FACTS ABOUT THE NUREMBERG TRIALS
G'day folks,
On October 1, 1946, an international tribunal in Nuremberg,
Germany, sentenced 12 high-ranking Nazis to death for war crimes. Here are some
interesting facts.
The Bavarian city that spawned the rise of the Third Reich
by hosting massive Nazi Party propaganda rallies in the 1920s and 1930s was
deemed by the victorious Allies to be a fitting place to stage its symbolic
death. Although World War II had left much of the city in rubble, the Palace of
Justice—which included a sizable prison capable of holding 1,200
detainees—remained largely undamaged and was chosen to host the trials once
German prisoners completed the work of enlarging its courtroom.
The Nuremberg Trials marked a milestone in the
establishment of international law. While there had been prior prosecutions of
war crimes in history, such as that of Confederate army officer Henry Wirz,
those had been conducted according to the laws of a single country. Until the
Nuremberg Trials, there had been no precedent for an international trial of war
criminals. Rather than use a single judge and jury, the trial of high-ranking
Nazi leaders was conducted by a panel of four judges. The United States, Soviet
Union, France and Great Britain each supplied a main judge and an alternate,
and Britain’s Lord Justice Geoffrey Lawrence presided. The Nuremberg Trials
served as a precedent for the subsequent prosecution of war crimes in Japan and
led to the establishment of the United Nations Genocide Convention and
Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 as well as the Geneva Convention
on the Laws and Customs of War in 1949.
The London Charter of the International Military Tribunal,
which set the laws and procedures for the conduct of the Nuremberg Trials,
defined three categories of crimes: crimes against the peace, war crimes and,
for the first time, crimes against humanity, which included murder, enslavement
or deportation of civilians or persecution on political, religious or racial
grounds.
With the defendants, judges and lawyers speaking a mix of
German, French, English and Russian, a language barrier threatened to bog down
the proceedings. However, the development of a new instantaneous translation
system by IBM allowed every trial participant to listen via headsets to
real-time translations of the proceedings. Yellow lights at microphones warned
speakers to slow down for the benefit of the translators, while red lights
signaled the need to stop and repeat statements. The simultaneous translation
system allowed the trial to be conducted four times faster than if consecutive
translation was used.
President Harry Truman asked Robert Jackson, an associate
justice of the Supreme Court, to serve as the chief American prosecutor at the
international tribunal. Jackson accepted the offer but was adamant that the
proceedings not be a show trial. “If we want to shoot Germans as a matter of
policy, let it be done as such, but don’t hide the deed behind a court,” he
wrote. Jackson’s colleague, Chief Justice Harlan Stone, did not think highly of
the proceedings. “Jackson is away conducting his high-grade lynching party in Nuremberg,”
he wrote privately to a friend in 1945. “I don’t mind what he does to the
Nazis, but I hate to see the pretense that he is running a court and proceeding
according to common law. This is a little too sanctimonious a fraud to meet my
old-fashioned ideas.”
Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-born lawyer who served as an
advisor to Jackson, is credited with coining the term “genocide” in 1944 to
describe the Nazis’ planned extermination of Jews. The word is an amalgam of
“genos,” the Greek word for “tribe” or “race,” and “-cide,” Latin for
“killings.” Lemkin, who lost nearly 50 relatives in the Holocaust, defined
genocide as “a coordinated plan of different actions aimed at the destruction
of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of
annihilating the groups themselves.” The Nuremberg Trials marked the first-ever
prosecutions for genocide.
Of the 22 high-ranking Nazis who stood trial for war crimes
before the international tribunal, 12 were sentenced to death by hanging,
including Martin Bormann, the personal secretary to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler
who is now believed to have committed suicide in May 1945, in absentia. Seven
others, including Hitler’s former deputy Rudolf Hess, received prison sentences
ranging from 10 years to life, but three were acquitted.
The highest-ranking Nazi to survive the war, Gestapo
founder and Luftwaffe commander-in-chief Herman Goering took his own life on
the night of October 15, 1946, just hours before his scheduled execution.
Dressed in silk pajamas, the man instrumental in ordering the Holocaust cheated
the noose by ingesting a small glass capsule of potassium cyanide that he had
smuggled into prison. In a suicide note to his wife, Hitler’s heir apparent
wrote that he would be willing to die by firing squad but not in such an
undignified manner as hanging. “I have decided to take my own life, lest I be
executed in so terrible a fashion by my enemies,” Goering wrote.
After Goering’s suicide, the Allies immediately ordered the
remaining 10 condemned men to be handcuffed to guards and dispatched clergymen
to administer last rites. In the early morning hours of October 16, 1946, the
Nazi war criminals were hanged one-by-one from a scaffolding erected in a
prison gymnasium. “I hope that this execution will be the last act of the
tragedy of the Second World War,” said Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the last of the 10
men to be hanged, as he was led to the gallows. The executions, which took
nearly two hours to complete, were administered by the U.S. Army’s official
hangman, Master Sergeant John C. Woods. “I wasn’t nervous,” the chief
executioner, who had overseen nearly 350 hangings in a 15-year career, told
Time magazine. “A fellow can’t afford to have nerves in this business.” The
magazine reported, however, that witnesses said “the executions had been
cruelly bungled” with the ropes too short and the trap doors too small,
resulting in deaths of slow strangulation. The U.S. Army denied the report.
While the trial of the 22 high-ranking Nazi leaders before
the international tribunal was the most notable of the judicial proceedings
held at Nuremberg, 12 additional trials occurred there between 1946 and 1949.
Among the nearly 200 other Nazis tried at Nuremberg were doctors accused of
conducting medical experiments on prisoners of war, lawyers and judges charged
with implementing the Nazis’ “racial purity” program through eugenic and racial
laws, military officers accused of atrocities against prisoners of war and
concentration camp inmates and industrialists who profited from slave labor and
plundered occupied countries. Growing differences among the Allies as the Cold
War began caused the subsequent trials to be conducted before U.S. military
tribunals instead of once again before a panel of international judges.
Clancy's comment: I still think about those who escaped and led a so-called 'normal life' after being involved in massive atrocities. We can only hope that Karma caught up with them.
I'm ...
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