WAR CRIMES: The Last Defendant

White-haired, ill and nearly blind, Field Marshal Fritz Erich von Manstein, who had fought for Germany in two world wars, sat calmly day after day in a Hamburg concert hall which had been turned into a courtroom, while British and German lawyers argued whether he was a criminal or just an officer who had done his duty.

Manstein was the last of the defendants in the war-crimes trials of World War II. When his British judges handed down their verdict this week, the Allies closed their case against the enemy leaders whom, in the name of all mankind, they had arraigned for crimes against humanity.

£25 from Churchill. Manstein’s Junker ancestors had fought for two kaisers and one czar. Young Manstein was commissioned in the exclusive Potsdam Guards, finished World War I with the rank of captain. In World War II, he served brilliantly as chief of staff to Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt in the invasion of Poland; in the summer of 1940, by then in command of an army of his own, Manstein broke through the French line on the Somme. When Hitler launched his attack on Russia, it was Manstein who commanded the southern German army group, won a string of victories in the Ukraine and the Crimea. Hamstrung during the long retreat after Stalingrad by frantic orders from the Führer, he broke with Hitler, lived in retirement while the Allies smashed their way into Germany.

After four years in British custody without trial, Manstein was finally brought before a British military tribunal in Hamburg last August. Britons raised a £1,620 fund to help pay for his defense; Winston Churchill contributed £25.

Limited Extent. Gist of the 77,000-word, 17-point indictment was that Erich von Manstein had permitted atrocities in areas under his command; had condoned the shooting, gassing and drowning of Jews, gypsies and other minorities, the execution of Russian soldiers, political commissars and civilians, and the deportation of Russians to Germany for slave labor. The defense tried to show that there was little to connect their client personally with any of these deeds. The slaughter of Jews, contended his British and German lawyers, was carried out by an SS unit attached to Manstein’s command only for “supply” purposes.

The accused himself denied knowledge of atrocities, such as the use of gas wagons painted like carnival caravans which were employed by SS troops for mass executions. “Obviously some people acted differently from the way I expected them to act,” he snapped. “A commander in chief can control his subordinates only to a very limited extent.”

Manstein admitted that he condoned executions of the wives of Russian partisan fighters as reprisals for attacks on German soldiers. But, he argued, the Russians themselves never adhered to any rules of war. “The shooting of women is not very nice,” said Manstein. “But sometimes the partisan war did not make anything else possible . . . The [Russian] civilians used every form of illegal warfare possible—shooting in the back, wearing German uniforms, employing women and children as spies and poisoning the water supply.”

This week in a hushed courtroom packed with German spectators, many of them with the stiff, erect bearing of former Wehrmacht officers, Manstein heard the verdict. He was found guilty on nine counts concerning execution and maltreatment of Russian soldiers and civilians; he was cleared of eight other counts, notably concerning the extermination of Jews. Then the court pronounced sentence: 18 years in prison. For 62-year-old Field Marshal Fritz Erich von Manstein, it was probably a life term.