Manstein with General der Panzertruppe Erich Brandenberger, one of his divisional commanders, in June 1941 (Image, Wikipedia Creative Common -
Bundesarchiv, Bild 101I-209-0086-12 / Koch / CC-BY-SA 3.0)
Von Manstein appeared as a witness for the defence at the main Nuremberg trials in 1946, after which he was held as a POW in Wales. He was tried before a British Military Tribunal in Hamburg in 1949, as a result of pressure from the Soviets, who wanted him to stand trial in Russia. At his trial, his lawyer Reginald Paget, proved that an alleged massacre of 10,000 Jews, claimed to have been murdered in just one day in the Crimea, turned out to be nearer 300, and a large percentage were not even Jews.
Below is an extract from Richard Harwood's book 'Nuremberg and Other War Crimes Trials' published by the Historical Review Press
One of Germany's most brilliant and most honourable generals of the Second World War was Erich von Lewinski, who had been adopted at an early age into the von Manstein family, and had taken their name. Both the Lewinski and Manstein families were Prussian militarists through and through, with a very strict code of honour and behaviour. Therefore, it was all the more ridiculous that such a man should be arraigned before a 'war-crimes' tribunal, accused of war atrocities.
Reginald Paget, an English barrister and Labour MP, thought so too, and disobeyed the instructions of the English bar association that English barristers should not defend war crimes defendants. He was so disturbed that Manstein should have to face a British military tribunal without the benefit of experienced British counsel, that he volunteered his services free of charge. Expenses were covered by a special defence fund set up by Lord de L'Isle and Lord Bridgeman; one of the first subscribers being Winston Churchill. A separate German fund paid for the services of additional German defence counsel, which included Dr. Laternser - who had already defended the General Staff at the International Military Tribunal (IMT) - von Leeb at the American Military Tribunal (IMT) and Kesselring at a British Military court in Italy. Paget was also assisted, rather inexplicably, by Sam Silkin, a Jewish barrister who later became a Labour MP like Paget, and since 1974 has been Attorney General. Silkin had a great deal of experience in war crimes trials — he had been President of the Court in the Far Eastern trials of 1946.
One can only but speculate as to Silkin's real function at the Manstein trial. It may be that he was there to keep an eye on the phlegmatic Paget, who was liable to put the defence case rather too forcefully and bluntly. It may be that the revenge lobby realised that the trial of a respected general four years after the end of the war would outrage public opinion too much, so they sent Silkin along to smooth things out a little. Whatever the real reason for his presence at the trial may have been, Paget provides no clues in his book, and has nothing but praise for him. If Silkin was being sincere in his defence of Manstein it was totally out of character with his subsequent attitudes. Sam Silkin is a fervent Zionist and speaks on platforms promoted by the (Zionist) Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Zionist Federation and AJEX (the anti-British Nationalist gangster organisation).
Manstein was charged on 1 January 1949 and the trial eventually opened in the Curio House, Hamburg, on 23 August 1949, before a British military tribunal. The prosecution was in the hands of Sir Arthur Comyns Carr (who had previously served at the Tokyo War Crimes trial) and Mr. Elwyn Jones (previously on the IMT prosecution team).
On the first day of the trial, Paget at once submitted that the court had no jurisdiction to try Manstein, and the Royal Warrant under which he was held was illegal. He submitted that as Britain was still (officially) at war with Germany, then Manstein was a prisoner of war, and if it could be proved that he had broken any of the rules of war, then he should be tried by a court martial, not a military tribunal dressed up as a civilian court. The prosecution replied that Manstein was no longer a POW; he had been transformed into a common criminal prisoner on the discretion of his captors. They went on to state that as a a war crime was so serious it could be proved by evidence that would be inadequate in the case of a lesser crime. From this startling argument, says Paget, it would seem to follow that evidence that would justify a conviction for murder might be insufficient to support a conviction for riding a bicycle without a lamp!
While the tribunal retired to consider this submission, the newspaper reporters at the trial were thrown into a tizzy wondering what 'angle' they should take when they wrote the story up. Several concluded that they would have to ring their employers to get advice on what angle to take. Paget writes that he overheard a journalist from one famous daily newspaper observing, "I sometimes wish I was on The Times and only had to report what had happened."
Needless to say, the tribunal rejected Paget's submissIon and the trial proper began next day. As in the other war crimes trials, the charges were nebulous accusations rather than allegations of infringing specific acts of legislation. There were 17 charges: 15 brought at the instigation of the Soviet government and two brought on behalf of the Communist Polish regime. A Polish government representative in the court was moved to complain vehemently that Paget was defending his client too vigorously, and that the court should not allow it. He felt that this was a negation of the promises made by the British authorities, who had refused Manstein's extradition to Poland on the grounds that he would be dealt with in the British Zone.
The basis of the charges against Manstein was that he had committed acts in breach of the Hague Convention on Land Warfare of 1907. But as Paget pointed out, the Hague Convention was only applicable if all the belligerent Hague countries agreed to it. Several did not. And even those which did, did not adhere to it. By a curious coincidence, another trial was proceeding in Hamburg simultaneously with Manstein's, concerning a shipyard owner who had dared to try to smuggle machine tools out of his own shipyard to prevent them being expropriated as 'reparations' by the British authorities. The defence submitted that the Hague Convention protected individuals' property in times of war and occupation. The British prosecution said that in modern conditions the Hague Convention was inapplicable. In both trials, therefore, the diametrically opposite contentions of the two British prosecution teams were upheld!
The allegations against Manstein revolved around atrocities committed against Russian POWs and civilians, mass shootings of Jews and Gypsies, and seizure and destruction of property. The case was presented over a period of twenty days, by the reading of some 800 documents to the court, and the examination of one solitary human witness, an Austrian corporal named Gaffa. Some of the documents were hearsay affidavits of condemned prisoners who were still alive, such as Ohlendorf, the Einsatzgruppe commander. Paget demanded the appearance of such witnesses so that they could be cross examined. He questioned the methods of obtaining 'affidavits' from such men, and cited the Simpson Report, which had ·investigated 139 cases of the torturing of German prisoners by Jewish-American jailers, for the specific purpose of extracting such affidavits. Of course, Paget was not suggesting that these witnesses had had their testicles kicked to destruction like the Dachau prisoners; on the contrary Paget reckoned that it was highly probable that their testicles were in perfect order. As Gestapo men they would, of course, appreciate the desirability of saying exactly what the American investigators wanted. The importance of the Simpson Report was that it showed the alternative to saying just what the prosecution wanted.
Although Paget's demand for the appearance of the affidavit authors was turned down, he was still able to demolish their claims that Manstein had known about the mass-shootings of Jews when he discovered an earlier affidavit by one of the SD men which contradicted his later one. With the production of this original affidavit, the evidence of the SD men disappeared from the trial.
Paget's discovery of the vital affidavit was the result of relentless and painstaking sifting of the documentary evidence. The previous year a British War Crimes Investigation team had been sent to Washington to inspect the tons of documentary evidence stored at Alexandria, Virginia (just outside the capital). The British team was allowed to borrow hundreds of thousands of documents relating to the war on the Eastern Front; those relating specifically to Manstein were sent first of all to London, and the remainder were sent direct to Hamburg. The documents sent to London were analysed there by a team of German Jews, and 800 items were selected for introduction as evidence at the trial. Unlike previous trials, this time the defence was allowed to have copies of all prosecution documentary evidence. The enormous balance of paperwork sent direct to Germany was stored in rows of filing cabinets, six feet high, all along one wall of the concert hall in Hamburg, which had been requisitioned as a document centre. Although Paget's small team of four or five was allowed access to this store-house, they had no hope of having enough time to sift the entire collection. Even if they did, the collection had been so filtered already — first by an American war crimes team, then by a British one — that there was unlikely to be any evidence left in the collection which might have been of any assistance to a determined defence counsel.
Therefore Paget was left to rely on legal argument and dialectics if he was to provide his client with an adequate defence. First, he pointed out that the charges were not based on any known or defined laws, enacted by any legislature. The indictment was just a list of confused and unconnected accusations.
Secondly, there were no rules of evidence in use. Hearsay affidavits were introduced willy-nilly, leaving the defence with no way of verifying the truth of the content, or indeed, the identity of the author, under cross-examination. Neither had the defence (or any previous war crimes defence) been allowed to sift the captured German war records stored in Washington. The only documents available to them were those which had already been vetted by the prosecution.
Paget also pointed out that potential defence witnesses were reluctant to come forward, in case they too were arrested, or in case their relations in the Soviet Zone suffered reprisals.
He went on to describe the retrospective nature of the war crimes charges, and their one-sidedness. He disputed the prosecution's suggestion that 'superior orders' was no defence. He quoted Field Marshal Montgomery's speech at Glasgow in 1946, when he said that, "Men must learn to obey orders, when all their instincts cry out for them not to be obeyed." He cited Admiral Somerville's reluctant sinking of the French fleet at Oran — with a loss of 1500 French lives — which was ordered by the War Office, regardless of Somerville's protests.
Paget then turned to the 'evidence' itself. The charges of German atrocities during the invasion of Poland were supported by depositions from witnesses. Most of these were so contradictory or full of holes that he was able to dispose of them quite easily. In his book, he mentions one such affidavit which told a story of a Jewish member of a working party who had accidentally happened to drop a bottle on the pavement, and for this 'crime' the Germans shot 12 men out of the group who were working with him.
Those allegations which did stand up to rigorous analysis were so general that they in no way implicated Manstein. Such misdeeds which did occur were the work of Himmler's SS, over which Manstein had no control. Paget concludes that the Polish charges were so flagrantly bogus that one was left wondering why they had been presented at all.....The Polish charges had had to be included for political reasons.
The Russian charges were based on allegations that partisans, communists and Jews had been exterminated in mass-shootings by Manstein's soldiers. First of all, Paget endeavoured to put anti-guerilla actions into their proper context. He quoted a Soviet-book Behind the Front Line by General Pomarenko, which praised the operation of the guerillas' "extermination battalions". According to the Soviet book, these roving bands killed 18,910 soldiers, blew up 64 troop trains, destroyed 1,621 lorries, exterminated more than 300 'traitors' and captured tons of equipment. In response, the Germans had imposed tough martial law on the civilian population, and some civilians were executed for carrying arms, using forged passes, ignoring the curfew and refusing to work. Paget pointed out that the Allies adopted exactly the same stringent regulations — Ordinance No.1 of the Military Government — when Eisenhower's forces reached the Rhineland.
Next, Paget examined the charge that Manstein had ordered the execution of civilian hostages. It was admitted that fifty hostages had been shot in the town of Simferopol, after a bomb had gone off and Germans killed. Paget produced a proclamation in precisely similar terms to Manstein's warning at Simferopol; issued by the Allies in Berlin. Amazingly, the court refused to receive this in evidence! When Paget further applied to call a British General to confirm that British soldiers would do likewise, this too was refused! All he was allowed to do was submit an excerpt from the British Manual of Military Law, where Article 453 stated that "Reprisals are ...indispensable as a last resource." Shortly after the trial ended, indeed, American soldiers in Korea were acting under anti-guerilla orders identical to those issued by Manstein.
Paget then turned to the vexed question of the murder of Jews. He pointed out: The Germans believed that the Jews were the ruling sect of Bolshevism. So far as the Ukraine was concerned there was a sub-stratum of truth in this. The only ethnic group in the Ukraine that was solidly behind the communist government was the Jews. They had every reason to be. The communist government was the first government of Russia that had effectively protected them from pogroms.
He then proceeded to destroy, piece by piece, the affidavit of Ohlendorf, the Einsatzgruppe commander who 'confessed' to all kinds of murderous deeds whilst operating in Manstein's area. According to Ohlendorf, single companies of about 100 soldiers, with about 8 lorries, were reporting killing up to 10,000 or 12,000 Jews every couple of days. Paget worked out they could not have loaded more than 20 or 30 Jews, with their luggage, into each lorry. It would take at least two hours to make each round trip to the killing place, 10 km away. Therefore, with the short Russian winter day restricting operations to eight or nine hours each day, it would have taken such a company at least three weeks to kill 10,000 Jews.
In one instance, the defence team were able to check the alleged figures. One of the SD affidavits claimed that they had killed 10,000 in Simferopol during November, and that by the following month, the town was clear of Jews. By a series of cross-checks, Paget showed that the SD company were only in Simferopol for one day during November — the 16th. And as the place of execution was supposed to be 15 km outside the town, no more than 300 people could have been killed. This allegation received a good deal of publicity, since it was supported by the prosecution's only live witness, an Austrian corporal by the name of Gaffa, who claimed that he knew the killings were going on because he heard rumours of the killings being bandied about in the mess hall. As a result of this publicity, Paget received a large number of letters from people who had been in Simferopol at the time of the alleged killings. As a result, the defence was able to call several new witnesses who had been billeted with very much alive Jewish families, and who spoke of the normal functioning of a synagogue, and of a Jewish market where they bought icons and similar bric-a-brac, during the entire period of the German occupation.
As Paget incisively commented:
Ohlendorf reported that not only Simferopol but the whole Crimea was cleared of Jews. He was clearly a man who was prepared to say anything that would please his employers. The Americans had found him the perfect witness .... I do not myself believe that the Jews murdered in the Crimea number more than 2000 to 3000.
Einzatsgruppe D conducting executions in the Crimea.
The number killed was greatly exaggerated
The number killed was greatly exaggerated
The court gave its decision on 19 December 1951. The Polish charges were thrown out altogether. Only two charges of the original 17 were sustained intact: that Manstein had used Russian POWs in clearing minefields, and that Russian civilians had been deported to work in Germany. Of course, this judgement completely overlooked the fact that all the Allies used POWs in mine-clearing operations. Eight of the charges, including the most serious one of being involved in the killing of Jews, were thrown out.
But the remaining seven charges were curiously altered by the court during its deliberations, i.e. after the defence had completed its submission on the original charges. Several had the vital words "deliberately and recklessly" deleted from them. The charges concerning taking reprisals against hostages were largely upheld — the Judge Advocate in his summing-up advised the court that the execution of hostages was at all times illegal; a direct contradiction of the British Military Manual. This was yet another example of one law for the British and another law for the Germans.
Manstein was sentenced to 18 years' imprisonment; a virtual life sentence for a man of his age. An appeal reduced the sentence to 12 years. However he was released in one of the general amnesties of 1952.
Paget's description of the trial was published as Manstein His Campaigns and His Trial (Collins, 1951). This book was one of the earliest attempts to criticise the war crimes trials, and remains one of the best ever published.
