Behind the Headlines Can It Ever Happen Again?

Jahrman was an American GI in the MIS unit who came from Wesermunde. His father was Christian and his mother Jewish and while he escaped to the States, his parents stayed and he told how his father saved his mother by suing the Nazi government for a false claim that his mother was Jewish. He was small and just this side of deformed, otherwise he wouldn’t have been accepted by the Army. He was in charge of the folders in the front office of the camp and made the assignment of the inmates to the team’s interrogators.

One day he brought me a folder. The inmate’s name was Herman Gering, not the famous Marshal, but a little man who was arrested because he had been a Gestapo “spitzel,” or stool pigeon. He was what the Germans called a lumpen, a declassed worker, part of the mass of unemployed of all classes who formed the core of the S.A., Hitler’s brown shirted street gangs. His Job was to inform on people and when they were “convicted” to take them into a closed room and shoot them with a pistol in the head.

He was brought in. Little and formerly fat. Prison fare had reduced the blubber and his skin hung. He was frightened to death. The men of the Team who came from Europe decided to have some fun with him. They insisted he was “the” Hermann Goering. He insisted he was not, pleaded he was not, cried he was not, because he feared if we really believed it, he would receive the same fate as his victims had. He confessed to his role with the Gestapo but refused to admit he was the Hermann Goering.

NO SENSE OF “FAIR PLAY”

One of the men on the team, he had Left his parents behind in Munich and then didn’t find them on his return, had a book entitled “Goering, Arbeit und Leben.” Or “Goering, Work and Life.” It had pictures in it. The title of the book was shown to the Gestapo stool pigeon and then the men withdrew and opened the book as if they had pictures in front of them. They compared him with the pictures and insisted he was the Hermann Goering.

The Europeans in MIS, especially those who had suffered either directly at the hands of the Nazis or lost family, had no American sense of “fair play.” With them it was an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth and in the context of the times, it was an acceptable code of behavior.

Then they ordered the man to strip. Nothing could be more humiliating to a human being than to be made to strip. Naked, he is exposed more than whatever he can conceal within him. As he stood there, they observed him and then said, yes, he was the Hermann Goering and they were glad they had captured him. They let him dress and the man was quaking. He envisioned a near and to his existence.

Then one of the men said to him: “Why did you do it? Why did you inform on people, then take them into a room and shoot them in the head with the pistol?” We were curious what could so debase and corrupt what once might have been a human being. And he said, “So ist das leben.” (Such is life.) And seemed satisfied with the answer.

THE CASE OF THE PROFESSOR

One day, Louis S, a Jewish Sergeant from Newark who was assigned to the Military Government unit came to the camp and told me there was a German professor of political science in town who wanted to help the Americans. The man was young, Louis said, about 39, was married to an English woman and had five children. Bring him in, I said.

The next day the man and his wife came. He was tall, thin and ascetic looking. What blond hair he had was receding and he spoke an impeccable English, having also studied at Oxford. We talked a little bit and I discovered he had been appointed to his job as chairman of the Department of Political Science of Berlin University after 1939. In our books then, he was a “mandatory arrest.” It wasn’t very clear how exactly he could help us but at that point my interest in him was other.

In our interrogations, we were to search out people who, if free, could constitute themselves a security threat. I also learned the professor was a Scharfuehrer (corporal) in the S.A. (Hitler’s Sturm Abteilung), the brown shirted bully boys who roamed the streets beating up and killing people until displaced by the SS, after the 1934 break with Roehm,head of the S.A, who was threatening Hitler’s leadership.

I then told the professor he would have to remain in camp. I told his wife she was a traitor and a renegade and the only reason she was being released was because she had five children.

JOINED S.A. FOR COMRADELY PURPOSES

For two days, off and on, I talked with the professor. We discussed philosophers and literature and I learned his basic job was to lecture troops on the necessity of destroying the British Empire. I thought that was an odd function for a teacher and he said he believed it. How come, I asked, that you, a professor, an intellectual, a thinking man joined the S.A. who were nothing but street gangs? He said it was for comradely purposes. They would drink a beer, that was all. With bums, with bullies, with killers of defenseless people?

I then asked him whether he supported Hitler’s treatment of the Jews (at that point the full story was not yet out). The professor said he was against the policy of destroying Jews. He believed they should have been sent to Palestine or in some far eastern country. I asked him whether he was a Zionist, in that sense, and he said his belief for the dispersion of the Jews to Palestine was simply a rejection of the need to destroy them.

I said, your idea of the final solution is to displace and dispossess the Jews. What did you do actively against the policy of killing the Jews? He didn’t answer. On the final day, when I had determined he should not be left free to roam German cities or streets, to talk to people about his ideas of Nazism, I asked him: And what do you think of Hitler now? He said, Hitler is like your flag. He is above criticism. I had him returned to the barracks and ordered that he not be assigned any work as long as he was in the camp.

I moved to the typewriter to do a report on these cases for Seventh Army Headquarters in Heidelberg and I remember thinking how glad I was that this mess was over, that it could never happen again. Never?