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Nuremberg Trials
The Nuremberg Trials were the most important criminal proceedings ever held. They established the principle that individuals will always be held responsible for their actions under international law, and brought closure to World War II, allowing the reconstruction of Europe to begin.
208 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2010
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 86 reviews
October 25, 2023
A clear and concise look at the Nuremberg trials. Paul Roland gives us a taunt picture of each of the defendants; their defense and attitude are examined in depth. This is a very important book - because many of the atrocities that the Nazi regime committed are still being committed today all around the world. Perhaps it is time that we revisit the lessons that we should have learned from this historic trial.
August 25, 2019
a great source of details, some of which may find their way into my current novel ... more to say later
September 26, 2017
Paul Roland does not offer any surprises in this description of the Nuremberg trails. The approach is very simplistic, without any particular insights. It does offer a good introduction, but for any in-depth analysis this one can be skipped
The author’s interest here seemed less to have anything to do with the trials themselves, but rather a simplistic description about the defendants and the judges of the trial. Unfortunately, I could have gotten the same information, or perhaps even more, by reading Wikipedia.
The book does cover each of the major defendants, with brief biographies and commentary, although it rarely delves into the actual crimes with which they are charged. Rather, he names the crimes, but does not detail their background at any length. There is some background on the judges, and excerpts from the various statements of the defendants and judges. In the end, a short description of the final words and then the book ends.
The author’s interest here seemed less to have anything to do with the trials themselves, but rather a simplistic description about the defendants and the judges of the trial. Unfortunately, I could have gotten the same information, or perhaps even more, by reading Wikipedia.
The book does cover each of the major defendants, with brief biographies and commentary, although it rarely delves into the actual crimes with which they are charged. Rather, he names the crimes, but does not detail their background at any length. There is some background on the judges, and excerpts from the various statements of the defendants and judges. In the end, a short description of the final words and then the book ends.
November 22, 2019
The photograph on the covering page fits every description of the person that Göring was, as portrayed amply by Upton Sinclair in the World's End series, in most of the eleven volumes thereof.
............
"Why another book about the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials? It is true that the story has been re-told many times, but it bears repetition because with the passing of time the Nazis have assumed an almost mythic status in the minds of those who did not experience the war, or the horrors of the concentration camps.
"There is a very real danger that for subsequent generations they will be reduced to two-dimensional villains – no more real than the sinister SS caricatures in the Indiana Jones films. Of more importance, though, is the fact that the lessons of Nuremberg do not appear to have been learned. There are still those who deny the Holocaust – despite the fact that Holocaust denial is now a crime in many European countries including Germany – but they do so in the face of the facts that are presented in this book, where the personal testimonies of eyewitnesses are verified by the words of the accused themselves.
"Another reason why I felt compelled to write this account was that I have managed to unearth several personal recollections that to the best of my knowledge have never been published in book form. They are not of great length, nor even of great significance from a historical point of view, but they reveal certain aspects of the trials, and the personalities involved, that are not generally known. But of more importance, they underline the impression that all of the characters in this human catastrophe were quite ordinary people, who were living through extraordinary times. And that includes the defendants. The Nazis continue to hold a morbid fascination for many people. However, when they were stripped of their Satanic symbolism, and dispossessed of the power over life and death that fed their fanatical arrogance, Hermann Goering, Albert Speer, Joachim von Ribbentrop and the rest of the Hitler gang were reduced to their essence – which in many cases was as pitiable as it was disturbing. Here was the ‘banality of evil’ laid bare. Hitler’s followers were the very embodiment of Untermenschen (the subhumans of Aryan master race mythology), who blindly obeyed immoral orders without recourse to their own conscience. They were men of diverse backgrounds – able military leaders, petty bureaucrats and mechanical functionaries. Some of them should have known better but they all willingly sold their souls to bring a madman’s nightmares to reality, feeding his neuroses and propagating his paranoid racist propaganda without considering the inevitable consequences of their actions. Deprived of the pretence of Teutonic heroism, and denied the ritual staging of their Wagnerian party rallies, the Nuremberg defendants were finally forced to face the sordid reality of the damage that their racist ideology and extreme nationalism had wrought upon the world.
"It is a disquieting fact that we tend to find villains more interesting than their victims – in fiction and in reality – but the Nuremberg Trials revealed that in real life criminals and murderers are invariably colourless individuals, who lack personality as well as compassion and conscience. It is their victims who frequently display courage and endurance beyond normal human experience."
............
"On the morning of 15 April 1945, Clara Greenbaum woke from an uneasy sleep to the realization that her recurring nightmare had no end. She was still incarcerated in the notorious Nazi slave labour camp at Belsen in northwestern Germany, where an estimated 100,000 prisoners, half of them Russian prisoners of war, had died since its inception in 1943. Clara and her two children – Hannah aged seven and Adam, who was not yet four – were just three of some 60,000 inmates who had miraculously survived starvation, summary execution and the typhus epidemic. Typhus alone had claimed the lives of up to 35,000 prisoners in the first few months of 1945. But no less of a hazard was the daily brutality meted out by the sadistic SS guards, who beat the prisoners unmercifully and frequently shot them at random for ‘target practice’."
"Large numbers of prisoners lay dying or dead where only yesterday they had been forced to stand to attention. The contrast was too surreal for Clara to take in at first. She almost wished for order to return, because she was so conditioned by those who held the power of life and death in this accursed place. Looking up she noticed that the guard towers were empty. In fact, there were no guards to be seen anywhere. But if this was the day of liberation, it did not feel like it. There was no elation, only a crippling anxiety. For four hours the mass of prisoners remained on the Appellplatz, not daring to approach the unguarded gates. Many of them must have realized that they were only a few hundred metres from freedom, but they were unable to move. It was not that they were afraid that the guards would return but, as Clara later remembered, the guards were still inside them and they would remain there to the end of their lives. They were so indoctrinated that the very thought of freedom filled them with fear. It was not only their bodies that had been imprisoned and tortured beyond endurance, but their minds.
"Hours passed and then the mass of people stirred. They could hear the unmistakable sound of heavy vehicles approaching from behind the low hills to the north. A moment later a column of tanks and trucks appeared. The vehicles were rumbling across the ploughed fields towards the barbed wire. Panic went through the crowd like a bolt of electricity. This was it. The Germans were going to machine-gun them and then roll over their bodies to eradicate the evidence of their crimes. Then someone saw the Union Jack flying from the turret of one of the tanks. They were British! To the prisoners’ amazement the column circled the camp twice before drawing up in formation at the front gates, where the vehicles’ engines were turned off. Presumably they had been checking to see if any SS troops were prepared to make a final stand. And there they waited. Not a word was spoken. No orders were given. Clara estimated that as many as 500 troops were standing in complete silence, staring through the barbed wire."
"Then some of the soldiers began throwing food over the fence and the prisoners scrambled to claim what they could. A moment later the leading tank roared into life and smashed through the gates, followed by orderly ranks of soldiers under the command of an officer. The inmates had been liberated, but Clara felt no joy. She only wanted to turn and hide. But after a few steps she was arrested by a terrible sound. It was the mourning wail of an old woman. Only it was not an old woman. It was Hannah. For the first time in three years she was crying – her convulsions were so violent that her mother feared that her small body would collapse. For three years she had kept her emotions in check, but now they had all risen to the surface and consumed her. Adam was also weeping, but in the way that a small child cries. That was the moment at which Clara’s stony resolve cracked. She too fell to the ground, screaming and pounding the dirt with her fists. Everything they had seen and suffered had to be exorcized.
"The survivors needed to be questioned before having their details taken for a Red Cross list, but first of all they were given soup. Clara asked for water to dilute it with because she knew that she and her children were too malnourished to drink it as it was. Even so they felt sick afterwards. Others were not so lucky. The soup was too much for their ravaged bodies and they died.
"‘In the concentration camp you cannot have hope. Only determination.’
"Clara Greenbaum"
............
"In other camps Allied officers found it difficult to maintain discipline among their men – in some cases captured SS guards were summarily executed. This was soldiers’ justice, meted out by men who had seen their share of death, but who could no longer restrain themselves when confronted with the cold-blooded slaughter, or brutalization, of innocent civilians.
"At Dachau, near Munich, the liberators were checking the railway sidings when 2,310 corpses spilled out of a single train. It had been bringing in prisoners from other camps for execution. Most of the dead, including 83 women and 21 children, had expired from malnutrition, dehydration and suffocation – the Germans had crammed them in several hundred to a wagon. Those who had survived the journey were dragged out before being shot, beaten to death with rifle butts or torn to pieces by the guard dogs.
"The corpses were so emaciated that the first American officer on the scene thought he was looking at mounds of rags. Then he realized that the pathetic bundles were human beings. He estimated that the heaviest of them could not have weighed more than sixty or seventy pounds. With considerable effort he managed to keep his composure and then he attempted to maintain discipline by ordering his men – many of whom were sobbing uncontrollably – to count the corpses. But he was too late to prevent a GI from machine-gunning a number of captured SS personnel (as many as 122 Germans died, according to some accounts) while his squad urged him on, aided by the inhuman cries of the prisoners behind the wire.
"But the SS were anonymous servants of the Nazi regime. Their names and their fate would be lost among the appalling statistics of a war that had claimed some 64 million victims in 27 countries, 40 million of them non-combatants. Besides, the survivors did not want revenge, they wanted justice. Someone would have to pay, and be seen to pay, for what the Nazi regime had done to Clara and millions like her, many of whom had simply vanished from the earth, cremated in the ovens of Auschwitz and more than a thousand other camps throughout Germany and the occupied countries. The architects of the Final Solution would have to be brought to account and the German nation must be forced to face up to its collective responsibility for giving Hitler the mandate to wage his war. There would have to be a trial.
"‘I never dreamed that such cruelty, bestiality, and savagery could really exist in this world... I made the visit (to Buchenwald) deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to “propaganda”.’
"General Eisenhower"
............
"Nuremberg was, in retrospect, the obvious venue for a public trial of the Nazi war criminals. It had been the site of the massed annual party rallies and it could be seen as the crucible of fascism. What more appropriate place to bring its demigods into the full glare of the public spotlight and reveal them for the ‘grotesque and preposterous... clowns and crooks’ (according to an Allied report) that they were?"
"Charter of the International Military Tribunal (Principal Points)
"Article 6
"The Tribunal... shall have the power to try and punish persons who, acting in the interests of the European Axis countries, whether as individuals or as members of organizations, committed any of the following crimes.
"(a) Crimes against Peace: namely, planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a Common Plan or Conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing;
"(b) War Crimes: namely, violations of the laws or customs of war. Such violations shall include, but not be limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labour or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity;
"(c) Crimes against Humanity: namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of domestic law of the country where perpetrated. Leaders, organizers, instigators, and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a Common Plan or Conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing crimes are responsible for all acts performed by any persons in execution of such plan.
"Article 7
"The official position of defendants, whether as Heads of State or responsible officials in Government departments, shall not be considered as freeing them from responsibility or mitigating punishment."
............
"The Allied powers had convened a War Crimes Commission as early as September 1943. One of its tasks was to draw up a list of suspected war criminals. Winston Churchill expected the list to include up to one hundred names, some of which would be those of Japanese or Italian participants. However, by the time the date and the venue for the International Tribunal at Nuremberg had been agreed upon the list had been whittled down to those who had served the German state.
"The Pacific War was not yet over, so it was agreed that if and when Japan finally surrendered there would be a separate trial to bring those accused of atrocities in the Far East to justice. As for the Italians, their allegiance had shifted with their surrender in 1943, so it was felt that it would not be politically expedient to accuse allies (no matter how recent) of war crimes, particularly in view of the fact that the Italians in the north of the country had been under German occupation since their capitulation.
"Despite Clement Attlee’s assertion that German officers who had behaved like gangsters should be shot and that German industrialists and financiers who had supported the regime should forfeit their assets, no members of these groups were arraigned when the time came for the final list to be approved. It was felt that it would be impossible to know where to draw the line. Instead one representative from each branch of the regime would stand trial and the prosecution would be charged with revealing their part in a criminal conspiracy to subjugate and enslave the peoples of Europe. It would not be necessary to prove individual acts of barbarity if the defendant was a member of one of the named criminal organizations. The seven named organizations were as follows: the Reich Cabinet; the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party; the SS; the SA; the Gestapo; the SD; and the General Staff and High Command of the German Armed Forces.
"This approach also invalidated the cowardly defence that captured ...
............
"Why another book about the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials? It is true that the story has been re-told many times, but it bears repetition because with the passing of time the Nazis have assumed an almost mythic status in the minds of those who did not experience the war, or the horrors of the concentration camps.
"There is a very real danger that for subsequent generations they will be reduced to two-dimensional villains – no more real than the sinister SS caricatures in the Indiana Jones films. Of more importance, though, is the fact that the lessons of Nuremberg do not appear to have been learned. There are still those who deny the Holocaust – despite the fact that Holocaust denial is now a crime in many European countries including Germany – but they do so in the face of the facts that are presented in this book, where the personal testimonies of eyewitnesses are verified by the words of the accused themselves.
"Another reason why I felt compelled to write this account was that I have managed to unearth several personal recollections that to the best of my knowledge have never been published in book form. They are not of great length, nor even of great significance from a historical point of view, but they reveal certain aspects of the trials, and the personalities involved, that are not generally known. But of more importance, they underline the impression that all of the characters in this human catastrophe were quite ordinary people, who were living through extraordinary times. And that includes the defendants. The Nazis continue to hold a morbid fascination for many people. However, when they were stripped of their Satanic symbolism, and dispossessed of the power over life and death that fed their fanatical arrogance, Hermann Goering, Albert Speer, Joachim von Ribbentrop and the rest of the Hitler gang were reduced to their essence – which in many cases was as pitiable as it was disturbing. Here was the ‘banality of evil’ laid bare. Hitler’s followers were the very embodiment of Untermenschen (the subhumans of Aryan master race mythology), who blindly obeyed immoral orders without recourse to their own conscience. They were men of diverse backgrounds – able military leaders, petty bureaucrats and mechanical functionaries. Some of them should have known better but they all willingly sold their souls to bring a madman’s nightmares to reality, feeding his neuroses and propagating his paranoid racist propaganda without considering the inevitable consequences of their actions. Deprived of the pretence of Teutonic heroism, and denied the ritual staging of their Wagnerian party rallies, the Nuremberg defendants were finally forced to face the sordid reality of the damage that their racist ideology and extreme nationalism had wrought upon the world.
"It is a disquieting fact that we tend to find villains more interesting than their victims – in fiction and in reality – but the Nuremberg Trials revealed that in real life criminals and murderers are invariably colourless individuals, who lack personality as well as compassion and conscience. It is their victims who frequently display courage and endurance beyond normal human experience."
............
"On the morning of 15 April 1945, Clara Greenbaum woke from an uneasy sleep to the realization that her recurring nightmare had no end. She was still incarcerated in the notorious Nazi slave labour camp at Belsen in northwestern Germany, where an estimated 100,000 prisoners, half of them Russian prisoners of war, had died since its inception in 1943. Clara and her two children – Hannah aged seven and Adam, who was not yet four – were just three of some 60,000 inmates who had miraculously survived starvation, summary execution and the typhus epidemic. Typhus alone had claimed the lives of up to 35,000 prisoners in the first few months of 1945. But no less of a hazard was the daily brutality meted out by the sadistic SS guards, who beat the prisoners unmercifully and frequently shot them at random for ‘target practice’."
"Large numbers of prisoners lay dying or dead where only yesterday they had been forced to stand to attention. The contrast was too surreal for Clara to take in at first. She almost wished for order to return, because she was so conditioned by those who held the power of life and death in this accursed place. Looking up she noticed that the guard towers were empty. In fact, there were no guards to be seen anywhere. But if this was the day of liberation, it did not feel like it. There was no elation, only a crippling anxiety. For four hours the mass of prisoners remained on the Appellplatz, not daring to approach the unguarded gates. Many of them must have realized that they were only a few hundred metres from freedom, but they were unable to move. It was not that they were afraid that the guards would return but, as Clara later remembered, the guards were still inside them and they would remain there to the end of their lives. They were so indoctrinated that the very thought of freedom filled them with fear. It was not only their bodies that had been imprisoned and tortured beyond endurance, but their minds.
"Hours passed and then the mass of people stirred. They could hear the unmistakable sound of heavy vehicles approaching from behind the low hills to the north. A moment later a column of tanks and trucks appeared. The vehicles were rumbling across the ploughed fields towards the barbed wire. Panic went through the crowd like a bolt of electricity. This was it. The Germans were going to machine-gun them and then roll over their bodies to eradicate the evidence of their crimes. Then someone saw the Union Jack flying from the turret of one of the tanks. They were British! To the prisoners’ amazement the column circled the camp twice before drawing up in formation at the front gates, where the vehicles’ engines were turned off. Presumably they had been checking to see if any SS troops were prepared to make a final stand. And there they waited. Not a word was spoken. No orders were given. Clara estimated that as many as 500 troops were standing in complete silence, staring through the barbed wire."
"Then some of the soldiers began throwing food over the fence and the prisoners scrambled to claim what they could. A moment later the leading tank roared into life and smashed through the gates, followed by orderly ranks of soldiers under the command of an officer. The inmates had been liberated, but Clara felt no joy. She only wanted to turn and hide. But after a few steps she was arrested by a terrible sound. It was the mourning wail of an old woman. Only it was not an old woman. It was Hannah. For the first time in three years she was crying – her convulsions were so violent that her mother feared that her small body would collapse. For three years she had kept her emotions in check, but now they had all risen to the surface and consumed her. Adam was also weeping, but in the way that a small child cries. That was the moment at which Clara’s stony resolve cracked. She too fell to the ground, screaming and pounding the dirt with her fists. Everything they had seen and suffered had to be exorcized.
"The survivors needed to be questioned before having their details taken for a Red Cross list, but first of all they were given soup. Clara asked for water to dilute it with because she knew that she and her children were too malnourished to drink it as it was. Even so they felt sick afterwards. Others were not so lucky. The soup was too much for their ravaged bodies and they died.
"‘In the concentration camp you cannot have hope. Only determination.’
"Clara Greenbaum"
............
"In other camps Allied officers found it difficult to maintain discipline among their men – in some cases captured SS guards were summarily executed. This was soldiers’ justice, meted out by men who had seen their share of death, but who could no longer restrain themselves when confronted with the cold-blooded slaughter, or brutalization, of innocent civilians.
"At Dachau, near Munich, the liberators were checking the railway sidings when 2,310 corpses spilled out of a single train. It had been bringing in prisoners from other camps for execution. Most of the dead, including 83 women and 21 children, had expired from malnutrition, dehydration and suffocation – the Germans had crammed them in several hundred to a wagon. Those who had survived the journey were dragged out before being shot, beaten to death with rifle butts or torn to pieces by the guard dogs.
"The corpses were so emaciated that the first American officer on the scene thought he was looking at mounds of rags. Then he realized that the pathetic bundles were human beings. He estimated that the heaviest of them could not have weighed more than sixty or seventy pounds. With considerable effort he managed to keep his composure and then he attempted to maintain discipline by ordering his men – many of whom were sobbing uncontrollably – to count the corpses. But he was too late to prevent a GI from machine-gunning a number of captured SS personnel (as many as 122 Germans died, according to some accounts) while his squad urged him on, aided by the inhuman cries of the prisoners behind the wire.
"But the SS were anonymous servants of the Nazi regime. Their names and their fate would be lost among the appalling statistics of a war that had claimed some 64 million victims in 27 countries, 40 million of them non-combatants. Besides, the survivors did not want revenge, they wanted justice. Someone would have to pay, and be seen to pay, for what the Nazi regime had done to Clara and millions like her, many of whom had simply vanished from the earth, cremated in the ovens of Auschwitz and more than a thousand other camps throughout Germany and the occupied countries. The architects of the Final Solution would have to be brought to account and the German nation must be forced to face up to its collective responsibility for giving Hitler the mandate to wage his war. There would have to be a trial.
"‘I never dreamed that such cruelty, bestiality, and savagery could really exist in this world... I made the visit (to Buchenwald) deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to “propaganda”.’
"General Eisenhower"
............
"Nuremberg was, in retrospect, the obvious venue for a public trial of the Nazi war criminals. It had been the site of the massed annual party rallies and it could be seen as the crucible of fascism. What more appropriate place to bring its demigods into the full glare of the public spotlight and reveal them for the ‘grotesque and preposterous... clowns and crooks’ (according to an Allied report) that they were?"
"Charter of the International Military Tribunal (Principal Points)
"Article 6
"The Tribunal... shall have the power to try and punish persons who, acting in the interests of the European Axis countries, whether as individuals or as members of organizations, committed any of the following crimes.
"(a) Crimes against Peace: namely, planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a Common Plan or Conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing;
"(b) War Crimes: namely, violations of the laws or customs of war. Such violations shall include, but not be limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labour or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity;
"(c) Crimes against Humanity: namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of domestic law of the country where perpetrated. Leaders, organizers, instigators, and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a Common Plan or Conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing crimes are responsible for all acts performed by any persons in execution of such plan.
"Article 7
"The official position of defendants, whether as Heads of State or responsible officials in Government departments, shall not be considered as freeing them from responsibility or mitigating punishment."
............
"The Allied powers had convened a War Crimes Commission as early as September 1943. One of its tasks was to draw up a list of suspected war criminals. Winston Churchill expected the list to include up to one hundred names, some of which would be those of Japanese or Italian participants. However, by the time the date and the venue for the International Tribunal at Nuremberg had been agreed upon the list had been whittled down to those who had served the German state.
"The Pacific War was not yet over, so it was agreed that if and when Japan finally surrendered there would be a separate trial to bring those accused of atrocities in the Far East to justice. As for the Italians, their allegiance had shifted with their surrender in 1943, so it was felt that it would not be politically expedient to accuse allies (no matter how recent) of war crimes, particularly in view of the fact that the Italians in the north of the country had been under German occupation since their capitulation.
"Despite Clement Attlee’s assertion that German officers who had behaved like gangsters should be shot and that German industrialists and financiers who had supported the regime should forfeit their assets, no members of these groups were arraigned when the time came for the final list to be approved. It was felt that it would be impossible to know where to draw the line. Instead one representative from each branch of the regime would stand trial and the prosecution would be charged with revealing their part in a criminal conspiracy to subjugate and enslave the peoples of Europe. It would not be necessary to prove individual acts of barbarity if the defendant was a member of one of the named criminal organizations. The seven named organizations were as follows: the Reich Cabinet; the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party; the SS; the SA; the Gestapo; the SD; and the General Staff and High Command of the German Armed Forces.
"This approach also invalidated the cowardly defence that captured ...
April 1, 2013
This book led me to finally, finally go the government trial transcripts themselves. Many, many, many pages and many, many MB of DL PDFs. I can only keep about four at a time on my I-Pad (they are broken up into about 34 sections) and honestly, I can't read all that much of them at one sitting. This book IS a good introduction, although not for the squeamish or faint of heart. Such cruelty spoken with such banality by men who were made of flesh and they did have blood, just like everyone else, coursing through their veins. These men couldn't turn their heads and say, "I didn't know." Because these were the evil that DID.
December 5, 2011
Its very accurate and I've read a ton of books on this issue and this is more of a picture book but it is short and a good read.
April 4, 2015
I read Holocaust literature to help preserve the human collective memory of the evil that was embodied in the Nazis. This is a very good presentation of the trials after the WWII.
Read
March 2, 2026This might be interesting for someone that knows nothing about the topic and who just wanted to look at the photographs. But it is biased, uses fervent language to denigrate, and the scarcity of references highlights the lack of credibility.
November 4, 2013
This was a short, high-paced, overview of the Nuremberg Trials. The book explains the necessity of the trial and how it was defined in lack of relevant (international) law, sketches the biographies of the accused in the main trial, presents the prices of gathering evidence, comments on short excerpts from the accused and accusation's statements, introduces and comments on the verdict, and skims through the other trials (e.g., the trial of German judges, which was also dramatized as Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)). The epilogue offers an interesting analysis on the impact of the Nuremberg Trials.
Overall, the book was shallow and seemed incremental. As a first read on the topic, it is accessible but relies on the author's interpretation and is light on facts. The inspired wording seems often to be taken - without reference - from other historical accounts, e.g., Hannah Arendt's 'banality of evil'. The strength of the book is the collection of excerpts, but there is little else to like for this reviewer.
Last, perhaps few would read the full original docs of the Trials, but some have been since digitized http://nuremberg.law.harvard.edu/php/...
Overall, the book was shallow and seemed incremental. As a first read on the topic, it is accessible but relies on the author's interpretation and is light on facts. The inspired wording seems often to be taken - without reference - from other historical accounts, e.g., Hannah Arendt's 'banality of evil'. The strength of the book is the collection of excerpts, but there is little else to like for this reviewer.
Last, perhaps few would read the full original docs of the Trials, but some have been since digitized http://nuremberg.law.harvard.edu/php/...
October 10, 2021
Just after World War II the allies established 12 different trials to judge those who participated in the organization, direction and management of that war, the concentration camps and in the extermination within Germany and in the invaded countries of population groups considered undesirable by the Nazis. The first Nuremberg trial was dedicated to judge the top 24 Nazi party hierarchs, which is Mr. Roland's theme in this book and was held from 19 November 1945 to 01 October 1946.
Later on the Americans held the subsequent 11 trials of lesser war criminals: The Justice Trial. The Doctors Trial. The Einsatzgruppen Trial. The Milch Case. The Pohl/WVHA Case. The Flick Case. The I. G. Farben Case. The R. U. S. H. A. Case. The Krupp Case. The Hostage Case. The Ministries Case
The author makes a brief presentation of the main reasons that the allies had for organizing the trials of these leaders, the procedures followed to prosecute them and a brief presentation of the accused characters, their judges and the indictments. After reading such indictments, it is clear that the defendants worked to bring to reality the nightmares of a lunatic that was a liar without respect for the truth, who knew how to pick his henchmen had a profound psychological influence on them and was not interested in how a task was accomplished, as he was only concerned with results.
The Author says that out of the accused 24 Nazi major war criminals: 3 were acquitted and freed. 2 committed suicide. 7 were incarcerated. 10 were hanged. 1 has not decision and 1 was condemned to death in absence. They should be 27, but Hitler and Goebels committed suicide before the war ended and Himmler committed suicide before the trials had begun.
In accordance with this book, the facts presented by the prosecutors were taken from official Nazi documents, personal testimonies of eyewitnesses and the words of the accused themselves. Nevertheless, the lessons of Nuremberg do not appear to have been learned, because there are still those who deny the Holocaust and 75 years later, there are dictators committing crimes against humanity.
After finishing this book, there is a feeling that these trials were illegal, since therein-past events until then not contemplated in any legislation were judged. It seemed as if the trials had been the result of revenge on the part of the allies and particularly of the USA.
Later on the Americans held the subsequent 11 trials of lesser war criminals: The Justice Trial. The Doctors Trial. The Einsatzgruppen Trial. The Milch Case. The Pohl/WVHA Case. The Flick Case. The I. G. Farben Case. The R. U. S. H. A. Case. The Krupp Case. The Hostage Case. The Ministries Case
The author makes a brief presentation of the main reasons that the allies had for organizing the trials of these leaders, the procedures followed to prosecute them and a brief presentation of the accused characters, their judges and the indictments. After reading such indictments, it is clear that the defendants worked to bring to reality the nightmares of a lunatic that was a liar without respect for the truth, who knew how to pick his henchmen had a profound psychological influence on them and was not interested in how a task was accomplished, as he was only concerned with results.
The Author says that out of the accused 24 Nazi major war criminals: 3 were acquitted and freed. 2 committed suicide. 7 were incarcerated. 10 were hanged. 1 has not decision and 1 was condemned to death in absence. They should be 27, but Hitler and Goebels committed suicide before the war ended and Himmler committed suicide before the trials had begun.
In accordance with this book, the facts presented by the prosecutors were taken from official Nazi documents, personal testimonies of eyewitnesses and the words of the accused themselves. Nevertheless, the lessons of Nuremberg do not appear to have been learned, because there are still those who deny the Holocaust and 75 years later, there are dictators committing crimes against humanity.
After finishing this book, there is a feeling that these trials were illegal, since therein-past events until then not contemplated in any legislation were judged. It seemed as if the trials had been the result of revenge on the part of the allies and particularly of the USA.
August 3, 2020
A great overview of the criminal hearings that followed after the end of WW2. It’s difficult to comprehend the evils that took place during this time. This book briefly touches on the mindsets of nazis and their crimes against humanity.
November 20, 2019
The photograph on the covering page fits every description of the person that Göring was, as portrayed amply by Upton Sinclair in the World's End series, in most of the eleven volumes thereof.
............
"Why another book about the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials? It is true that the story has been re-told many times, but it bears repetition because with the passing of time the Nazis have assumed an almost mythic status in the minds of those who did not experience the war, or the horrors of the concentration camps.
"There is a very real danger that for subsequent generations they will be reduced to two-dimensional villains – no more real than the sinister SS caricatures in the Indiana Jones films. Of more importance, though, is the fact that the lessons of Nuremberg do not appear to have been learned. There are still those who deny the Holocaust – despite the fact that Holocaust denial is now a crime in many European countries including Germany – but they do so in the face of the facts that are presented in this book, where the personal testimonies of eyewitnesses are verified by the words of the accused themselves.
"Another reason why I felt compelled to write this account was that I have managed to unearth several personal recollections that to the best of my knowledge have never been published in book form. They are not of great length, nor even of great significance from a historical point of view, but they reveal certain aspects of the trials, and the personalities involved, that are not generally known. But of more importance, they underline the impression that all of the characters in this human catastrophe were quite ordinary people, who were living through extraordinary times. And that includes the defendants. The Nazis continue to hold a morbid fascination for many people. However, when they were stripped of their Satanic symbolism, and dispossessed of the power over life and death that fed their fanatical arrogance, Hermann Goering, Albert Speer, Joachim von Ribbentrop and the rest of the Hitler gang were reduced to their essence – which in many cases was as pitiable as it was disturbing. Here was the ‘banality of evil’ laid bare. Hitler’s followers were the very embodiment of Untermenschen (the subhumans of Aryan master race mythology), who blindly obeyed immoral orders without recourse to their own conscience. They were men of diverse backgrounds – able military leaders, petty bureaucrats and mechanical functionaries. Some of them should have known better but they all willingly sold their souls to bring a madman’s nightmares to reality, feeding his neuroses and propagating his paranoid racist propaganda without considering the inevitable consequences of their actions. Deprived of the pretence of Teutonic heroism, and denied the ritual staging of their Wagnerian party rallies, the Nuremberg defendants were finally forced to face the sordid reality of the damage that their racist ideology and extreme nationalism had wrought upon the world.
"It is a disquieting fact that we tend to find villains more interesting than their victims – in fiction and in reality – but the Nuremberg Trials revealed that in real life criminals and murderers are invariably colourless individuals, who lack personality as well as compassion and conscience. It is their victims who frequently display courage and endurance beyond normal human experience."
............
"On the morning of 15 April 1945, Clara Greenbaum woke from an uneasy sleep to the realization that her recurring nightmare had no end. She was still incarcerated in the notorious Nazi slave labour camp at Belsen in northwestern Germany, where an estimated 100,000 prisoners, half of them Russian prisoners of war, had died since its inception in 1943. Clara and her two children – Hannah aged seven and Adam, who was not yet four – were just three of some 60,000 inmates who had miraculously survived starvation, summary execution and the typhus epidemic. Typhus alone had claimed the lives of up to 35,000 prisoners in the first few months of 1945. But no less of a hazard was the daily brutality meted out by the sadistic SS guards, who beat the prisoners unmercifully and frequently shot them at random for ‘target practice’."
"Large numbers of prisoners lay dying or dead where only yesterday they had been forced to stand to attention. The contrast was too surreal for Clara to take in at first. She almost wished for order to return, because she was so conditioned by those who held the power of life and death in this accursed place. Looking up she noticed that the guard towers were empty. In fact, there were no guards to be seen anywhere. But if this was the day of liberation, it did not feel like it. There was no elation, only a crippling anxiety. For four hours the mass of prisoners remained on the Appellplatz, not daring to approach the unguarded gates. Many of them must have realized that they were only a few hundred metres from freedom, but they were unable to move. It was not that they were afraid that the guards would return but, as Clara later remembered, the guards were still inside them and they would remain there to the end of their lives. They were so indoctrinated that the very thought of freedom filled them with fear. It was not only their bodies that had been imprisoned and tortured beyond endurance, but their minds.
"Hours passed and then the mass of people stirred. They could hear the unmistakable sound of heavy vehicles approaching from behind the low hills to the north. A moment later a column of tanks and trucks appeared. The vehicles were rumbling across the ploughed fields towards the barbed wire. Panic went through the crowd like a bolt of electricity. This was it. The Germans were going to machine-gun them and then roll over their bodies to eradicate the evidence of their crimes. Then someone saw the Union Jack flying from the turret of one of the tanks. They were British! To the prisoners’ amazement the column circled the camp twice before drawing up in formation at the front gates, where the vehicles’ engines were turned off. Presumably they had been checking to see if any SS troops were prepared to make a final stand. And there they waited. Not a word was spoken. No orders were given. Clara estimated that as many as 500 troops were standing in complete silence, staring through the barbed wire."
"Then some of the soldiers began throwing food over the fence and the prisoners scrambled to claim what they could. A moment later the leading tank roared into life and smashed through the gates, followed by orderly ranks of soldiers under the command of an officer. The inmates had been liberated, but Clara felt no joy. She only wanted to turn and hide. But after a few steps she was arrested by a terrible sound. It was the mourning wail of an old woman. Only it was not an old woman. It was Hannah. For the first time in three years she was crying – her convulsions were so violent that her mother feared that her small body would collapse. For three years she had kept her emotions in check, but now they had all risen to the surface and consumed her. Adam was also weeping, but in the way that a small child cries. That was the moment at which Clara’s stony resolve cracked. She too fell to the ground, screaming and pounding the dirt with her fists. Everything they had seen and suffered had to be exorcized.
"The survivors needed to be questioned before having their details taken for a Red Cross list, but first of all they were given soup. Clara asked for water to dilute it with because she knew that she and her children were too malnourished to drink it as it was. Even so they felt sick afterwards. Others were not so lucky. The soup was too much for their ravaged bodies and they died.
"‘In the concentration camp you cannot have hope. Only determination.’
"Clara Greenbaum"
............
"In other camps Allied officers found it difficult to maintain discipline among their men – in some cases captured SS guards were summarily executed. This was soldiers’ justice, meted out by men who had seen their share of death, but who could no longer restrain themselves when confronted with the cold-blooded slaughter, or brutalization, of innocent civilians.
"At Dachau, near Munich, the liberators were checking the railway sidings when 2,310 corpses spilled out of a single train. It had been bringing in prisoners from other camps for execution. Most of the dead, including 83 women and 21 children, had expired from malnutrition, dehydration and suffocation – the Germans had crammed them in several hundred to a wagon. Those who had survived the journey were dragged out before being shot, beaten to death with rifle butts or torn to pieces by the guard dogs.
"The corpses were so emaciated that the first American officer on the scene thought he was looking at mounds of rags. Then he realized that the pathetic bundles were human beings. He estimated that the heaviest of them could not have weighed more than sixty or seventy pounds. With considerable effort he managed to keep his composure and then he attempted to maintain discipline by ordering his men – many of whom were sobbing uncontrollably – to count the corpses. But he was too late to prevent a GI from machine-gunning a number of captured SS personnel (as many as 122 Germans died, according to some accounts) while his squad urged him on, aided by the inhuman cries of the prisoners behind the wire.
"But the SS were anonymous servants of the Nazi regime. Their names and their fate would be lost among the appalling statistics of a war that had claimed some 64 million victims in 27 countries, 40 million of them non-combatants. Besides, the survivors did not want revenge, they wanted justice. Someone would have to pay, and be seen to pay, for what the Nazi regime had done to Clara and millions like her, many of whom had simply vanished from the earth, cremated in the ovens of Auschwitz and more than a thousand other camps throughout Germany and the occupied countries. The architects of the Final Solution would have to be brought to account and the German nation must be forced to face up to its collective responsibility for giving Hitler the mandate to wage his war. There would have to be a trial.
"‘I never dreamed that such cruelty, bestiality, and savagery could really exist in this world... I made the visit (to Buchenwald) deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to “propaganda”.’
"General Eisenhower"
............
"Nuremberg was, in retrospect, the obvious venue for a public trial of the Nazi war criminals. It had been the site of the massed annual party rallies and it could be seen as the crucible of fascism. What more appropriate place to bring its demigods into the full glare of the public spotlight and reveal them for the ‘grotesque and preposterous... clowns and crooks’ (according to an Allied report) that they were?"
"Charter of the International Military Tribunal (Principal Points)
"Article 6
"The Tribunal... shall have the power to try and punish persons who, acting in the interests of the European Axis countries, whether as individuals or as members of organizations, committed any of the following crimes.
"(a) Crimes against Peace: namely, planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a Common Plan or Conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing;
"(b) War Crimes: namely, violations of the laws or customs of war. Such violations shall include, but not be limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labour or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity;
"(c) Crimes against Humanity: namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of domestic law of the country where perpetrated. Leaders, organizers, instigators, and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a Common Plan or Conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing crimes are responsible for all acts performed by any persons in execution of such plan.
"Article 7
"The official position of defendants, whether as Heads of State or responsible officials in Government departments, shall not be considered as freeing them from responsibility or mitigating punishment."
............
"The Allied powers had convened a War Crimes Commission as early as September 1943. One of its tasks was to draw up a list of suspected war criminals. Winston Churchill expected the list to include up to one hundred names, some of which would be those of Japanese or Italian participants. However, by the time the date and the venue for the International Tribunal at Nuremberg had been agreed upon the list had been whittled down to those who had served the German state.
"The Pacific War was not yet over, so it was agreed that if and when Japan finally surrendered there would be a separate trial to bring those accused of atrocities in the Far East to justice. As for the Italians, their allegiance had shifted with their surrender in 1943, so it was felt that it would not be politically expedient to accuse allies (no matter how recent) of war crimes, particularly in view of the fact that the Italians in the north of the country had been under German occupation since their capitulation.
"Despite Clement Attlee’s assertion that German officers who had behaved like gangsters should be shot and that German industrialists and financiers who had supported the regime should forfeit their assets, no members of these groups were arraigned when the time came for the final list to be approved. It was felt that it would be impossible to know where to draw the line. Instead one representative from each branch of the regime would stand trial and the prosecution would be charged with revealing their part in a criminal conspiracy to subjugate and enslave the peoples of Europe. It would not be necessary to prove individual acts of barbarity if the defendant was a member of one of the named criminal organizations. The seven named organizations were as follows: the Reich Cabinet; the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party; the SS; the SA; the Gestapo; the SD; and the General Staff and High Command of the German Armed Forces.
"This approach also invalidated the cowardly defence that captured ...
............
"Why another book about the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials? It is true that the story has been re-told many times, but it bears repetition because with the passing of time the Nazis have assumed an almost mythic status in the minds of those who did not experience the war, or the horrors of the concentration camps.
"There is a very real danger that for subsequent generations they will be reduced to two-dimensional villains – no more real than the sinister SS caricatures in the Indiana Jones films. Of more importance, though, is the fact that the lessons of Nuremberg do not appear to have been learned. There are still those who deny the Holocaust – despite the fact that Holocaust denial is now a crime in many European countries including Germany – but they do so in the face of the facts that are presented in this book, where the personal testimonies of eyewitnesses are verified by the words of the accused themselves.
"Another reason why I felt compelled to write this account was that I have managed to unearth several personal recollections that to the best of my knowledge have never been published in book form. They are not of great length, nor even of great significance from a historical point of view, but they reveal certain aspects of the trials, and the personalities involved, that are not generally known. But of more importance, they underline the impression that all of the characters in this human catastrophe were quite ordinary people, who were living through extraordinary times. And that includes the defendants. The Nazis continue to hold a morbid fascination for many people. However, when they were stripped of their Satanic symbolism, and dispossessed of the power over life and death that fed their fanatical arrogance, Hermann Goering, Albert Speer, Joachim von Ribbentrop and the rest of the Hitler gang were reduced to their essence – which in many cases was as pitiable as it was disturbing. Here was the ‘banality of evil’ laid bare. Hitler’s followers were the very embodiment of Untermenschen (the subhumans of Aryan master race mythology), who blindly obeyed immoral orders without recourse to their own conscience. They were men of diverse backgrounds – able military leaders, petty bureaucrats and mechanical functionaries. Some of them should have known better but they all willingly sold their souls to bring a madman’s nightmares to reality, feeding his neuroses and propagating his paranoid racist propaganda without considering the inevitable consequences of their actions. Deprived of the pretence of Teutonic heroism, and denied the ritual staging of their Wagnerian party rallies, the Nuremberg defendants were finally forced to face the sordid reality of the damage that their racist ideology and extreme nationalism had wrought upon the world.
"It is a disquieting fact that we tend to find villains more interesting than their victims – in fiction and in reality – but the Nuremberg Trials revealed that in real life criminals and murderers are invariably colourless individuals, who lack personality as well as compassion and conscience. It is their victims who frequently display courage and endurance beyond normal human experience."
............
"On the morning of 15 April 1945, Clara Greenbaum woke from an uneasy sleep to the realization that her recurring nightmare had no end. She was still incarcerated in the notorious Nazi slave labour camp at Belsen in northwestern Germany, where an estimated 100,000 prisoners, half of them Russian prisoners of war, had died since its inception in 1943. Clara and her two children – Hannah aged seven and Adam, who was not yet four – were just three of some 60,000 inmates who had miraculously survived starvation, summary execution and the typhus epidemic. Typhus alone had claimed the lives of up to 35,000 prisoners in the first few months of 1945. But no less of a hazard was the daily brutality meted out by the sadistic SS guards, who beat the prisoners unmercifully and frequently shot them at random for ‘target practice’."
"Large numbers of prisoners lay dying or dead where only yesterday they had been forced to stand to attention. The contrast was too surreal for Clara to take in at first. She almost wished for order to return, because she was so conditioned by those who held the power of life and death in this accursed place. Looking up she noticed that the guard towers were empty. In fact, there were no guards to be seen anywhere. But if this was the day of liberation, it did not feel like it. There was no elation, only a crippling anxiety. For four hours the mass of prisoners remained on the Appellplatz, not daring to approach the unguarded gates. Many of them must have realized that they were only a few hundred metres from freedom, but they were unable to move. It was not that they were afraid that the guards would return but, as Clara later remembered, the guards were still inside them and they would remain there to the end of their lives. They were so indoctrinated that the very thought of freedom filled them with fear. It was not only their bodies that had been imprisoned and tortured beyond endurance, but their minds.
"Hours passed and then the mass of people stirred. They could hear the unmistakable sound of heavy vehicles approaching from behind the low hills to the north. A moment later a column of tanks and trucks appeared. The vehicles were rumbling across the ploughed fields towards the barbed wire. Panic went through the crowd like a bolt of electricity. This was it. The Germans were going to machine-gun them and then roll over their bodies to eradicate the evidence of their crimes. Then someone saw the Union Jack flying from the turret of one of the tanks. They were British! To the prisoners’ amazement the column circled the camp twice before drawing up in formation at the front gates, where the vehicles’ engines were turned off. Presumably they had been checking to see if any SS troops were prepared to make a final stand. And there they waited. Not a word was spoken. No orders were given. Clara estimated that as many as 500 troops were standing in complete silence, staring through the barbed wire."
"Then some of the soldiers began throwing food over the fence and the prisoners scrambled to claim what they could. A moment later the leading tank roared into life and smashed through the gates, followed by orderly ranks of soldiers under the command of an officer. The inmates had been liberated, but Clara felt no joy. She only wanted to turn and hide. But after a few steps she was arrested by a terrible sound. It was the mourning wail of an old woman. Only it was not an old woman. It was Hannah. For the first time in three years she was crying – her convulsions were so violent that her mother feared that her small body would collapse. For three years she had kept her emotions in check, but now they had all risen to the surface and consumed her. Adam was also weeping, but in the way that a small child cries. That was the moment at which Clara’s stony resolve cracked. She too fell to the ground, screaming and pounding the dirt with her fists. Everything they had seen and suffered had to be exorcized.
"The survivors needed to be questioned before having their details taken for a Red Cross list, but first of all they were given soup. Clara asked for water to dilute it with because she knew that she and her children were too malnourished to drink it as it was. Even so they felt sick afterwards. Others were not so lucky. The soup was too much for their ravaged bodies and they died.
"‘In the concentration camp you cannot have hope. Only determination.’
"Clara Greenbaum"
............
"In other camps Allied officers found it difficult to maintain discipline among their men – in some cases captured SS guards were summarily executed. This was soldiers’ justice, meted out by men who had seen their share of death, but who could no longer restrain themselves when confronted with the cold-blooded slaughter, or brutalization, of innocent civilians.
"At Dachau, near Munich, the liberators were checking the railway sidings when 2,310 corpses spilled out of a single train. It had been bringing in prisoners from other camps for execution. Most of the dead, including 83 women and 21 children, had expired from malnutrition, dehydration and suffocation – the Germans had crammed them in several hundred to a wagon. Those who had survived the journey were dragged out before being shot, beaten to death with rifle butts or torn to pieces by the guard dogs.
"The corpses were so emaciated that the first American officer on the scene thought he was looking at mounds of rags. Then he realized that the pathetic bundles were human beings. He estimated that the heaviest of them could not have weighed more than sixty or seventy pounds. With considerable effort he managed to keep his composure and then he attempted to maintain discipline by ordering his men – many of whom were sobbing uncontrollably – to count the corpses. But he was too late to prevent a GI from machine-gunning a number of captured SS personnel (as many as 122 Germans died, according to some accounts) while his squad urged him on, aided by the inhuman cries of the prisoners behind the wire.
"But the SS were anonymous servants of the Nazi regime. Their names and their fate would be lost among the appalling statistics of a war that had claimed some 64 million victims in 27 countries, 40 million of them non-combatants. Besides, the survivors did not want revenge, they wanted justice. Someone would have to pay, and be seen to pay, for what the Nazi regime had done to Clara and millions like her, many of whom had simply vanished from the earth, cremated in the ovens of Auschwitz and more than a thousand other camps throughout Germany and the occupied countries. The architects of the Final Solution would have to be brought to account and the German nation must be forced to face up to its collective responsibility for giving Hitler the mandate to wage his war. There would have to be a trial.
"‘I never dreamed that such cruelty, bestiality, and savagery could really exist in this world... I made the visit (to Buchenwald) deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to “propaganda”.’
"General Eisenhower"
............
"Nuremberg was, in retrospect, the obvious venue for a public trial of the Nazi war criminals. It had been the site of the massed annual party rallies and it could be seen as the crucible of fascism. What more appropriate place to bring its demigods into the full glare of the public spotlight and reveal them for the ‘grotesque and preposterous... clowns and crooks’ (according to an Allied report) that they were?"
"Charter of the International Military Tribunal (Principal Points)
"Article 6
"The Tribunal... shall have the power to try and punish persons who, acting in the interests of the European Axis countries, whether as individuals or as members of organizations, committed any of the following crimes.
"(a) Crimes against Peace: namely, planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a Common Plan or Conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing;
"(b) War Crimes: namely, violations of the laws or customs of war. Such violations shall include, but not be limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labour or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity;
"(c) Crimes against Humanity: namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of domestic law of the country where perpetrated. Leaders, organizers, instigators, and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a Common Plan or Conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing crimes are responsible for all acts performed by any persons in execution of such plan.
"Article 7
"The official position of defendants, whether as Heads of State or responsible officials in Government departments, shall not be considered as freeing them from responsibility or mitigating punishment."
............
"The Allied powers had convened a War Crimes Commission as early as September 1943. One of its tasks was to draw up a list of suspected war criminals. Winston Churchill expected the list to include up to one hundred names, some of which would be those of Japanese or Italian participants. However, by the time the date and the venue for the International Tribunal at Nuremberg had been agreed upon the list had been whittled down to those who had served the German state.
"The Pacific War was not yet over, so it was agreed that if and when Japan finally surrendered there would be a separate trial to bring those accused of atrocities in the Far East to justice. As for the Italians, their allegiance had shifted with their surrender in 1943, so it was felt that it would not be politically expedient to accuse allies (no matter how recent) of war crimes, particularly in view of the fact that the Italians in the north of the country had been under German occupation since their capitulation.
"Despite Clement Attlee’s assertion that German officers who had behaved like gangsters should be shot and that German industrialists and financiers who had supported the regime should forfeit their assets, no members of these groups were arraigned when the time came for the final list to be approved. It was felt that it would be impossible to know where to draw the line. Instead one representative from each branch of the regime would stand trial and the prosecution would be charged with revealing their part in a criminal conspiracy to subjugate and enslave the peoples of Europe. It would not be necessary to prove individual acts of barbarity if the defendant was a member of one of the named criminal organizations. The seven named organizations were as follows: the Reich Cabinet; the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party; the SS; the SA; the Gestapo; the SD; and the General Staff and High Command of the German Armed Forces.
"This approach also invalidated the cowardly defence that captured ...
Read
November 21, 2019The photograph on the covering page fits every description of the person that Göring was, as portrayed amply by Upton Sinclair in the World's End series, in most of the eleven volumes thereof.
............
"Why another book about the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials? It is true that the story has been re-told many times, but it bears repetition because with the passing of time the Nazis have assumed an almost mythic status in the minds of those who did not experience the war, or the horrors of the concentration camps.
"There is a very real danger that for subsequent generations they will be reduced to two-dimensional villains – no more real than the sinister SS caricatures in the Indiana Jones films. Of more importance, though, is the fact that the lessons of Nuremberg do not appear to have been learned. There are still those who deny the Holocaust – despite the fact that Holocaust denial is now a crime in many European countries including Germany – but they do so in the face of the facts that are presented in this book, where the personal testimonies of eyewitnesses are verified by the words of the accused themselves.
"Another reason why I felt compelled to write this account was that I have managed to unearth several personal recollections that to the best of my knowledge have never been published in book form. They are not of great length, nor even of great significance from a historical point of view, but they reveal certain aspects of the trials, and the personalities involved, that are not generally known. But of more importance, they underline the impression that all of the characters in this human catastrophe were quite ordinary people, who were living through extraordinary times. And that includes the defendants. The Nazis continue to hold a morbid fascination for many people. However, when they were stripped of their Satanic symbolism, and dispossessed of the power over life and death that fed their fanatical arrogance, Hermann Goering, Albert Speer, Joachim von Ribbentrop and the rest of the Hitler gang were reduced to their essence – which in many cases was as pitiable as it was disturbing. Here was the ‘banality of evil’ laid bare. Hitler’s followers were the very embodiment of Untermenschen (the subhumans of Aryan master race mythology), who blindly obeyed immoral orders without recourse to their own conscience. They were men of diverse backgrounds – able military leaders, petty bureaucrats and mechanical functionaries. Some of them should have known better but they all willingly sold their souls to bring a madman’s nightmares to reality, feeding his neuroses and propagating his paranoid racist propaganda without considering the inevitable consequences of their actions. Deprived of the pretence of Teutonic heroism, and denied the ritual staging of their Wagnerian party rallies, the Nuremberg defendants were finally forced to face the sordid reality of the damage that their racist ideology and extreme nationalism had wrought upon the world.
"It is a disquieting fact that we tend to find villains more interesting than their victims – in fiction and in reality – but the Nuremberg Trials revealed that in real life criminals and murderers are invariably colourless individuals, who lack personality as well as compassion and conscience. It is their victims who frequently display courage and endurance beyond normal human experience."
............
"On the morning of 15 April 1945, Clara Greenbaum woke from an uneasy sleep to the realization that her recurring nightmare had no end. She was still incarcerated in the notorious Nazi slave labour camp at Belsen in northwestern Germany, where an estimated 100,000 prisoners, half of them Russian prisoners of war, had died since its inception in 1943. Clara and her two children – Hannah aged seven and Adam, who was not yet four – were just three of some 60,000 inmates who had miraculously survived starvation, summary execution and the typhus epidemic. Typhus alone had claimed the lives of up to 35,000 prisoners in the first few months of 1945. But no less of a hazard was the daily brutality meted out by the sadistic SS guards, who beat the prisoners unmercifully and frequently shot them at random for ‘target practice’."
"Large numbers of prisoners lay dying or dead where only yesterday they had been forced to stand to attention. The contrast was too surreal for Clara to take in at first. She almost wished for order to return, because she was so conditioned by those who held the power of life and death in this accursed place. Looking up she noticed that the guard towers were empty. In fact, there were no guards to be seen anywhere. But if this was the day of liberation, it did not feel like it. There was no elation, only a crippling anxiety. For four hours the mass of prisoners remained on the Appellplatz, not daring to approach the unguarded gates. Many of them must have realized that they were only a few hundred metres from freedom, but they were unable to move. It was not that they were afraid that the guards would return but, as Clara later remembered, the guards were still inside them and they would remain there to the end of their lives. They were so indoctrinated that the very thought of freedom filled them with fear. It was not only their bodies that had been imprisoned and tortured beyond endurance, but their minds.
"Hours passed and then the mass of people stirred. They could hear the unmistakable sound of heavy vehicles approaching from behind the low hills to the north. A moment later a column of tanks and trucks appeared. The vehicles were rumbling across the ploughed fields towards the barbed wire. Panic went through the crowd like a bolt of electricity. This was it. The Germans were going to machine-gun them and then roll over their bodies to eradicate the evidence of their crimes. Then someone saw the Union Jack flying from the turret of one of the tanks. They were British! To the prisoners’ amazement the column circled the camp twice before drawing up in formation at the front gates, where the vehicles’ engines were turned off. Presumably they had been checking to see if any SS troops were prepared to make a final stand. And there they waited. Not a word was spoken. No orders were given. Clara estimated that as many as 500 troops were standing in complete silence, staring through the barbed wire."
"Then some of the soldiers began throwing food over the fence and the prisoners scrambled to claim what they could. A moment later the leading tank roared into life and smashed through the gates, followed by orderly ranks of soldiers under the command of an officer. The inmates had been liberated, but Clara felt no joy. She only wanted to turn and hide. But after a few steps she was arrested by a terrible sound. It was the mourning wail of an old woman. Only it was not an old woman. It was Hannah. For the first time in three years she was crying – her convulsions were so violent that her mother feared that her small body would collapse. For three years she had kept her emotions in check, but now they had all risen to the surface and consumed her. Adam was also weeping, but in the way that a small child cries. That was the moment at which Clara’s stony resolve cracked. She too fell to the ground, screaming and pounding the dirt with her fists. Everything they had seen and suffered had to be exorcized.
"The survivors needed to be questioned before having their details taken for a Red Cross list, but first of all they were given soup. Clara asked for water to dilute it with because she knew that she and her children were too malnourished to drink it as it was. Even so they felt sick afterwards. Others were not so lucky. The soup was too much for their ravaged bodies and they died.
"‘In the concentration camp you cannot have hope. Only determination.’
"Clara Greenbaum"
............
"In other camps Allied officers found it difficult to maintain discipline among their men – in some cases captured SS guards were summarily executed. This was soldiers’ justice, meted out by men who had seen their share of death, but who could no longer restrain themselves when confronted with the cold-blooded slaughter, or brutalization, of innocent civilians.
"At Dachau, near Munich, the liberators were checking the railway sidings when 2,310 corpses spilled out of a single train. It had been bringing in prisoners from other camps for execution. Most of the dead, including 83 women and 21 children, had expired from malnutrition, dehydration and suffocation – the Germans had crammed them in several hundred to a wagon. Those who had survived the journey were dragged out before being shot, beaten to death with rifle butts or torn to pieces by the guard dogs.
"The corpses were so emaciated that the first American officer on the scene thought he was looking at mounds of rags. Then he realized that the pathetic bundles were human beings. He estimated that the heaviest of them could not have weighed more than sixty or seventy pounds. With considerable effort he managed to keep his composure and then he attempted to maintain discipline by ordering his men – many of whom were sobbing uncontrollably – to count the corpses. But he was too late to prevent a GI from machine-gunning a number of captured SS personnel (as many as 122 Germans died, according to some accounts) while his squad urged him on, aided by the inhuman cries of the prisoners behind the wire.
"But the SS were anonymous servants of the Nazi regime. Their names and their fate would be lost among the appalling statistics of a war that had claimed some 64 million victims in 27 countries, 40 million of them non-combatants. Besides, the survivors did not want revenge, they wanted justice. Someone would have to pay, and be seen to pay, for what the Nazi regime had done to Clara and millions like her, many of whom had simply vanished from the earth, cremated in the ovens of Auschwitz and more than a thousand other camps throughout Germany and the occupied countries. The architects of the Final Solution would have to be brought to account and the German nation must be forced to face up to its collective responsibility for giving Hitler the mandate to wage his war. There would have to be a trial.
"‘I never dreamed that such cruelty, bestiality, and savagery could really exist in this world... I made the visit (to Buchenwald) deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to “propaganda”.’
"General Eisenhower"
............
"Nuremberg was, in retrospect, the obvious venue for a public trial of the Nazi war criminals. It had been the site of the massed annual party rallies and it could be seen as the crucible of fascism. What more appropriate place to bring its demigods into the full glare of the public spotlight and reveal them for the ‘grotesque and preposterous... clowns and crooks’ (according to an Allied report) that they were?"
"Charter of the International Military Tribunal (Principal Points)
"Article 6
"The Tribunal... shall have the power to try and punish persons who, acting in the interests of the European Axis countries, whether as individuals or as members of organizations, committed any of the following crimes.
"(a) Crimes against Peace: namely, planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a Common Plan or Conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing;
"(b) War Crimes: namely, violations of the laws or customs of war. Such violations shall include, but not be limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labour or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity;
"(c) Crimes against Humanity: namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of domestic law of the country where perpetrated. Leaders, organizers, instigators, and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a Common Plan or Conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing crimes are responsible for all acts performed by any persons in execution of such plan.
"Article 7
"The official position of defendants, whether as Heads of State or responsible officials in Government departments, shall not be considered as freeing them from responsibility or mitigating punishment."
............
"The Allied powers had convened a War Crimes Commission as early as September 1943. One of its tasks was to draw up a list of suspected war criminals. Winston Churchill expected the list to include up to one hundred names, some of which would be those of Japanese or Italian participants. However, by the time the date and the venue for the International Tribunal at Nuremberg had been agreed upon the list had been whittled down to those who had served the German state.
"The Pacific War was not yet over, so it was agreed that if and when Japan finally surrendered there would be a separate trial to bring those accused of atrocities in the Far East to justice. As for the Italians, their allegiance had shifted with their surrender in 1943, so it was felt that it would not be politically expedient to accuse allies (no matter how recent) of war crimes, particularly in view of the fact that the Italians in the north of the country had been under German occupation since their capitulation.
"Despite Clement Attlee’s assertion that German officers who had behaved like gangsters should be shot and that German industrialists and financiers who had supported the regime should forfeit their assets, no members of these groups were arraigned when the time came for the final list to be approved. It was felt that it would be impossible to know where to draw the line. Instead one representative from each branch of the regime would stand trial and the prosecution would be charged with revealing their part in a criminal conspiracy to subjugate and enslave the peoples of Europe. It would not be necessary to prove individual acts of barbarity if the defendant was a member of one of the named criminal organizations. The seven named organizations were as follows: the Reich Cabinet; the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party; the SS; the SA; the Gestapo; the SD; and the General Staff and High Command of the German Armed Forces.
"This approach also invalidated the cowardly defence that captured ...
............
"Why another book about the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials? It is true that the story has been re-told many times, but it bears repetition because with the passing of time the Nazis have assumed an almost mythic status in the minds of those who did not experience the war, or the horrors of the concentration camps.
"There is a very real danger that for subsequent generations they will be reduced to two-dimensional villains – no more real than the sinister SS caricatures in the Indiana Jones films. Of more importance, though, is the fact that the lessons of Nuremberg do not appear to have been learned. There are still those who deny the Holocaust – despite the fact that Holocaust denial is now a crime in many European countries including Germany – but they do so in the face of the facts that are presented in this book, where the personal testimonies of eyewitnesses are verified by the words of the accused themselves.
"Another reason why I felt compelled to write this account was that I have managed to unearth several personal recollections that to the best of my knowledge have never been published in book form. They are not of great length, nor even of great significance from a historical point of view, but they reveal certain aspects of the trials, and the personalities involved, that are not generally known. But of more importance, they underline the impression that all of the characters in this human catastrophe were quite ordinary people, who were living through extraordinary times. And that includes the defendants. The Nazis continue to hold a morbid fascination for many people. However, when they were stripped of their Satanic symbolism, and dispossessed of the power over life and death that fed their fanatical arrogance, Hermann Goering, Albert Speer, Joachim von Ribbentrop and the rest of the Hitler gang were reduced to their essence – which in many cases was as pitiable as it was disturbing. Here was the ‘banality of evil’ laid bare. Hitler’s followers were the very embodiment of Untermenschen (the subhumans of Aryan master race mythology), who blindly obeyed immoral orders without recourse to their own conscience. They were men of diverse backgrounds – able military leaders, petty bureaucrats and mechanical functionaries. Some of them should have known better but they all willingly sold their souls to bring a madman’s nightmares to reality, feeding his neuroses and propagating his paranoid racist propaganda without considering the inevitable consequences of their actions. Deprived of the pretence of Teutonic heroism, and denied the ritual staging of their Wagnerian party rallies, the Nuremberg defendants were finally forced to face the sordid reality of the damage that their racist ideology and extreme nationalism had wrought upon the world.
"It is a disquieting fact that we tend to find villains more interesting than their victims – in fiction and in reality – but the Nuremberg Trials revealed that in real life criminals and murderers are invariably colourless individuals, who lack personality as well as compassion and conscience. It is their victims who frequently display courage and endurance beyond normal human experience."
............
"On the morning of 15 April 1945, Clara Greenbaum woke from an uneasy sleep to the realization that her recurring nightmare had no end. She was still incarcerated in the notorious Nazi slave labour camp at Belsen in northwestern Germany, where an estimated 100,000 prisoners, half of them Russian prisoners of war, had died since its inception in 1943. Clara and her two children – Hannah aged seven and Adam, who was not yet four – were just three of some 60,000 inmates who had miraculously survived starvation, summary execution and the typhus epidemic. Typhus alone had claimed the lives of up to 35,000 prisoners in the first few months of 1945. But no less of a hazard was the daily brutality meted out by the sadistic SS guards, who beat the prisoners unmercifully and frequently shot them at random for ‘target practice’."
"Large numbers of prisoners lay dying or dead where only yesterday they had been forced to stand to attention. The contrast was too surreal for Clara to take in at first. She almost wished for order to return, because she was so conditioned by those who held the power of life and death in this accursed place. Looking up she noticed that the guard towers were empty. In fact, there were no guards to be seen anywhere. But if this was the day of liberation, it did not feel like it. There was no elation, only a crippling anxiety. For four hours the mass of prisoners remained on the Appellplatz, not daring to approach the unguarded gates. Many of them must have realized that they were only a few hundred metres from freedom, but they were unable to move. It was not that they were afraid that the guards would return but, as Clara later remembered, the guards were still inside them and they would remain there to the end of their lives. They were so indoctrinated that the very thought of freedom filled them with fear. It was not only their bodies that had been imprisoned and tortured beyond endurance, but their minds.
"Hours passed and then the mass of people stirred. They could hear the unmistakable sound of heavy vehicles approaching from behind the low hills to the north. A moment later a column of tanks and trucks appeared. The vehicles were rumbling across the ploughed fields towards the barbed wire. Panic went through the crowd like a bolt of electricity. This was it. The Germans were going to machine-gun them and then roll over their bodies to eradicate the evidence of their crimes. Then someone saw the Union Jack flying from the turret of one of the tanks. They were British! To the prisoners’ amazement the column circled the camp twice before drawing up in formation at the front gates, where the vehicles’ engines were turned off. Presumably they had been checking to see if any SS troops were prepared to make a final stand. And there they waited. Not a word was spoken. No orders were given. Clara estimated that as many as 500 troops were standing in complete silence, staring through the barbed wire."
"Then some of the soldiers began throwing food over the fence and the prisoners scrambled to claim what they could. A moment later the leading tank roared into life and smashed through the gates, followed by orderly ranks of soldiers under the command of an officer. The inmates had been liberated, but Clara felt no joy. She only wanted to turn and hide. But after a few steps she was arrested by a terrible sound. It was the mourning wail of an old woman. Only it was not an old woman. It was Hannah. For the first time in three years she was crying – her convulsions were so violent that her mother feared that her small body would collapse. For three years she had kept her emotions in check, but now they had all risen to the surface and consumed her. Adam was also weeping, but in the way that a small child cries. That was the moment at which Clara’s stony resolve cracked. She too fell to the ground, screaming and pounding the dirt with her fists. Everything they had seen and suffered had to be exorcized.
"The survivors needed to be questioned before having their details taken for a Red Cross list, but first of all they were given soup. Clara asked for water to dilute it with because she knew that she and her children were too malnourished to drink it as it was. Even so they felt sick afterwards. Others were not so lucky. The soup was too much for their ravaged bodies and they died.
"‘In the concentration camp you cannot have hope. Only determination.’
"Clara Greenbaum"
............
"In other camps Allied officers found it difficult to maintain discipline among their men – in some cases captured SS guards were summarily executed. This was soldiers’ justice, meted out by men who had seen their share of death, but who could no longer restrain themselves when confronted with the cold-blooded slaughter, or brutalization, of innocent civilians.
"At Dachau, near Munich, the liberators were checking the railway sidings when 2,310 corpses spilled out of a single train. It had been bringing in prisoners from other camps for execution. Most of the dead, including 83 women and 21 children, had expired from malnutrition, dehydration and suffocation – the Germans had crammed them in several hundred to a wagon. Those who had survived the journey were dragged out before being shot, beaten to death with rifle butts or torn to pieces by the guard dogs.
"The corpses were so emaciated that the first American officer on the scene thought he was looking at mounds of rags. Then he realized that the pathetic bundles were human beings. He estimated that the heaviest of them could not have weighed more than sixty or seventy pounds. With considerable effort he managed to keep his composure and then he attempted to maintain discipline by ordering his men – many of whom were sobbing uncontrollably – to count the corpses. But he was too late to prevent a GI from machine-gunning a number of captured SS personnel (as many as 122 Germans died, according to some accounts) while his squad urged him on, aided by the inhuman cries of the prisoners behind the wire.
"But the SS were anonymous servants of the Nazi regime. Their names and their fate would be lost among the appalling statistics of a war that had claimed some 64 million victims in 27 countries, 40 million of them non-combatants. Besides, the survivors did not want revenge, they wanted justice. Someone would have to pay, and be seen to pay, for what the Nazi regime had done to Clara and millions like her, many of whom had simply vanished from the earth, cremated in the ovens of Auschwitz and more than a thousand other camps throughout Germany and the occupied countries. The architects of the Final Solution would have to be brought to account and the German nation must be forced to face up to its collective responsibility for giving Hitler the mandate to wage his war. There would have to be a trial.
"‘I never dreamed that such cruelty, bestiality, and savagery could really exist in this world... I made the visit (to Buchenwald) deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to “propaganda”.’
"General Eisenhower"
............
"Nuremberg was, in retrospect, the obvious venue for a public trial of the Nazi war criminals. It had been the site of the massed annual party rallies and it could be seen as the crucible of fascism. What more appropriate place to bring its demigods into the full glare of the public spotlight and reveal them for the ‘grotesque and preposterous... clowns and crooks’ (according to an Allied report) that they were?"
"Charter of the International Military Tribunal (Principal Points)
"Article 6
"The Tribunal... shall have the power to try and punish persons who, acting in the interests of the European Axis countries, whether as individuals or as members of organizations, committed any of the following crimes.
"(a) Crimes against Peace: namely, planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a Common Plan or Conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing;
"(b) War Crimes: namely, violations of the laws or customs of war. Such violations shall include, but not be limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labour or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity;
"(c) Crimes against Humanity: namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of domestic law of the country where perpetrated. Leaders, organizers, instigators, and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a Common Plan or Conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing crimes are responsible for all acts performed by any persons in execution of such plan.
"Article 7
"The official position of defendants, whether as Heads of State or responsible officials in Government departments, shall not be considered as freeing them from responsibility or mitigating punishment."
............
"The Allied powers had convened a War Crimes Commission as early as September 1943. One of its tasks was to draw up a list of suspected war criminals. Winston Churchill expected the list to include up to one hundred names, some of which would be those of Japanese or Italian participants. However, by the time the date and the venue for the International Tribunal at Nuremberg had been agreed upon the list had been whittled down to those who had served the German state.
"The Pacific War was not yet over, so it was agreed that if and when Japan finally surrendered there would be a separate trial to bring those accused of atrocities in the Far East to justice. As for the Italians, their allegiance had shifted with their surrender in 1943, so it was felt that it would not be politically expedient to accuse allies (no matter how recent) of war crimes, particularly in view of the fact that the Italians in the north of the country had been under German occupation since their capitulation.
"Despite Clement Attlee’s assertion that German officers who had behaved like gangsters should be shot and that German industrialists and financiers who had supported the regime should forfeit their assets, no members of these groups were arraigned when the time came for the final list to be approved. It was felt that it would be impossible to know where to draw the line. Instead one representative from each branch of the regime would stand trial and the prosecution would be charged with revealing their part in a criminal conspiracy to subjugate and enslave the peoples of Europe. It would not be necessary to prove individual acts of barbarity if the defendant was a member of one of the named criminal organizations. The seven named organizations were as follows: the Reich Cabinet; the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party; the SS; the SA; the Gestapo; the SD; and the General Staff and High Command of the German Armed Forces.
"This approach also invalidated the cowardly defence that captured ...
January 28, 2021
A short but good overview of the Nuremberg Trials. A good starting place if you know little about the trials but not the place to get loads of info. A good structure to the book made it really easy to follow, the constant use of the word “dour” irritated me slightly, there are other words in the English language.
November 22, 2019
The photograph on the covering page fits every description of the person that Göring was, as portrayed amply by Upton Sinclair in the World's End series, in most of the eleven volumes thereof.
............
"Why another book about the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials? It is true that the story has been re-told many times, but it bears repetition because with the passing of time the Nazis have assumed an almost mythic status in the minds of those who did not experience the war, or the horrors of the concentration camps.
"There is a very real danger that for subsequent generations they will be reduced to two-dimensional villains – no more real than the sinister SS caricatures in the Indiana Jones films. Of more importance, though, is the fact that the lessons of Nuremberg do not appear to have been learned. There are still those who deny the Holocaust – despite the fact that Holocaust denial is now a crime in many European countries including Germany – but they do so in the face of the facts that are presented in this book, where the personal testimonies of eyewitnesses are verified by the words of the accused themselves.
"Another reason why I felt compelled to write this account was that I have managed to unearth several personal recollections that to the best of my knowledge have never been published in book form. They are not of great length, nor even of great significance from a historical point of view, but they reveal certain aspects of the trials, and the personalities involved, that are not generally known. But of more importance, they underline the impression that all of the characters in this human catastrophe were quite ordinary people, who were living through extraordinary times. And that includes the defendants. The Nazis continue to hold a morbid fascination for many people. However, when they were stripped of their Satanic symbolism, and dispossessed of the power over life and death that fed their fanatical arrogance, Hermann Goering, Albert Speer, Joachim von Ribbentrop and the rest of the Hitler gang were reduced to their essence – which in many cases was as pitiable as it was disturbing. Here was the ‘banality of evil’ laid bare. Hitler’s followers were the very embodiment of Untermenschen (the subhumans of Aryan master race mythology), who blindly obeyed immoral orders without recourse to their own conscience. They were men of diverse backgrounds – able military leaders, petty bureaucrats and mechanical functionaries. Some of them should have known better but they all willingly sold their souls to bring a madman’s nightmares to reality, feeding his neuroses and propagating his paranoid racist propaganda without considering the inevitable consequences of their actions. Deprived of the pretence of Teutonic heroism, and denied the ritual staging of their Wagnerian party rallies, the Nuremberg defendants were finally forced to face the sordid reality of the damage that their racist ideology and extreme nationalism had wrought upon the world.
"It is a disquieting fact that we tend to find villains more interesting than their victims – in fiction and in reality – but the Nuremberg Trials revealed that in real life criminals and murderers are invariably colourless individuals, who lack personality as well as compassion and conscience. It is their victims who frequently display courage and endurance beyond normal human experience."
............
"On the morning of 15 April 1945, Clara Greenbaum woke from an uneasy sleep to the realization that her recurring nightmare had no end. She was still incarcerated in the notorious Nazi slave labour camp at Belsen in northwestern Germany, where an estimated 100,000 prisoners, half of them Russian prisoners of war, had died since its inception in 1943. Clara and her two children – Hannah aged seven and Adam, who was not yet four – were just three of some 60,000 inmates who had miraculously survived starvation, summary execution and the typhus epidemic. Typhus alone had claimed the lives of up to 35,000 prisoners in the first few months of 1945. But no less of a hazard was the daily brutality meted out by the sadistic SS guards, who beat the prisoners unmercifully and frequently shot them at random for ‘target practice’."
"Large numbers of prisoners lay dying or dead where only yesterday they had been forced to stand to attention. The contrast was too surreal for Clara to take in at first. She almost wished for order to return, because she was so conditioned by those who held the power of life and death in this accursed place. Looking up she noticed that the guard towers were empty. In fact, there were no guards to be seen anywhere. But if this was the day of liberation, it did not feel like it. There was no elation, only a crippling anxiety. For four hours the mass of prisoners remained on the Appellplatz, not daring to approach the unguarded gates. Many of them must have realized that they were only a few hundred metres from freedom, but they were unable to move. It was not that they were afraid that the guards would return but, as Clara later remembered, the guards were still inside them and they would remain there to the end of their lives. They were so indoctrinated that the very thought of freedom filled them with fear. It was not only their bodies that had been imprisoned and tortured beyond endurance, but their minds.
"Hours passed and then the mass of people stirred. They could hear the unmistakable sound of heavy vehicles approaching from behind the low hills to the north. A moment later a column of tanks and trucks appeared. The vehicles were rumbling across the ploughed fields towards the barbed wire. Panic went through the crowd like a bolt of electricity. This was it. The Germans were going to machine-gun them and then roll over their bodies to eradicate the evidence of their crimes. Then someone saw the Union Jack flying from the turret of one of the tanks. They were British! To the prisoners’ amazement the column circled the camp twice before drawing up in formation at the front gates, where the vehicles’ engines were turned off. Presumably they had been checking to see if any SS troops were prepared to make a final stand. And there they waited. Not a word was spoken. No orders were given. Clara estimated that as many as 500 troops were standing in complete silence, staring through the barbed wire."
"Then some of the soldiers began throwing food over the fence and the prisoners scrambled to claim what they could. A moment later the leading tank roared into life and smashed through the gates, followed by orderly ranks of soldiers under the command of an officer. The inmates had been liberated, but Clara felt no joy. She only wanted to turn and hide. But after a few steps she was arrested by a terrible sound. It was the mourning wail of an old woman. Only it was not an old woman. It was Hannah. For the first time in three years she was crying – her convulsions were so violent that her mother feared that her small body would collapse. For three years she had kept her emotions in check, but now they had all risen to the surface and consumed her. Adam was also weeping, but in the way that a small child cries. That was the moment at which Clara’s stony resolve cracked. She too fell to the ground, screaming and pounding the dirt with her fists. Everything they had seen and suffered had to be exorcized.
"The survivors needed to be questioned before having their details taken for a Red Cross list, but first of all they were given soup. Clara asked for water to dilute it with because she knew that she and her children were too malnourished to drink it as it was. Even so they felt sick afterwards. Others were not so lucky. The soup was too much for their ravaged bodies and they died.
"‘In the concentration camp you cannot have hope. Only determination.’
"Clara Greenbaum"
............
"In other camps Allied officers found it difficult to maintain discipline among their men – in some cases captured SS guards were summarily executed. This was soldiers’ justice, meted out by men who had seen their share of death, but who could no longer restrain themselves when confronted with the cold-blooded slaughter, or brutalization, of innocent civilians.
"At Dachau, near Munich, the liberators were checking the railway sidings when 2,310 corpses spilled out of a single train. It had been bringing in prisoners from other camps for execution. Most of the dead, including 83 women and 21 children, had expired from malnutrition, dehydration and suffocation – the Germans had crammed them in several hundred to a wagon. Those who had survived the journey were dragged out before being shot, beaten to death with rifle butts or torn to pieces by the guard dogs.
"The corpses were so emaciated that the first American officer on the scene thought he was looking at mounds of rags. Then he realized that the pathetic bundles were human beings. He estimated that the heaviest of them could not have weighed more than sixty or seventy pounds. With considerable effort he managed to keep his composure and then he attempted to maintain discipline by ordering his men – many of whom were sobbing uncontrollably – to count the corpses. But he was too late to prevent a GI from machine-gunning a number of captured SS personnel (as many as 122 Germans died, according to some accounts) while his squad urged him on, aided by the inhuman cries of the prisoners behind the wire.
"But the SS were anonymous servants of the Nazi regime. Their names and their fate would be lost among the appalling statistics of a war that had claimed some 64 million victims in 27 countries, 40 million of them non-combatants. Besides, the survivors did not want revenge, they wanted justice. Someone would have to pay, and be seen to pay, for what the Nazi regime had done to Clara and millions like her, many of whom had simply vanished from the earth, cremated in the ovens of Auschwitz and more than a thousand other camps throughout Germany and the occupied countries. The architects of the Final Solution would have to be brought to account and the German nation must be forced to face up to its collective responsibility for giving Hitler the mandate to wage his war. There would have to be a trial.
"‘I never dreamed that such cruelty, bestiality, and savagery could really exist in this world... I made the visit (to Buchenwald) deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to “propaganda”.’
"General Eisenhower"
............
"Nuremberg was, in retrospect, the obvious venue for a public trial of the Nazi war criminals. It had been the site of the massed annual party rallies and it could be seen as the crucible of fascism. What more appropriate place to bring its demigods into the full glare of the public spotlight and reveal them for the ‘grotesque and preposterous... clowns and crooks’ (according to an Allied report) that they were?"
"Charter of the International Military Tribunal (Principal Points)
"Article 6
"The Tribunal... shall have the power to try and punish persons who, acting in the interests of the European Axis countries, whether as individuals or as members of organizations, committed any of the following crimes.
"(a) Crimes against Peace: namely, planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a Common Plan or Conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing;
"(b) War Crimes: namely, violations of the laws or customs of war. Such violations shall include, but not be limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labour or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity;
"(c) Crimes against Humanity: namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of domestic law of the country where perpetrated. Leaders, organizers, instigators, and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a Common Plan or Conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing crimes are responsible for all acts performed by any persons in execution of such plan.
"Article 7
"The official position of defendants, whether as Heads of State or responsible officials in Government departments, shall not be considered as freeing them from responsibility or mitigating punishment."
............
"The Allied powers had convened a War Crimes Commission as early as September 1943. One of its tasks was to draw up a list of suspected war criminals. Winston Churchill expected the list to include up to one hundred names, some of which would be those of Japanese or Italian participants. However, by the time the date and the venue for the International Tribunal at Nuremberg had been agreed upon the list had been whittled down to those who had served the German state.
"The Pacific War was not yet over, so it was agreed that if and when Japan finally surrendered there would be a separate trial to bring those accused of atrocities in the Far East to justice. As for the Italians, their allegiance had shifted with their surrender in 1943, so it was felt that it would not be politically expedient to accuse allies (no matter how recent) of war crimes, particularly in view of the fact that the Italians in the north of the country had been under German occupation since their capitulation.
"Despite Clement Attlee’s assertion that German officers who had behaved like gangsters should be shot and that German industrialists and financiers who had supported the regime should forfeit their assets, no members of these groups were arraigned when the time came for the final list to be approved. It was felt that it would be impossible to know where to draw the line. Instead one representative from each branch of the regime would stand trial and the prosecution would be charged with revealing their part in a criminal conspiracy to subjugate and enslave the peoples of Europe. It would not be necessary to prove individual acts of barbarity if the defendant was a member of one of the named criminal organizations. The seven named organizations were as follows: the Reich Cabinet; the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party; the SS; the SA; the Gestapo; the SD; and the General Staff and High Command of the German Armed Forces.
"This approach also invalidated the cowardly defence that captured ...
............
"Why another book about the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials? It is true that the story has been re-told many times, but it bears repetition because with the passing of time the Nazis have assumed an almost mythic status in the minds of those who did not experience the war, or the horrors of the concentration camps.
"There is a very real danger that for subsequent generations they will be reduced to two-dimensional villains – no more real than the sinister SS caricatures in the Indiana Jones films. Of more importance, though, is the fact that the lessons of Nuremberg do not appear to have been learned. There are still those who deny the Holocaust – despite the fact that Holocaust denial is now a crime in many European countries including Germany – but they do so in the face of the facts that are presented in this book, where the personal testimonies of eyewitnesses are verified by the words of the accused themselves.
"Another reason why I felt compelled to write this account was that I have managed to unearth several personal recollections that to the best of my knowledge have never been published in book form. They are not of great length, nor even of great significance from a historical point of view, but they reveal certain aspects of the trials, and the personalities involved, that are not generally known. But of more importance, they underline the impression that all of the characters in this human catastrophe were quite ordinary people, who were living through extraordinary times. And that includes the defendants. The Nazis continue to hold a morbid fascination for many people. However, when they were stripped of their Satanic symbolism, and dispossessed of the power over life and death that fed their fanatical arrogance, Hermann Goering, Albert Speer, Joachim von Ribbentrop and the rest of the Hitler gang were reduced to their essence – which in many cases was as pitiable as it was disturbing. Here was the ‘banality of evil’ laid bare. Hitler’s followers were the very embodiment of Untermenschen (the subhumans of Aryan master race mythology), who blindly obeyed immoral orders without recourse to their own conscience. They were men of diverse backgrounds – able military leaders, petty bureaucrats and mechanical functionaries. Some of them should have known better but they all willingly sold their souls to bring a madman’s nightmares to reality, feeding his neuroses and propagating his paranoid racist propaganda without considering the inevitable consequences of their actions. Deprived of the pretence of Teutonic heroism, and denied the ritual staging of their Wagnerian party rallies, the Nuremberg defendants were finally forced to face the sordid reality of the damage that their racist ideology and extreme nationalism had wrought upon the world.
"It is a disquieting fact that we tend to find villains more interesting than their victims – in fiction and in reality – but the Nuremberg Trials revealed that in real life criminals and murderers are invariably colourless individuals, who lack personality as well as compassion and conscience. It is their victims who frequently display courage and endurance beyond normal human experience."
............
"On the morning of 15 April 1945, Clara Greenbaum woke from an uneasy sleep to the realization that her recurring nightmare had no end. She was still incarcerated in the notorious Nazi slave labour camp at Belsen in northwestern Germany, where an estimated 100,000 prisoners, half of them Russian prisoners of war, had died since its inception in 1943. Clara and her two children – Hannah aged seven and Adam, who was not yet four – were just three of some 60,000 inmates who had miraculously survived starvation, summary execution and the typhus epidemic. Typhus alone had claimed the lives of up to 35,000 prisoners in the first few months of 1945. But no less of a hazard was the daily brutality meted out by the sadistic SS guards, who beat the prisoners unmercifully and frequently shot them at random for ‘target practice’."
"Large numbers of prisoners lay dying or dead where only yesterday they had been forced to stand to attention. The contrast was too surreal for Clara to take in at first. She almost wished for order to return, because she was so conditioned by those who held the power of life and death in this accursed place. Looking up she noticed that the guard towers were empty. In fact, there were no guards to be seen anywhere. But if this was the day of liberation, it did not feel like it. There was no elation, only a crippling anxiety. For four hours the mass of prisoners remained on the Appellplatz, not daring to approach the unguarded gates. Many of them must have realized that they were only a few hundred metres from freedom, but they were unable to move. It was not that they were afraid that the guards would return but, as Clara later remembered, the guards were still inside them and they would remain there to the end of their lives. They were so indoctrinated that the very thought of freedom filled them with fear. It was not only their bodies that had been imprisoned and tortured beyond endurance, but their minds.
"Hours passed and then the mass of people stirred. They could hear the unmistakable sound of heavy vehicles approaching from behind the low hills to the north. A moment later a column of tanks and trucks appeared. The vehicles were rumbling across the ploughed fields towards the barbed wire. Panic went through the crowd like a bolt of electricity. This was it. The Germans were going to machine-gun them and then roll over their bodies to eradicate the evidence of their crimes. Then someone saw the Union Jack flying from the turret of one of the tanks. They were British! To the prisoners’ amazement the column circled the camp twice before drawing up in formation at the front gates, where the vehicles’ engines were turned off. Presumably they had been checking to see if any SS troops were prepared to make a final stand. And there they waited. Not a word was spoken. No orders were given. Clara estimated that as many as 500 troops were standing in complete silence, staring through the barbed wire."
"Then some of the soldiers began throwing food over the fence and the prisoners scrambled to claim what they could. A moment later the leading tank roared into life and smashed through the gates, followed by orderly ranks of soldiers under the command of an officer. The inmates had been liberated, but Clara felt no joy. She only wanted to turn and hide. But after a few steps she was arrested by a terrible sound. It was the mourning wail of an old woman. Only it was not an old woman. It was Hannah. For the first time in three years she was crying – her convulsions were so violent that her mother feared that her small body would collapse. For three years she had kept her emotions in check, but now they had all risen to the surface and consumed her. Adam was also weeping, but in the way that a small child cries. That was the moment at which Clara’s stony resolve cracked. She too fell to the ground, screaming and pounding the dirt with her fists. Everything they had seen and suffered had to be exorcized.
"The survivors needed to be questioned before having their details taken for a Red Cross list, but first of all they were given soup. Clara asked for water to dilute it with because she knew that she and her children were too malnourished to drink it as it was. Even so they felt sick afterwards. Others were not so lucky. The soup was too much for their ravaged bodies and they died.
"‘In the concentration camp you cannot have hope. Only determination.’
"Clara Greenbaum"
............
"In other camps Allied officers found it difficult to maintain discipline among their men – in some cases captured SS guards were summarily executed. This was soldiers’ justice, meted out by men who had seen their share of death, but who could no longer restrain themselves when confronted with the cold-blooded slaughter, or brutalization, of innocent civilians.
"At Dachau, near Munich, the liberators were checking the railway sidings when 2,310 corpses spilled out of a single train. It had been bringing in prisoners from other camps for execution. Most of the dead, including 83 women and 21 children, had expired from malnutrition, dehydration and suffocation – the Germans had crammed them in several hundred to a wagon. Those who had survived the journey were dragged out before being shot, beaten to death with rifle butts or torn to pieces by the guard dogs.
"The corpses were so emaciated that the first American officer on the scene thought he was looking at mounds of rags. Then he realized that the pathetic bundles were human beings. He estimated that the heaviest of them could not have weighed more than sixty or seventy pounds. With considerable effort he managed to keep his composure and then he attempted to maintain discipline by ordering his men – many of whom were sobbing uncontrollably – to count the corpses. But he was too late to prevent a GI from machine-gunning a number of captured SS personnel (as many as 122 Germans died, according to some accounts) while his squad urged him on, aided by the inhuman cries of the prisoners behind the wire.
"But the SS were anonymous servants of the Nazi regime. Their names and their fate would be lost among the appalling statistics of a war that had claimed some 64 million victims in 27 countries, 40 million of them non-combatants. Besides, the survivors did not want revenge, they wanted justice. Someone would have to pay, and be seen to pay, for what the Nazi regime had done to Clara and millions like her, many of whom had simply vanished from the earth, cremated in the ovens of Auschwitz and more than a thousand other camps throughout Germany and the occupied countries. The architects of the Final Solution would have to be brought to account and the German nation must be forced to face up to its collective responsibility for giving Hitler the mandate to wage his war. There would have to be a trial.
"‘I never dreamed that such cruelty, bestiality, and savagery could really exist in this world... I made the visit (to Buchenwald) deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to “propaganda”.’
"General Eisenhower"
............
"Nuremberg was, in retrospect, the obvious venue for a public trial of the Nazi war criminals. It had been the site of the massed annual party rallies and it could be seen as the crucible of fascism. What more appropriate place to bring its demigods into the full glare of the public spotlight and reveal them for the ‘grotesque and preposterous... clowns and crooks’ (according to an Allied report) that they were?"
"Charter of the International Military Tribunal (Principal Points)
"Article 6
"The Tribunal... shall have the power to try and punish persons who, acting in the interests of the European Axis countries, whether as individuals or as members of organizations, committed any of the following crimes.
"(a) Crimes against Peace: namely, planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a Common Plan or Conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing;
"(b) War Crimes: namely, violations of the laws or customs of war. Such violations shall include, but not be limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labour or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity;
"(c) Crimes against Humanity: namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of domestic law of the country where perpetrated. Leaders, organizers, instigators, and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a Common Plan or Conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing crimes are responsible for all acts performed by any persons in execution of such plan.
"Article 7
"The official position of defendants, whether as Heads of State or responsible officials in Government departments, shall not be considered as freeing them from responsibility or mitigating punishment."
............
"The Allied powers had convened a War Crimes Commission as early as September 1943. One of its tasks was to draw up a list of suspected war criminals. Winston Churchill expected the list to include up to one hundred names, some of which would be those of Japanese or Italian participants. However, by the time the date and the venue for the International Tribunal at Nuremberg had been agreed upon the list had been whittled down to those who had served the German state.
"The Pacific War was not yet over, so it was agreed that if and when Japan finally surrendered there would be a separate trial to bring those accused of atrocities in the Far East to justice. As for the Italians, their allegiance had shifted with their surrender in 1943, so it was felt that it would not be politically expedient to accuse allies (no matter how recent) of war crimes, particularly in view of the fact that the Italians in the north of the country had been under German occupation since their capitulation.
"Despite Clement Attlee’s assertion that German officers who had behaved like gangsters should be shot and that German industrialists and financiers who had supported the regime should forfeit their assets, no members of these groups were arraigned when the time came for the final list to be approved. It was felt that it would be impossible to know where to draw the line. Instead one representative from each branch of the regime would stand trial and the prosecution would be charged with revealing their part in a criminal conspiracy to subjugate and enslave the peoples of Europe. It would not be necessary to prove individual acts of barbarity if the defendant was a member of one of the named criminal organizations. The seven named organizations were as follows: the Reich Cabinet; the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party; the SS; the SA; the Gestapo; the SD; and the General Staff and High Command of the German Armed Forces.
"This approach also invalidated the cowardly defence that captured ...
April 3, 2019
Excellent book.
I loved the point on efficient German bureaucracy damning them. So much evidence. Who can question or deny.
I loved the point on efficient German bureaucracy damning them. So much evidence. Who can question or deny.
March 1, 2026
It is a disquieting fact that we tend to find villains more interesting than their victims – in fiction and in reality – but the Nuremberg Trials revealed that in real life criminals and murderers are invariably colourless individuals, who lack personality as well as compassion and conscience. It is their victims who frequently display courage and endurance beyond normal human experience.
*****
In 1921 the Allies had allowed Germany to prosecute those of its own countrymen who were accused of war crimes, but of 900 named and arraigned only two were convicted and even they escaped house arrest shortly afterwards. One of those accused had been Field Marshal von Hindenburg, who later became president of the Weimar Republic. His vacillations made it possible for Hitler to rise to power in 1933.
*****
Ironically it was the American secretary of war, the elderly Republican Henry Stimson, who vehemently opposed Morgenthau’s plan. He found an unexpected ally in the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who had told Winston Churchill that if the leading Nazis were summarily executed the world would say that their enemies had been afraid to put them on trial and had put them to death to silence them.
*****
‘So it has come,’ Goering said gloomily. He took the documents without looking at them.
*****
Under the new regime, German workers were forced to work harder and longer and they could not strike or leave their jobs without the government’s permission. The Nazis avoided discontent, and reconciled the workers to the regime, by providing a range of subsidized leisure activities, which proved very popular with the German population.
*****
There then followed the formal reading of the indictments, which took two days. Each 24,000-word document was read into the official record by junior members of the prosecution, who took it in turn to speak for five hours before handing on to a colleague. It was something of an anticlimax after months of anticipation, but much of the trial would be taken up with monotonous routine, points of procedure and the dictating of reams of documents on which subsequent questions would be based. That said, for anyone who listened carefully there was drama in the indictment, because the full range of Nazi iniquities was detailed in public for the first time.
*****
The pleas having been entered – all 21 defendants declaring themselves ‘not guilty’
*****
‘We have no purpose here to incriminate the whole German people. Hitler did not achieve power by a majority vote but seized it by an evil alliance of revolutionaries, reactionaries and militarists.
*****
It was hard to believe that human beings could have lived through such torment. But many, of course, did not survive the attempt to save them. A single biscuit or a bowl of soup often proved too much for their decimated frames and they died on the day of their liberation.
*****
The dead were counted in metres.
*****
At last the final frames rattled through the sprockets and the screen went black. The lights came on. Nobody spoke. Not even the judges. They simply rose and went out. The session was adjourned.
Nobody articulated the question that was on everyone’s lips.
‘How could supposedly civilized people do that to their fellow human beings?’
No one answered because no one knew.
*****
On 13 December Thomas Dodd wheeled in a small table covered in a white sheet and asked for it to be introduced into evidence as Exhibit 253. After a brief introduction he whipped the sheet away to reveal the shrunken head of a Polish prisoner, which had been used as a paperweight by the wife of the commandant of Buchenwald concentration camp. There was an audible gasp in the court. His next exhibit was no less shocking – a piece of tattooed skin flayed from the body of a prisoner for the commandant’s wife, who was known to take perverse pleasure in boasting that she had lampshades fashioned from human skin.
*****
To everyone’s relief, this dilemma was resolved when the tribunal ruled that membership alone did not provide grounds for indictment. The organizations themselves were on trial and selected representatives would be summoned to speak on their behalf. To the consternation of the Allied authorities, hundreds of thousands of former members of the SA, the SS and the Leadership Corps responded to the radio appeals, newspaper notices and leaflets distributed all over Germany. By the end of the year 136,000 affidavits from former members of the SS and their representatives had been received and filed. It was clear that die-hard Nazis and Nazi lawyers in the internment camps planned to swamp the Allied War Crimes Commission with paperwork.
*****
‘One night we were awakened by terrifying cries. And we discovered, on the following day, from the men working in the Sonderkommando – the Gas Kommando – that on the preceding day, the gas supply having run out, they had thrown the children into the furnaces alive.’
*****
On the third day Goering concluded a total of 12 hours of testimony by quoting Winston Churchill who had stated, ‘In a struggle for life and death there is no legality’. There was no denying that the fat man was ahead on points. It would take a skilled advocate to get him on the ropes.
*****
‘And that Jews must pay for the damage caused by anti-Jewish riots with their insurance claims forfeited by the Reich?’
‘I did sign a similar law but whether it is the same…’
Jackson cut him short.
‘Did you not say about those riots, “I wish you had killed 200 Jews instead of destroying such valuables”?’
In a move calculated to intimidate, Jackson approached the witness stand and deposited the transcript of the conversation on the table, as if challenging the defendant to deny its very existence.
‘But that was said in a moment of bad temper and extreme excitement.’
‘Spontaneous sincerity, in other words,’ Jackson observed.
Goering blanched.
*****
‘The witness is excused,’
Jackson announced that he was done and then he strode back to the bench. No one had ever turned their back on Reichsmarschall Goering before.
‘I am not finished,’ Goering protested, unaccustomed to being cut short.
‘The witness is excused,’ repeated Judge Shawcross.
‘But I am not finished,’ Goering exclaimed.
The Judge raised his gavel. The session was adjourned.
*****
But Goering was warming to his subject and would not be persuaded.
‘Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.’
*****
Even the well-educated had fallen for these appeals to vanity and national pride, because they had enabled everyone to project their own hopes and fears on to the leadership. Such generalizations allowed everyone to hear whatever they wanted to hear.
*****
In the Nazi dictionary of sardonic euphemisms “final solution” of the Jewish problem was a phrase which meant extermination, “special treatment” of prisoners of war meant killing; “protective custody” meant concentration camp; “duty labour” meant slave labour; and an order to “take a firm attitude” or “take positive measures” meant to act with unrestrained savagery…
*****
After Jodl’s final plea, Justice Birkett could not refrain from commenting.
‘I am always struck by the apparently sincere and passionate idealism of so many of these defendants – but what ideals!’
*****
There was no sense of triumph among the victors, only relief that this tragic and violent era had finally come to an end.
*****
‘In no way am I responsible or guilty for the murder of the 5 million Jews or the deaths of others in the concentration camps… The fact that I was in charge of all the concentration camps in Germany from 1942 until the end is beside the point.’
OSWALD POHL
*****
Surprisingly, each defendant was well educated and knew full well what they were being ordered to do. Eight were lawyers, one was a university professor, a third was an opera singer and a fourth had been an art collector; yet they were shown to have been capable of the most brutal crimes of modern times.
*****
The lessons of Nuremberg are not invalidated, as some might argue, by the subsequent atrocities and abuses committed by the United States in Vietnam and Iraq, by the British in Northern Ireland, by the French in Algeria and by the Russians in Afghanistan and in their satellite states. Any abuses that took place in these countries are also covered by the laws that were formulated and clarified in postwar Germany and no right-thinking person would deny a captured enemy the right to humane treatment, be they freedom fighter or terrorist. The fact that these abuses continue is not the fault of those who prosecuted and presided at the Nuremberg tribunals. The torture, imprisonment without trial and ethnic cleansing that we witness on the nightly news does not expose the flaws in international law, only our ability and willingness to enforce it.
*****
The alternative to Nuremberg would have been the summary execution of the Nazi leaders. This might have satisfied the immediate need for vengeance, but the wrong message would have been sent to the world.
*****
In 1921 the Allies had allowed Germany to prosecute those of its own countrymen who were accused of war crimes, but of 900 named and arraigned only two were convicted and even they escaped house arrest shortly afterwards. One of those accused had been Field Marshal von Hindenburg, who later became president of the Weimar Republic. His vacillations made it possible for Hitler to rise to power in 1933.
*****
Ironically it was the American secretary of war, the elderly Republican Henry Stimson, who vehemently opposed Morgenthau’s plan. He found an unexpected ally in the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who had told Winston Churchill that if the leading Nazis were summarily executed the world would say that their enemies had been afraid to put them on trial and had put them to death to silence them.
*****
‘So it has come,’ Goering said gloomily. He took the documents without looking at them.
*****
Under the new regime, German workers were forced to work harder and longer and they could not strike or leave their jobs without the government’s permission. The Nazis avoided discontent, and reconciled the workers to the regime, by providing a range of subsidized leisure activities, which proved very popular with the German population.
*****
There then followed the formal reading of the indictments, which took two days. Each 24,000-word document was read into the official record by junior members of the prosecution, who took it in turn to speak for five hours before handing on to a colleague. It was something of an anticlimax after months of anticipation, but much of the trial would be taken up with monotonous routine, points of procedure and the dictating of reams of documents on which subsequent questions would be based. That said, for anyone who listened carefully there was drama in the indictment, because the full range of Nazi iniquities was detailed in public for the first time.
*****
The pleas having been entered – all 21 defendants declaring themselves ‘not guilty’
*****
‘We have no purpose here to incriminate the whole German people. Hitler did not achieve power by a majority vote but seized it by an evil alliance of revolutionaries, reactionaries and militarists.
*****
It was hard to believe that human beings could have lived through such torment. But many, of course, did not survive the attempt to save them. A single biscuit or a bowl of soup often proved too much for their decimated frames and they died on the day of their liberation.
*****
The dead were counted in metres.
*****
At last the final frames rattled through the sprockets and the screen went black. The lights came on. Nobody spoke. Not even the judges. They simply rose and went out. The session was adjourned.
Nobody articulated the question that was on everyone’s lips.
‘How could supposedly civilized people do that to their fellow human beings?’
No one answered because no one knew.
*****
On 13 December Thomas Dodd wheeled in a small table covered in a white sheet and asked for it to be introduced into evidence as Exhibit 253. After a brief introduction he whipped the sheet away to reveal the shrunken head of a Polish prisoner, which had been used as a paperweight by the wife of the commandant of Buchenwald concentration camp. There was an audible gasp in the court. His next exhibit was no less shocking – a piece of tattooed skin flayed from the body of a prisoner for the commandant’s wife, who was known to take perverse pleasure in boasting that she had lampshades fashioned from human skin.
*****
To everyone’s relief, this dilemma was resolved when the tribunal ruled that membership alone did not provide grounds for indictment. The organizations themselves were on trial and selected representatives would be summoned to speak on their behalf. To the consternation of the Allied authorities, hundreds of thousands of former members of the SA, the SS and the Leadership Corps responded to the radio appeals, newspaper notices and leaflets distributed all over Germany. By the end of the year 136,000 affidavits from former members of the SS and their representatives had been received and filed. It was clear that die-hard Nazis and Nazi lawyers in the internment camps planned to swamp the Allied War Crimes Commission with paperwork.
*****
‘One night we were awakened by terrifying cries. And we discovered, on the following day, from the men working in the Sonderkommando – the Gas Kommando – that on the preceding day, the gas supply having run out, they had thrown the children into the furnaces alive.’
*****
On the third day Goering concluded a total of 12 hours of testimony by quoting Winston Churchill who had stated, ‘In a struggle for life and death there is no legality’. There was no denying that the fat man was ahead on points. It would take a skilled advocate to get him on the ropes.
*****
‘And that Jews must pay for the damage caused by anti-Jewish riots with their insurance claims forfeited by the Reich?’
‘I did sign a similar law but whether it is the same…’
Jackson cut him short.
‘Did you not say about those riots, “I wish you had killed 200 Jews instead of destroying such valuables”?’
In a move calculated to intimidate, Jackson approached the witness stand and deposited the transcript of the conversation on the table, as if challenging the defendant to deny its very existence.
‘But that was said in a moment of bad temper and extreme excitement.’
‘Spontaneous sincerity, in other words,’ Jackson observed.
Goering blanched.
*****
‘The witness is excused,’
Jackson announced that he was done and then he strode back to the bench. No one had ever turned their back on Reichsmarschall Goering before.
‘I am not finished,’ Goering protested, unaccustomed to being cut short.
‘The witness is excused,’ repeated Judge Shawcross.
‘But I am not finished,’ Goering exclaimed.
The Judge raised his gavel. The session was adjourned.
*****
But Goering was warming to his subject and would not be persuaded.
‘Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.’
*****
Even the well-educated had fallen for these appeals to vanity and national pride, because they had enabled everyone to project their own hopes and fears on to the leadership. Such generalizations allowed everyone to hear whatever they wanted to hear.
*****
In the Nazi dictionary of sardonic euphemisms “final solution” of the Jewish problem was a phrase which meant extermination, “special treatment” of prisoners of war meant killing; “protective custody” meant concentration camp; “duty labour” meant slave labour; and an order to “take a firm attitude” or “take positive measures” meant to act with unrestrained savagery…
*****
After Jodl’s final plea, Justice Birkett could not refrain from commenting.
‘I am always struck by the apparently sincere and passionate idealism of so many of these defendants – but what ideals!’
*****
There was no sense of triumph among the victors, only relief that this tragic and violent era had finally come to an end.
*****
‘In no way am I responsible or guilty for the murder of the 5 million Jews or the deaths of others in the concentration camps… The fact that I was in charge of all the concentration camps in Germany from 1942 until the end is beside the point.’
OSWALD POHL
*****
Surprisingly, each defendant was well educated and knew full well what they were being ordered to do. Eight were lawyers, one was a university professor, a third was an opera singer and a fourth had been an art collector; yet they were shown to have been capable of the most brutal crimes of modern times.
*****
The lessons of Nuremberg are not invalidated, as some might argue, by the subsequent atrocities and abuses committed by the United States in Vietnam and Iraq, by the British in Northern Ireland, by the French in Algeria and by the Russians in Afghanistan and in their satellite states. Any abuses that took place in these countries are also covered by the laws that were formulated and clarified in postwar Germany and no right-thinking person would deny a captured enemy the right to humane treatment, be they freedom fighter or terrorist. The fact that these abuses continue is not the fault of those who prosecuted and presided at the Nuremberg tribunals. The torture, imprisonment without trial and ethnic cleansing that we witness on the nightly news does not expose the flaws in international law, only our ability and willingness to enforce it.
*****
The alternative to Nuremberg would have been the summary execution of the Nazi leaders. This might have satisfied the immediate need for vengeance, but the wrong message would have been sent to the world.
June 27, 2015
The Nuremberg Trails were conducted following World War II in order to hold Germany's Nazi government accountable for the war and the Holocaust without excessively punishing the German people has World War I reparations had done. The authors briefly discusses the main characters tried, the charges against them, and the verdicts. There are numerous photos. The follow-up trails of a lesser cast of charters are briefly mentioned.
May 23, 2012
Really really good book! I learned a lot about how the Nuremberg Trials were conducted to make sure that justice was done in a way that was fair to the accused. I learned a lot about the war criminals and even those charged seperately after the trial was done! I recommend the book.
October 27, 2014
Excellent
EAsy to read and understand. Gave me insight and information into the understandable. t
helped me make some sense of the trials ,whereas the movie had been the only source of information previously.
EAsy to read and understand. Gave me insight and information into the understandable. t
helped me make some sense of the trials ,whereas the movie had been the only source of information previously.
October 14, 2011
Horrifying.
December 16, 2017
The book is like reading a documentary. The build-up is slow but it gives a perspective of what antisemitism is all about. Its hard to believe the extent of lack of conscience!
July 16, 2024
One judge remarked that there were too many jews in the prosecution.
The presiding judge in Case 7 (trial of the German generals for alleged wholesale murder of hostages), Charles F. Wennerstrum, spoke out publicly:
"If I had known seven months ago what I know now, I would never have come here.. Obviously, the victor in any war is not the best judge of the war crime guilt..
The prosecution has failed to maintain objectivity aloof from vindictiveness, from personal ambitions for convictions.
The entire atmosphere here is unwholesome.Linguistics were needed.
Lawyers, clerks, interpreters and researchers were employed who became Americans ONLY IN RECENT YEARS.
The trials were to have convinced the Germans of the guilt of their leaders.
They convinced the Germans merely that their leaders lost the war to tough conquerers.
Most of the evidence (had been a) selection made by the prosecution.
THE DEFENSE HAD ACCESS ONLY TO THOSE DOCUMENTS WHICH THE PROSECUTION CONSIDERED MATERIAL TO THE CAUSE.
The Hoax of the Twentieth Century by Arthur R Butz, PP 50, 51
https://archive.org/details/holocaust...
The presiding judge in Case 7 (trial of the German generals for alleged wholesale murder of hostages), Charles F. Wennerstrum, spoke out publicly:
"If I had known seven months ago what I know now, I would never have come here.. Obviously, the victor in any war is not the best judge of the war crime guilt..
The prosecution has failed to maintain objectivity aloof from vindictiveness, from personal ambitions for convictions.
The entire atmosphere here is unwholesome.Linguistics were needed.
Lawyers, clerks, interpreters and researchers were employed who became Americans ONLY IN RECENT YEARS.
The trials were to have convinced the Germans of the guilt of their leaders.
They convinced the Germans merely that their leaders lost the war to tough conquerers.
Most of the evidence (had been a) selection made by the prosecution.
THE DEFENSE HAD ACCESS ONLY TO THOSE DOCUMENTS WHICH THE PROSECUTION CONSIDERED MATERIAL TO THE CAUSE.
The Hoax of the Twentieth Century by Arthur R Butz, PP 50, 51
https://archive.org/details/holocaust...
October 7, 2024
I really think that this trial, if it should get into an argument over the political and economic causes of this war, could do infinite harm, both in Europe...and in America.If we should have a prolonged controversy over whether Germany invaded Norway a few jumps ahead of a British invasion of Norway, or whether France in declaring war was the real aggressor, this trial can do infinite harm for those countries with the people of the US.
And the same is true of our Russian relationships.The Germans will certainly accuse all three of our European allies of adopting policies which forced them to war.
The reason I say that is that captured documents which we have always made that claim- that Germany would be forced into war...the captured documents of the Foreign Office that I have examined all come down to this claim, "We have no way out; we must fight; we are encircled; we are being strangled to death."
-Justice Jackson, Nürnberg trial record.
(Who Started WW2?)
And the same is true of our Russian relationships.The Germans will certainly accuse all three of our European allies of adopting policies which forced them to war.
The reason I say that is that captured documents which we have always made that claim- that Germany would be forced into war...the captured documents of the Foreign Office that I have examined all come down to this claim, "We have no way out; we must fight; we are encircled; we are being strangled to death."
-Justice Jackson, Nürnberg trial record.
(Who Started WW2?)
October 25, 2022
A forma de avaliação entre um livro de ficção e não ficção é complicada, até entre vários tipos de não ficção difere.
Eu gostei deste livro? Não
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Eu gostei deste livro? Não
Eu fico feliz de ter lido este livro? Sim
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 24, 2021
A great primer overview of the world famous Nuremberg Trials which started with one round of trials in 1945 and ended with 12 more (subsequent) trials through 1949. Roland divides the subject matter in nice organized themes, and the book comes with plenty of photographs. Roland starts with the philosophical idea of why a trial, the accused in the first round trial of the top Nazi henchmen, and then the major events during the trial, including the presentation of evidence, some key cross examinations, and the verdict through sentencing. The reader will leave the book with a firm grasp of what occurred, and the legal legacy in international law as to why this trial was necessary.
July 5, 2018
Read and learn from history
For many of us, “Nuremberg” conjures images of Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, and Richard Widmark in the 1961 Hollywood classic. However, the real story is so much richer than the narrow slice of history dramatized in the film. For anyone interested in this fascinating dark chapter in history—and for anyone concerned with the course of history in the making as our leaders demonize minorities, assault the media and the courts, and speak of building walls—this is a MUST read.
For many of us, “Nuremberg” conjures images of Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, and Richard Widmark in the 1961 Hollywood classic. However, the real story is so much richer than the narrow slice of history dramatized in the film. For anyone interested in this fascinating dark chapter in history—and for anyone concerned with the course of history in the making as our leaders demonize minorities, assault the media and the courts, and speak of building walls—this is a MUST read.
July 2, 2017
I am extremely impressed by the layout of this book which took an enormous topic and broke it down in an easily readable sections. As heavy as the material was, I couldn’t put this book down. I am in awe of the level of coordination and undertaking that was necessary to have multiple countries come together and decide on charges against those who ideated and orchestrated decades of unthinkable crimes against humanity.
February 20, 2018
A great detail book of The Nuremberg Trials
This book provide a detail view of what was going on in Nuremberg Trials. We can understand why Allies established these trials and how they organized them. By the end of the day, each Nazi leader received his own punishments based on what he did during WWII. No matter what they accept the sentences, they still had to pay back for millions lost lives through those years.
This book provide a detail view of what was going on in Nuremberg Trials. We can understand why Allies established these trials and how they organized them. By the end of the day, each Nazi leader received his own punishments based on what he did during WWII. No matter what they accept the sentences, they still had to pay back for millions lost lives through those years.
June 29, 2018
Very interesting from the very first beginning.
It reads very easy because it does not go deep into the confessions. They are summed up and just
enough to understand have happened during the nazi era and be shocked about the behavior of most
of the defendants.
The comments about the reaction of the different defendants are accurate and witty.
A really must read for somebody interested in the World War II and the Nazi era.
It reads very easy because it does not go deep into the confessions. They are summed up and just
enough to understand have happened during the nazi era and be shocked about the behavior of most
of the defendants.
The comments about the reaction of the different defendants are accurate and witty.
A really must read for somebody interested in the World War II and the Nazi era.
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