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- Herausgeber: Pocket Essentials
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
At the end of the Second-World-War the victorious Allies began unprecedented proceedings against those leading Nazis who had been captured. The trial that followed was conducted in four languages and involved over 400 sessions of open court.Andrew Walker provides a chronology of the proceedings and revealing portraits of the personalities involved. There are frequent references to the terrible events unleashed on Europe by the Nazis and the book asks the questions that were raised at the time and have not been fully answered since. What was the legal validity of the trial and were the ones who were tried always the right people to bear the responsibility for Nazi crimes?
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The Nazi War Trials
ANDREW WALKER
POCKET ESSENTIALS
In memory of Betty Aileen Roberts 1916 – 2003
Acknowledgements
I am grateful for the kindness and support shown by Sarah Walsh and Nick Rennison during the writing of this book.
Contents
Introduction
Preliminaries
Background to the Trial; The Defendants; Preparations for the Trial
The Trial: Prosecution Case
The Trial Begins; The American and British Cases; The French Case; The Soviet Case
The Trial: The Defence Cases
Göring; Hess; Von Ribbentrop; Keitel; Kaltenbrunner; Rosenberg; Frank and Frick; Streicher; Schacht and Funk; Dönitz and Raeder; Von Schirach; Sauckel; Jodl; Seyss-Inquart; Von Papen; Speer; Von Neurath and Fritzsche; Bormann
The Trial Concludes
Closing Speeches; Deliberations; The Verdicts on Individuals; Sentencing; Carrying Out the Sentences
Epilogue
Further Reading
Websites
Introduction
One of the most extraordinary things about the Nazi War trials in Nuremberg in 1945 and 1946 was the fact that they took place at all. At the end of the most devastating war in history, victors as well as vanquished were exhausted. Much of Europe was in ruins. Germany itself was a virtual wasteland and many of its people were close to starvation. In this context, the fact that a tribunal was convened and that, over a period of more than a year, those leading Nazis who had survived and been captured were tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity is astonishing enough.Yet, the trials themselves were unprecedented. Never before had nations in victory attempted to hold the leaders of the defeated nation to legal account. The challenges faced by those who established the tribunal were enormous. The international law under which the men were tried was debatable. The argument that the trial was vengeance masquerading as justice was one that was heard from its beginning. To prove, as Rebecca West wrote, 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’ would be no easy task.
From the very beginning the Nuremberg Trial was about much more than the individual fates of the men who stood trial. It became the focus of desires for a post-war settlement in Europe that would ensure lasting peace and that would exorcise the horrors of the previous six years. It embodied hopes that solutions could be found to problems of international conflict which had plagued the continent for centuries. Again in the words of Rebecca West, it could ‘warn all future war-mongers that law can at last pursue them into peace and thus give humanity a new defence against them’. In this sense, the Nazi War Trials can be seen as one of the most significant events of the twentieth century.
This book is primarily an attempt to provide a clear and accurate précis of what happened at Nuremberg between 20 November 1945, when the trial began, and 16 October 1946, when sentence was carried out on those men convicted by the tribunal. It identifies each of the defendants, summarises the charges against each of them and gives a brief account of the prosecution and defence speeches, the judgement, the sentencing and the carrying out of the sentences. It also looks at the cases the Allies made against various key organisations within the Nazi state.To set the trials in context, the book examines the debate amongst the Allies before the war ended about what form judgement on the Nazis would take and looks briefly at events after they were concluded. At a time when the war crimes court in The Hague still pursues men involved in the Balkans War and when the trial of Saddam Hussein in Iraq is underway, the Nuremberg Trial has a renewed relevance and this book endeavours to show why.
Preliminaries
‘The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.’ Robert H Jackson, Opening Address for the United States, November 21st 1945
Background to the Trial
As the Allies began their advance upon Germany on two fronts in 1944, the fate of the top ranking Nazi leaders was being hotly debated. The one abiding aim for all parties was to avoid the travesty of justice that had followed Germany’s surrender in 1918. Then the German government had been charged with the prosecution of those men accused of war crimes. After the punitive Treaty of Versailles, the will to pander to the demands of the Allies was clearly lacking, and the Kaiser was able to live out his days in peaceable exile in the Netherlands. Other cases were pursued with no more vigour: out of the 45 cases set for trial, only 12 came to court, and from them only six men were convicted.
In 1944 then, the Allies had a precedent to avoid, but little more of substance. As early as October 1941 Churchill and Roosevelt had declared that the punishment of crimes committed by the Nazis was a major goal of the war. In 1943 three German officers were found guilty by the Soviets and shot. After D-Day, American and British troops were increasingly likely to apprehend such people and a unified protocol was urgently required. By Churchill’s own account, the issue had been encapsulated in a bizarre exchange between the three leaders at Teheran in 1943. Stalin stated his opinion that justice would be served by the execution of 50,000 Nazis. Churchill remonstrated that he would sooner be taken out into the garden himself and shot than countenance such an idea. Roosevelt, mediating between his two fellow leaders, came up with the somewhat ghoulish compromise that 49,000 should suffice. Churchill stormed out of the room, only to return when Stalin assured him that the remark was made in jest. Thus Churchill painted a scene of the British sense of justice outraged by Soviet barbarity, with only the pragmatism of the Americans to unite them.
Yet the reality was not quite so convenient. It was Churchill who was set on the idea of summary justice, fearing that a long drawn out trial would provide an unwelcome opportunity for the Nazi leadership to garner sympathy. In notes made by the deputy cabinet secretary (made public only in 2006), it’s clear Churchill proposed execution for Hitler, ‘Instrument – electric chair, for gangsters, no doubt available on lease-lend’. He also proposed that a list of ‘grand criminals’ be drawn up, and these men ‘be shot as soon as they were caught and their identity established’. A surprising stickler for propriety was Stalin, who, not known to be troubled by the concept of a trial taking any longer than he wished, counselled against the absence of a court hearing and warned that this would leave the Allies open to accusations of vindictiveness. The British Ambassador in Moscow caught the Soviet attitude perfectly when he demurred to Stalin,‘I am sure that the political decision that Mr Churchill has in mind will be accompanied by all the necessary formalities’.
The Americans too had their disagreements. For a large part of the war, their country was far removed from the direct horror of Nazi aggression on mainland Europe and there was little public outrage until the massacre of seventy American prisoners-of-war by SS troops at Malmédy in December 1944. The subsequent clamour for vengeance strengthened the hand of Henry Morgenthau, the Secretary of the Treasury. His extreme plan for post-war Germany called for the country to be permanently stripped of its means to wage war by reducing it to the level of an agricultural society. In his view, the leading Nazis were clearly guilty of murder and should be summarily executed. Opposed to these draconian measures was the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, who believed that the wealth and stability of Germany were vital to the success of post-war Europe. For him, establishing the guilt of the Nazi leadership before an international court would be an essential part of the process of rehabilitating the German people. Such a trial would also serve the unashamedly idealistic aim of establishing a legal precedent to deter men from waging war in the future.
Both men vied for the ear of the dying President. Roosevelt, although characteristically disposed to deferring the decision for as long as possible, was personally inclined to favour the severe measures recommended by Morgenthau. Until Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, Stimson appeared to be losing the battle. Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, however, enthusiastically backed Stimson’s proposal, and its sudden elevation to policy led to the acceptance of the principle of a trial by the Allied powers at the founding conference of the United Nations in May of that year.
Yet much remained to be decided. Truman appointed Supreme Court Justice Robert H Jackson ‘chief of counsel for the prosecution of Axis criminality’. Jackson was a brilliant and passionate lawyer, whose distinguished career was unusual in that his admission to the bar was obtained by serving an apprenticeship rather than by obtaining a law school degree. Jackson inherited the concept of the trial proposed by Lieutenant Colonel Murray Bernays, an attorney in the War Department. Bernays had suggested invoking the law of conspiracy to try the career of the Third Reich as one vast pre-meditated criminal enterprise. Not only would this enable a single trial to address the vast number of individual outrages, but it would also hold accountable the Nazi leaders, who might otherwise claim that they had not personally executed civilians or burnt down villages. A similar catch-all proposal in Bernays’ plan was to charge organisations with crimes. Thus, finding the SS as a whole guilty of criminal activity, for example, would mean that trials against individuals could proceed easily on the basis of their membership of it.
Jurists from the four major Allied powers met in London in July to establish the legal mechanisms for such a trial. It is worth stressing the point that all this had to be done from scratch, as there were simply no precedents in international law for the trial of war criminals. Jackson and the American team had provided the basic concept of the trial, but national differences were not easily overcome. The law of conspiracy had been used with great success against organised crime and fraudulent businesses in America, but had no basis in Continental or Soviet law. Even the adversarial nature of the Anglo-Saxon system was alien to the French representatives. The eventual structure of the court was therefore a necessary hybrid. Opposing lawyers would present cases for the prosecution and the defence, as in the Anglo-Saxon model, but a panel of four judges would pass judgement, with four alternates sitting in reserve. Even the decision that a conviction would require a vote of at least three to one was reached in the face of appalled protests from the Soviet delegation.
Less easily overcome were grave objections to the legality of the trial itself. By defining the crimes after the event, the Allies risked creating ‘ex post facto’ law. The Nazis may well have conspired to wage aggressive war, but when they had done so, however immoral it was, it was not illegal. Jackson’s argument was pragmatic, if not entirely persuasive. ‘Let’s not be derailed by legal hair-splitters’, he intoned, ‘Aren’t murder, torture, and enslavement crimes recognized by all civilized people?’ This justification indirectly raised the other uncomfortable point that the defence lawyers might make. Just as the Axis forces had committed atrocities, so had the Allies. The Soviets, who would be sitting in judgement on the Nazi leadership, had themselves invaded Poland in 1939, shortly after the Germans.The representatives at the conference were at pains to avoid the trial appearing simply as victor’s justice, but it was an undeniable fact that the Nazis were on trial because they were on the losing side. This argument of ‘tu quoque’ (‘you also’) could not be allowed to jeopardise the trial, and the way around it was uncompromising: the court would render any line of defence based on this argument inadmissible.
After six weeks of often exasperating legal wrangling, the Charter of the International Military Tribunal was signed. Article 6 set out the Tribunal’s power to try those charged with committing any of four crimes: Crimes against Peace, War Crimes, Crimes against Humanity and Engaging in a Common Plan or Conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of these.
The Defendants
The question of who was to stand trial caused as much debate and deal-making among the Allied powers as any of the previous issues. Again the Americans were to the fore, not least because the majority of the candidates for trial had been astute enough to fall into their hands rather than those of the Russians. The most prominent Nazi still alive was the flamboyant Reichsmarschall, Herman Göring. Despite having been stripped of office in Hitler’s last act before his suicide, Göring went into captivity with typically arrogant bravado. When he arrived at the detention centre in the resort hotel of Bad Mondorf, he had with him his valet and a sixteen-piece set of matching luggage. Contained in the luggage were over 20,000 paracodeine tablets, to which he was addicted. Second only to Göring in prominence was Rudolf Hess, the deputy leader of the Nazi party, who had flown to Scotland in 1941 in a bizarre attempt to broker peace between Britain and Germany. Having been in Allied captivity since then, his inclusion for trial was a clear signal by the Allies that the entire career of the Third Reich was within the remit of the Tribunal’s charter.
Hitler’s successor as Führer, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, had set up a short-lived government in Flensburg, from where he had sent the chief of Wehrmacht operations, Colonel General Alfred Jodl, to negotiate surrender to the Americans. Both men were taken into custody at Flensburg after the surrender, together with the Chief of Staff of the armed forces, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Hitler’s former Armaments Minister Albert Speer, and the foremost philosopher of Nazism, Alfred Rosenberg.
The Allies were clearly motivated in their choice of defendants by a desire to represent the full compass of Nazi rule and to give the widest possible range of injured parties the sense that justice would be done. Defendants with geographical responsibilities included Hans Frank, Governor-General of occupied Poland, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Reich commissioner for the Netherlands, and Minister of the Interior, Wilhelm Frick. The role that management of the economy played in Hitler’s rise to power was indicated by the inclusion on the indictment of Hjalmar Schacht, former head of the Reichsbank, and Walther Funk, Reich Minister of Economics.With an eye to the charge of conspiracy, three diplomats were also indicted: Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s Foreign Minister, his predecessor Constantin von Neurath, and the former Reich chancellor, Franz von Papen. Less grand functionaries were Fritz Sauckel, Reich Director of Labour, and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the fearsome chief of the Reich Central Security Office.
Deprived of the chance to indict Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, by his suicide, the Allies called other men to account for the dissemination of Nazi culture. Baldur von Schirach had been Head of Hitler Youth from 1933 to 1940; Julius Streicher had been editor of the anti-semitic paper ‘Der Stürmer’. Both were named on the indictment. Largely because he was one of only two likely candidates held by the Soviets, the propagandist and broadcaster Hans Fritzsche was also included. The other Soviet contribution to the list was Erich Raeder, head of the navy until 1943.
In addition to these twenty-one, three men were named on the indictment but did not appear before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Hitler’s Private Secretary Martin Bormann was tried ‘in absentia’, although there were several reports that he had died trying to escape from Hitler’s bunker in Berlin. The industrialist Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach was pronounced too senile to stand trial. Anxious to represent German industry on the indictment, Jackson tried to have him replaced at the trial by his son Alfred who had been in charge of Krupps’ weapons production during the war. Much to Jackson’s chagrin the motion was thrown out of court. The third missing man was Robert Ley, the alcoholic leader of the Labour Front, who committed suicide in his cell before the trial started.
Preparations for the Trial
Before the trial could commence, there were certain practicalities which had to be settled.Where were the proceedings to take place? How, and where, were the prisoners to be held in custody? How were they to be defended? How was the courtroom to be laid out? How was it to be reported and recorded? In this trial, the most basic of questions – which would simply not arise in ordinary proceedings, governed by precedent and the custom of centuries – had to be answered.
That the trial had to take place in Germany was not in doubt. Justice had to be seen to be done in the country in whose name the defendants had held power, not in the capital of one of the victorious nations. Berlin was the obvious choice for a venue, and indeed the Russians (unsurprisingly) argued vociferously that it should take place there, but the city was in rubble, it was overcrowded and its limited resources were already stretched to the limits. An American general suggested Nuremberg.The city, with its huge rallies, had had a central role in Nazi propaganda and, by chance, some of its major buildings, despite the enormous damage inflicted by Allied bombing, were still intact. The Palace of Justice was still standing and so too was the jail which was linked directly to the court. Most importantly for the Americans, it was in a part of Germany they controlled. Eventually, the Russians conceded and, although Berlin was named formally as the ‘permanent seat of the Tribunal’, Nuremberg was to be the site of the trial.
The first formal session of the Tribunal took place (in Berlin) on 18 October 1945. The indictments of those who would face the court were presented and a date set for the trial to begin – 20 November. The defendants, by now ensconced in Nuremberg jail under the guardianship of an American colonel named Burton C. Andrus, were served with the indictment on 19 October. The time had come for them to choose lawyers to present their defence cases in the forthcoming trial. Only Dönitz, who had heard of a naval officer and lawyer called Otto Kranzbuehler, was prepared and, more than a week later, half of the defendants were still without counsel.The process of ensuring that all the prisoners had legal representation proved a slow one but, despite the concerns of both prosecution and defendants, it eventually reached a satisfactory conclusion. Göring, originally scornful of the very idea that German lawyers could be persuaded to take part in the proceedings, was pleased with his own choice of a judge from Kiel called Stahmer. Since Stahmer was quoted as saying that he was ‘not finding it difficult to persuade himself of Göring’s innocence’ (a task very nearly everybody else in Germany would have found exceedingly difficult), the Reichsmarschall’s pleasure is understandable. Some of the defence lawyers were later to prove major irritations to the court. Of von Papen’s counsel, Kuboschok, the judge Norman Birkett wrote that, ‘he is not exactly to be described as a windbag, because that implies some powers of rhetoric and possible eloquence. Of these qualities this man is strikingly bereft.’ However, despite the knowledge that some of the defence lawyers were undoubtedly former Nazis, the Tribunal only stepped in to veto one defendant’s choice of counsel. Rosenberg requested that he should be defended by his fellow prisoner Hans Frank, but the prospect of Frank zig-zagging between the dock and the lawyers’ lectern throughout the trial was not one the Tribunal was prepared to contemplate. Rosenberg was obliged to look elsewhere.
As the task of finding defence lawyers for them went ahead, the prisoners settled into the routine which Andrus had devised for them. Much of their time was spent alone. Just about the only opportunity to chat to one another came in the daily half-hour of exercise in the prison yard. For the rest of the day, the men were confined to their cells with little to do but read and write letters. Andrus was not unaware of the dangers of keeping his prisoners largely unoccupied – ‘a guy could go nuts,’ he wrote, ‘sitting in a little cell with what some of these boys have got on their minds’ – but he needed to keep them under almost permanent surveillance. After Ley’s suicide on 25 October, restrictions on the men only became more severe. Andrus was, at heart, a decent and humane man but he was determined that he should lose no-one else under his care and the surveillance was stepped up several degrees. Just about the only relief from the deadening routine was provided by visits from doctors and psychiatrists. Gustav Gilbert, the prison psychologist, asked the men to take a series of intelligence tests and many enjoyed doing them. Göring, in particular, behaved ‘like a bright, egotistical schoolboy, anxious to show off before the teacher’ and his good humour was only spoiled when he was told that he had come third in the IQ ratings behind Schacht and Seyss-Inquart. All the prisoners tested higher than average. Sauckel, Kaltenbrunner and Streicher scored lowest.
