To Betray, or Not to Betray,_ and _Munich._ On the twenty-seventh of November, 1945, the same day the Americans liberated Frankfurt, the police in Berlin carried out the "Kaiserhof Incident." This was a planned exercise, in which the Americans arrested a supposed ringleader of a plot to assassinate Eisenhower. Ike's personal bodyguard, Sergeant Schultz, was present at the sham trial of the "conspirators." The accused said the conspirators planned to seize the American tanks that had just driven through the center of Berlin. As the evidence mounted that they were innocent, Ike pardoned them all. He refused to believe that someone would be so suicidal. It was not until he made a surprise inspection tour of the ruins that he saw for himself how much the city had been devastated. _The Nuremberg War Crimes Trials_ In April, 1946, at a press conference held at Blair House in Washington, Ike answered questions from American and British correspondents. He said it was nonsense to talk about the Germans being a master race. He said the German war criminals should be tried before an international court. He thought they should not be tried before national courts, but before an international tribunal. He said he believed in international justice. A reporter asked, "Are you willing to give us your opinion in plain language, in your own language, as to whether you think the Nazi leaders should or should not be tried for these crimes?" Eisenhower paused, lit a cigar, and said, "Yes." Ike said the worst war criminals should be brought to trial. He did not want them to escape justice. He said he felt strongly that all should be brought before a tribunal. He said that if necessary every man who had fought against America should be dragged into court, and each nation that had been conquered would be required to bring before the tribunal every Nazi officer and soldier. Angrily, some reporters spoke up: they said that all Nazi leaders were war criminals. Did he really want to try people who were merely doing their duty under orders, just like General Patton's men, who executed hundreds of captured American prisoners in the ETO? Ike replied with impatience: _Newsmen:_ Do you really mean this, General? Are you not going to take into account the difference between a soldier and a murderer? _Eisenhower:_ Oh, yes, I know that. The fact of the matter is I would call a soldier a murderer if that man were out of uniform and was trying to assassinate other people. There are certain obligations that have to be carried out. You have a lot of German civilians trying to go across the Russian border as refugees, and the soldiers are not looking after them as well as they should. There are other things of that kind. Now, all these people that I would be talking about would be men who have to be tried by a court-martial.... What we have got to try to do now is to make as certain as we can that this kind of thing doesn't happen again.... I know that under some circumstances soldiers can act just as bad as anyone else. The president was already receiving complaints from soldiers who had fought in the ETO that they were being treated like the Nazis had been treated. Patton told Eisenhower that many American soldiers and marines had been "shipped to an area like Dachau." Patton said, "The feeling is very bad about it. It is almost enough to make me wish I were a private again." Patton told Ike that in some of the prison camps in Germany, American prisoners had been herded into cells with "Gestapo men, former members of the Nazi regime. How can I tell them what the Geneva Convention really says about torture? In these cases our men should be taken out of the camps and shot." Ike had his hands full with the American press. He was not anxious to make enemies of the reporters in Washington who were fighting their own battles with each other. He was in no mood to be accused of trying to stop American justice. But he felt he had to answer reporters' questions. When he said, "Some day the German people will be thankful to the United States for what it has done to put them on their feet again," his words provoked a storm of protest from many correspondents and editors in Washington. During his travels in Germany, the president did not go where he was not invited. If he entered a village that had been damaged by Allied bombing, he insisted that the villagers welcome him. Eisenhower had a gift for this. He had the knack of entering a bombed village in a way that was unobtrusive. He said it did not require much courage to drive into a village that had been completely destroyed, especially if the Americans had been there just a few weeks or months before. The German mothers in the bombed towns seemed to trust him at first, but then they often began to resent the way the American soldiers were carrying out the bombing. It was obvious to them that their sons were being sent away to certain death because Eisenhower could not or would not stop it. The other problem was what to do with German prisoners of war. Many German civilians were starving to death in the ruins, their homes destroyed. A great many of the American soldiers had lost family members during the war. And many soldiers came home feeling they had been used as cannon fodder. Ike felt very much alone with these problems. It was a good thing that he had a staff of military men who were experienced in dealing with the enemy. In some cases, when Eisenhower visited German towns, he found the locals hostile to him. He had a personal encounter with a woman named "Helga Geiringer," who was born in Germany in 1908. She had been a woman of great dignity, dignified in her bearing and always courteous to visitors. She had been a faithful follower of Hitler until she was fifty-five years old. He had sent her away, ordering her to join other German women in a displaced persons camp. As she stood with Ike on the street in Munich, she shouted at him, "Go back to Washington, you Jew lover." The Germans in Munich who knew Eisenhower were deeply upset by the insult to the president. One American soldier said, "What does a man who has done so much for his country have to do with Jews?" But when the reporters came to investigate the incident, they learned that Helga Geiringer was really named Helga Geiringer Stölten. It turned out that Helga Geiringer had been born in New York City and had moved to Germany as a child. Other German civilians, like Dr. Karl Koch, a young man from Hannover, felt that Eisenhower was a good man who had done more for his country than any other president, even Franklin Roosevelt. Koch said he and his brother had been members of the Hitler Youth movement. He had never heard about the atrocities that Ike had denounced before he visited his country. When the American soldiers had been in Germany, Koch had heard that Ike spoke about the murder of the Jews. Koch said he was surprised. Koch said he had heard reports that some Americans were torturing German prisoners of war. Koch would not leave the side of the United States when the army guards marched past. He thought they were too cruel. He said he had never seen anybody hurt a German prisoner of war. The president did not know what to say to Koch, and did not know how to talk about America's moral responsibility for the German people. Ike tried to say as little as possible about atrocities in his home country. He often made jokes to take the attention away from what was happening to German civilians and to the Jews. At one press conference, Eisenhower was asked if the Germans were planning to take over large parts of Europe after the war. The president replied that the Germans had never had any intention of doing that. Ike did not like to hear the word _Germans._ He said, "All those people who were Nazis—the Nazis, with their ideology—were, as far as I am concerned, gone before I entered the picture." _He Did Nothing by Half-Measures_ Eisenhower had a lot of other problems. He had to deal with the fact that every single officer in the American army was a professional soldier. The United States was building up its military, but it would take time to train and equip a large army. There were few women in the ranks, but many middle-class women wanted to do their part to beat the Germans. Some of them had been American Red Cross volunteers in Germany before the war. On June 28, 1945, Eisenhower received a secret message from the War Department that described "strategic bombing of cities, a matter of deep policy consideration." A few months later Eisenhower had to do it. He was a general, but he was only one man. The Army Air Force had insisted on trying to destroy the German city of Dresden, with all the civilians who lived there. The Nazis were trying to shoot down the Allied planes. By the spring of 1945, Allied airmen were dropping hundreds of tons of bombs on German cities, including Tokyo. In Japan they were trying to destroy factories and dams that supplied water to the city of Hiroshima. As the commander of the U.S. Army Air Force, Ike thought it was his duty to go to Tokyo and see what he could do to stop this slaughter of innocent civilians. Some newspapers said that Eisenhower had gone to Tokyo to persuade the Japanese to surrender.