Hitler's First Victims Page 4
A day before the next round of student elections, Hitler returned to campus. “I do not think there is anything that speaks stronger for the victory of the National Socialist movement than the fact that ever more numbers of young Germans, especially the young people from the German intelligentsia, are finding their way to our beliefs,” the Nazi leader observed. “There can be no liberation movement of a people that is not embraced at the universities, no triumph of a nation when it does not begin there.” The following day, November 14, 1930, the National Socialists swept the university-wide elections, carrying 83 percent of the student vote. Friedrich Alexander was later hailed as the “first National Socialist university of the Third Reich.”
By then, Benario’s parents were living in diminished circumstances. The economic crash of 1929 had jolted the Bing family fortunes. Amid the deteriorating economy, the company tilted toward insolvency, and in November 1931, Bing Metal Works collapsed in bankruptcy. Leo and Maria left their villa in Nuremberg and moved to Moststrasse in Fürth, just off the main town square and a few streets from the apartment Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson would occupy a decade and a half later. Rudolf lived with his sister and parents, working on his doctoral dissertation, on the legal framework of workers’ councils between 1840 and 1849, the precursors to the modern-day labor unions, and quickly found his way onto the political scene.
Rudolf joined the Fürth Rowing Club, which was serving as a cover for the local political activists following the “Presidential Decree on Suppressing Street Violence,” issued in November 1931, that banned public demonstrations amid increasingly violent clashes between the militant factions of the left- and right-wing parties. Rudolf worked to earn his place among the local proletariat, planting trees and hauling wheelbarrow loads of dirt to help shore up the riverbank in front of the clubhouse. He was referred to facetiously but affectionately as “Herr Doktor.”
Rudolf soon took up with Ernst Goldmann. Goldmann was an unemployed high school dropout—he had attended Fürth’s Israeli High School—who was estranged from his parents, Siegfried and Meta Goldmann, owners of a shoe shop on Schwabacherstrasse, just around the corner from the Benario residence. In addition, Ernst Goldmann was involved with the Communist Party.
In July, Rudolf was arrested during a street demonstration outside the Fürth employment office, where a belligerent crowd had been chanting, “Give us bread! Give us work!” He was charged, along with three other demonstrators, with violating the presidential decree against street violence.
At his trial, Rudolf readily admitted to his left-wing political affiliation, observing that the German Communist Party, of which he was not a member, was an officially registered organization that regularly participated in state and national elections, and was represented by delegates in both the state parliament in Munich and the Reichstag in Berlin. However, he denied any leadership responsibility in the demonstration. He insisted that he had been little more than a passive observer. The prosecutor asserted that Benario had been in proximity to the belligerent crowd and that following his arrest both the demonstration and the shouting subsided. He urged the judge to sentence the four men to three months in prison in accordance with Paragraph 2 of the presidential decree and, in addition, to fine Benario fifty marks for his leadership role. In the end, the judge dismissed the charges against the three other defendants but held Benario accountable, since he had not only expressed his “inner solidarity with the demonstrators” but also had “participated as long as possible” in the illegal gathering. The judge gave Benario the choice between eight days in prison or an eighty-mark fine.
Chastened by the experience, Rudolf appears to have withdrawn from political activism and devoted his attentions to completing his dissertation. Four months later, when the police intervened in another communist activity, Rudolf was notably absent. On that night, November, 23, 1931, the Fürth police raided the Golden Lamb restaurant and arrested thirty local communists, including Ernst Goldmann. At his trial, Goldmann, like Benario, reminded the judge of the legal status of the German Communist Party and argued that the gathering at the Golden Lamb had been nothing more than a meeting of party members, not a public demonstration, and thus was not in violation of the presidential decree. The judge acquitted Goldmann and the other twenty-nine defendants. But now both Goldmann and Benario were registered in police files.
The following autumn, Benario conducted the oral defense of his dissertation. On January 28, 1933, he was officially awarded a doctorate in political economy. Two days later, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany. On the evening of March 9, in the wake of elections the previous Sunday that saw the National Socialists claim nearly 44 percent of the vote nationally, a delegate to the Bavarian state parliament appeared on the balcony of the Fürth town hall and declared a “National Socialist revolution.” “Also in Fürth, a city that was once Red and completely Jewified, we will make a clean and honest German city,” he said. “As of today, the big cleanup of Bavaria begins!”
That night the streets echoed with the clatter of jackboots on cobblestones and the pounding of fists on doors as squads of local policemen, accompanied by storm troopers, moved through the town, arresting those they believed to be communists. Around 2:30 in the morning, they stormed the Benarios’ second-floor apartment to take Rudolf Benario into protective custody. His parents objected, noting that their son was in bed with a 104-degree fever. The storm troopers ordered Rudolf out of bed, forced him to dress, then hurled him down the stairs. Neighbors heard screaming and shouting, then the dull thud of the young man tumbling down the stairwell. The next day, the Fürther Anzeiger reported that fifteen communists had been detained, among them “the all-too-well-known communist and Jew Benario.” The brief news item was headlined “Peaceful Night in Fürth.”
Two weeks after Rudolf was taken into custody, Leo learned that his teaching position had been terminated. “The retired editor and guest lecturer at the Nuremberg Professional School of Business and Social Sciences will be on leave for the Summer Semester 1933,” the rector announced, “and his services will no longer be engaged after that point.” There was no immediate explanation for the dismissal, but on Friday, April 7, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service removed any potential administrative or judicial recourse. “To restore a national and professional civil service and to simplify administration, civil servants may be dismissed from office in accordance with the following regulations,” the new law stipulated, “even when there would be no grounds for such action under the prevailing law.” Civil servants who were not of Aryan descent were to be retired and those bearing honorary titles were to be “dismissed from their official status.” The law provided an exception for non-Aryans “who fought at the Front for the German Reich or its Allies in the World War, or whose fathers or sons fell in the World War.” As a peace advocate and a Jew who had spent the war years as an editor with the Frankfurter Zeitung, Leo had no grounds for appealing his dismissal. We do not know the exact sentiments that haunted the Benario household from that day forward, but Victor Klemperer, a Jewish professor in Dresden who had fought in the war, certainly echoed representative apprehensions. “For the moment I am still safe, but as someone on the gallows, who has the rope around his neck, is safe,” he noted in his diary in those days. “At any moment a new ‘law’ can kick away the steps on which I am standing and then I’m hanging.”
On April 13, Leo sat at his desk drafting the letter to accompany the package of clothing and medications for his son. He knew Rudolf was strong-willed, opinionated, and occasionally aggressive, so he sought to strike a tone that might assuage any ire or irritation Rudolf’s comportment might provoke among his keepers. As a former editor, Leo was sensitive to nuance in language, and he now sought to calibrate and measure his words in a letter that not only conveyed both respect for authority along with an understanding of rules and regulations, but also imparted a sense of paternal concern.
“To the Admini
stration of the Dachau Concentration Camp,” Leo wrote, “I kindly ask to give my son Rudolf Benario from the contents of this package those items that are permitted and perhaps to store for him the remaining items.” Leo noted in particular his son’s relatively frail health and expressed advanced appreciation for any “kindhearted updates” on his condition, “since with the exception of short intervals he has been suffering from bronchitis since November.” He closed with a double courtesy, first with the traditional formality, “With high regard,” followed by a subservient nod, “Most obediently yours,” and sealed the missive with his two initials in an elegant and carefully rendered hand that suggested a man of refined manners and good order. For convenience, Leo appended a complete list of the package’s contents.
That afternoon, the Fürther Anzeiger published a brief news item under the headline THREE COMMUNISTS SHOT TO DEATH DURING AN ATTEMPTED ESCAPE FROM THE DACHAU CONCENTRATION CAMP. The text read, “On Wednesday afternoon, according to a police report, four communists interned in Dachau attempted an escape. Since they did not respond to the guards’ calls to halt, the guards fired on them, killing three of the communists and seriously wounding the fourth.” The article did not mention names.
The Amper-Bote carried the story but included news of the anticipated Easter amnesty. “In these days, once again, several more detainees have been released from protective custody, including the Dachau workers Schwalbe, Schellkopf, and Zellner,” the newspaper reported. It anticipated further releases in advance of the Easter holiday.
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* The legal term Schutzhaft dates back to Prussia’s 1850 Law for the Protection of Personal Freedom (Gesetz zum Schutze der persönlichen Freiheit), which stipulated that detainees could be held without cause, but had to “be released at the latest the following day” or handed over to “proper authorities.” The parameters for Schutzhaft were expanded in 1916 in response to wartime security concerns, then curtailed in the Weimar Republic, only to be radically applied under the Nazis.
3
Wintersberger
THE NEXT MORNING, Good Friday, a day when many in Bavaria curtailed their work in observance of the solemn occasion, Josef Hartinger appeared in the office of Karl Wintersberger to report on the alleged failed escape attempts from the Dachau Concentration Camp. “I did not hesitate to give my opinion that the entire story of the escape was invented,” Hartinger recalled. “I remember specifically that I said I was of the opinion that the three SS men had acted on instructions from the commandant.”
After two years as the senior prosecutor for Munich II, Wintersberger had grown accustomed to Hartinger’s instinctual reactions about investigations. But he knew that his deputy possessed “many years of experience in criminal legal practice and combines a quick mind, great intellectual agility and breadth with healthy judgment,” as Hartinger’s June 1931 performance evaluation noted. Hartinger’s legal briefs were praised for their precision, clarity, and intelligence. His appearances both in departmental meetings as well as the courtroom were marked by “eloquence” with a generally “measured passion,” except when confronted by injustice. Hartinger was known to slam files onto his desk, and colleagues recalled hearing his voice booming down the office corridors. Nevertheless, Hartinger was praised for the respect he showed toward superiors, colleagues, and subordinates, as well as the public at large. The black-and-white photograph stapled to Hartinger’s personnel file shows a middle-aged man in suit and tie, slightly balding, with thick-framed spectacles and the onset of jowls. His jaw is set in a determined clench. There is something of a bulldog about him.
Wintersberger was older and more conservative than his deputy. He was twelve years away from retirement, widowed with one child, and in the final years of his career, looking ahead to the possibility of appointment as president of a district court and retirement in 1945 at age sixty-five. Wintersberger had begun his legal career under the monarchy and remained a royalist in spirit, obedient to and in the service of authority. Hartinger recalled that Wintersberger ran Munich II “in a mostly near-authoritarian manner.” Wintersberger was exclusively responsible for the liaison with the state attorney general and the state justice minister, and retained signing authority for all Munich II memoranda and correspondence. “Rightfully so,” Hartinger observed, “because he needed to have a complete overview, especially in political cases.” Wintersberger had scored modestly on his law boards in 1907, compared with Hartinger’s perfect score in 1926. Wintersberger, however, compensated for his academic limitations with hard work and “iron diligence.” He and Hartinger enjoyed a “collegial” relationship.
As a deputy prosecutor for Munich I in the early 1920s, Wintersberger pursued his cases with resoluteness and a commitment to seeing justice rendered. It was a time when many in the Bavarian judiciary remained defiantly conservative and perilously antidemocratic, a point brought home by a controversial report, Four Years of Political Murder, published by Emil Gumbel in October 1922. In his study, this professor of statistics and former associate of Albert Einstein tracked the judicial proceedings for hundreds of murders perpetrated by right- and left-wing radicals between 1919 and 1922, and sought to hold individual judges and prosecutors accountable for lapses in judicial process. The Gumbel report, formally presented in a public session of the Reichstag, represented a devastating condemnation of the German judicial system in general, and the Munich I and Munich II jurisdictions in particular. “Of the thirty-five jurisdictions called to account, twenty-six did not respond, in particular in Munich, where most of the cases occurred,” Gumbel reported. “Three hundred thirty political murders, of which four were perpetrated by the left and 326 by the right, were never prosecuted and remain unprosecuted today.” Gumbel cautioned that such judicial negligence accompanied by the absence of individual accountability set a dangerous precedent that could lead to a spiraling circle of public violence and undermine the foundations of democratic process and the future stability of the republic. “In another era, there was some political risk to committing murder, even a certain heroism,” Gumbel asserted. “But with such leniency today, a person can kill without any risk of consequences.”
Hitler underscored the Gumbel thesis a year later, on the night of November 8, 1923, when he fired a pistol into the ceiling of the Bürgerbräu beer hall in Munich and announced the overthrow of the Bavarian state government, with the goal of marching on Berlin, as Mussolini had marched on Rome the previous year, and establishing a fascist dictatorship in Germany. Hitler’s plans came to an abrupt halt the following morning when a phalanx of state police and military fired on the right-wing rabble on Odeonsplatz, leaving eighteen dead and Hitler with a wrenched shoulder. The Bavarian judicial response confirmed Gumbel’s worst expectations. Since Hitler’s stated goal was to topple the Weimar Republic, he could have been dispatched to the Reich Court in Leipzig, where a conviction for treason could have resulted in a death sentence. The botched beer hall enterprise, in fact, never made it beyond the Munich city limits, and so it was decided to try the defendants within the Munich I jurisdiction. Under the auspices of a sympathetic judge, Hitler transformed the monthlong trial into a media circus that concluded with a scandalously light sentence and an unrepentant defendant. “You may pronounce us guilty a thousand times over,” Hitler proclaimed in his closing statement, “but the eternal goddess of the eternal court of history will smile and tear to shreds the brief of the state prosecutor and the sentence of this court, for she will acquit us.” Hitler was given a sentence of only five years and was out of prison by Christmas.
A few weeks after Hitler’s courtroom triumph, Karl Wintersberger and his Munich I colleagues were scheduled to prosecute the forty members of the Stosstrupp Hitler (Assault Troop Hitler, precursor to the SS) as co-conspirators for their role in the bungled putsch. This hard core of loyalists, who served as Hitler’s beer hall protection squad, had spearheaded the failed putsch, blocking the entrances to the Bürgerbräu beer hall with machine guns, sma
shing the offices of the Social Democratic Party in downtown Munich, demolishing the printing press of the left-wing Münchner Post, and taking six Bavarian political leaders hostage. When the putsch collapsed, the Assault Troop members were arrested. Wintersberger was responsible for the investigation and preparation of the indictments.
Wintersberger made the same case for collective guilt against the Assault Troop that Warren Farr was to make two decades later in Nuremberg against the SS and its related entities. Like Farr, Wintersberger argued that the members knowingly and willingly participated in a joint criminal activity. “It is therefore not relevant in terms of the guilt of individual defendants,” he argued, “whether and to what degree they were involved in individual actions.”
On April 23, the opening day of the trial, the forty defendants paraded into the Munich Palace of Justice for what the media dubbed “the little Hitler trial.” The Assault Troop members were in high spirits, catcalling and jeering at Wintersberger, then forty-three, as he entered the courtroom. Wintersberger was unmoved. He had prepared his indictments systematically and meticulously, defendant by defendant, fact by fact. While Hitler’s trial had been marked by tirades, hyperbole, and repeated raucous interruptions by all parties, Wintersberger’s prosecution was steady, measured, and precise in detailing hour by hour and man by man the defendants’ complicity in the failed attempt “to eliminate through violence the Reich government and the Bavarian government, and to alter through violence the constitution of the German Reich and of the Free State of Bavaria.”