Prelude to Nuremberg

Allied War Crimes Policy and the Question of Punishment

Arieh J. Kochavi

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780807866870
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Holocaust History
• Index: History

Between November 1945 and October 1946, the International
Military Tribunal in Nuremberg tried some of the most notorious
political and military figures of Nazi Germany. The issue of
punishing war criminals was widely discussed by the leaders of
the Allied nations, however, well before the end of the war. As
Arieh Kochavi demonstrates, the policies finally adopted,
including the institution of the Nuremberg trials, represented
the culmination of a complicated process rooted in the domestic
and international politics of the war years. Drawing on extensive research, Kochavi painstakingly
reconstructs the deliberations that went on in Washington and
London at a time when the Germans were perpetrating their worst
crimes. He also examines the roles of the Polish and Czech
governments-in-exile, the Soviets, and the United Nations War
Crimes Commission in the formulation of a joint policy on war
crimes, as well as the neutral governments' stand on the question
of asylum for war criminals. This compelling account thereby
sheds new light on one of the most important and least understood
aspects of World War II.

1: Governments-in-Exile Call for Retaliation

THE DEMAND FOR A DECLARATION

Polish citizens were the first to suffer from German oppression, and they experienced some of the worst horrors of the German invaders. Within weeks after the German invasion on 1 September 1939, the Wehrmacht had completed its occupation of Poland. The Soviets were not late in seizing their share, and on 17 September the Red Army entered eastern Poland. On 28 September Poland was partitioned between Germany and the Soviet Union. The same day Warsaw surrendered to the Germans, and several days later fighting ceased. Over 100,000 Polish troops had fallen in the month-long campaign, 133,000 had been wounded, and a million Polish soldiers had been captured by the Germans and the Russians. By the end of October Germany had begun annexing parts of western and northern Poland, including Pomerania, Upper Silesia, a part of Mazovia, and parts of the Lodz, Kraków, and Kielce districts. Almost one-quarter of the entire country was annexed to Germany. The remaining areas of Poland held by Germans were placed under the supervision of a civil administration, called the Generalgouvernement. More than 22 million inhabitants of Poland were now under German occupation; nearly half this number, including about 600,000 Jews, resided in the territories annexed by the Reich. The rest, some 12 million people, including 1.5 million Jews, lived in the Generalgouvernement areas. More than 1 million Poles were deported to the Generalgouvernement from the territories incorporated into Germany. In the area controlled by the Soviets, there were between 5 million and 6 million Poles and 1.2 million Jews.

Germany’s goal was to destroy the Polish nation and to turn the Poles into a slave labor force for the German Reich. In order to achieve this goal, the Germans focused on liquidating the nation’s intellectual, political, spiritual, and economic elites. Poland was turned into a slave country, its inhabitants forced to serve the German economic and military machine: 1,798 labor camps and 136 refugee camps were built, while 2.5 million Poles were sent to work in Germany. Moreover, Poland served the Germans as their main killing ground. For that purpose they built extermination centers and concentration camps. Transit camps for deportees also were used as killing sites. Between 1939 and 1945 6 million people, half of them Jews, lost their lives in Poland through extermination, murder, execution, or starvation or in battles against the Germans.¹

On the day the Red Army entered eastern Poland, the top Polish leaders decided to leave for France through Romania, but they were interned by the Romanian authorities and never reached their destination. On 30 September 1939 President Ignacy Mościcki resigned and nominated as his successor Wladislaw Raczkiewicz, marshal of the senate and president of the World Union of Poles Abroad, who was then in France. The new president appointed Gen. Wladislaw Sikorski, who earlier had been named commander of the Polish army in France, as prime minister. The new government was recognized by the Western Allies as the de jure government of Poland. On 4 January 1940 a military agreement was signed between French prime minister Edouard Daladier and Sikorski that enabled the formation of the Polish armed forces on French soil.²

At the beginning of 1940 the Polish government-in-exile requested both the British and the French governments to condemn Nazi barbarities and to threaten to punish the perpetrators. The Polish leaders also called for making it clear that the Germans would have to compensate for the damages they caused as a result of their violation of international law. British Foreign Office officials opposed the idea. Any such declaration, Sir Orme Sargent, deputy undersecretary of state in the Foreign Office, maintained, would be regarded as mere propaganda. He pointed to the white paper “The Treatment of German Nationals in Germany,” published shortly after Britain had declared war on Germany.³ This white paper, which dealt with German atrocities against German nationals interned in the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps in 1938 and 1939, Sargent argued, “was not a success and was largely criticized as being merely stale and tendentious propaganda on our part.” He assumed that the same would be said of any reports that Britain would publish on conditions in Poland and Czechoslovakia.⁴ Frank Roberts, then acting first secretary in the Central Department of the Foreign Office, even doubted the accuracy of the reports, which came mainly from Polish and Czech sources. He thought that Britain was not in a position to issue absolutely reliable official statements.⁵ Lack of credence given to reports received from occupied Eastern Europe was to characterize the general attitude of British officials throughout most of the war years. In early 1940, British policy was still characterized by the wish to do nothing that could overly irritate the Germans, although Britain and France had declared war on Germany the previous September. (Indeed, the British refrained from taking any military measures until the spring of 1940.)

Nevertheless, the need to encourage the endurance of the Polish people as well as the government-in-exile was recognized and led the Foreign Office to modify its stand. In mid-February 1940, London agreed in principle to the publication of an Anglo-French-Polish declaration. Eight weeks passed, however, before the statement was actually published. In addition to the lack of fervor among Foreign Office officials, differences over the phraseology of the declaration had to be overcome.⁶ In their first draft the Poles had included a paragraph to the effect that the signatories of the declaration reserved for themselves “the right to pursue and punish according to the full force of the law persons of German nationality guilty of having committed acts in flagrant contradiction of the laws and customs of war.”⁷ In reaction to British and French reservations, the Poles then proposed a revised draft less controversial: the three signatories “desire to make a formal and public protest to the conscience of the world against the action of the German Government whom they must hold responsible for these crimes which cannot remain unpunished.”⁸

Well aware of London’s cautious policy at the time, Count Edward Raczyński, the Polish ambassador to Britain, interpreted the debatable paragraph as meaning that any German criminals who remained within Polish jurisdiction after the war would be punished. Sir Alexander Cadogan, the permanent undersecretary in the Foreign Office, disagreed with this limited interpretation. If both the French and the British governments were associated with this declaration, he argued, “that would imply something rather more in the nature of action against ‘war criminals’, which had led us into a certain amount of trouble after the last war.” Cadogan believed that Britain should not define its attitude in detail.⁹

The Poles meanwhile succeeded in winning French support for their revised draft. Charles Corbin, the French ambassador in London, joined the Polish effort to convince the Foreign Office that the paragraph as it now stood did not imply any undertaking to pursue war criminals after the war. British foreign secretary Earl Halifax was not persuaded. He feared that German propaganda would portray such a commitment as evidence of a British objective to destroy the German people.¹⁰ In regard to a declaration, the Foreign Office was only ready to state that the British, French, and Polish governments “must hold the German Government responsible for these crimes, and they reaffirm their determination to right the wrongs inflicted on the Polish people.”¹¹

The Poles were forced to give way in the face of London’s determination not to issue a forthright statement. The British War Cabinet was told that the Polish government had intimated that it regarded the proposed declaration as a statement of principle, not a contractual obligation. That is to say, no claim vis-à-vis the Germans would be based on it by either the British or the French governments in the future. The War Cabinet approved the statement, subject to receiving a formal assurance of this reading from the Polish government.¹²

The declaration was published on 18 April 1940. It accused the German government of opening the war against Poland “by brutal attacks upon the civilian population of Poland in defiance of the accepted principles of international law.” Furthermore, Germany’s acts “clearly reveal a policy deliberately aiming at the destruction of the Polish nation.” Specific mention was given to “the atrocious treatment inflicted” on the Jewish community. Berlin was charged with violating the laws of war and the customs of war on land as well as international agreements such as the Fourth International Convention of The Hague of 1907. The concluding sentence, however, which to a great extent was imposed upon the other two signatories, diluted the significance of the declaration. The three Allies, it read, “reaffirm the responsibility of Germany for these crimes and their determination to right the wrongs thus inflicted on the Polish people.”¹³

Even a much firmer declaration almost certainly would not have caused the Germans to alter their policy. Yet this consideration was not one that guided Foreign Office officials. In addition to Britain’s initial policy not to collide with Germany, the Foreign Office wanted to avoid any undertaking to punish war criminals. It was deemed too problematic and sensitive an issue for London to become entangled in, especially as it had no direct interest in the matter. The failure of the Allies after World War I to implement their threats to punish war criminals only strengthened reservations about making unequivocal obligations at this stage of the new war.

CONTENTION WITHIN WHITEHALL

After the fall of France in June 1940, the Polish government moved to Britain. During the following year relations between Britain and Poland became very close. On 5 August an Anglo-Polish military agreement was signed; Polish forces subsequently fought alongside the British in the Battle of Britain, in Norway, in Africa, and later in Italy, Holland, France, and Germany.¹⁴ At the same time, with Britain left alone to fight a war for survival, the exiled governments recognized that there was no sense in threatening the Germans with reprisals. Nevertheless, the Polish government gave public expression to the Germans’ misdeeds, as did the Czech government, in exile in London since the summer of 1940 but recognized by the British only in July 1941. A joint statement in November 1940 decried the violence and cruelty to which the two countries had been subjected, charging they were unparalleled in human history. The statement pointed to the mass executions and deportations to concentration camps, the expulsion of populations, and the banishment of hundreds and thousands of men and women to forced labor in Germany. A month later the Polish government denounced the German policy of denationalization in Poland.¹⁵

As part of efforts to fortify the morale of the occupied peoples, British statesmen issued sporadic statements to the effect that the Germans would have to pay for their acts. In a broadcast to the French nation on 21 October 1940, for example, Winston Churchill stated that all the crimes of Hitler would bring upon him and upon all who belonged to his system “a retribution which many of us will live to see.” In a speech in Mansion House toward the end of May 1941 Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden spoke of the time “Hitler and his gang” would lose the war. Every German, Eden stated, must know and fear that “the reckoning will indeed be wide and fierce.” Three weeks later, on 22 June, Churchill addressed the question of punishing Nazi collaborators: “These quislings, like the Nazi leaders, if not disposed of by their fellow countrymen—which would save trouble—will be delivered by us on the morrow of the victory to the justice of the Allied tribunals.”¹⁶ His statement came on a very special occasion, several hours after the beginning of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Yet warnings such as these should not be regarded as sanctioning any official undertaking on the part of the British government to punish Axis leaders and the perpetrators of atrocities. They were, rather, firm rhetoric, expressions of fury, not statements of operative intentions.

Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union marked a turning point in the relations between Britain and Poland. Sikorski was quick to realize that London regarded improving its relations with the Soviet Union as a vital interest and that, if necessary, the British would sacrifice their relations with Poland. Whitehall made clear the importance it ascribed to an agreement between the Polish government and the Soviet Union. Disagreement over Poland’s frontiers was the main obstacle to the signing of such a document. The Polish government was determined to preserve its pre-1939 frontiers, whereas Moscow was adamant in its desire to regain the territories it had captured following the Ribbentrop-Molotov agreement. Sikorski, his government wholly dependent on Britain, was compelled to give way to British pressure and to sign some sort of agreement with the Soviet Union. The challenge was to find an equivocal formula that would enable postponement of the clash over Poland’s frontiers. Accordingly, the Soviet government issued a statement that the articles of the Soviet-German treaty of 1939 “relative to territorial changes in Poland have lost their validity.” The Soviets, furthermore, agreed to the formation in their territory of a Polish army under Polish command, which would be subordinate in operational matters to the supreme command of the USSR. Moscow also took it upon itself to grant amnesty to all Polish citizens who had been deprived of their freedom in the territory of the USSR. The agreement, which was signed on 30 July 1941, brought about Soviet recognition of the Polish government-in-exile. For their part both Britain and the United States separately stated that they did not recognize any territorial changes imposed on Poland after August 1939.¹⁷ Several weeks later the British and the Americans followed the Soviets’ lead and finally decided to recognize the Czech government-in-exile.¹⁸

The Germans, following their attack on the Soviet Union, intensified their atrocities in occupied countries, enacting especially harsh measures against both civilians and soldiers in the Soviet Union. Although continual reports on the Germans’ terrible acts reached London, Foreign Office officials generally treated them with great suspicion. By autumn 1941, however, the Foreign Office had to contend with the growing concern among Cabinet ministers as well as in Parliament about the government’s treatment of the reports of German atrocities. In September Hugh Dalton, Labour MP and minister for economic warfare, called Eden’s attention to the “monstrous practice” that the Germans had recently introduced of seizing and executing hostages whenever a German was attacked. Dalton well knew that Britain was in no position to deter the Germans. Still, he thought his government should not ignore such acts. He proposed telling the people of Europe that the names of all those connected with the shooting of hostages—from the commander of the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Prelude to Nuremberg
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations & Acronyms
• Introduction
• 1: Governments-in-Exile Call for Retaliation
• 2: Setting Up a War Crimes Commission
• 3: Summary Execution
• 4: Obstructing the UNWCC
• 5: Atrocities Other Than War Crimes
• 6: Asylum for War Criminals
• 7: Closing the Circle
• Conclusion
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index