Anna-Liza Kozma (ALK): I’ve been to Medicine Hat and I had no idea there was a POW camp there, let alone mass executions. Can you talk about what drew you to this very specific and little-known moment in Canadian history?
Nathan Greenfield (NG): I’ve had much of the research for this book for two decades, but until I presented the idea to Ken Whyte, publisher of Sutherland Books, my editors were uninterested in the idea.
After having written three books that deal with Canadian POWs, one in the First World War, one about the Canadians who were prisoners of Japan after having been captured during the Battle of Hong Kong in December 1941, and one about evaders and escapers in Europe during the Second World War, it seemed natural to try to interest an editor in this story about POWs in Canada.
The Medicine Hat murders, as they are known, was the perfect lens because it gave the book a narrative drive that a more academic history would have lacked.
And, as a historian friend of mine put it: “What’s not to like? You have Nazis in Canada. You have not one but two murders. You have the RCMP leading an investigation apparently going nowhere. And you have gripping trials that could never happen again.”
ALK: How conscious were you of the feelings of the living relatives of the people involved in these atrocities? What contact did you have with the relatives of people involved in the story? Were there some details you chose to leave out?
NG: When I became interested in this story 20 years ago, I interviewed former RCMP Constable Bill Westlake, Howard Millin and Joyce Reesor née Colby. As readers will discover, Westlake was my source for much relating to the executions. Howard not only told me about the rumours that swirled through Medicine Hat after the murders but also about what he had seen in the camp shortly after the first murder when he delivered Coca Cola. Since he was a juror in one of the Lehmann murder trials, he told me about how his jury reacted to events in the courtroom.
What Millin never revealed, try as I did to wheedle it out of him, was what happened in the jury room after the door was closed. Unlike American jurors, Canadian jurors are enjoined from discussing anything about their deliberations. Even though my interview with him was over the phone, I could sense from his tone of voice his great pride in keeping the secret of the jury room some six decades after that door was closed.
ALK: A book like yours involves extensive research over an extended time frame. What kept you going, especially given the difficult nature of your subject?
NG: My research took place in two spurts. The first was almost twenty years ago when received the trial records from the Alberta archives and other material from the National Archives in Ottawa. Then in 2018, after Sutherland House agreed to publish the book, I contacted these archives and several others to see if there was more information that could be released and, indeed, there was.
Most of the deep reading took place in the early months after the Covid-pandemic hit. Writing the first draft took about 2 ½ months. The reason for this speed was partly because the story had been stewing in my mind for years. The other reason, as I explain often enough, is that when it comes to writing narrative history, we know what we know. Sometimes we know what we don’t know –for example what happened in the jury room. But we also know we are not going to find this out and, thus, it can be set aside.
Since the book follows a timeline, my practice was deceptively simple. For, say, the chapter about the murder of Private Plaszek in 1943, which I knew would run from the murder through the investigation up to Lehmann’s murder in 1944, I put all the RCMP and military intelligence reports by date on my floor, picked up the first one, and started writing.
ALK: Can we talk about the degree of subjectivity involved in writing History. The Cambridge historian, E.H. Carr, asserted that writing history always involves a dialogue between the past and the present. Do you agree? And what was it about our present moment that found its way into your writing Hanged in Medicine Hat?
NG: The final chapter in Medicine Hat is an essay titled, “Executing Justice.” In it I address what I see as the miscarriage of justice that occurred in the Canadian courts in 1946. I’m aware of the charge of presentism, which is why when I quoted one of the defense attorneys who, when he referred to homosexuality in the camp introduced the issue by saying, “Let us step a little deeper into the mire,” I pointed out that today this would –properly—lead to a mistrial but in 1946 it did not.
My critique of the trials rested, rather, on legal precepts from the period. The Germans were not tried by a jury of their peers, which is not to say that they should have had juries made up of German POWs. Rather, Canada did not follow both the Geneva Convention (1929) and the nation’s War Measures Act that clearly stated that such important trials should be before military officers. Nor did Canada follow a South African precedent it knew of in which a South African judge refused to apply the death sentence to a case involving a murder in the camp because, he said, POW camps are not natural environments. What he meant, and what was true in the Canadian instance, especially in the cases against the men who killed Dr. Hermann Lehmann, is that they could have legitimately feared for their lives had they not carried out the orders of the camp’s Nazified leadership.
Finally, I argued that the defendant’s argument that German military law was operative within the camp was to a large extent true –and that the Canadian government recognized this. For example, the Canadian government turned a blind eye to the Degradation Ceremonies and acquiesced to other examples of the camp’s German leadership discipling German POWs according to German military law. Canada did this partially because the Geneva Convention clearly says that POWs exist under three sets of laws: the laws of their home army; the laws of the detaining, in this case, Canadian army; and the metropolitan laws where the POW camp is located.
In Carr’s terms, I saw myself in this final chapter, as appearing before an appeals court charged with judging this blot on the Canadian judicial escutcheon.
ALK: What is the most valuable piece of writing advice you have ever been given?
NG: When I was writing my first book, The Battle of the St. Lawrence: The Second World War IN Canada, I wrote a ten-page history of the torpedo that sank HMCS Esquimalt a few days before the end of the war. It so happens that we know the torpedo’s serial number, which allowed me to trace it back to the factory that made it and from there, I traced to the mines where the iron and coal were dug to make the steel, etc. I thought it was a pretty nice essay within a chapter. After reading the chapter, my wife, Micheline, who reads everything I write, said to me, “What the hell happened to the ship?” Somewhat crestfallen, I followed her advice to cut, cut, cut. The ten pages ended up with about three paragraphs before, “going back to sink the ship.”
It was a salutary lesson that in my exuberance I’d pushed aside –and one I taught my writing students many times during my 30+ years as an English professor. Put simply, “If you think something is really, really cool, your reader probably won’t. It’s sort of like laughing at your own jokes.”
ALK: Tell us about a book that you have returned to over the years and read more than once?
NG: The non-fiction book I keep going back to is The Origins of German Tragic Drama, which is a study of German drama from the Baroque period by the German cultural critic Walter Benjamin, who died trying to flee the Nazis in 1940. The book focuses on plays that are not unlike Hamlet and MacBeth, plenty of intrigue, wars and rumours of wars, revenge and blood. Despite, or perhaps, of this, Benjamin ends up discussing some very interesting issues, including the origins of language, how language can be used by the usurper and the epistemology of allegory and the development of the theological basis of kingship.
In Medicine Hat, I turned to it because of its discussion of the dictator. The German military law that the POWs acted under when they killed Private August Plaszek in 1943 and Dr. Karl Lehmann in 1944 took shape during the Baroque period. Benjamin’s discussion of the power of the dictator, his efforts to stabilize society in a world which no longer had had “eschatology,” that is, where the End of Times was unknown, was useful when explaining Hitler’s dictatorship and why the POWs felt (which is really too weak a word) they had to follow his orders to kill all considered traitors.
ALK: Are you aware of having taken some deliberate risks in the preparation of this book? Please explain.
NG: The discussion of homosexuality in Camp 134 was the biggest risk I took in the book. I purposely stayed away from any speculation about where sex may have taken place.
The discussion was important to include, however, not only because homosexuality came up in the trials but because of the reasons it did. The prosecution brought it up for two reasons. First to discredit witnesses. This trial took place in 1946 in a small city on the Canadian prairies, where even speaking about homosexuality was all but forbidden. Showing the jury that some men were homosexual was a sure way to discredit them. The second reason the prosecution brought up homosexuality was in the context of the Degradation Ceremony. Homosexuality was illegal under the German military code (as it was under the Canadian military code). Thus, when Nazified German leadership learned of active homosexuals, not only did it turn a blind eye when other POWs beat up the homosexuals, it, the leadership, called the men to a meeting where the homosexuals were publicly berated and stripped of their rank. For the prosecution, this was proof of the POWs continued to actively conduct themselves as “good Nazis.”
The defense also brought up homosexuality and the Degradation Ceremony, though for a different reason. For the defence, the Degradation Ceremony –and the fact that the Canadian authorities were aware they occurred – was proof that German military law continued to operate in the camp. The perseverance of the German military law, the defence argued, meant that the orders to kill Lehmann and his execution were legal because he was deemed by the German leadership to be a traitor –and following Hitler’s order after the failure of the Bomb Plot (Operation Valkyrie), killing traitors was legal.
ALK: How was the title chosen for this book? Who had input and what were the deciding factors?
NG: Authors have little say in their books’ titles. For my book The Damned: The Canadians at the Battle of the Hong Kong and the POW Experience, 1941-45, my then editor and I must have gone through 20 titles, which, as I told him, is ten times as many planes as the Canadians shot down during the battle.
My working title for Medicine Hat was Executing Justice. I thought this title nicely captured three things. First, the POWs’ view that in killing Plaszek and Lehmann, they were performing legal executions, that is, that their acts were just. Second, Executing Justice captured the investigations undertaken by the Canadians and the trial. In this second sense, “Executing” means carrying out. Finally, I thought that Executing Justice captured the idea of meting out justice by the Canadians when the men were executed.
My arguments fell on rather deaf ears, I was told, when they were presented to the sales force. The same was true of a couple of other half-baked options. As I remember it, the title came from my editor, Ken Whyte. The subtitle was definitely his.
ALK: Was there anything edited out of this book that you wish you could have included? Why was it cut?
NG: My editor cut an entire chapter that dealt with escape attempts at other camps and one of the strangest stories of the period. After the “Night of the Long Knives” in 1934 when Hitler had many of his early supporters murdered, Otto Strasser escaped and ended up in Canada. He lived under RCMP surveillance in Montreal on the same block as the city’s main Jewish synagogue, Shaare Zion Beth-El –which means that it’s more than likely that the young Leonard Cohen, whose family belonged to the temple, must have crossed paths with one of the earliest supporters of Hitler many times.
ALK: Fiction writers often deal with the truth by blending it with imagination and making the truth more composite. What, in your opinion, should be a CNF writer’s approach to presenting truth in all of its dimensions?
I have an uncommon view of novelists and their craft because my late father, Irving A. Greenfield, was a novelist. Over his more than half century of writing, he wrote some 250 novels, under more than 20 pen names, some of which were women because Gothic Novels are always written by women.
I can remember many times being at lunch with him and one of his editors as they went over a manuscript and the editor said, “Irv, we need a sex scene here” or “Irv, more detail is needed here.”
In other words, I know that most fiction is built upon an armature that has less to do with “truth” than it does with what an editor thinks will keep readers coming back for more. In the case of historical novels, of which my father wrote several, I take the view that the novelist has leeway to make up dialogue, but I get hot under the collar when writers have known historical figures undertake actions or make arguments that are simply impossible for them to have undertaken or made. Further, I find that most historical novels suffer from a presentism of language that is irksome. No, a novel in which George Washington is a major figure cannot be weighed down with a bunch of “thees” and “thous.” But it is also wrong to make him sound as if he grew up in the 1970s.
Author Bio
NATHAN GREENFIELD was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York; he came to Canada to study at McGill in 1980. He is the author of six military histories. His expertise in Canadian POW escapers and evaders in the World War II resulted in the writing of a history of escape and evasion for the professional development centre of the Canadian Special Operations Forces Command (CANSOFCOM). Nathan is the North American correspondent for the University World News.