Rtn David Axon: War criminals

This was our last meeting at Hamptons Sports & Leisure, formerly the Marconi Athletics and Social Club, which has been our home for something like thirty years. The current owners will shortly sell the building.

Our speaker was our Programme Officer, Rtn David Axon, who gave us further information about his father’s activities in the RAF immediately after the Second World War, when he was serving as an Intelligence Officer in Occupied Germany. One advantage of his role was that he was given a pass authorising him to commandeer army vehicles.

General Montgomery ordered him to interrogate Josef Kramer, former Commandant of Belsen, and Irma Grese, a senior female SS guard at the camp, who had both been captured when the British entered Belsen in the closing stages of the war. They were known respectively as “The Beast of Belsen” and “The Bitch of Belsen”. Josef Kramer had been Commandant of Auschwitz before being posted to Belsen and Irmsa Grese had served there as well.

David’s father visited Belsen about four weeks after it had been liberated to familiarise himself with the camp and some of the things that had happened there. It still housed former prisoners who had not been repatriated - and numerous dead bodies.

He interrogated Josef Kramer for three days before he broke and started to talk about what he had done. It was a further six days before he stopped talking! He gave a lot of information.

According to David’s father, Irma Grese was a very beautiful 22-year old blonde. She also talked freely about what she had done, appearing to be proud of it even then. Among other things, she had kept half-starved dogs which she got to attack prisoners and tear them to pieces.

Having obtained information from Josef Kramer and Irma Grese, it was then necessary to gather further evidence and testimony from those who had suffered so it could be presented at their subsequent trials. Kramer and Grese were both sentenced to death and hung in December 1945. Irma Grese was the youngest woman hung by the British in the twentieth century.

David’s father was then given the task of tracking down Heinrich Himmler, who was last reported to be in the north of Germany. At this time it was fairly easy for former Nazis to lose themselves among all the people on the move. Local enquiries suggested that Himmler had last been seen walking south.

The occupying forces picked up a man on the road who was Himmler’s height and build. That, however, was his only resemblance. He was unshaven, wearing shabby clothing and had a patch over one eye. He claimed his name was Heinrich Hentzen. When he was ordered to remove the eye patch and put on glasses it was realised that he was indeed Himmler. It turned out that Himmler had had the real Heinrich Hentzen executed some years before and had decided to appropriate the identity in case of need because of the similarities between their names.

Himmler was stripped and searched. He was also medically examined to see whether he was concealing any suicide pills. When given a further examination by specialist Intelligence medical personnel, he was seen to free a black pill from his teeth. Despite efforts to stop him biting the pill, and subsequently to pump any poison from his stomach, he died some fifteen minutes later.

When the Nuremberg trials started in 1946, the only defendant who had not been apprehended was Martin Bormann. David’s father was asked to find out where he was. He came to the conclusion that Bormann had died trying to escape from Berlin after Hitler’s death. Since this could not be proved conclusively, Bormann was sentenced to death in his absence. After the discovery of his body during construction work in 1977, and later DNA analysis, it was confirmed that he had indeed died fleeing Berlin in May 1945.