Nuremberg: Nazis On Trial

The Nuremberg trial

In November 1945, in the German city of Nuremberg, the victors of the World War Two began the first international war crimes trial. The choice of the city was significant for it was here that the National Socialist Party held its annual rallies.

Adolf Hitler intended it to be rebuilt as the 'party city'. Now many of the leaders of the party were on trial for their lives, only a short distance from the grand arena where they had been fêted by the German people.

The 21 defendants came from very different backgrounds. Some, like Hitler's chosen successor Hermann Goering, were senior politicians - their responsibility clear.

Others were there because senior party leaders Heinrich Himmler, head of the feared SS, and Joseph Goebbels, head of propaganda - had killed themselves rather than face capture and trial.Their deputies or juniors stood on trial instead of them. But most of them were regarded by the western public, rightly or wrongly, as key playmakers in a system that had brought war to Europe and cost the lives of 50 million people.

The charges laid at their door were extraordinary. They were collectively accused of conspiring to wage war, and committing crimes against peace, crimes against humanity (including the newly defined crime of genocide) and war crimes in the ordinary sense (abuse and murder of prisoners, killing of civilians and so on). This catalogue of sin was difficult for many of the defendants to come to terms with.

One of them, Robert Ley, best known for his role as head of the 'Strength through Joy' movement, which masterminded the Volkswagen car, hanged himself in his cell a few weeks before the trial started, so shamed was he by the accusations of crime. Ley's suicide was the most extreme example of the many ways the defendants responded to the trial.

The reaction of the others covered a very wide spectrum, from confident defiance to full admission of responsibility. In the case of Rudolf Hess, Hitler's former deputy, the reality was almost complete memory loss.

Two prisoners in particular came to represent opposite poles in their reaction to the trials and the accusation of massive crimes. Hermann Goering, the man Hitler chose as his successor in the 1930s and the most flamboyant and ambitious of the party hierarchy, prepared to defend Hitler and the Reich's war policy rather than admit that what had been done was criminal.

On the other hand Albert Speer, the youthful architect who rose to run Germany's armaments effort during the war, accepted from the start the collective responsibility of the defendants for the crimes of which they were accused and tried to distance himself from Hitler's ghostly presence at the tribunal.

Hermann Goering: 'Prisoner Number One'

Hermann Goering at Nuremberg  ©

Goering was captured shortly after the end of the war with large quantities of his looted artworks. He thought he could negotiate with the Allies as Germany's most senior politician, but he found himself under arrest, stripped of everything, and held in an improvised prison camp before his transfer to Nuremberg to stand trial.

He was a big personality in every sense. The guards nicknamed him 'Fat Stuff' and bantered with him. He was charming, aloof and confident, and from the start was determined to dominate the other prisoners and make them follow his line of defence.

Goering insisted that everything that they had done was the result of their German patriotism. To defy the court was to protect Germany's reputation and to maintain their loyalty to their dead leader.

With the start of the trial, Goering assumed at once the informal role as leader and spokesman for the whole cohort of prisoners. He was given the most prominent position in the dock.

When it came to his cross-examination he prepared carefully and in the opening exchanges with the American chief prosecutor Robert Jackson he emerged an easy winner.

So frustrated did Jackson become with Goering's clever, mocking but evasive responses that at the end of the session he threw down the headphones he had been wearing to hear the translated answers and refused to continue.

'If you all handle yourselves half as well as I did,' Goering boasted to the other prisoners, 'you will do all right.' Only after his cross-examination by the more experienced British barrister, Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, was Goering at last cut down to size.

For the prosecution teams, Goering's domineering role among the prisoner body posed a problem. In mid-February 1946, on the recommendation of the psychologist who monitored prisoner behaviour, Goering was forced to exercise and take his meals on his own.

His isolation allowed the other prisoners to talk freely to each other and in the courtroom. The united front that Goering wanted soon collapsed.

During the long summer months, when he had to listen to the catalogue of crimes and atrocities laid at the door of the system he had served, he became less confident. But he maintained his loyalty to Hitler until the very end, when he finally confessed to the prison psychologist his realisation that in the eyes of the German people Hitler had 'condemned himself'.

Goering was found guilty on all the charges laid against him and condemned to death. He regarded the whole trial as simply a case of victors' justice and had not expected to escape with his life. At the very end he cheated his captors. On 14 October 1946, the night before he was to be executed, he committed suicide with a phial of cyanide either hidden in his cell or smuggled in by a sympathetic guard.

Albert Speer: The 'Decent Nazi'

Albert Speer in his cell at Nuremberg  ©

Speer was the opposite of Goering in almost every respect. Tall, conventionally good-looking, capable of a quiet charm, he impressed his captors and interrogators more than any of the other prisoners. For some time he had not expected to be one of the major war criminals.

From the start he posed as an efficient and helpful technocrat, willing to give detailed information quite voluntarily on German weapons, economic performance and strategy. He was held separately from the other war criminals and was transferred to Nuremberg only in the autumn when it was clear that he was one of those chosen for trial.

Despite the reservations of his defence lawyer, Speer decided that his best defence was to admit his share of collective responsibility for the crimes of the regime and to distance himself from Hitler, a man who Speer freely admitted had once held him in thrall like all the rest.

At the same time in his interrogations and cross-examinations, he seldom expressed his individual guilt. He succeeded in presenting himself as part of the system, but not a driving force.

Just before the trial opened he sent a four-page letter to Robert Jackson reminding him again of just how useful he had been as a source of intelligence and technical information since his capture.

Speer was bound to clash with Goering. He resented Goering's efforts to dominate the prisoners and to dictate the course of their defence. When Goering was separated from the other prisoners in February, Speer was free to talk openly with them about the crimes of the regime.

The others did not all share his candour, any more than they shared Goering's ebullience, but for the rest of the trial period the cohort of prisoners divided into small groups rather than presenting a united front.

Speer added to the division when he dramatically revealed early in the trial that at the very end of the war he had tried to find a way to assassinate Hitler by pouring poison gas into his underground bunker. The plot was abortive, but it again presented Speer to the prosecution as someone different from the rest of the defendants.

When Speer was cross-examined he got off more lightly than others. At the end of the trial, even though he had been responsible for the mass exploitation of forced foreign labour, he was given a 20-year sentence. The man who supplied the labour, Fritz Sauckel, was executed.

The Speer story has remained an enigma. No doubt he benefited from his pose as a technical manager (whose social background was not very different from those who were trying him) and from his willingness to confess responsibility. The extent to which he manipulated his story to win sympathy or genuinely believed that the regime he served was criminal is still open to conjecture.

The Forgetful Rudolf Hess

Rudolf Hess in Spandau prison  ©

The most bizarre choice to stand trial was Hitler's deputy and head of the party chancellery, Rudolf Hess. There was no doubt that he had been a key figure in organising and running the party in the 1920s and early 1930s. He it was who took down the dictated draft of Hitler's 'Mein Kampf'. But from the mid-1930s he became a more marginal political figure - 'one of the great cranks of the Third Reich', in the words of Speer.

In May 1941 - apparently anxious at his loss of favour with Hitler and pre-occupied with the dangers of the impending two-front war which would follow Germany's attack on the USSR scheduled for June - Hess took a plane and flew it to Scotland. Here he was captured by the British, interrogated and put in an institution. He became increasingly paranoid and eventually descended into long periods of self-induced hysterical amnesia.

It was in this state of almost complete forgetfulness that Hess was eventually flown to Nuremberg in October 1945 at the insistence of the Soviets, who had been puzzled and distrustful about what Hess had been doing in Britain for four years.

It became clear that a decision had to be taken about whether he was fit to plead. A panel of medical and psychiatric experts was recruited and finally recommended on 29 November, more than a week after the trial had started, that Hess was fit to plead. The following day, to the shock of the court, Hess suddenly stood up apparently lucid at last and announced: 'My memory is in order again.'

Hess retained his lucidity for a few weeks, but with partial memory loss. He then relapsed into complete amnesia again and spent his time in court reading, occasionally laughing and disregarding the process around him. In a conventional criminal court he would have been deemed to be of unsound mind, but the Allies were worried about the effect it might have on the public perception of the trial if Hess were removed.

He was sentenced to life imprisonment, though he pretended not to hear or understand the judgement. He committed suicide in Spandau prison, Berlin, in 1987.

Goering, Speer and Hess represented extreme responses to the trial at Nuremberg, but they all shared with the others in the dock some degree of responsibility. In Goering's case a very great one for the programme of oppression, war and genocide on which Hitler's regime embarked from its inauguration in 1933.

This did not make them criminals in the ordinary sense, and for many of the offences for which they were tried there was as yet no body of internationally agreed law.

They were indicted for the most part under retrospective law. But over the following years conventions on the laws of war, genocide and human rights were signed which embodied much of the 'law' made up at Nuremberg.

Those legal instruments have not safeguarded innocent populations from violation over the last 60 years, but thanks to Nuremberg there is at least a proper understanding of what violation means, even if the international community still lacks an entirely effective means of punishing it.

/By BBC/