New book sheds light on war crimes trials at the Curiohaus in Hamburg, Germany
We’re all familiar with the Nuremberg trials, where many top figures in the Nazi hierarchy were tried for war crimes, but much less well-known are the Curiohaus trials, which took place in Hamburg after the Second World War.
Eighty years ago, in the summer of 1945, the Allies began war crimes trials – but not in Nuremberg. The Soviets, Americans, French and British prosecuted thousands of Nazis in the zones of Germany that they occupied.
The British military held more than 300 trials in north-western Germany, hardly any of which have made it into an English publication – until now.
Castle Camps-based author Russell Kent’s new book, The Curiohaus Trials, looks at a selection of these prosecutions and asks whether the British achieved their aims of criminal justice, punishment, rehabilitation and deterrence.
“It’s always been in the background for me because my grandad was a navigator in the Lancaster bombers,” says Russell, a retired IT consultant, of how the idea to write the book came about.
“So the war was always talked about at home, and then I watched The World at War series – it was an early ’70s series and really good.”
Russell went on to work in Germany at the end of the ’80s, beginning of the ’90s. “In 1990, I think it was, I was in Munich,” he recalls.
“So I went to see the Dachau concentration camp, which was the first camp that the Nazis set up, and from there I started to read about the trials and the war criminals.
“But the only books I could find were on Nuremberg and like everybody else, I thought ‘Well, that was it then’.
“It wasn’t really until the internet matured that I was able to search, only to find that there were hundreds of other trials in many other countries.
“And in occupied Germany what happened was the occupying forces in each of the quarters did their own war crimes trials.
“Eventually, I found out that there were hundreds of British trials in our occupied zone – and over 150 of them were in one building, in this place called the Curiohaus in Hamburg.
“I was really intrigued, I thought hundreds of books must have been written about this already, so I did a search for books on it and there aren’t any.
“There’s one book by a German author – it’s her dissertation, and it’s pretty good but it looks at statistics, rather than looking at the individual trials themselves and the process of the trials and what the accused were accused of and how their trial was presented…
“So there weren’t really any books on it so I thought, ‘Here’s an opportunity’.”
Russell flew to Hamburg in 2022 to continue his research. “I’d already put some groundwork in, I’d contacted the Curiohaus and said could I have a look around,” he explains. “They were really nice and said, ‘Yes, come along’.
“And there’s a huge concentration camp near to Hamburg, which again nobody’s heard of, called Neuengamme. I contacted the archivist there and said could I come and see them and they said yes.
“I went to the Curiohaus, I had a look around. It’s run by a group of very young people who knew nothing about the trials, but I was able to photograph plenty of the rooms.
“Then I went to Neuengamme and spent two days in the archives there. The director literally threw the archive open to me and said, ‘Take what you want, there’s the photocopier – do what you want’.
“And thank goodness he did because it was very difficult to know the extent of the British trials, where each trial was held, but most importantly the file references to the documents that cover the trials in the National Archives in Kew.
“It was an absolutely critical document; it runs to about 150 pages and I stood at the photocopier all afternoon. It was brilliant – I owe them a huge debt.”
Russell also spent eight weeks at the National Archives, reading about all of the different trials.
“People say to me, ‘How come nobody’s ever done this [written about the Curiohaus trials] before?’,” he says, “and I think the point is that there were millions of people who experienced World War II and they all have a story.
“And that means there’s millions of stories that have not been told, and this is just one aspect of them.”
The book includes information about the trials at Curiohaus of Gestapo men involved in ‘The Great Escape’, when 76 Allied airmen famously escaped from the Nazi prisoner of war camp, Stalag Luft III.
“Yes, that’s right,” says Russell. “There’s lots of books about The Great Escape, of course, but none about the trials…
“And there were two trials held at the Curiohaus for the Gestapo members who were part of the group that shot the officers.
“In the film [1963’s The Great Escape], you see truckloads of officers taken away to be shot, but that’s not how it happened at all.
“People that were representing the Gestapo in different cities took them away in ones and twos and shot them, and so the trials were quite complex because there were lots of people involved – and I think there’s probably a book in that itself.”
Russell notes that there were 328 British military trials in total and that 150 of those took place in the Curiohaus.
As the Nuremberg trials were the International Military trials, there was more of a global interest, a much larger press contingent, and the proceedings were filmed.
“But in the Curiohaus, there was really only German press that reported on it,” says Russell, whose other titles include JFK Medical Betrayal and JFK: Echoes from Elm Street.
“And I know that because I’ve been to the Newspaper Archives at the British Library and I had a look at the archives for the biggest-selling newspaper at the time, which was the News of the World.
“It had a huge six, seven, eight million readers a week, and of course that was just the person that bought it… Whole families would have read it, so probably half the population read that each week.
“I went through every edition for four years and the only reporting was on the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, and a bit about the Belsen trial, which was a British trial held in Lunenburg – and only really the beginning and the end of that.”
Russell comments on the sheer scale of those potentially involved in committing war crimes.
“The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has estimated there were 42,500 camps or ghettos. Can you imagine? Probably I can name 10 or so…
“And if you imagine there was only one guard per shift at each of those places; there’d be three shifts – that would give you 128,000 potential war criminals.
“But of course lots of those camps had hundreds of guards, so I think there’s probably well over a million people who could have been accused of a war crime.
“All of them slipped through the net, except for the thousand that we did and about a thousand that the Germans did, and it’s difficult to get figures from Russia, but probably a thousand from them and a thousand from the French – if that.
“So most of those people got away with it.”
Russell will be holding a book launch between 2pm and 4pm on Saturday, 21 June, in the Byron & The Bard bookshop in Lavenham.
The Curiohaus Trials was published by Pen & Sword History in April. For more on Russell, go to russellkent.my.canva.site.
