You’re either with us or against us”. His reporting was informed by a Marxist insistence on the primacy of social class and served the predetermined propaganda goal of “using the entire trial as a lever to unleashe a wave of hatred in the [German] people and of revulsion [for the defendants]”.23 At the start of the proceedings, the central administration for education in the Soviet occupation zone demanded that special broadcasts about the trial that should end with the statement “The Nuremberg defendants are Germany’s worst enemies”.24 An essential component of this campaign was depicting the accused not as people but as embodiments of an abstract idea to be rejected. Individual characteristics and traits were irrelevant. As Wolf made clear to his listeners, it didn’t matter which books the defendants borrowed from the prison library and how often they attended religious services, since discussing such things “would be to pay them an honour they truly don’t deserve”.25 Over and over, the capitalist system as a whole was blamed for the crimes of National Socialism.
Wolf was well versed in ratcheting up emotions. His commentaries were full of vivid descriptions of the destruction and immeasurable suffering caused by German troops in the Soviet Union. His report in the Berliner Zeitung on 28th January 1946 included the testimony of Auschwitz survivor Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, whose inner strength and confidently down-to-earth manner fascinated Wolf and many others. He also called for the death penalty across the board. “All twenty-one of the accused without exception deserve to die,” he said in his daily radio report on 31st July, adding that “progressive humanity” demanded this punishment.
Wolf admired Stalin and assiduously pushed the Soviet leader’s agenda and put his media policies into practice. He was aware of Stalin’s purges, but not even the murders of tens of thousands of people could shake his faith in the dictator. Even many years later, he still insisted that Stalin “remained the embodiment of our cause, a good and noble cause”.26 The court didn’t heed Wolf’s call for the comprehensive death penalty. While twelve of the defendants were sentenced to die, three received life imprisonment, four were given lengthy prison terms and three were acquitted. In his commentary on the verdicts Wolf supported the position of the Russian judge, who had also demanded the death penalty for all the accused but had been outvoted by the Western judges.
Unlike Brandt, who was sceptical about the fairness of the de-Nazification proceedings, calling them a “bureaucratic witch hunt”,27 Wolf took a hard line. Moreover, he completely rejected Brandt’s contention that German judges should have been part of the trial. In his final commentary on the trial, titled “The World Court Has Its Judgment”, Wolf wrote that the German people had lacked sufficient wisdom and, later, strength to “free itself from its own evil”. For that reason, an international court was needed to render judgment on the war criminals. Wolf ultimately viewed the trial positively and appealed to Germans to learn from their mistakes. This final commentary was broadcast in both Germany and Austria.
Wolf had no way of knowing that one day he would be measured against his own words. In 1993, in an attempt to bring him to trial for “treason and affairs of intelligence espionage”, a prosecutor representing reunified Germany cited several sentences from his final commentary on the Nuremberg Trial, including the rhetorical question “After this trial, who would stoop… to robbing others of their freedom?” This was precisely what his detractors accused Wolf and the other main leaders of Communist East Germany of doing.
Brandt and Wolf regularly crossed paths in the press camp but took no notice of each other. “I only became aware later of Willy Brandt, who reported for the Norwegians—no one knew him yet,” Wolf remarked in a 2005 interview in the Tagesspiegel. “I had an office in the Palace of Justice, where the trial took place, and the first thing I learned was how to operate a teletypewriter. There I sent two fifteen-minute reports to Berlin every day. As of 1946, they were published in print in the Berliner Zeitung as being reported ‘by the special correspondent of Berliner Rundfunk’. I only spoke directly over the telephone in extraordinary circumstance.” Wolf carried one reminder of the press camp with him for the rest of his life—literally. On New Year’s Eve 1945/46, intoxicated revellers had loosened a chandelier in the ballroom of Schloss Faber-Castell and a crystal had fallen and hit his head, leaving behind a scar on his forehead. When he finally departed Nuremberg, Wolf continued to work for Berliner Rundfunk until 1949, before launching his mercurial career via the East German embassy in Moscow as the head of the Communist foreign intelligence service.
Brandt’s time in Nuremberg was a major crossroads in his life. In 1945, he was unsure whether he should stay in Norway or return to Germany. He was a Norwegian citizen— his German citizenship had been revoked and wouldn’t be restored until 1948. Moreover, his job and social life were in Scandinavia. He had a wife and child in Norway, as well as a lover, Rut Bergaust, whom he would later marry. The press camp was a chance for Brandt to test his chances in the land of his birth, to which he remained emotionally attached. He wrote to Social Democrat Kurt Schumacher, who was working to rebuild the SPD, and re-established contact with various colleagues and relatives on his trips through the country. In May 1946 he gave a lecture titled “Germany and the World” in his home town, Lübeck, and that year he was offered the mayorship of the city.
Brandt, today known as a “pragmatic visionary”, did in fact act pragmatically in deciding that Lübeck would be too confining and that he would rather work as a Norwegian citizen in Berlin. He became a press attaché for the Norwegian military mission there and was elected an SPD deputy to the Bundestag in 1949. Although he had remained a member of the “unorthodox Communist” SAP until 1944,28 the key moment in his relationship to the practical reality of that ideology came in the spring of 1948 when the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia seized power in a coup d’état, ending democracy there. That changed Brandt, in the words of biographer Peter Merseburger, “from a supporter of an anti-fascist alliance with the Communists to a so-called Cold Warrior”.29 He would remain such until the first years after the construction of the Berlin Wall.
As the peaceful revolution in East Germany was coming to a head, Wolf would try to portray himself as the face of reform at the mass demonstration against the Communist regime on East Berlin’s Alexanderplatz on 4th November 1989. The former head of the foreign intelligence division of the Stasi wasn’t able to win over the majority of his fellow citizens. In the years that followed he did succeed, however, in establishing a reputation as something of a grandee of Eastern European espionage. He often appeared as an intellectual in German media. In 1986 he began writing books. His most highly regarded work was The Troika, the story of the divergent biographies of his brother Konrad Wolf, a famous East German director, and two friends. It appeared simultaneously in the West and the East in the spring of 1989 and caused a stir with its critical, autobiographically inflected reminiscences of Stalin’s terror in 1930s Moscow.
If Markus Wolf is to be believed, he tried in his later years to engineer a reconciliation with Brandt. In his memoirs he wrote of the Nobel peace laureate: “I personally apologized to Willy Brandt. I myself experienced his greatness as a human being when, shortly before his death in 1992, he publicly came out against me being prosecuted. I never got the chance to see him in person. He felt that a meeting would cause him too much pain.”30
