The Nuremberg Trials | “Say I Slew Them Not”
May it please Your Honors:
The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. 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.
- Justice Robert Jackson, opening statement at the Nuremberg trials -
Twenty-one men sat in the dock awaiting their fate. Once the leaders of Europe's mightiest nation who had strutted proudly across the world stage arrogantly proclaiming the supremacy of the Aryan race, their faces remained defiant as their empire lay in ruins outside. Some showed open contempt for the victors who now sat in judgment over them. Others sat quietly, their faces frozen and their eyes fixed forward. Some even looked surprised at having been charged with crimes against humanity, since they were "just following orders." Their leader, now dead, had commanded them to murder millions, and as good Germans, they had done just that. Now, with the world's most terrible war at an end, they would face justice.
The Nuremberg trials originated in a 1943 declaration by the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union. It stated that on their victory, the Allied Powers would prosecute the leaders of Nazi Germany who had started the Second World War. Over the next two years, as the German Reich crumbled in the face of the Allied onslaught, officials began to plan how exactly to prosecute the criminals who had unleashed this storm of war on the world. Some believed the Nazi leaders should be summarily executed and others hoped to destroy Germany physically so that it could never again threaten world peace. Eventually, President Franklin Roosevelt managed to convince Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin to back the creation of an International Military Tribunal to try leading Nazis in an open court and lay their crimes before the world.
After Roosevelt's death in April 1945, Harry Truman followed his predecessor's plan and spearheaded the creation of the IMT. It would be made up of four main judges and four alternates from the leading Allied Powers in the European theater—the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union—and each country also sent prosecutors to try the defendants. The site for the trial was the Bavarian city of Nuremberg, once the "spiritual heart" of Nazism in Germany famous for its annual party rallies, and its Hall of Justice, where the 1935 Nuremberg Laws had stripped German Jews of their citizenship and begun the process that led ultimately to the Holocaust. The prosecution, led by the American Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, spent the summer and early fall of 1945 gathering evidence and preparing the cases, and the Trial of Major War Criminals opened on November 20th.
The Defendants at Nuremberg
Many of the Third Reich's leaders had died during the war or committed suicide during its turbulent final days, including Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, and Joseph Goebbels. A total of 24 men who had survived were selected by the prosecutors as a representative sample of Germany's wartime leaders. Nazi Party Secretary Martin Bormann, who had been a leading architect of Germany's persecution of Jews and Christians, was tried in absentia as he had disappeared in Berlin during the Third Reich's last days. Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, head of Krupp AG and a leading figure in German rearmament, was too ill to be present at Nuremberg. And Robert Ley, chief of the German Labor Front, hanged himself in his cell before the trial began.
The remaining 21 stood in the dock on November 20, 1945, and heard charges against them: conspiracy against peace, waging aggressive war, committing war crimes, and committing crimes against humanity. Each man rose when his name was called to enter his plea—and every one replied simply, "Nicht schuldig," "not guilty." In the front row were Reichsmarshall Hermann Göring, the senior surviving Nazi; Rudolf Hess, deputy Führer until his 1941 flight to England; Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler's foreign minister; General Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the High Command of the Army; Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the highest-ranking SS officer who had survived the war; Alfred Rosenberg, the party's racial philosopher and Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories; Hans Frank, Governor-General of Occupied Poland; Wilhelm Frick, an early supporter of Hitler and Germany's Interior Minister; Julius Streicher, party leader in Nuremberg and the worst antisemite in the dock; Walther Funk, president of the Reichsbank who had funded the war effort; and Hjalmar Schacht, another Reichsbank president who had become an opponent of the regime. In the back sat Admiral Karl Dönitz, head of the submarine force; Admiral Erich Raeder, head of the entire German Navy; Baldur von Schirach, leader of the Hitler Youth; Fritz Sauckel, chief of Germany's slave labor program; General Alfred Jodl, operations chief at Army High Command; Franz von Papen, Hitler's vice-chancellor and later ambassador to Austria; Artur Seyss-Inquart, Nazi ruler of Austria; Albert Speer, Hitler's personal friend, private architect, and Minister of Armaments; Konstantin von Neurath, former Foreign Minister and Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia; and Hans Fritzsche, a popular radio commentator and deputy Propaganda Minister under Joseph Goebbels.
Prosecution and Defense
The prosecution opened its case by presenting a vast trove of documents to the court and showing a series of films either captured in Nazi archives or taken by Allied photojournalists at the concentration camps. Witnesses for the prosecution also testified to their experiences in the camps or in forced labor factories. The world press covering the trial was horrified at the tales of brutality and murder, and accounts exist of observers breaking down into tears or becoming physically ill at the sight of dead bodies and emaciated survivors captured on film. Justice Jackson and the British prosecutor David Maxwell-Fyfe took the lead in examining the witnesses and drawing from them a complete picture of the horrors endured by the victims of Nazi Germany. When the prosecution rested its case in late February 1946, the world wondered what defense the accused could present to refute the stunning evidence against them.
Each defendant at Nuremberg had a German attorney to represent him before the court. The first to take the stand was Hermann Göring, who openly admitted his role in Nazi tyranny and managed to get the better of Justice Jackson during the first day of his cross-examination. Jackson was not a skilled interrogator and tended to cut the Nazi leader off while he made long statements, but David Maxwell-Fyfe took over and treated him, in the prosecutor's words, "like the Nazi bastard he was." Other defendants were less articulate, especially Hess, who claimed to have suffered a psychotic break, and Ribbentrop, who had compensated for his lack of intelligence with a brutal character and fanatical devotion to his Führer.
Three incidents during the defense stage of the trial stood out to observers and are of interest to historians of this period. In 1940, the Soviet Red Army had murdered over twenty thousand Polish officers and civilians near the forest of Katyn, and the Nazis had discovered their remains two years later during the invasion of the Soviet Union. At Nuremberg, the Soviet prosecutors tried to blame the Germans for these murders, and in July 1946 eyewitnesses testifying for the defense told the world that they had seen Russian soldiers carry out this crime. Barbarism, it turned out, was not confined to the Third Reich.
One of the defendants, the SS thug Ernst Kaltenbrunner, insisted that he had not been part of the Holocaust because he had never visited the Auschwitz death camp. This single bit of evidence was certainly not enough to earn him an acquittal, but his lawyer brought the Auschwitz commander Rudolf Höss to Nuremberg to testify to this fact. After a single question from the German attorney about Kaltenbrunner's whereabouts, Justice Jackson then rose to cross-examine Höss. Over the next hour, the Nazi murderer explained in cold, calculating language that he had made Auschwitz into the most efficient death camp in the world and had murdered about 2.5 million people in three years. He showed no remorse for his actions, commenting that rat-catchers do not think it is wrong to kill rats. This was a clear example of the first of two attitudes taken by the defendants at Nuremberg and other trials held after the war—the Jews were not humans, and thus their murders were not murder.
The soldiers tried at Nuremberg attempted to justify their crimes, especially the "Night and Fog" decree to murder civilians accused of helping the Allies and the "Commissar Order" to kill Soviet political officers during the invasion of Russia, by insisting that they were "just following orders." "Befehl ist Befehl," or "orders are orders," is how one of the defendants put it during his testimony. The Germans tried to place the full blame for their war crimes and the murders of the Holocaust squarely on the leaders of the Third Reich, all of whom—except for Göring—were now dead. The judges rejected this defense, now known as "superior orders," but it has returned on occasion when the soldiers of other nations faced justice for their crimes committed during war. The statute established at Nuremberg, that soldiers are responsible for their actions if an order is illegal or immoral, has not always been applied universally, and there is still considerable debate in legal circles about whether or not "just following orders" is an acceptable defense for war crimes.
During the trial, the U.S. Army psychologist Gustave Gilbert spoke with each defendant and documented his conversations. He also gave each Nazi official an I.Q. test to determine their intelligence level and see if there was a correlation between one's mental abilities and their willingness to commit mass murder. The results were surprising. Of the five top-scoring Nazis, three of them (Seyss-Inquart, Dönitz, and Göring) had been fanatical supporters of the regime, and the same was true of four of the five bottom-scoring ones (Funk, Sauckel, Kaltenbrunner, and Streicher). The Allies conducted other tests on former Nazi officials during the late 1940s to try to assess how and why so many Germans had embraced Adolf Hitler. Unfortunately there isn't time in this podcast to address them, but I'm hoping Joe will ask me about them in our discussion. Gilbert's lasting contribution to the Nuremberg trials came in his work defining the nature of evil. In his 1950 book The Psychology of Dictatorship, Gilbert wrote, "In my work with the defendants, I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”
Judgements and Criticism
Justice Jackson's closing statement at Nuremberg recounted the prosecution's case against each defendant. After laying once again the crimes of Nazi Germany before the judges and the world, he ended his argument with these words: "It is against such a background that these defendants now ask this Tribunal to say that they are not guilty of planning, executing, or conspiring to commit this long list of crimes and wrongs." Jackson then recalled William Shakespeare's play Richard III, a story of villainy and murder. "They stand before the record of this trial as blood-stained Gloucester stood by the body of his slain King. He begged of the widow, as they beg of you: 'Say I slew them not.' And the Queen replied, 'Then say they were not slain. But dead they are,' If you were to say of these men that they are not guilty, it would be as true to say there has been no war, there are no slain, there has been no crime."
The court adjourned on September 1, 1946, and spent the month deliberating on the sentences to be handed out. The Soviet judge, Iona Nikitchenko, insisted that all 21 defendants be sentenced to death. The Frenchman Henri Donnedieu de Vabres wished to allow military officers to be shot by firing squad, but Nikitchenko refused to allow the "fascist criminals" to die honorably. Ultimately, the American judge Francis Biddle and the British head of the court Geoffrey Lawrence convinced their counterparts to base the judgments on the evidence and sentence the guilty to death by hanging.
Eleven defendants were given the death sentence: Göring, Ribbentrop, Keitel, Kaltenbrunner, Rosenberg, Frank, Frick, Streicher, Sauckel, Jodl, and Seyss-Inquart. Three were sentenced to life imprisonment: Funk, Hess, and Raeder. Funk and Raeder were released because of ill health during the 1950s, and Hess remained in prison until his death by suicide in 1987. Schirach and Speer got twenty years for their crimes and served their full sentences, Neurath received fifteen for his but was released for health reasons only nine years later, and Dönitz got ten years and served his sentence. The last three—Papen, Schacht, and Fritzsche—were acquitted of all charges because the prosecution had failed make their case. Of those sentenced to death, ten were ultimately hanged in the Nuremberg jail by Master Sergeant John Woods on October 16, 1946. The executions were botched because Woods had miscalculated the length of rope needed and the size of the trap door. Each man made a final statement, most protesting their innocence or blessing Germany and its army, and then the sentence was carried out. One man, Hermann Göring, escaped the hangman's noose by committing suicide with a cyanide capsule he had hidden in his luggage. But in the end, all met their eternal fate and received the justice they had denied to millions of their victims.
Several legal scholars criticized the Nuremberg Trials at the time and continue to do so today. Some are deep and complicated legal critiques too involved to be discussed here, but the most common claim is that what happened at Nuremberg was not a fulfillment of justice but a travesty. The defendants' statements were not accepted as true unless they backed up the prosecution's case (which was true in some cases), and those defendants like Speer and Schirach who expressed remorse for their crimes were given lenient sentences despite their horrific crimes (which was also true). The families of several defendants later sued to have their relatives' names and property restored by the West German government, and General Alfred Jodl's widow actually got a statement from Konrad Adenauer's ministry in Bonn that declared him innocent of the charges—which the Allied Control Council then reversed. No matter the criticisms, valid or otherwise, the Nuremberg Trials established an important precedent in international law: that some crimes, such as genocide, are so great that only humanity itself can judge their perpetrators through world institutions like the International Criminal Court of the United Nations. Whether this precedent would be followed after 1945 was an open question, and sadly the subsequent history of the world shows that it was not.
Learning from History
As I close my last full episode of this season, I first want to say that I hope you have enjoyed these podcasts and have learned many lessons from the history I have presented to you, our wonderful audience. It has not always been easy to summarize the many pieces of information and warnings from the past into fifteen-minute segments. The Nuremberg Trials is such a topic, and there are more lessons than I can possibly share with you in our closing moments. So with apologies again to my fellow historians, I hope to synthesize the trials' many lessons into two overarching themes.
The first is something that Joe and I have talked about a lot over the past two seasons on "15-Minute History," that the road to oppression and murder does not start with gas chambers or mass graves. The men at Nuremberg described how Adolf Hitler and his henchmen convinced them, and their nation, to embrace a philosophy of death and then unleash it on the world. The road to Auschwitz started slowly, was fueled by propaganda and small acts of evil, and then culminated on the steps of its gas chambers. It took a nation to commit the crimes of the Third Reich, but it began with one man and a small cabal of demented minds who listened to him without asking themselves if what he required of them was right. The first lesson of Nuremberg is one we have referenced in the book Good Men, that decent people will do terrible things if driven forward by propaganda, a desire to keep their jobs (which was Hans Frank's defense of his many murders), and a belief that they were "just following orders."
Adolf Hitler corrupted not just his followers and the nation they led, but also the long-established institutions of Germany: the government, the courts, the schools, the churches, and much more. As I hope we'll discuss in the next segment, the education system was a key component of the Nazification of German society, and as illustrated by Gustave Gilbert's conversations with the Nuremberg defendants, these institutional pillars must be protected from those who would tear them down or infest them with dangerous ideologies. Right or left, conservative or progressive, those who seek to transform a society will not simply hold a gun to your head and say, "submit." Rather, they will do what Hitler and many other dictators before and since have done. They will turn society into a weapon against their enemies, real or perceived, and then unleash those who have failed to notice the transformation and embraced their leaders' new agenda upon an unsuspecting nation. The greatest lesson of the Nuremberg trials, and indeed of this season of "15-Minute History" is this: each one of us must be ever-vigilant against those who promote radicalism in the guise of transformation, reform, and progress.
