In the row behind Keitel sat General Alfred Jodl, chief of the Wehrmacht operations staff, which directed the entire war outside of Russia. Jodl had condoned a number of illegal acts, including the shooting of hostages.

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Julius Streicher was a particularly nasty piece of work. One of the very early Nazis, Streicher’s major contribution to the party had been a series of rabble-rousing speeches and his crass, semipornographic tabloid, Der Stürmer (The Stormer). Streicher’s paper dripped with hatred for anything Jewish and invented whatever "news" it needed to condemn Jews as the authors of every ill Germany was heir to. A sadist, he rose to become Gauleiter (district leader) of Franconia, although his influence declined somewhat as the war went on.

Even fouler than Streicher was huge, brutal Ernst Kaltenbrunner, onetime Austrian lawyer and police official. A boyhood friend of Adolf Eichmann, Kaltenbrunner became commander of the Austrian SS, and after the Anschluss (the German annexation of Austria) became Austrian minister for state security. In 1943 he replaced the vile Reinhard Heydrich as chief of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), the state security office. He thus became not only Gestapo chief but also boss of the death camp system and executor of the "final solution," the extermination of the Jews. An alcoholic egotist, Kaltenbrunner personally researched the efficacy of the various means of execution used in his camps. He drove RSHA’s goons to hunt down more Jews and was responsible for the murder of Allied parachutists.

Equally repulsive in his own way was Walther Funk. Once a journalist of sorts, he became able chief of the office for economic policy for the party. Funk, an oily, undersized man, was a well-known homosexual and alcoholic, but for a while served as the spokesman for German big business. He became president of the Reichsbank in 1939, and as such presided over the huge secret SS accounts, stuffed with phenomenal amounts of money and other valuables stolen from murdered Jews.

Alfred Rosenberg, the "philosopher" of National Socialism, dealt in the mystic nonsense that passed for Nazi doctrine. He preached, for example, that international Jewry was responsible for the Russian Revolution and that Freemasons had somehow fomented World War I. His writing, as convoluted and distorted as his speech, included such racist claptrap as The Track of the Jew Through Time and Immorality in the Talmud.

Obsessed with dark, international conspiracies, Rosenberg harped endlessly on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the plan of an international Zionist "conspiracy," a spurious document in fact invented by the czarist secret police. Rosenberg also edited the Nazi Party paper, and in 1930 published The Myth of the Twentieth Century, a garbled smorgasbord of Nazi racial and anti-Christian theory that Goebbels condescendingly referred to as "philosophical belching." Baldur von Schirach, Reich youth leader, said that Rosenberg "sold more copies of a book no one ever read than any other author" (maybe excepting Hitler’s turgid Mein Kampf).

Schirach himself sat in the dock just a few seats from Rosenberg. Schirach was a genuine aristocrat, and his American mother had passed on to him the blood of two signers of the Declaration of Independence. Anti-Semitic, anti-Christian and oddly anti-aristocrat, Schirach joined the party in 1924 and for many years was the highly effective organizer and leader of the Hitler Youth, a compulsory military-style organization for German youth between the ages of 10 and 18. Later relieved of his job due to Bormann’s intrigues, he became Gauleiter of Vienna. He participated in the deportation of almost 200,000 Austrian Jews to the East, although he tried to persuade Hitler to moderate his treatment of Eastern Europe generally and the Jews in particular.

Near Schirach sat Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Austrian Nazi and enthusiastic supporter of the 1938 Anschluss. He was rewarded for his treason with the governorship of Austria, which he held until the spring of 1939. As governor of the Netherlands during the war, he deported Dutch Jews to the camps and shipped some 5 million Netherlanders to Germany for forced labor.

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