Holocaust Theatre: A Thespian at Belsen

 

The postwar prosecutions of Germans for atrocities alleged to have been committed against internees of the Third Reich’s concentration camp system, most famously associated with the proceedings at Nuremberg, also included the Belsen trials held in Lüneburg in the autumn of 1945. “Many historians and students of World War II are fully aware that the Nuremberg Trials (IMT) are painted as a shining example of the four victorious Allies working together in ‘perfect harmony’,” notes Robert Sherwood, a former Metropolitan Police detective with degrees in Law and Holocaust Studies. “But less is known in relation to the Belsen Trials,” he goes on: “These are synonymously associated with the United Kingdom, given that Belsen was liberated by British forces (whereas the US Army liberated Dachau, and the Red Army, Auschwitz).” [1] 

While popularly understood to constitute an exemplary landmark in the annals of justice, close scrutiny reveals various peculiarities in the collection of evidence and the conduct of the cases, one small example of which involves the participation of Anglo-Jewish actor and lawyer Leo Genn, who served as part of No. 1 War Crimes Investigation Team at Belsen and as an assistant prosecutor in Lüneburg. Genn, recognizable for his thick, dark eyebrows and “black velvet” voice, would appear in such high-profile films as The Snake Pit (1948), Quo Vadis (1951), Moby Dick (1956), and in yellowface in 55 Days at Peking (1963) before winding up his career in the likes of The Death Ray of Dr. Mabuse (1964), Night of the Blood Monster (1970), Die Screaming Marianne (1971), and Frightmare (1974). His involvement in the investigation and prosecution of the alleged Belsen atrocities, however, remains an underappreciated cultural contribution.

Genn “studied law at Cambridge in the 1920s and even practised as a barrister in London for a short time. But acting was his true passion,” relates historian A.T. Williams in the 2016 book A Passing Fury: Searching for Justice at the End of World War II: “After a couple of years at the Bar from 1928 to 1930, he met the wonderfully named stage actor and producer Leon Lion. Lion encouraged Genn’s theatre acting whilst having him help out as legal counsel.” [2]. Probably not hurting his career was Genn’s marriage to Ealing Studios casting director Marguerite van Praag in 1933 [3]. “Genn’s acting career flourished and by the mid-1930s he’d already appeared in films [including playing Shylock in 1935’s The Immortal Gentleman] and had been taken on as a member of the Old Vic Company,” Williams continues:

His smooth voice and equally smooth features made him ideal for the movies and the stage. He appeared in a succession of plays both in London and New York as well as the odd film now and then. The war changed that. By 1940 he’d signed up with the Royal Artillery. [4]

In I Went Back, a documentary short in which Genn appeared for British Pathé in 1950 to celebrate the Marshall Plan, his account of demobilization at the end of the Second World War gives viewers the impression that he not only had spent the war years in uniform but had even participated in the Normandy invasion:

And those of us who had crossed the Channel in 1944 were heading home at last. To civvy street and civvy clothes. To home and family. And to our memories. As soldiers always have, we swore we would go back. To see again the yesterdays as they are today. When the time came it was V plus 5. Victory in Europe plus five years. And I was heading back to the places I had known in circumstances far different. Different too was the mode of travel. Comfortable seats on an airplane. A relaxed mood. Rather different from that glider or bomber or that bouncing little landing craft that took you across the first time on a journey that spanned the continent. [5]

Genn at any rate would go on to appear as an actor in the 1962 movie The Longest Day, which depicts the invasion. “His thespian skills weren’t forgotten, though, and he was drafted in to narrate official war films,” notes Williams: “In 1944 he was given leave to act in Laurence Olivier’s Henry V. It must have been strange for him to leave his unit, fighting across France, to go home and pretend to be fighting the fifteenth-century French.” [6] Indeed, Genn’s schedule of film work during the war years would have left him little time for actual combat. In the course of earning his Croix de Guerre, the actor managed to put in appearances in the films Blackout (1940), Ten Missing Days (1940), Law and Disorder (1940), The Girl in the News (1940), The Young Mr. Pitt (1942), The Way Ahead (1944), and Henry V (1944) in addition to furnishing narration for French Communique (1940), Far into the Night (1943), The Return of the Vikings (1944), Tunisian Victory (1944), and Attack! Battle of New Britain (1944).

Leo Genn does some make-believe soldiering in 1957's Steel Bayonet.

Early in 1945 Genn was appointed to a SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) Court of Inquiry investigating “various massacres of Allied troops taken prisoner during the Battle of Normandy and in the campaign across northern France and into the Low Countries.” [7] A puzzled Williams finds the Court of Inquiry’s reports to have had little value, as “Genn and his fellow investigators couldn’t identify the German troops involved with any certainty. They could only plead for the Allies to search for more information.” “There were several cases like this,” he adds:

Each produced a carefully typed report deposited with SHAEF headquarters. No doubt the details were passed on to London, but I couldn’t quite understand why such work had been undertaken at a time when the war had yet to be won, when there was so much death and devastation to contend with. What had it achieved? A reaffirmation of decency formulated by legal process? Maybe that was enough. [8]

Though Williams concludes that “Genn’s experience made him the natural choice for taking on the case of Bergen-Belsen” after the war [9], he also acknowledges that “it occurred to me ungenerously that perhaps his glamour and charm and growing celebrity, coupled with his rank of lieutenant colonel and the Croix de Guerre on his chest, might have made him an irresistible choice for the War Office. With a whole department of long-serving lawyers in the Judge Advocate General’s Office back in Whitehall,” he muses, “why else would they have selected a man who clearly had only a cursory interest in the law, had little if any investigative experience in civilian life, and had never practised criminal law to any great degree?” [10]

“Eventually, on 19 May 1945, Lt. Col. Leo Genn, the senior investigating officer, arrived at Belsen – over a month after the liberation,” recounts Sherwood:

Genn, a peace time thespian and barrister, had an indeterminate approach to the investigation and created a culture some have considered inappropriate, given the severity and importance of the enquiry.

Genn’s papers, archived at the Imperial War Museums, reveal that the war crimes investigation team at Bergen-Belsen gave the impression to outsiders that the officers of the unit were, to a degree, a “Boys’ Own club”. Evidence has been unearthed that the unit referred to themselves as the “Crime Club”, hosted dinners and other social functions. Dinner menus were even produced with a “club” motif on the front and a play by Genn was also written. Genn also found sufficient time to pen rhymes about many of his colleagues which could be described as sarcastic, pedantic and arguably childish. There is little doubt of Genn’s ability and intellect. However, as he found time to arrange for thespian colleagues, Sybil Thorndike and Laurence Olivier, to perform George Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man, this perhaps indicates he needed to refocus his time and efforts on the forthcoming trial, rather than as an opportunity to perform on the stage. [11]

The account Williams gives is somewhat more forgiving:

There was something very British about the way Leo Genn and his team approached their task. A blackly humorous, complaining, self-deprecatory, slightly louche, determined culture set in, as far as I can tell. They called themselves the “Crime Club” and designed a little motif of a skull and crossbones to decorate their occasional homemade dinner menu cards. The camaraderie was quick to be forged, a besieged team having to battle army red tape and a lack of comprehension of their work at the War Office. They organised parties in the mess to interrupt the boredom, [and] occasional “swans” to European cities. When Leo Genn left the team at the end of October to be demobbed, they clubbed together to compose comic songs about everyone. [12]

One of Genn’s pieces of doggerel went as follows:

The Crime Club loves death sentences … you can see it in their dials

So they expend their efforts in designing lovely trials

Another rhyme, equally indicative of the lack of seriousness with which Genn approached the historic set of legal outcomes he helped to effect, went:

Good folk, bad folk, everybody come,

Investigate the criminals and make yourselves at home,

Bring a pair of handcuffs and reflect upon the floor

On singular atrocities you’ve never heard before. [13]

Notwithstanding his frolics, Genn did find the time to take a number of witness depositions. “His interim report in June 1945 reads like that of a lawyer preparing a case for the local magistrates’ court in the shires of England,” Williams writes. Most interestingly:

Though the evidence was being accumulated with greater efficiency now, Genn wasn’t convinced it could be used to condemn those he held in custody. Underpinning his anxieties was an ambivalent appetite for Justice Jackson’s premise that membership of the SS and other criminal organisations would be enough to establish guilt. […]

Membership of the SS might provide a starting presumption of guilt, but it wouldn’t be enough, at least not for the fair-minded British lawyers. Some other evidence was deemed necessary to prove personal responsibility. It was the quality of this proof, or often the lack of it, that worried Genn. “Many of the witnesses were unversed in British ideas of evidence,” he wrote, “and were, on some occasions, found to have little clear idea of the difference between evidence which was hearsay and direct evidence which depended on what they had themselves seen or heard, and were found to be proffering evidence without clearly differentiating between hearsay and direct evidence.” […]

“Some of the witnesses were vague as to dates and to a considerable extent, as to details,” he continued to complain. [14]

“In search of the ideal testimony, Genn and his team continued to interview as many people as they could,” Williams explains, revealing ridiculous results:

They particularly wanted to obtain positive identification of SS personnel who’d committed precise crimes. But hundreds of SS had served in Bergen-Belsen over the course of its operation. Hundreds more had done so at Auschwitz [charges in connection with which were included in the Belsen trials]. Finding inmates who could remember the names and faces of those who’d abused them was demanding in the extreme.

To help them, the investigators collected a host of photographs, of SS personnel, of inmates, of German soldiers, and pinned them to the wall of the interview hut in the camp. In an effort to appear “fair”, they included innocent men and women and even pinned up a blurred newspaper photograph of Field Marshal Montgomery, as a “joke”, Major [Savile] Champion would say later. Every witness who was questioned was asked to survey the wall and identify anyone they recognized as someone who’d committed an act of violence. One inmate picked out Montgomery as an SS brute. [15]

“I imagined the British officers in the Crime Club would have laughed at that in the mess,” Williams notes in an aside [16].

An entertainment journalist suggests Genn’s participation in the Belsen trials as one of the possible
“exploitation angles” for 1947’s Mourning Becomes Electra.

“The prosecution’s case was forged from Lt Col Genn’s initial investigation report and recommendations,” Williams details:

Genn sat next to [Col Thomas] Backhouse as he delivered his opening speech, having returned to assist in the completion of his work, back from Britain where he would shortly resume his successful acting career. Captain [Stephen] was there too, the team looking like a row of forties film stars, which of course Genn was fast aspiring to become, having already appeared in Laurence Olivier’s Henry V. [17]

Further corroborating the comparative frivolousness with which Genn approached his courtroom responsibilities is the fact that he spent the evening of the first day of the Belsen trials not rehearsing future presentation of atrocity evidence, but performing on the stage in an Edgar Wallace play, as The Daily Telegraph reported on September 21, 1945:

Among the counsel for the prosecution is Lt.-Col. Leo Genn, the barrister-actor who wrote the commentary to Desert Victory, and played the Constable of France in the film, Henry V. It was he who conducted the Belsen investigation on the spot.

At the end of the first day in court Col. Genn played the lead in The Case of the Frightened Lady, an Ensa [Entertainments National Service Association] show put on at five hours’ notice. He acted in uniform as other clothes were unobtainable. [18]

The transcripts of the Belsen proceedings more than once indicate Genn’s absence from the hearings. On day thirty of the trials, for example, Captain D.F. Roberts made the following statement with reference to the case of Karl Flrazich: “I have finished with Flrazich but there are two points I want to mention at this stage. The first is that as part of Flrazich’s defence I want to put in an affidavit but a certain difficulty has arisen in connection with it and that is that the original of the affidavit is in the hands of Colonel Genn who at the moment, I understand, is in Paris” [19] – on one of his “swans”, presumably.

The exhibition of Belsen “horror films” aided in the prosecutions.

“The trial commenced at Lüneburg, northern Germany, on 17 September 1945,” summarizes Sherwood, who acknowledges that “corners were cut” in the investigation and that preparation for the trials was less than adequate:

It persecuted [sic] forty-four defendants (twenty were women while one was unfit to stand trial), and was concluded within just two months, ending on 17 November 1945. To put this in context, twenty-four defendants stood trial at the International Military Trial (IMT) at Nuremberg, which lasted nearly an entire year. […]

Outcomes also varied. Eleven defendants were sentenced to death and executed on 13 December 1945. There were fourteen acquittals compared to just two at the IMT […] For instance, at the first Dachau Trial conducted on 15 November to 15 December 1945, all forty defendants were convicted.

The poor conviction rate, and trial circumstances, were commented upon at the conclusion of the trial by the Secretary of State for War who remarked to Prime Minister Attlee that there were too many defendants […] too many defending officers. The government’s intention was quick, cheap, justice with limited resources. [20]

Genn himself, in an unfinished memoir, would confess, “The dictates of publicity were paramount” and reflected that “this particular fact remained one for exasperation and lasting regret.” [21] “Considering the thousands who ran the Nazi murder machines, only a small number faced the hangman’s noose,” kvetches Jerry Klinger, president of the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation in a 2023 article for San Diego Jewish World: “Most of those who were convicted and imprisoned were released after a few years, as the fickle political winds blew from a different direction. By the early 50s, Germany was needed by the West to be an ally against the Russians.” [22] The UK branch of Klinger’s organization mounted a plaque at Genn’s birthplace to commemorate the “famous actor and soldier” and Klinger writes of his frustration with the lack of publicity this generated: “It was a surprise when we shared the Genn effort with the local press, none were interested.” [23]

Genn escorts a ghetto lad under watchful Nazis’ gaze in the 1974 German film Sie sind frei, Doktor Korczak.

Perhaps in expiation of his “lasting regret” over the lackluster handling of the Belsen prosecutions, Leo Genn would do his part to enlighten the world on the dangers of anti-Semitism by lending his talents to the documentary Life of Adolf Hitler in 1961 as well as appearing in the 1958 Dreyfus Affair drama I Accuse! and playing the title character in a 1974 German drama about the Warsaw Ghetto, Sie sind frei, Doktor Korczak. Genn’s unserious behavior at the time of his service with No. 1 War Crimes Investigation Team, however, remains highly instructive, as he, both a Jew and an asset of the propaganda efforts of the British government and the entertainment industry, was in a position to see how at least one link of the Holocaust sausage was made.

Rainer Chlodwig von K.

Endnotes

[1] Sherwood, Robert. “The Lack of Preparation for War Crimes Investigations”. Holocaust Centre North (April 10, 2023): https://archive.ph/UaE6m

[2] Williams, A.T. A Passing Fury: Searching for Justice at the End of World War II. London: Jonathan Cape, 2016, p. 95.

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Genn

[4] Williams, A.T. A Passing Fury: Searching for Justice at the End of World War II. London: Jonathan Cape, 2016, p. 95.

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcXoM6MsG44

[6] Williams, A.T. A Passing Fury: Searching for Justice at the End of World War II. London: Jonathan Cape, 2016, p. 95.

[7] Ibid., p. 96.

[8] Ibid., p. 97.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid., p. 96.

[11] Sherwood, Robert. “The Lack of Preparation for War Crimes Investigations”. Holocaust Centre North (April 10, 2023): https://archive.ph/UaE6m

[12] Williams, A.T. A Passing Fury: Searching for Justice at the End of World War II. London: Jonathan Cape, 2016, pp. 130-131.

[13] Ibid., p. 131.

[14] Ibid., pp. 131-132.

[15] Ibid., pp. 132-133.

[16] Ibid., p. 133.

[17] Ibid., pp. 212-213.

[18] “Luneburg Prosecutors”. The Daily Telegraph (Sept. 21, 1945), p. 4.

[19] https://archive.ph/h9xSi

[20] Sherwood, Robert. “The Lack of Preparation for War Crimes Investigations”. Holocaust Centre North (April 10, 2023): https://archive.ph/UaE6m

[21] Klinger, Jerry. “The British Belsen War Crimes Trials and Leo Genn”. San Diego Jewish World (August 15, 2023): https://archive.ph/UnpJy

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid.