Eighty years ago in Nuremberg, top Nazis faced justice
The hangman, Army Sgt. John C. Woods, waxed and tested his ropes. He checked the wooden gallows for stability. He yanked the lever on the trap door to see if it worked properly. It creaked. So he added a little oil.
On Oct. 16, 1946, in Nuremberg, Germany, Woods was about to play an important role in one of the closing scenes of the tragedy of World War II. Walking up the steps of his scaffold would be 10 men who played key roles in Nazi Germany’s vast killing machine.
Woods, 43, who had already hanged 300 men in his career, wanted everything to go as planned, according to an account in Joseph E. Persico’s book “Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial.”
Almost a year earlier, on Nov. 20, 1945—80 years ago Thursday—more than 20 top Nazis who had survived the collapse of Adolf Hitler’s Germany were put on trial in the medieval but now bombed-out town of Nuremberg.
Despite calls for execution, victorious allied leaders decided instead to accord them a legal proceeding in which they might defend themselves against accusations of genocide, aggression, torture, depravity and cultural looting.
It was to be “the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world,” U.S. Chief Prosecutor Robert H. Jackson said as the proceedings began.
“The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored,” he said.
It would be a trial that would establish precedents for the future prosecution of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
And it would reveal in detail the depth of the Nazi crimes.
Some of the worst Nazis had already escaped justice.
Hitler had killed himself in his Berlin bunker earlier in 1945. Joseph Goebbels, his minister of propaganda, had, along with his wife, killed themselves and their six children. Heinrich Himmler, who oversaw the Nazi project to exterminate Europe’s Jews, killed himself after his capture in 1945.
But other top Nazis, including Hermann Göring, the former head of the German air force and the highest-ranking Nazi still alive; Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and armaments minister; and Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister, were in custody.
(Göring’s relationship with an American psychiatrist during his incarceration is the subject of a new movie, “Nuremberg.”)
The idea of a trial instead of execution stemmed from a wish, especially among the Americans, to take a moral high road, said Patricia Heberer Rice, senior historian at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. But there were practical reasons as well.
“One of the things probably the U.S. officials had on their minds was the treatment of Germany after World War I,” she said in a telephone interview Monday.
The harsh terms of that postwar settlement crippled the German economy and helped fuel the bitter sense of grievance that gave rise to Nazis, she said. Especially with the Cold War brewing between West and East, the Americans did not want to repeat that mistake.
Nazi Germany started the war in Europe in 1939. Germany attacked, among others, Poland, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Norway, the Soviet Union and Great Britain, and declared war on the United States.
Before the war ended in May 1945, the Nazis had killed millions of people in concentration camps and by other methods. They worked slave laborers to death. They stole money, art, goods, businesses and homes, conducted deadly medical experiments on captives, and took gold fillings from the teeth of those they killed.
Much of this they meticulously documented in print, photos and film for posterity, according to Persico’s 1994 book.
One defendant, Hans Frank, who was the brutal Nazi overseer in occupied Poland, kept a 42-volume, 11,000-page diary.
Hitler’s interpreter turned over 12 volumes of notes.
Forty-seven crates containing the files of Nazi philosopher and defendant Alfred Rosenberg, who directed cultural looting in Europe, were found in the basement of a castle.
Hitler’s photographer Heinrich Hoffmann steered the allies to a huge cache of photos.
The allies picked Nuremberg, in southern Germany, as the location of for the trial because it was the spiritual home of the Nazis, Persico wrote.
It was in Nuremberg that the Nazis held their annual torchlight pageants, where Hitler ranted before massive crowds, and where the Nazis’ notorious antisemitic Nuremberg laws were announced.
Although Nuremberg was in ruins —“a vast heap of rubble” one reporter called it—American officials found that the city’s old Palace of Justice was salvageable. The palace also had a large prison complex where defendants could be held.
The Americans assembled hundreds of workers who used 5,000 gallons of paint, 250,000 bricks and 100,000 feet of lumber to create the courtroom where the trial would be held, Persico wrote.
On Oct. 6, one of the Nazis, Leonardo Conti, hanged himself in his cell. Conti, a top medical officer who helped run the “T-4” project to kill people with disabilities, was being held for a subsequent trial.
Three weeks later, defendant Robert Ley, a powerful Nazi labor leader who had once written, “The war will end with the extermination of the Jewish race,” died by suicide in his cell. He had hanged himself with a piece of towel as he sat on the toilet.
At 10 a.m. on Nov. 20, the trial opened in Room 600 before a throng of VIPs, judges, lawyers and reporters. The 21 defendants sat together on two rows of benches, like men in church pews.
The trial would go on for 315 days. The eight judges, from the U.S., Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union, heard testimony documenting the Nazis’ more than 10-year reign of horror across Europe.
They heard a prosecutor read German construction supervisor Hermann Graebe’s eyewitness account of the slaughter of Jews in the Ukrainian city of Dubno.
They heard the affidavit of Rudolf Höss, commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, who described his use of the pesticide Zyklon B to kill people more efficiently.
They saw films of the dead—shot, burned, stacked and strewn about the grounds of concentration camps.
The defendants generally claimed that they were unaware or not responsible, or were only following orders, or did not personally kill anyone. Some expressed remorse. Defendant Frank testified: “A thousand years will pass and still Germany’s guilt will not have been erased.”
The verdicts were read on Oct. 1, 1946. Eleven men, including Goring, Frank, Rosenberg and von Ribbentrop, were found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging. Seven, including Speer, got long prison sentences. Three were acquitted.
The hangings were scheduled for the early morning of Oct. 16 in the prison gymnasium, where Sgt. Woods would be waiting.
But at 10:44 the evening before, there was a commotion at Goring’s cell. All these weeks, he had managed to keep hidden, at one point in his rectum, a glass ampoule of cyanide, which he had just crushed in his mouth. He was dead in seconds.
“We will be martyrs,” he had told a fellow inmate. “Even if it takes 50 years the German people will recognize us as heroes. They’ll put our bones in marble caskets.”
After the executions, the remains of Goring and the others were cremated and taken to an Army mortuary in a suburb of Munich, where they were dumped without ceremony in the tiny Wenzbach River.
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