Nuremberg Trial

Hans Frank was the Nazi Party’s pet lawyer, personal counsel to Hitler from the earliest days, and marcher in the farcical Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. Appointed governor-general of Poland, Frank systematically looted the country and exterminated what remained of its leadership. As for the Jews, he was utterly merciless, declaring: They will have to go….We must destroy the Jews wherever we meet them….

Wilhelm Frick was a doctor of laws, and an early Nazi who used his position to help Nazi criminals escape trial. Sentenced to 15 months in prison for his part in the 1923 putsch, in the surreal Germany of the time Frick nevertheless continued as chief of the Munich criminal police. Frick served as minister of the interior, in which job he did nothing to curb the brutalities of the SS and Gestapo. Appointed Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia in 1943, he presided over the death camps in his protectorate, although his subordinate, Karl-Hermann Frank, did most of the actual dirty work.

Goebbels, the Nazis’ clever chief of propaganda, had poisoned his six children before he died outside the Berlin bunker with his pitiful wife. He was beyond the reach of the Tribunal, but one of his lesser deputies was not. Hans Fritzsche held several responsible posts in Goebbels’ ministry, and during the war was a widely heard radio commentator.

Close to Fritzsche sat Constantin Freiherr von Neurath, a 73-year-old career diplomat. Neurath, a conservative rather than a passionate Nazi, had been foreign minister until 1938, when he was removed from office after he was unwilling to endorse Hitler’s plans for stealing Austria and Czechoslovakia and making war on the Western powers. After a series of meaningless jobs, he was appointed protector of Bohemia and Moravia in 1939–only to be removed from that job, too,in 1941.

Fritz Sauckel spent most of the war years as plenipotentiary-general for labor mobilization, in which capacity he was responsible for the rounding up of some 5 million workers for the German war machine. As a sidelight, he supervised the extermination of thousands of Jewish laborers in Poland.

In stark contrast to the crude Sauckel was sophisticated Franz von Papen. Pompous scion of an old aristocratic family, he became chancellor of Germany in 1932. A believer in the strong totalitarian state, he had immediately abolished the ban on the SA (Sturm Abteilung), Hitler’s private army, and had begun firing republican officials. Conspiring with Hitler–in hopes of controlling him–Papen served as vice chancellor for a while but criticized extreme Nazi philosophy and was very nearly murdered along with Ernst Röhm and the leaders of the SA in 1934. Thereafter he served as ambassador to Austria, and, for most of the war years, to Turkey.

Last, but not least, was Hjalmar Schacht, banking wizard and financial manager of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. An ardent nationalist, Schacht said, I wish a great and strong Germany; to achieve it I would enter an alliance with the Devil. And he did. Schacht organized support for Hitler among the industrial giants of Germany, Krupp, I.G. Farben and the rest. Schact was fired as president of the Reichsbank in 1939 when he opposed full-scale war preparation on the grounds that Germany could not economically support a long conflict. He was also, apparently, upset by the organized anti-Jewish repression of 1938 and the purge of the army leadership. Arrested after the failed July 20, 1944, plot to kill Hitler, Schacht was sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, and later was held at Flossenbürg and Dachau.

There had been 24 Nuremberg defendants at the start. In addition to the men already mentioned, the accused included Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach. Head of the Krupp works that supplied so much of Germany’s armaments, Gustav Krupp used thousands of slave laborers, many of whom did not survive. He did not stand trial, however, because a stroke had reduced him to incompetence.

Also absent was Robert Ley, who headed the German Labor Front from 1933 to the end of the war. Another crude, uncouth anti-Semite, Ley controlled an enormous budget and was virtual czar of all German workers. He controlled wages and hours and such profitable swindles as the Volkswagen fraud, in which thousands of workers paid for a car in installments and nobody ever saw either a car or a refund of his hard-earned marks. Unwilling to face trial at Nuremberg, Ley had hanged himself in his cell on October 24, 1945.

One of the minor miracles of Nuremberg–and the other prosecutions–was that they happened at all. In an understandable fury at the enormous crimes perpetrated in Nazi Germany, many people wished for vengeance, pure and simple, administered summarily and quickly.

To the everlasting credit of the Allies, the trials were to be run fairly and formally, each person judged according to the evidence, and punished–or not–according to individual guilt. Lord Simon, speaking in the British House of Lords in 1943, put it as well as anybody could: From…the British point of view, we must never fail, however deeply we are tried, and however fundamentally we are moved by the sufferings of others, to do justice according to justice…whatever happens…war criminals shall be dealt with because they are proved to be criminals, and not because they belong to a race led by a maniac…who has brought this frightful evil upon the world.

The trial itself was unique. It had no parallel in legal history. Retribution after war was certainly nothing new, but the Nuremberg prosecutions were unprecedented in every way. For one thing, they were to be good-faith proceedings, dedicated to convicting nobody, save on substantial evidence of guilt.

The Soviets were not happy with all the protections afforded the accused. The accused, they said, were already guilty, and needed only to be sentenced, a sort of they’re-guilty-because-we-say-they-are approach. The Western Allies, of course, would have none of the Soviet view, even though the Soviets were by no means alone.

Many people across the civilized world expressed their willingness to deal summarily with all war criminals. Even The Nation, long the flagship of the American liberal press, proclaimed: In our opinion…the proper procedure would have been to…read off their crimes with as much supporting data as seemed useful, pass judgment upon them quickly, and carry out the judgment without any delay whatever.

The accused would have the protection of an expert, unbiased judicial panel, one judge from each of the four major Allies (though it is and was a little hard to say unbiased and Soviet in the same breath). The International Military Tribunal would decide procedural matters by majority vote, with the president’s vote deciding ties. Conviction or sentence of any accused required three votes out of four. Each nation also appointed an alternate judge, present and sitting when that nation’s primary judge was absent for any reason. All four nations had to be represented before the Tribunal could do any business.

Most important of all, perhaps, the defendants were protected by defense counsel, able German lawyers whose sole obligation was to fight as hard as they could for their clients.

Just working out the procedure of the trials proved to be a complicated undertaking. To start with, some way had to be found to operate efficiently in four languages and have everybody in the courtroom fully understand what went on. And some common procedure had to be arrived at, some melding of the Anglo-American common-law tradition and the basically Roman law practiced in Europe. Even between the practitioners of Roman law–the Germans, the French and the Soviets–there were substantial differences.

There were other problems. Even the place of trial had to be settled. While the Western Allies agreed that Nuremberg was the logical venue, the Russians grumbled and held out for Berlin. Once that hurdle was cleared, there remained the substantial problem of facilities.

The Nuremberg Palace of Justice, like much of the rest of the ancient city, had been heavily bombed. Much reconstruction needed doing before any sort of trial could be held. And, besides general refurbishment, the chosen courtroom had to be greatly enlarged. It had to hold not only an elevated bench to accommodate eight judges but also the 21-defendant dock, plus room for a small army of counsel for both sides (some 50 lawyers appeared for the prosecution alone). Room also had to be found for a good-sized interpreters’ booth, a lectern from which the lawyers could question and argue, a witness box, a press gallery, and an area for spectators.

And so a wall was knocked out to expand the courtroom. The new courtroom got the requisite furniture and a fresh coat of paint. Left standing at the courtroom entrance were three large bronze panels mounted on marble pillars. In the center, Eve offered Adam an apple, emblematic of human temptation to do the forbidden. Eden was flanked by a figure with a sword–that was justice–and the Roman fasces, the bundle of rods and axes that symbolized the authority of the state.

The courtroom also received a sophisticated sound system. All testimony, arguments of counsel and rulings by the court were to be transmitted into the interpreters’ booth and simultaneously translated into the three languages not then being spoken. All participants in the trial, including each accused and counsel, were provided with headsets and a system of switches, by which they could choose to listen to the proceedings in any of the four languages. The sound system extended to the press gallery and the spectators’ seats as well. There was even a system of lights, installed to warn speakers when they were talking too fast.

Once facilities were available, the accused were moved into the neighboring prison–most of them had thus far been confined in Luxembourg. They were held in individual cells, and some care was exercised to thwart attempts at suicide.

Even so, Ley had managed to unravel a GI towel and hang himself. After that, precautions against suicide were increased, although the spectacle of the erstwhile Nazi Party bigwig dangling from a toilet pipe in a dingy cell seemed at least as appropriate as a formal execution. After Ley’s death, each defendant was constantly watched by a guard, day and night.

The prosecution glittered with a whole galaxy of illustrious lawyers. Counsel for the United States was led by tough, able Robert H. Jackson, justice of the United States Supreme Court. For Britain, Attorney General Sir Hartley Shawcross led, although the lion’s share of the actual trial was carried by brilliant, urbane Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, himself once attorney general under Sir Winston Churchill.

Well before the trials began, the prosecutors had to decide whether to rely primarily on documentary evidence or on live witnesses. The decision was taken to depend on documents, a resolution that turned out to be quite correct. Aside from the stupendous logistical task of rounding up the right witnesses in the wilderness of postwar Europe, there was another, more important consideration. Nobody could later accuse a piece of paper of having a poor memory, of perjury, or of biased testimony. However, the decision to rely primarily on paper evidence required the sifting of thousands upon thousands of documents, a colossal job of evaluation and cross-referencing that required months of work by hundreds of people.

The Nuremberg Trial proceeded on a formal indictment, couched in four counts. First, the defendants were accused of participating in a Nazi master plan, a massive conspiracy to gain totalitarian control of Germany, to rearm, to conquer others, and in the process to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The second count simply alleged that the defendants did the things they were alleged to have planned under count one.

Count three charged violations of the customs and laws of warfare, including killing civilians, taking hostages, and maltreating prisoners of war.

The fourth and final count charged crimes against humanity. It incorporated the allegations of count three, but added allegations dealing with the concentration camps and with the persecutions of Jews and other groups of people prior to the war, in Germany, Czechoslovakia and Austria.

The Tribunal convened in Nuremberg in the autumn of 1945, headed by its president, brilliant, articulate Lord Justice Geoffrey Lawrence. Lord Geoffrey led off with a simple, impressive statement of the Tribunal’s function, a reminder to everybody concerned to discharge their duties without fear or favor, in accordance with the sacred principles of law and justice….[It] is the duty of all concerned to see that the Trial in no way departs from those principles and traditions which alone give justice its authority and the place it ought to occupy in the affairs of all civilized states.

The trial lasted about 10 months, the verdicts and sentences being handed down September 30October 1, 1946. Before it was over, the world learned much about death camps and other horrors of the Thousand-Year Reich. Most of the 21 defendants were sentenced to hang or to long prison terms; several were acquitted. The unprecedented trial was not without controversy, but the turmoil surrounding it was small indeed compared to the death and destruction the world had just witnessed.

This article was written by Robert Barr Smith and originally appeared in the November 1995 issue of World War II magazine. For more great articles subscribe to World War II magazine today!