Major Winwood: Recollections of a British War Crimes Trial
Over their Shoulder:
Recollections of a British War Crimes Trial in Europe
by
Maj. T.C.M. Winwood (formerly 1 Major T.D.)
(Leading Defence Counsel, “The Belsen Trial”, 1945)
In the early summer of 1945, I saw a notice from the Headquarters of the British Army on the Rhine requesting the names of serving officers qualified as barristers or solicitors. I had qualified as a solicitor in 1938 and, ignoring the first rule of Army life — “never to volunteer” — I sent in my name. Some two months later, I was ordered to report the following day at RAF Headquarters at Celle. As far as I can remember, there was no reason specified for the visit.
The next day, I was greeted by a Staff Officer who told me, “Well, as you are the first to arrive, you had better take the first four on my list.” Noticing my expression of bewilderment, he told me that as soon as Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp had been liberated, a War Crimes Investigation Unit went into the Camp and, as a result, some thirty members of the SS, men and women, had been arrested and were now being charged with War Crimes. The Accused were in Celle Prison and were due to be moved the following day to Lüneburg, where their trial was due to start in two or three weeks’ time. They had all been offered the choice of being defended by British (not Polish in the case of the Polish accused) officers or German civilian lawyers. They all opted for the first alternative, presumably on the basis that “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.” As I spoke German, I refused the offer of a Dutch interpreter, picked up my pile of papers, and, having perused them for thirty minutes, went along to the prison.
oraz L.S.W. Cranfield (po prawej, obrońca m.in. Irmy Grese),
The first of my four clients was Josef Kramer, now known to history as “the Beast of Belsen”, who had been the Commandant of the Camp. Kramer had joined the Nazi Party at the beginning of December 1931 and had volunteered for the SS a month later. From the autumn of 1934 until April 1945, he had been in the Concentration Camp Service. At the time of his arrest, he held the rank of a Hauptsturmführer, the SS equivalent of an Captain in the German Army.
Dr. Fritz Klein was an ethnic German from Rumania who had qualified as a physician in Budapest while it was still one of the great cities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After three years of wartime service in the Rumanian Army, he and all other members of the German minority in the Rumanian armed forces were obliged under the terms of an German-Rumanian treaty in 1943 to transfer to German colours: by December of that year he then wound up, in SS uniform, as the Camp doctor at Bergen-Belsen.
My third Defendant, Peter Weingärtner, came originally from Yugoslavia. In circumstances not dissimilar to those of Dr. Klein, he had served in the Yugoslav Army until taken prisoner, was sent home on parole until October 1942 when he was conscripted into the SS as a concentration camp guard for the duration of the war.
Georg Kraft, the last of the four, was another SS guard who had been born an ethnic German in Rumania, served in the Rumanian Army until April 1943 and ultimately ended up as a unwilling conscript in the SS.
In the case of the first two Accused, the charges on the Indictment related not only to Bergen-Belsen but to Auschwitz, where Kramer had been Commandant of Birkenau and where Klein had as a doctor taken part in the “selection” of the incoming victims into those capable and those incapable of work, the latter category destined for the gas chamber.
I introduced myself to my four clients. Kramer was most anxious to discuss the whole matter there and then (for which there was not the time) and was most concerned to know whether there were any charges concerning the camp at Natzweiler, where he also had been a Commandant. He was relieved to hear that there were no such charges and I learnt afterwards that this was the camp at which inhuman medical experiments had been carried out. Dr. Klein remarked that he had taken part in the XXXXX rather XXXXX XXXX was an insurmountable hurdle to any defence.
There were immense problems facing the defence. The charges were heinous, time was short, and pressure came from the British Government to get the trial over before the Americans got going at Nuremberg. Although the trial was under English Law, the Royal Warrant, under which War Crimes Trials were set up in the British Zone, ruled out the defence of acting under superior orders and rendered admissible hearsay evidence, both written and oral, subject to the weight to be given to it. This meant that the many statements of the inmates of the Camp could not be tested for the truth as most of those who had made such statements had disappeared into the chaos that was Germany.
Imperial War Museum w Londynie. Luty 2025
We had little time to formulate a coherent defence policy beyond agreeing that we would put forward a joint objection to the jurisdiction and other legal matters at the opening of the Trial and, indeed, from time to time during the trial, Captain J.R. Phillips, MC, RA (later Mr. Justice Phillips) brilliantly undertook the task. Needless to say, these objections were opposed by the Prosecution and turned down by the Court. It was clear that at some point in the Trial the Court took the view that the Defence was making difficulty at every occasion. We were therefore called one evening to see the President of the Court (Major-General H.M.P. Berney-Ficklin, CB, MC) who told us that he did not wish to interrupt us in any way, but progress had to be made. He reminded us that we were still under military discipline and he expected us to comply. We had taken the job as a duty (someone had to do it) and were determined to do our best for our clients, an XXXX XXXX by our visit to the President. Some of us had our Demobilization postponed. One solicitor had to give up his partnership in a Golders Green practice after complaints from some of their Jewish clients. I, myself, was strongly criticized on three occasions: (i) by a Question in Parliament, (ii) a leading article in Pravda and (iii) the British Board of Jewish Deputies. This latter occasion was upsetting because I had been working in London, Frankfurt and Vienna for Jewish refugees in 1938/39. I answered all of these by pointing out that I was not in any way expressing my own views but those of my clients.
Major T.C.M. Winwood rozmawia z Josefem Kramerem.Lüneburg, 17.09.1945
I remember that, at one point in the Trial, everyone seemed confused about the layout of the Camp so it was decided that the Court would adjourn to Belsen where we were shown round by the only person who knew his way around — Kramer himself!
One more problem was that, due to the terms of the Royal Warrant, we could not shift the blame to the Nazi hierarchy, many of whom were held at Nuremberg. It was thought, however, that the Court should have seen evidence of the condition under which people’s lives were controlled by the Nazi machine. We were given permission to fly to Nuremberg to interview Alfred Rosenberg (the philosopher of the Party) to invite him to agree that under Hitler the ordinary citizen and, to a greater extent, a member of the SS had no individual choice to make. I went with another officer with a list of questions to put direct to Rosenberg in German by me. The Americans, who were in charge of Nuremberg, would have none of this and everything had to be channelled through their intelligence office and interpreters. We achieved nothing, as Rosenberg was clearly not prepared to commit himself to anything of importance.
The Trial meandered along with all the evidence being given in English and German (and in Polish, when the Polish Accused were involved). The days of microphones and simultaneous translation had not arrived.
Imperial War Museum w Londynie. Luty 2025
At last the verdicts and sentences were announced. As far as my clients were concerned, Kramer, Klein and Weingärtner were sentenced to death. Kraft was acquitted on the grounds that the evidence against him was too flimsy. Kramer decided to appeal and wrote out his notes which I translated into English and handed in at Headquarters, B.A.O.R. Dr. Klein refused to appeal, saying that he had realized that his part in the Holocaust was such that he was not fit to live. Weingärtner also refused to appeal. I remained at Lüneburg until the Accused were taken to Hamburg for execution. Not requiring an interpreter, I was able to talk with Kramer in the prison, and one of the last things he said to me concerned the visit of Heinrich Himmler and his aide to the Camp a short time before it was liberated. Kramer alone knew of the visit. The three of them went to a spot at the edge of the compound and the two visitors had a discussion beyond Kramer’s hearing. He was, however, quite convinced from their gestures and so forth that they were discussing the installation of gas chambers and/or crematoria to ensure that when the Allies came there would be no one left to tell the tale. Fate overtook Himmler not many miles from the Camp.
When in future the Camp was mentioned, the name “Bergen” was dropped: the name “Belsen” alone being more expressive of all that it stood for.
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