The International Commission of Jurists: Global Advocates for Human Rights

1. Recruiting Free World Jurists

Chapter 1 Recruiting Free World Jurists Investigators digging at the site of a Soviet-run prison camp in the former East Germany have uncovered mass graves containing the bodies of 12,500 people .... The camp was at Sachsenhausen , north of Berlin, and was open from 1945 to 1950 .... In the years after the end of World War II, occupying Soviet forces imprisoned thousands of Germans .... Some were simply picked off the street, victims of Stalinist crackdowns. -The New York Times, September 24,1992, p. 7 Cold War Containment The war that ended Hitler's genocidal crimes against humanity left a rival mass murderer in control of Eastern Europe. Stalinism appeared on the march in Czechoslovakia, Greece, China, and Korea. The United States feared that communist totalitarianism was spreading throughout Europe and beyond. The International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) was a small offshoot of a comprehensive U.S. policy to contain Soviet expansion. Containment brought aid to the Greek government , the Marshall Plan, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.. and the U.N.-endorsed defense of South Korea. The United States also created a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with covert action capability.' A top secret National Security Council Directive (10/2) in June 1948 authorized clandestine propaganda, economic warfare, preventative direct action including sabotage , anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures . . . subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance move- 26 Chapter 1 ments, guerrillas and refugee liberation groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world. Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty began broadcasting with agency support and a private fund-raising cover. Divided Berlin in East Germany became a Cold War flash point and the ICJ's birthplace. Over Western objections in 1949, the USSR created a new German Democratic Republic in Soviet-occupied Eastern Germany. Stalinists arrested and summarily executed thousands of former Nazis and pro-democracy dissidents. The Soviets blockaded Berlin, and the United States mounted a massive airlift to retain control of the Western-occupied zone. In 1952 the U.S. Information Service Daily Wireless reported: "The swelling mass of refugees fleeing from East Germany into anti-Communist West Berlin during the last several days is now estimated by Western officials at about 200,000 men, women and children." 2 The U.S. High Commissioner for Germany, John J. McCloy, supervised both civilian and paramilitary intelligence operations. His two chief deputies, Bethuel Webster and Eli Whitney Debevoise, were also leaders of the New York bar. An associate in McCloy's law firm, Benjamin Shute, was director of intelligence for the Allied High Commission for Occupied Germany (HICOG). All three belonged to the presitigious Council on Foreign Relations, which helped initiate the containment policy. Since 1921 the Council's elite, exclusive membership of bankers, lawyers, and government advisers had encouraged U.S. policy makers to assume global leadership responsibilities." Shute helped recruit, equip, train, and finance German groups to undermine communist authority in the Soviet zone." The United States conducted a "sophisticated ... campaign designed to persuade left-of-center European intellectuals to oppose communist political influence. Thousands of Germans ... were drawn into this intelligence network as informants, agents of influence, and propagandists ."" Nazis eagerly joined the anticommunist campaign: The U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps used war criminal Klaus Barbie. Shute recommended that McCloy appoint another Hitler intelligence expert as a security adviser to the new German government. 6 U.S. sponsors did not always care about or carefully check records. A founding member of the ICJ, Dr. Theo Friedenau, had created a false identity to conceal his Nazi past. A self-proclaimed Jewish lawyer and survivor of Gestapo imprisonment, Friedenau directed a publicly funded Investigating Committee of Free Jurists in West Berlin." In fact, Friedenau was Horst Erdmann, born of German parentage and Recruiting Free World Jurists 27 a Stammfuhrer in Hitler Youth responsible for a battalion-size force. He had attended university for only one term and was a lawyer in name only." Friedenau applied the Nuremberg principles to warn individual communist officials that they would be held criminally liable for abuse of power. His government-funded staff of thirty used a network of informers and agents in the Soviet zone." Their evidence documented how the communists had destroyed the independence of bench and bar and used nonlawyer judges responsible to the party. Between April 21st and July 1st, thirty-five hundred people were sentenced to prison terms...