The Nuremberg Trial

Ann Tusa, John Tusa

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781620879436
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Segunda Guerra Mundial

Here is a gripping account of the major postwar trial of the Nazi hierarchy in World War II. The Nuremberg Trial brilliantly recreates the trial proceedings and offers a reasoned, often profound examination of the processes that created international law. From the whimpering of Kaltenbrunner and Ribbentrop on the stand to the icy coolness of Goering, each participant is vividly drawn. Includes twenty-four photographs of the key players as well as extensive references, sources, biographies, and an index.

Chapter One

Monday, 30 September 1946 was a bright and sunny but cool day in Nuremberg. At first light, armoured cars carrying steel-helmeted American military policemen slid into position round the Palace of Justice. It was a drab, dark pink sandstone building about a kilometre outside the old town; it was pockmarked with bullets and shell holes. The armoured cars were its inner ring of defence. The whole city was in fact surrounded by US Army vehicles; every road into it was barricaded, every form of transport and every pedestrian trying to enter was being stopped and searched.

By seven o’clock in the morning crowds were arriving at the entrance to the courtroom of the Palace. Some of the visitors wore uniform and were high-ranking officers; many of the civilians were distinguished, their faces familiar from newsreels and newspaper photographs. Even so, they were stopped outside the building and scrutinized by MPs and US Intelligence officers. They were asked to present passes; if the passes were out of date, their bearers were turned away. Today, everyone entering the courtroom had to have a special pass. Even inside the building the security checks continued – passes had to be shown again, women who had ignored the ban on handbags were sent to deposit them in a guarded cloakroom.

By eight o’clock the corridors were jammed. In one room a group of about three dozen men was assembling. They wore a variety of academic gowns, nearly all black, one bright purple. They were German lawyers. At nine o’clock security officers came and checked their passes, gave them a body search and rifled through their files of papers. Then at nine thirty the doors of the courtroom were opened. In flooded spectators who went upstairs to their gallery, journalists who moved to seats at the back of the room, defence and prosecution counsel who made their way to tables in the well of the court. The room was dazzlingly bright. Banks of lights had been turned on while newsreel cameras whirred and press photographers darted around spotting eminent faces for their shots. After a few minutes of chatter and bustle, the courtroom fell silent. All eyes turned to a panel in the wall which had slid to one side. Through it, at intervals of a few seconds, came groups of men in twos and threes whose names and faces had been famous for years, escorted by American guards in immaculate white helmets and webbing. These men were defendants in a trial which had begun ten months before. Today their judges would deliver the judgement of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. (1)

The prisoners took their seats on a double row of benches in the defendants’ dock. The photographers swarmed round them. Smiling, and greeting the audience, was Field Marshal Hermann Goering, once Commander-in-Chief of the German Luftwaffe and Lord High Nearly Everything Else. At one time Hitler had named Goering as his eventual successor as ruler of the Third Reich. There were other former military commanders in the dock too: Grand Admirals Doenitz and Raeder, Field Marshal Keitel, who had been the Chief of the High Command of the Armed Forces, and General Jodl, his Chief of the Operations Staff. There were diplomats and politicians: Constantin von Neurath, Franz von Papen, Ribbentrop, who had been Hitler’s Foreign Minister, Frick, once his Minister of the Interior, Sauckel, who had been responsible for Labour Mobilization, and Speer, Hitler’s architect and his Minister for Armaments and War Production. In the front row, next to Goering, sat Rudolf Hess, once the Deputy Leader of the Nazi Party. He seemed to have a headache and kept striking his forehead with his right hand. Further along the row sat Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi party’s ideologist; Streicher its publicist, who had called for the extermination of the Jews; and Kaltenbrunner who had controlled the Gestapo and the concentration camp system through which the extermination was to be carried out. Sitting with them were two financial experts – Walther Funk and Hjalmar Schacht, both of whom had been Minister of Economics and President of the Reichsbank. There were two men who had administered countries conquered by Germany – Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the Reich Commissioner of the Netherlands and Hans Frank, the Governor-General of Poland. Towards one end of the back row, Baldur von Schirach, the leader and educator of German Youth, had taken his place.

Stuck at the farthest corner of the back row was the lowliest of the defendants, the man least known to the general public – Hans Fritzsche, a journalist and broadcaster. Even after so many months of the trial most people wondered why he was here. But there was no doubt about why the rest of them were in the dock. They were the surviving leaders of the former Nazi Reich and for the last ten months they had been on trial for the crimes that regime was alleged to have committed in Germany and all over Europe.

Their judges, whose findings and sentences were now about to be delivered, constituted an International Military Tribunal – ‘international’ because there was now no German state and the victorious Allies in the war had decided to establish this tribunal to try Germany’s former leaders; ‘military’ because there was no civil authority in Germany. The country was run by the occupying forces of the four major Powers who had defeated it. They had appointed eight judges – American, British, Russian and French. They could mount this trial of Germany’s former leaders because they had insisted on, and since May 1945 acquired, total power over Germany. After the defeat of her armed forces Germany had not been allowed to negotiate terms with her invaders. The Allies recalled the myth after the First World War that the German Army had been stabbed in the back by politicians and deprived of victory; they remembered the interminable negotiations at Versailles and the failure of the Treaty they produced to prevent renewed German aggression. They had abhorred the savagery of the Second World War and the appalling atrocities which had besmirched it. This time, they had said, Germany’s enemies will not treat. President Roosevelt had been the first Allied leader to call for ‘unconditional surrender’ at Casablanca in 1943; the other three major Powers had affirmed the demand at Yalta. In the First World War, it was felt, the German population had escaped unscathed by experience of the realities of war; this time the lessons of aggression had been brought home to them, literally. They were bombed by the Allies and invaded; their state had collapsed, their armies had been defeated. By May 1945 no German institutions survived. Germany was completely taken over by the Allies and lay at the mercy of her enemies.

In May 1945 Jodl had to sign a document of unconditional surrender. With his signature German sovereignty passed to the Allied forces. As he wrote his name, Jodl said: ‘With this signature the German people and the German Armed Forces are, for better or worse, delivered into the hands of the victors … In this hour I can only express the hope that the victors will treat them with generosity.’ That was a lot to ask. Thanks to the War, the cities of Europe were in ruins. No one yet knew how many had died in the bombing and the fighting, but they could see around them the millions of maimed, orphaned, homeless and starving. As the Allied forces advanced they encountered hordes of foreign slave workers who had been held captive in German labour camps; they had opened the gates of concentration camps, seen the gas chambers and ovens, looked in horror at the huddled masses of skeletal inmates clad in lice-infested rags and riddled with typhus. The Nazis had once disposed of the bodies of those they murdered in the camps. As their government collapsed so too did the organization for disposing of its victims; Allied bulldozers now had to shovel mounds of corpses into mass graves. After fighting a war for five years and seeing the results of Nazi rule in Europe, few people felt generosity towards the Germans. Surely, they said, they have caused all this, their leaders especially. They should pay for it, suffer as they have made others suffer. In May 1945 an instinct for revenge and punishment was stronger than that of generosity.

The men who sat in the dock at Nuremberg on 30 September 1946 awaiting the judges’ verdict had not expected anything other than revenge and punishment when they were first brought into court, ten months before. Goering had said then: ‘As far as the trial is concerned, it’s just a cut-and-dried political affair and I’m prepared for the consequences. The victors are the judges … I know what’s in store for me.’ (2) Yet four days before the International Military Tribunal gave its judgement, Rebecca West, who had observed parts of the trial, wrote: ‘The judgement that is now about to be delivered has to answer a challenge which has been thrown down not only by Germans but by many critics among the Allies. It has to prove that victors can so rise above the ordinary limitations of human nature as to be able to try fairly the foes they vanquished, by submitting themselves to the restraints of law … The meeting of the challenge will also warn all future war-mongers that law can at last pursue them into peace and thus give humanity a new defence against them. Hence the judgement of the Nuremberg Tribunal may be one of the most important events in the history of civilization.’ (3)

There was a noticeable disparity in the view of the Nuremberg Trial between the early expectation of Goering and the final aspiration of Rebecca West. Both had deep roots in a debate which had gone on for hundreds of years – did might make right or should there be a higher law to govern the relationships of nations and control their behaviour? The debate had become more intense and had been accompanied by practical steps in the last fifty years. Was it possible to get international agreement to establish laws and punish those who broke them, above all those who committed the ultimate brutality – aggressive war? The nations had tried. They had passed resolutions condemning violence by states and individuals; after the First World War they had formulated a Treaty which it was hoped would punish the aggressors and deter any future resort to arms; they had founded a League of Nations and hoped that it would govern the world peacefully through negotiations and co-operation. The Second World War had not destroyed all hope of this. Instead it had fuelled the will to find a better way with an extra determination. Faced with destruction, death and atrocity on a scale the world had never seen, people cried: ‘This must never happen again.’

The trial of the Nazi leaders at Nuremberg was not held just to establish their guilt and decide whether to punish them for committing crimes. It was part of the search for a better way to control strong human impulses, aggression and revenge. It was an attempt to replace violence with acceptable and effective rules for human behaviour.

While the trial lasted many people saw it as the essence of courtroom drama, some as a graphic display of the history of a regime or the psychology of its leaders, others as a vital experiment in international co-operation and the application of law. The trial was much more than a hearing of cases against twenty-odd men accused of crimes against the law of war and against humanity and of the crime of launching aggressive war. It was the focus of strong emotions, troubling questions and profound longings. The very events which led up to the trial and shaped it were in themselves dramatic, a nexus of history and a study in the clash of personalities and principles. Those events involved political, legal and moral conflict.

When the eight judges of the Military Tribunal entered the courtroom in Nuremberg at ten o’clock on 30 September, more was expected of them than a judgement on twenty-two individuals. In bringing those Nazi leaders to judgement some hoped for vengeance, some for a just basis for the post-war settlement of Europe. Others hoped for a solution to problems which had plagued the civilized nations for centuries.

References* for Chapter One

1 The scene and the security surrounding the court are described in various newspaper accounts of the day

2 Gilbert

3 Daily Telegraph, 26 September 1946

 

* A list of abbreviations used in the References will be found in the Sources, p. 505

Chapter Two

For centuries war had been the standard method for settling disputes between nations and satisfying their ambitions. Once a war was over the motto was the old Roman one: ‘vae victis’ – woe to the conquered, because the victors could treat them as they saw fit. There were no universally accepted limits to the right of the victors to punish those who had fought against them, nor definitions of war crimes, though there was some sense of the ‘laws and customs of war’ and a shifting view of what was acceptable practice. The defeated might hope for leniency or even a gentlemanly acknowledgement that nasty things happen in war, but often they feared retribution for having fought at all, let alone for fighting with ferocity or means outside whatever happened to be the contemporary norm.

In the 17th century, Hugo Grotius collected and examined the various laws and customs of war, and considered what principles governed or should govern the behaviour of nations towards each other in a book called De Jure Belli ac Pacis (Concerning the Laws of War and Peace). In the view of some, Grotius is the father of International Law. He wrote his book during the Thirty Years War – as savage and destructive a conflict as had ever lacerated Europe. Then, as in 1918 or 1945, actual experience of cruelty and suffering jerked people into thinking how their violence and brutality could be controlled.

Grotius was a scholar and a theorist. From the second half of the 19th century, international opinion began to demand practical action to get agreed limits on methods of fighting and to establish rules of behaviour towards those at the mercy of either side in a war. The Red Cross was founded and its right to look after the wounded was gradually recognized, then extended to such matters as the inspection of prisoner-of-war camps and bringing solace to prisoners in the form of food parcels or extra blankets. A series of Geneva Conventions was widely ratified – beginning in 1864 and developing to that of 1925 on gas and bacteriological warfare, and that of 1929 on wounded and sick prisoners-of-war. Most nations signed the 1899 and 1907 Hague Conventions laying down the rules of war on land and sea, limiting the weapons which belligerents might use, governing the opening of hostilities, and defining the rights of neutrals. By 1914, the international community had decided on definitions of crimes and certain limits on methods of fighting and the treatment of the helpless. But their decisions could not be said to have the full force of law – there were no agreed sanctions to be applied to those who broke the rules, no international courts had been established to try those accused of crimes.

In practice it was accepted that a country where war crimes had been committed could summon, try, and if need be punish those accused of them – whether they were nationals or aliens. Alternatively, the country whose subjects were accused could be left, or put under pressure, to try cases of alleged criminal behaviour.

It became clear to many, however, that these methods for dealing with war criminals were unsatisfactory. They were only applied to little men – individual brutes or subordinates ordered to commit atrocities; the leaders who condoned or encouraged the crimes tended to go scot-free. Furthermore, nations could try the war criminals they caught, but there was no way to compel other states to try their own. The inadequacy of this existing machinery was demonstrated after the First World War, and the experience of its failure and of the attempts to replace it were to influence the thinking of many during the Second World War and to shape the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg.

From the early days of the First World War the public was fed stories of ‘Hunnish atrocities’. A few of these stories contained an element of truth. Most of those about raped Belgian nuns and impaled babies did not. They had sprung from the lurid imaginations of the pressroom. They were believed partly because people wanted to believe them: they wanted a comprehensible reason for hating the Germans and fighting them. But as a result of their acceptance of the tales the public increasingly demanded more than military victory. They called not just for the punishment of German war criminals but the punishment of those in high places whom they considered guilty of formulating criminal plans and issuing criminal orders. To disentangle the facts and to try to determine whether war crimes were directed by German civil and military leaders, the Bryce Committee was set up in France. In December 1914, J.H. Morgan of the Home Office was sent to join it. This committee was dissolved in 1915. But largely on Morgan’s insistence, a replacement was organized in October 1918 under Birkenhead to enquire into outrages committed by the German forces and in particular to establish the guilt of the General Staff and ‘other highly-placed individuals’.

The British government was undecided about what to do once the facts were gathered, but thought the exercise might have immediate practical benefits. As Lord Milner, the Secretary for War put it, it was doubtful whether a trial should be held but meanwhile ‘it would not at all be a bad thing that the offenders should think that we intended to punish them’. The committee had not intended to include the Kaiser in its brief. They regarded him as a mere figurehead and feared that to accuse h...