Sixty years on, the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal remembered
Monsters and Critics.com ^ | Nov 20, 2005 | Deutsche Presse-Agentur
Nuremberg, Germany - Sixty years ago on November 20, 1945 the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial against 21 leading Nazis, including Hermann Goering, Rudolf Hess, and Joachim von Ribbentrop, began in Room 600 of the city's spacious Palace of Justice.
Almost a year later, on September 30 and on October 1 1946 the court announced its verdicts. A dozen of Hitler's closest cohorts were sentenced to death by hanging, seven were given life sentences or lesser terms, and three were acquitted.
Before the war even ended the U.S., the Soviet Union and Britain had already agreed to punish those responsible for war crimes.
Hardly surprisingly, drama surrounded the marathon 218-day-long proceedings, presided over by Britain's Lord Justice Geoffrey Lawrence (later Baron Trevethin and Oaksey). Each of the Four Great Powers (France was now included) provided one judge and an alternate as well as the prosecutors.
When Hermann Goering, chief of the Luftwaffe, trustee of the Reich's Four Year Plan, and successor-designate to Hitler, was given a death sentence, he cheated his captors by crunching on a cyanide pill and dying in his cell on the night before his execution.
The other eleven top Nazis to receive death sentences - Ribbenttropp, Alfred Jodl, Wilhelm Keitel, Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Alfred Rosenberg, Fritz Sauckel, Arthur Seyss- Inquart and Julius Streicher - were duly hanged in the early morning of October 16 1946, in the old gymnasium of the Nuremberg prison.
During the marathon trials testimony was introduced from 360 witnesses, some verbal, some written, and more than 200,000 affidavits were evaluated. A vast swarm of journalists, most of them from the four victor-powers, reported on the Nuremberg trials.
Among them were Chicago-born Allan Dreyfuss, a 27-year-old journalist working for the U.S. Army's Stars and Stripes newspaper; Markus Wolf, later to become communist East Germany's famous head of foreign intelligence; and Ernest W. Michel, a survivor of the Auschwitz, Bikenau and Buchenwald concentration camps, who covered the International Military Tribunal (IMT) as a reporter-observer for DANA, an early post-war German news agency.
Dreyfuss, a former Boston and Chicago newspaper man, helped the 'Stars and Stripes' maintain one of the most complete files on the proceedings carried by any paper in the world.
During the proceedings, psychologists rated Hermann Goering as the 'keenest brain among the ill-starred aggregation of defendants.'
Dreyfuss held a somewhat different view. For him, Goering was a 'pompous, bemedalled egocentric who waddled through the high offices of the Hitler government carrying out the mad designs of its leader with callous disregard for human rights and decency.'
The number two man of Nazi Germany had combined 'a core of steel and cruelty with a lust for self-adornment and power in a certain affability.'
Minutes of high Nazi meetings introduced at the Tribunal indicated that Goering had sanctioned such programmes as the extermination of 30,000,000 Slavs and Jews, and had penned a note in May 1944 proposing that American airmen be shot immediately on capture.
Goering had also sponsored a multi-billion dollar looting programme in Russia.
Alfred Rosenberg, the Estonian-born Nazi philosopher and leading anti-Semite, was portrayed at the trial as 'one of the most sticky- fingered of the Nazi conspirators.'
Dreyfuss wrote that the task force Rosenberg was alleged to have run looted enough goods and artistic treasures from overrun countries to fill over 27,000 railroad cars for the journey back to Germany.
The 53-year-old 'High Priest of Nazism,' who was accused in a score of documents of actively seeking to exterminate all Jews, even tried to convince the court that his theory of German racial superiority was neither new nor a Nazi invention, but rather the result of 400 years of investigation into the 'laws of inheritance.'
In November, 1945, Markus Wolf was a reporter working for the 'Berliner Rundfunk' (Radio) in then 4-Power occupied Berlin. Aged 22, he was the youngest journalist to be accredited to cover trial.
The son of German-Jewish parents, he had seen out the war in the Soviet Union, and had only recently returned from exile in Moscow to Berlin, to get a job with the Berliner Radio.
As a German, there was little chance of his being allowed to cover the trial, due to the huge number of scribes linked to the conquering Allied Powers who had descended on Nuremberg.
But Wolf was offered a spot with the Soviet Press delegation at the trial, after flashing an outdated Russian press pass. He was even given permission to stay at the then American-requisitioned Faber castle, on the Nuremberg outskirts, housing many of the international press representatives.
'The advantage of that was I didn't need to use a ration card, and got well fed by the U.S. Army,' he said, when interviewed in Berlin recently.
The East's former master-spy claimed work dominated his thoughts. 'I first learned how to use a telex there, and twice daily was allowed two 15-minute slots to file my copy on the morning and afternoon trial sessions.'
From 1946 onwards his radio commentaries were printed in the Berliner Zeitung, a local Berlin daily, but only rarely was he allowed to report on the trial via a direct phone hook-up with Berlin. When the trial verdicts were pronounced, his commentary was beamed to all German-speaking radio stations, including those in Austria and Switzerland. 'That was really something,' he said.
Asked if there had been signs in Nuremberg that the East-West Cold War was about to descend on a divided Europe, Wolf says relations between the Russian and Western correspondents were always relaxed, and 'only towards the end of the trial was there a whiff of political tensions.'
Ernest Michel, now 82, who emigrated to the United States in 1946 after being a reporter-observer at the trial, says that because he was a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps, the Nuremberg trial deeply affected him. At one stage during the trial he had come face to face with Goering in his cell. 'That was a meeting I shall never forget,' he says.
Michel is currently on a visit to Germany. On November 22, he is to give a talk at the Jewish Museum in Berlin linked to the 60th anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials.
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