The defendants of the International Military Tribunal (IMT) who received a capital sentence, or committed suicide, were taken in secret to a Munich crematoria and their ashes were scattered into the river Isar. The responsible Allied officials approached publicity of the executions with a mixture of secrecy and candor. US Army photographer Edward F. McLaughlin photographed the corpses, and the Soviet newspaper Soviet Weekly and the British tabloid Sunday Pictorial reprinted these graphic photos. In contrast, the cremation and disposal was handled secretly, leading to rumors such as the guilty were burned at Dachau. Some of the families of the accused nonetheless marked their dead. Jodl's family erected a centopath as did Keitel's family despite not having a body.

Although the rationale behind this treatment of the corpses was understandable, it transgressed a number of cultural and legal German norms. German law was quite clear about the position of corpses executed by the state or died in prison; they were either to be turned over to the next of kin or if unclaimed, handed over to a medical or research institution. Allied inquiries in 1944 and 1945 on what to do with the corpses of war criminals revealed the position of German law on this matter, but Allies largely ignored these laws in the IMT and their own subsequent trials. The British maintained a mass grave in the prison facilities of Hamlin, eventually leading to overcrowded burial plots. This was a source of tension between the British military government and the wider German population. There was also a strong tradition of family crypts and eschewing of mass burials in German society, so this apparently cavalier attitude towards corpses feed into narratives of victimization and an unfair Allied victor's justice. Later in 1953/54, the Hamlin corpses were exhumed and reinterred by the Federal Republic at state expense, albeit still in a mass grave and with a degree of secrecy. By the mid-1950s, the Western Allies had largely shifted over to the position that immediate family should take possession of the corpses of war criminals. The declining health of the diplomat Konstantin von Neurath in Spandau brought this matter to a head with the three Allied directors proposing that if he should die, his family would receive the corpse for a quiet ceremony and the Soviet director Zimin arguing that von Neurath could be buried in Spandau with his family present and the ground consecrated. Von Neurath was eventually released on health grounds, and the general amnesties left only Hess as the sole occupant of the prison. His declining health in the 1980s led to a protocol among the Directors in which Hess's family would be informed of his death, and his corpse autopsied and disposed of quickly within the limits of West German law. Hess's corpse was interred and then later reburied in the family plot in Wunsiedel. Hess's corpse soon became the site of neo-Nazi gatherings, prompting the local church to terminate the families lease on the plot, and leading to the body to be exhumed yet again, cremated, and then scattered over the sea in 2011. Hess's granddaughter tried to launch a suit to keep the gravesite, but the local parish convinced her to drop it.

As the somewhat strange journey of Hess's corpse shows, the war criminals possessed a symbolic quality even in death. Both Allied and later German governments often had to tread a very fine line between honoring burial traditions and preventing gravesites from becoming postmortem shrines to the departed Third Reich.

Sources

Confino, Alon, Paul Betts, and Dirk Schumann. Between Mass Death and Individual Loss: The Place of the Dead in Twentieth-Century Germany. New York: Berghahn Books, 2008.

Goda, Norman J. W. Tales from Spandau: Nazi Criminals and the Cold War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Ward, Richard. A Global History of Execution and the Criminal Corpse. New York: Palgrave, 2015.