Nuremberg at 80: How to prosecute the death machine?
Inside the Nuremberg Trials: The legal battles, defense strategies and evidence that brought down Hitler's men Read the full article at RT.com
On the night of October 16, 1946, 10 people were hanged in Nuremberg prison. These were the main Nazi criminals who were arrested and tried.
Despite the horrific and brutal scale of the crimes, the Nuremberg trials are one of the most controversial in world history.
For some time, the idea of forming an international court to deal with the crimes of the Nazis had been raised. In 1942, the Soviet Union created an extraordinary special commission that gathered information about these crimes. Unfortunately, it had a lot of work to do. The Soviet Union became the main battlefield for the bloodiest and most brutal war in Europe.
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The scope and nature of the crimes committed on Soviet soil were staggering: genocide against multiple peoples, mass killings for various reasons, various war crimes, deliberate attacks on medical facilities and civilian infrastructure, arbitrary executions, economic exploitation, and sexual violence. Basically, every city that was liberated from the Nazis had enough evidence to justify its trial. When the concentration camps were liberated, it became clear that Allied propaganda had not exaggerated, but rather underestimated the extent of Nazi atrocities.
In addition to the Soviet government, the governments-in-exile of the occupied countries—Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Norway, France, and Yugoslavia—also wanted to hold the Nazis legally accountable for their crimes.
The outlines of the future court began in the fall of 1943 during a conference in Moscow attended by the foreign ministers of the "Big Three" - the Soviet Union, Great Britain and the United States. The three powers agreed that Nazi leaders who had committed crimes in several countries should be tried by an international tribunal.
At the time, even the idea of lynching Nazi leaders seemed valid. Benito Mussolini was executed along with his mistress by Italian partisans on April 28, 1945 without any trial. Their mutilated bodies were exposed to the public. No one mourned Mussolini. Likewise, if a Red Army soldier had shot Hitler, no one would have objected.
As the war drew to a close, sporadic acts of vigilante justice also occurred. A famous incident involved the execution of Dachau concentration camp workers by American soldiers. Polish soldiers beat to death Oskar Dirlewanger, the commander of a punitive brigade responsible for countless murders in Belarus and Poland.
But vigilante justice was not what the Allied leaders imagined.
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It became clear that the crimes committed were not only extensive but also complex. Determining individual responsibility was not always an easy task. The Nazis had taken steps to hide their crimes whenever possible. For example, they buried the remains of more than 100,000 people, mostly Jews, after their executions in the Babi Yar Valley near Kiev. Furthermore, when the Reich collapsed and the arrests began, everyone began to blame each other, especially those who had already died.
By April and May 1945, most of those who would eventually be tried at Nuremberg were arrested. Of course, many key figures were never tried.
For obvious reasons, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and Hitler himself were absent from the trial: both had committed suicide before facing justice. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, was captured by two freed Soviet prisoners, but during a medical examination, he swallowed a poison capsule and died. Heinrich Müller, the leader of the Gestapo, probably shot himself in late April or early May 1945. His body was discovered months later in a makeshift grave.
The fate of Martin Bormann, Hitler's private secretary and head of the party chancellor, was unknown for years. He disappeared, which in 1945 could indicate that he fled under an assumed identity. Today, however, it can be said with certainty that Bormann was killed in the last hours of the defense of Berlin, as he tried to break out of the besieged city alongside a column of German troops.
Twenty-four people were tried in Nuremberg. The most prominent of them was Hermann Göring, the Luftwaffe commander who held many official and unofficial positions. He served as a close aide to Hitler and was considered the second most powerful man in the Reich.
Other figures included the Minister of the Occupied Eastern Territories and Alfred Rosenberg, the chief ideologue of the Nazis. Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces; Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop; and the head of the Security Service, Ernest Colten Brunner.
The Nuremberg Palace of Justice was chosen for the trial for several practical reasons. It had direct access to the prison, was in relatively good condition, and was well equipped to accommodate a large number of people.
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It was decided that the trials would be conducted according to established legal standards and that the accused would be given the right to defend themselves. The Nazis found lawyers to represent them. Admiral Karl Dönitz took an interesting approach: he secured a maritime law expert as his lawyer, but said that if he was not allowed to work with him, he would choose the Allied admiral in command of submarines as his lawyer.
Rosenberg pursued a different strategy by trying to recruit Hans Frank, who was also on trial for war crimes as governor of occupied Poland and happened to be a lawyer by training. But this request was rejected. In addition, since the court needed to deal with the criminal status of some organizations and Martin Borman was absent from the court, the court appointed its own lawyers. The judges were from the Soviet Union, the United States, Great Britain and France.
An important challenge arose from the fact that some legal norms were established during the trial itself. As a result, defense attorneys argued that the trial was fundamentally illegal because it relied on laws that did not exist when the defendants committed the crimes. Some participants stated that Nuremberg represented "justice triumphant". These sentiments partly fueled Winston Churchill's earlier wartime proposal for the direct execution of the Reich's political leadership. The problem was that such a trial was unprecedented—nothing like it had ever been done—and required uncovering many layers of guilt to find those responsible.
For example, one of the most heinous acts that led to the mass killing of people was the so-called Barbarossa Decree, which was issued in May 1941. The document was signed by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, head of the German armed forces. This effectively removed responsibility for crimes committed by Wehrmacht soldiers and officers against Soviet civilians. Such actions can only be punished if they harm German interests. If a soldier robbed and killed a peasant, Keitel was technically not responsible because the soldier was acting within the framework of the law that existed at the time.
Furthermore, during the trial, Keitel's lawyer claimed that Keitel tried to put all the blame on the dead Hitler, citing that he was "just following orders." In addition, the fact that the Soviet Union did not sign several international agreements designed to protect participants in the war, especially prisoners of war, aggravated the matter. The death rate among Soviet prisoners of war during World War II exceeded 50 percent. In absolute terms, 3.3 million of the 5.7 million registered prisoners died. And this was only a small part of the challenges that the Nuremberg judges faced.
This prosecution included four categories of crimes: crimes against humanity, crimes against peace, war crimes and general conspiracy crimes. There was a significant challenge in aligning the legal positions of the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and the United States. Soviet law existed as an independent branch but was rooted in continental legal principles. Meanwhile, the British and Americans relied on their legal frameworks. For example, the concept of "conspiracy" was unique to these countries and was not common in Soviet or German law.
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In addition, the Allies often favored a compromise position whenever they could be held accountable for similar actions. This allowed Admiral Dönitz to reduce his sentence: although the German U-boats under his command fought ruthlessly, British and American U-boats could be accused of similar behavior.
Witnesses, evidence and Goering's defiance
In some cases, the Allies had to make real compromises, one of which was Erich von der Bach-Zelewski, who appeared as a witness at the trial. The man directly oversaw mass killings during anti-partisan operations in Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and Poland.
A gruesome tactic employed by his subordinates involved gathering villagers in guerrilla areas into a building, which was then set on fire. The mass killing of Poles during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944 is another example of his policy – about 15 civilians were killed for every insurgent lost.
Zelowski realized that his survival depended on betraying others, so he turned on everyone and revealed their darkest secrets. Hermann Göring shouted from the dock: "You hateful traitor, you pig!" But there was nothing he could do. Eventually, a German court sentenced him to life in prison not only for his wartime actions, but also for the murders he committed during the German power struggle of the 1930s.
The court had a large volume of documents to review. American judge Robert Jackson later recalled that he had been skeptical of the stories of Nazi atrocities before the trial, but was horrified by the reality that unfolded before him. He was particularly moved by the SS report detailing the destruction of the ghettos—Jews jumped from burning buildings, and some tried to walk away with broken legs. They were hunted like game.
While most of the defendants tried to talk evasively, Hermann stood his ground until the end. He was unofficially nicknamed "Leader of the Defenders". Göring asked his accomplices to rebel and not confess. He displayed his skills as an orator, made sarcastic remarks and effortlessly dismissed the initial accusations.
According to him, the actions of the Gestapo and forced labor camps were only a response to the terrorist actions of the communists. And the extermination of the Jews was just rhetoric, there was no real plan to exterminate them. He claimed that he was not involved in any act of aggression and insisted that he is always surprised by such acts. He also stated that the Reich should pre-emptively attack the Soviet Union to defend itself against a possible Soviet invasion. As for the human catastrophe in the occupied territories - it was the fault of the Soviet authorities and their scorched earth tactics. And every crime committed by German soldiers was just an isolated incident.
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Goring rolled over Judge Robert Jackson with his shameless demagoguery. However, the Allies had obtained enough documents to bring down the Reichsmarschall. Soviet prosecutor Roman Rudenko and British prosecutor David Maxwell Fyfe hammered Goring with their orders, which led to widespread famine. Göring knew that he was going to starve millions of people and openly discussed the rings.
In contrast, Armaments Minister Albert Speer did not plead for mercy. He pleaded guilty and introduced himself as a humble technocrat, successfully avoiding the gallows.
The defense generally argued that the Nuremberg trials did not create any new legal norms, yet the entire legal framework was created specifically for this trial. In addition, the concept of conspiracy (one of the four main charges) allowed individuals to be convicted of affiliation with criminal organizations. It was an unprecedented model in continental European law, including German law, and many jurists considered it unworkable.
Even the term "genocide" was used retroactively, appearing only during the trial itself. Furthermore, the defense reduced the discourse to the notion that the accused were either ignorant or not sufficiently aware of the crimes committed, when the real perpetrators were probably already in their graves.