The Nuremberg Trials: The Nazis and Their Crimes Against Humanity

230 Pages·2012·8.66 MB·English

by  Paul Roland

THE
NUREMBERG
TRIALS
THE NAZIS AND THEIR CRIMES
AGAINST HUMANITY
PAUL ROLAND
PICTURE CREDITS
Images courtesy of, Mirco De Cet Collection/US National Archives, College Park, Washington DC,
Topfoto, Getty, Corbis, Shutterstock. For more information contact [email protected]
This edition published in 2012 by Arcturus Publishing Limited
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Copyright © 2010 Arcturus Publishing Limited
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ISBN: 978-1-84858-792-2
Contents
Introduction
Preface: The Nightmare Revealed
CHAPTER ONE: WHY A TRIAL?
CHAPTER TWO: THE ACCUSED
CHAPTER THREE: GATHERING THE EVIDENCE
CHAPTER FOUR: NAZISM ON TRIAL
CHAPTER FIVE: THE VERDICTS
CHAPTER SIX: THE FORGOTTEN TRIALS
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Introduction
The Nuremberg War Crimes Trials began on 20 November 1945 and ended on 13 April 1949. At the
first trial, twenty-four leading Nazis were indicted, but only 21 defendants made an appearance. On 9
December 1946, 12 subsequent trials of ‘lesser war criminals’ were held by the Americans. A
summary of these hearings will be found in the final chapter.
W
hy 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.
Heinrich Himmler was one of the prime architects of the Holocaust and oversaw the concentration camp
system. The first to be opened in March 1933 was Dachau, which he is here seen inspecting with other
SS officers.
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.
Adolf Hitler meets his adoring public. He dreamed of a Europe ruled solely by the Ayrian master-race.
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.
And that aspect of human nature has, I hope, been brought out in this account of
the trials. For the final reason for writing this account was to give voice to the
survivors of Nazi atrocities – those who had witnessed unimaginable horrors but
had still found the courage to continue with their lives. Women such as Clara
Greenbaum…
PREFACE
The Nightmare Revealed
‘… Here over an acre of ground lay dead and dying people. You could not see which was which…
The living lay with their heads against the corpses and around them moved the awful, ghostly
procession of emaciated, aimless people, with nothing to do and with no hope of life, unable to move
out of your way, unable to look at the terrible sights around them… Babies had been born here, tiny
wizened things that could not live… A mother, driven mad, screamed at a British sentry to give her
milk for her child, and thrust the tiny mite into his arms, then ran off, crying terribly. He opened the
bundle and found the baby had been dead for days. This day at Belsen was the most horrible of my
life.’
RICHARD DIMBLEBY, BBC CORRESPONDENT
O
n 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’.
The Germans were not the only oppressors in that man-made hell on earth.
There were also the hated Kapos, the trustees who burst into the barracks each
morning. They barked out orders and cursed and banged on the bunks with their
sticks. It would surely be only a few minutes before their regular Kapo came in
and the silence of the morning was shattered. Clara was always torn between
allowing the children to rest and waking them to save them from being startled
from their slumber. If she relented and let them sleep they would wake up crying
and she would have to comfort them while getting them ready for roll call. It was
all part of the daily ritual of the camp. She had also created her own rituals,
feeling that some form of routine would enable her to keep her sanity. These
included keeping a record of the number of days that had passed since her arrest
on suspicion of being a member of the French underground. To date she had
survived 818 days of imprisonment – two and a half years of privation and hard
labour – with no more than a bowl of watered-down soup and a slice of bread
each day to sustain a life that had no value to the Nazis other than as a unit of
labour. Snapping out of her reverie she checked the children who slept in the
bunk behind her, to see if they had survived the night. In addition to her own
children, she had adopted those whose mothers had died. At any one time there
might be up to five children crowded into that one cot. Then she would check the
two women with whom she shared her bunk. If one or both had died in the night
she would search the corpse for a scrap of food that might have been hidden
away, or an item of clothing that could keep her warm in the bitter weather. The
only chance of acquiring a new pair of socks or a scarf was to take it from a dead
body. Concentration camp inmates did not receive Red Cross parcels.
The next thing she remembered was waking up again. Incredibly she had
fallen asleep and her dreams had not been disturbed by the Kapo. Her first
thought was that she was dead. There was no other explanation for the fact that
the Kapo had not woken her. Then she was overwhelmed by fear. Being late for
assembly was a punishable offence. Inmates had been publicly hanged for less.
Turning over she saw that her children were still sleeping. Her anxiety
intensified, for they too would be punished. Sitting up she saw that many of her
fellow inmates were awake. Some were even standing in the aisle between the
bunks. They were speaking to each other in whispers. What was going on? The
only explanation that made any sense was that the Kapos had deliberately let
them sleep so they would have an excuse to punish them all.
One of the mass graves at Belsen concentration camp, which housed political prisoners and Russian