Warning: This story contains disturbing content.
Last week marked 75 years since the end of trials for Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg. Steve Braunias wonders how we treat such 'demonic' history.
Dunbar Sloane recently held a rare books auction in Wellington, and I bought the complete 42-volume set of the 1945-46 Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals for $190 plus GST. They were sent up to the auction house offices in Parnell in three banana boxes. I took them home in the boot of an Uber on a Wednesday afternoon. It took about an hour to stack them in my shed in correct numerical order, and there they are, in a long, tidy row, with their navy blue binding and their gold embossing and their record of unbelievable monstrousness.
I bought them because I like trials, and Nuremberg was the ultimate trial of the 20th century.
Volume I sets out the charges of crimes against peace and crimes against humanity. There are figures of extreme variousness: the German Army plundered 87,000,000 bottles of Champagne from France, and "it is conservatively estimated that 5,700,000 Jews have disappeared, most of them put to death".
In Volume II, the defendants are asked to plead guilty or not guilty. Rudolf Hess, who had plainly gone mad, replies: "No." The presiding judge says, "That will be entered as a plea of not guilty." And then, transcribed in the court record in italics: Laughter. The judge: "If there is any disturbance in court, those who make it will have to leave the court." It's one of the first signs that the Nuremberg trials are like any courtroom: full of complaint and fussiness, laughing in the wrong places, lies and deception, poor oration, and the endless struggle to contain paperwork.
The judge, to an American prosecutor wanting to present Nazi speeches: "Are the documents very long?"
Reply: "Whenever it is a speech by Adolf Hitler, you can count it is fairly long."
I sit in the shed, pull a volume down from the tidy stack, and take notes. I am court reporting. No one has asked me to, and there is no fine upstanding principle of open justice being upheld, but whenever I get the chance, I sit in the shed on a nice wicker couch and take notes.
To enter the shed is to suddenly step into a kind of subterranean cave, a state of blackness, made dark by the 42 volumes and the awful history they contain. Every criminal trial presents a folder of photos taken at the scene of the crime; the Nuremberg set of 42 volumes includes photos taken at concentration camps. But actually, the text is even worse. The photos of bodies and crematoria are the consequence; the text details the way it was achieved. Volume VII reports that something called The Danzig Anatomic Institute perfected the recipe for the preparation of soap from human fat.
The set was published in 1948. They are court transcripts, from a court especially created for the trial - an international military tribunal established on August 8, 1945, just two days after Hiroshima. There's a sense of haste to the Nuremberg trials: day one was conducted on November 20, 1945, and it adjourned less than a year later (with a fortnight break at Christmas) on October 1, 1946, when 12 senior Nazis were sentenced to death. Ten were hanged the following day. Hermann Goering committed suicide that morning and Martin Bormann was tried in absentia, his likely death outside Hitler's bunker as yet unconfirmed.
New Zealand was signatory to the tribunal, and as such, a 42-volume set was sent from Nuremberg to the Parliamentary Library in Wellington. That seems only proper: a book of this magnitude and profound meaning ought to be stored at New Zealand's Parliament. But the set that I bought at auction was thrown out of the library - or to use the euphemism preferred by library staff, "deaccessioned". I sit in my shed with the 42 volumes and take notes, and now and then I wonder about the gross insensitivity of New Zealand's Parliament putting the volumes up for private sale. As such, I emailed the Parliamentary Library and asked, "Do you think that the decision to rid them from the Library of the New Zealand Parliament is grossly insensitive?"
I received a reply. "The standard process of deaccessioning takes into consideration a range of factors including past-use, other titles in the collection, and whether the titles are available through partnerships with other libraries and archives. The Parliamentary Library is not an archive but ensures there is an ability to source titles, if requested, to support the work of members." The reply read like it was generated by a robot, and it may well have been the case, but I was told the quote can be attributed to Rafael Gonzalez-Montero, Parliamentary Service chief executive.
I continued to sit on the nice wicker couch and take notes, and sometimes worked myself up into a moral rage about the decision to turf the volumes - until I called Dunbar Sloane to ask about the auction and spoke with senior valuer Anthony Gallagher, who said he thought there was another set at the Parliamentary Library. It was in better condition, he seemed to recall. I calmed down. It wasn't like they'd got rid of their only copy.
But when I emailed the library and mentioned the spare set in passing, I received a reply from either the robot or Rafael Gonzalez-Montero: "Deaccessioning is a standard process practised by libraries. The volumes purchased [by Dunbar Sloane] were deaccessioned in 2018 and while we do not hold another set, they are available at seven other New Zealand libraries or online."
They had, in fact, got rid of their only copy. So, the one set held in the seat of Parliament of New Zealand is now the set in my shed, where I sit and take notes. Horror is presented at regular intervals. Exhibit USA-254: "A human head with the skull removed, shrunken, stuffed, and preserved. The Nazis had him decapitated and fashioned this terrible ornament from his head." A witness who survived Auschwitz tells that victims about to be gassed shed their clothes in a room where "a radio played rather loudly". A man who survived the Mauthausen camp says of the prisoners, "They could do nothing, they were absolutely forbidden even to live."
Prosecutor: "Even to live?"
"Even to live."
A man who survived the Buchenwald camp talks about a medical experiment involving the use of a vaccine against typhus.
"To manufacture the vaccine, it is necessary to have bacterial cultures of typhus. Victims were injected with typhus germs and killed so there was a constant supply of these cultures."
Prosecutor: "They were literally murdered to keep typhus germs alive?"
"They were literally murdered to keep typhus germs alive."
The volumes are demonic, a collection of bad spells for extermination. I take notes from each volume, and then put them back on the shelf.
There is a ping-pong table in the shed, plus something like 600 LPs, a pair of gumboots, a hammer and a saw, a painting of Jesus that I bought in Crete, a poster for one of my own books, a black-and-white photograph of a parrot, a packet of chalk. It used to be pleasant and relaxing to sit in there, but I began to find it oppressive, and I felt guilty for owning the Nuremberg volumes. Volume XXIII contains the subject index. Under "Atrocities": bone-crushing machine, utilisation of corpses, crucifixion. Volume XXXI contains affidavits. It includes descriptions of 78 scenes of an 8mm film made by the SS and captured by the Allies. The location is unknown; it's a street, somewhere in Europe. Still images were unable to be made from the 8mm film. It's a small mercy. I think the pictures would be even worse than the text. "Naked girl runs across courtyard… Half-stripped woman runs through crowd… Woman with blouse ripped stands trapped in circle."
What had I bought? To Dunbar Sloane, it was just a lot in an auction. Senior valuer Anthony Gallagher spoke about them with blithe indifference in his beautiful Irish accent. In the catalogue, the Nuremberg set was priced at $300-$500 (I got it for a bargain). I asked Anthony how he arrived at that figure and he said, "I based that on what they came up for on auction overseas and took an average price. But it's a big bulky heavy unwieldy set that not a lot of people are going to be bothered dealing with or looking at. That's the downside from the selling point of view."
He acquired the set from Parliamentary Services about 18 months ago, and they had passed through two previous auctions without a bid until I saw them. "They don't fetch vast prices. It's just not something a lot of people want to read about. There's a bit of a stigma attached to some of this stuff. People don't want to get near it."
Really. Volume XII refers to concentration camp guard Rudolf Radtke, a former wrestler from the German circuses, who prepared a special lash made of aluminium wire to whip prisoners. Witness: "On Sundays he would come to the camp drunk, throw himself on the first prisoner he met, torture and kill him."
Volume XVI refers to the Nazi Governor-General of Holland, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, who tells the court he is only aware of one camp, at St Michielsgestel: "The inmates played golf." He pleads for mercy in Volume XXII, and talks of how he actually made life better during his reign of terror over the Netherlands: "I introduced extensive health insurance."
I sit in the shed by the ping-pong table and the painting of Jesus in Crete, and take notes. This is my leisure time. This is what I am doing with my life. It's an interesting pastime and I feel compelled to do it, but it's a kind of moral trespassing – it was all very well to accuse Parliamentary Services of gross insensitivity, but was I any better by taking the volumes into my possession, and storing them in my shed like spoils of war? I felt an imperative to do the right thing. I decided to call Bob Narev in St Heliers.
Last year, I interviewed Bob as one of the last living survivors of the Theresienstadt concentration camp. He was liberated as a boy, and came to New Zealand with his mother as refugees. He had done well for himself as a lawyer and was also very active in the Auckland Jewish community. He would know what to do with the burden of my Nuremberg volumes.
But in the meantime, I continued taking notes, and I became aware of a certain dark glamour, a black potent force, emanating from every mention of Hermann Goering.
"His guilt", said US prosecutor Robert H. Jackson, "is unique in its enormity." He was the star of the Nuremberg trials, the worst of the worst; but there was a charm to his delivery in the court transcripts, at once decadent and amiable. He is the most present of all the accused Nazis. He tells the court in Volume IX: "I did not want a war and I thought the best way to avoid a war was to be strongly armed according to the well-known adage, 'He who has a strong sword has peace.'" He delights in language, in adages and images, in games. They reach a fine point during his cross-examination by Soviet prosecutor General Rudenko, who asks him about Germany's intentions following its invasion of Russia during Operation Barbarossa.
Rudenko: "After the war was won, you would have seized Russian provinces and annexed them."
Goering: "Not in principle. As an old hunter, I acted according to the principle of not dividing the bear's skin before the bear was shot."
Rudenko: "I understand. And the bear's skin should be divided only when the territories were seized completely, is that correct?"
Goering: "Just what to do with the bear's skin could be decided only after the bear was shot."
Rudenko: "Luckily, this did not happen."
Goering: "Luckily, for you."
The volumes are full of amazing reading. But had anyone read this particular set? In the back of Volume I, a library card records the date of the only issued set, on March 29, 1949, to the only borrower, whose name is illegible. Maybe they didn't even get very far. Maybe I was the first to open the covers of all the 42 volumes, the first to walk through their valley of evil. Certainly they are in very good condition. When I talked with Anthony Gallagher of Dunbar Sloane, I asked him if he regarded the set purely in terms of the condition of their quality and binding.
"Completely," he said.
"How would you rate this set?"
"An eight-and-a-half out of 10."
"That's moderate. I would have thought nine."
"Yeah, I would agree with that, Steve. They've been well stored in a professional library. I would doubt that anyone had ever looked at them."
We were talking about the books as chattels, and giving a record of the Holocaust a star rating. As for the content, all of the Nuremberg trials are available online. Scholars and researchers can source anything they wish. But the 42 volumes exist as a terrible physical object of history. The binding, the embossed covers – this is the 20th century at work, this is civilisation trying to reclaim a sense of order and justice; these are exhibits.
I called Bob. He heard me out and said he would make a few calls. He got back to me a few days later with a number for someone at the Holocaust Centre in Wellington; he wasn't sure, but he thought they might be interested in storing the books. I wrote down the name and number, and thanked him. I like Bob a lot. He's a man who wants to be of service, who is always keen to lend a helping hand. He was too young to remember much about life in Theresienstadt, in occupied Czechoslovakia, where an estimated 90,000 Jews were sent east to their deaths in Auschwitz and Treblinka. He still has the yellow Jewish star he was ordered to wear.
I phoned the number for the person at the Holocaust Centre. There was no reply. I went back to the shed, pulled down another Nuremberg volume, and took notes. A defence lawyer acting for Fritz Sauckel, who very efficiently mobilised slave labour for the Nazis, comes up with this fantastical line to justify his client's methods in Volume XVIII: "Nothing is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." Rudolf Hess raves that his captors have "strange eyes… glassy, like eyes in a dream."
He wakes to say this of Hitler: "I was permitted to work under the greatest son whom my people has brought forth in its thousand-year history." How to defend Goering? Insanely. In his closing address, Goering's defence lawyer raves, "He always endeavoured to be just. His attitude towards all criminal acts directed against the honour of women are proof of his chivalry. The oath he had taken to the Fuhrer meant everything to him and was the substance of his life. His loyalty became his disaster… In a period still threatened by chaos, the positive value of such loyalty should not be ignored."
God almighty. Madness, abominable acts, a book of the dead. Horror, beautifully indexed. I haven't tried that phone number again for the Holocaust Centre. I covered the 42 volumes with a bolt of silk with blue and gold thread that I bought years ago in Bali. They look nice like that. I've finished taking notes; it's once more pleasant and relaxing to sit in my shed, and take something else out from the shelves.