Janice Anderson - War Crimes and Atrocities

As World War II came to a close, the United States President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, raised the question of how to bring the leaders of the Third Reich to justice as war criminals. The Allies had discovered that atrocities in the concentration camps went beyond the scale of what anyone had imagined, and that the Nazis had been involved in the full-scale genocide of the Jewish people, not only gassing them to death in great numbers but torturing and brutalizing them as well. In addition, people with mental and physical disabilities, homosexuals, communists, gypsies, twins and others, had been abused, as Nazi doctors conducted horrific experiments on them.

Roosevelt felt that the captured Nazi leaders should be tried in a court of law, but there was some disagreement about this. Churchill favoured immediate execution of the Nazi leaders, and Stalin wanted to execute thousands of officers. According to some sources, Roosevelt initially thought that Stalin was joking about this, but soon realized his mistake. The US Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau Jr, then came up with a plan to punish the Germans with a series of crushing economic and other sanctions. However, when Roosevelt died in April 1945, his successor Harry S. Truman rejected the Morgenthau Plan, realizing that it would create problems for the future (as had the previous agreement, The Treaty of Versailles, at the end of World War I), and he went on to devise a plan for a judicial war crimes review with the head of his War Department, Henry L. Stimson.

In the meantime, several leading Nazi figures had committed suicide once it became clear that their cause was lost. Hitler, as is well known, shot himself in his Berlin bunker when news of the Allied victory reached him, shortly after marrying his mistress Eva Braun, who also killed herself. Heinrich Himmler, the head of the notorious SS and Gestapo, which had been responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews and others, also took his own life, poisoning himself with cyanide when he was captured. Joseph Goebbels, who became chancellor for one day after Hitler’s death, also committed suicide, along with his wife, Magda, who had earlier drugged and poisoned their six children. Martin Bormann, Hitler’s private secretary, escaped; some believe that he died while doing so, others that he went on the run for many years after the war.

Eventually, it was agreed that the war criminal trials should take place in the German city of Nuremberg, at the Palace of Justice. The first of the trials, in which 24 prominent members of the Nazi administration were charged, took place from 20 November, 1945 to 1 October, 1946, and became the most famous, attracting worldwide attention.

During the trial, evidence of the extreme brutality and sadism of the Nazi regime came to light as the prosecution presented their case. In one instance, prosecutors produced a tattooed piece of human skin, which had been tanned for use as a lampshade. Apparently, the wife of the Commandant of Buchenwald, Isle Koch, liked to have the skin of concentration-camp victims made into decorative household objects for her home. She even used the shrunken head of one victim as a paperweight. In another instance, the prosecution read out descriptions of experiments performed by Nazi doctors on camp inmates. For example, Dr Sigmund Rasher forced victims at Dachau to strip naked before being thrown into tanks of iced water, then threw them into hot water to see how rapidly they warmed up. All the while, the victims had thermometers thrust into their rectums. Dr Rasher’s notes also reported how, in most cases, the victims went into convulsions and died during the experiments.

Inmates who had survived the concentration camps also gave their testimony. In one case, a Frenchwoman, Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, described her ordeal at Auschwitz. According to her, Nazi soldiers had gone through the crowds of inmates, sizing up which were to be gassed and which could be forced to perform slave labour on the basis of their physical condition. In another instance, she described how the Nazi soldiers ran out of gas in the chambers, so begun to hurl live children into the furnaces instead. In total, 33 witnesses and hundreds of exhibits were produced, confirming that the Nazi regime had perpetrated some of the worst crimes in human history, and on a scale much larger than ever before.

One of the most interesting aspects of the trial was the evidence of psychiatrists, such as Leon Goldensohn, who was charged with caring for the mental health of the defendants during the trial and detailed the personality traits of those involved. (His notes describing his conversations with the former Nazi officers were later published as The Nuremberg Interviews .) In most cases, the defendants alleged that they knew nothing about the concentration camps and what had been going on in them, although this was hard to believe. For example, Joachim von Ribbentrop alleged that he knew nothing of the concentration camps, even though several of them were located near his homes. In other cases, they reported what they had done without seeming to understand that it was wrong. For instance, Colonel Rudolf Hess, speaking as a defence witness for SS head Ernst Kaltenbrunner, described how in an average day at the concentration camp, 10,000 inmates could be gassed to death. His matter-of-fact tone of voice and demeanour shocked many people in the courtroom to the core.

In some cases, those accused admitted their guilt and expressed repentance for their heinous crimes. For example, Albert Speer, who had been Minister of Armaments, expressed his regret for participating in the genocide, calling the Nazi regime a disaster, and saying, ‘A thousand years will pass and still Germany’s guilt will not have been erased.’ However, there were others, such as Hermann Goering, who refused to accept that they had committed crimes and continued to maintain that what they had done was right. Shortly before his conviction, Goering made a statement saying that it had been his pleasure to work under Hitler, ‘the greatest son which my people produced in a thousand-year history’.

Among those convicted was Martin Bormann, who was tried in his absence and sentenced to death. Hermann Goring, the Head of the Luftwaffe and several sections of the SS, also received the death sentence, but he committed suicide the night before he was due to be executed. Others sentenced to death were: Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Nazi Minister of Foreign Affairs; Wilhelm Frick, the Minister of the Interior and architect of Nazi race laws; Hans Frank, Head of the Poland under its occupation; Wilhelm Keitel, head of the Wehrmacht; Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the highest-ranking SS officer to survive the war; and Julius Streicher, editor of the weekly newspaper, Der Sturmer, which had incited hatred and murder of the Jews.

Among those who received a life sentence was Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s former deputy. Hess later died in Spandau Prison at the age of 93, apparently having committed suicide. (However, some believe he was murdered, questioning the motivation and ability of a 93-year-old to hang by an electrical extension cord from the ceiling.) Since his death, Hess has become a cult figure in Neo-Nazi circles and is regarded with reverence by many contemporary anti-Semites.

Trials of former Nazi officials continued in Nuremberg for the next two years, generating an enormous amount of discussion and controversy. The aim of the trials, besides bringing the culprits to justice, was to ensure that mass genocide of the kind that took place in the Third Reich would never happen again – but sadly, that did not turn out to be the case. However, the Nuremberg trials did bring the hideous crimes of the Nazi war leaders to light, ensuring that they could never become war heroes or martyrs in their country and helped to establish racial tolerance and democracy in modern-day Germany.