10
The American people not only sympathize with all victims of Nazi crimes but will hold the perpetrators of these crimes to strict accountability in a day of reckoning which will surely come.—Franklin D. Roosevelt1
If Hitler falls into our hands we shall certainly put him to death.—Winston Churchill2
Prosecutors at the postwar Nuremberg trials were portrayed in the media as heroes of the courtroom, of the tribunal that would bring justice to some of the worst criminals in the history of civilized nations. The prosecutors were able to do what Nakam and Mossad were not able to do. They sought justice not only on behalf of the boxers who had to fight for their lives but for all inmates who had endured torturous conditions in the Nazi-run death camps. The boxers who survived praised the prosecutors and judges for so determinedly delivering judicial punishment to those who had committed horrendous crimes.
While there were prosecutors from four Allied countries who participated in the first major Nuremberg trial, it was the American prosecutors who brought a level of judicial dispassion to their mission. They were the most dispassionate (as chief prosecutor Robert Jackson stated in his opening comments) because the land of the United States had not come under direct attack by the Nazis. Another reason for focusing on American prosecutors in this chapter is that the American government was the only Allied government to conduct a total of twelve Nuremberg trials against the Nazis.
Furthermore, the original plan, “Trial of European War Criminals,” was drafted by a U.S. cabinet official, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and the staff of his War Department. Then following the death of President Roosevelt, the U.S. government negotiated with its allies to work out the mechanics and the location of the trial, which the Allies agreed should be held in Nuremberg in the Palace of Justice, beginning on November 20, 1945. At what was formally known as the International Military Tribunal, the prosecutors entered indictments against twenty-four top-ranking Nazi war criminals and several Nazi organizations: the Reich Cabinet, the SS, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the Gestapo, the Sturmabteilung (SA), and the Nazi High Command. Included in the indictments were charges against the Nazis for “the extermination of racial and national groups, against the civilian populations of certain occupied territories to destroy particular races and classes of people and national, racial, or religious groups, particularly Jews, Poles, and Gypsies and others.”
Robert H. Jackson, chief American counsel, opened the trial with an introduction that has been acclaimed in journals of jurisprudence for its clarity and high moral tone, particularly as related to crimes against humanity, such as genocide. Here are several important excerpts from his opening comments.
What makes this inquest significant is that these prisoners represent sinister influences that will lurk in the world long after their bodies have returned to dust. We will show them to be living symbols of racial hatreds, of terrorism and violence, and of the arrogance and cruelty of power. They are symbols of fierce nationalisms and of militarism, of intrigue and war-making which have embroiled Europe generation after generation, crushing its manhood, destroying its homes, and impoverishing its life. They have so identified themselves with the philosophies they conceived and with the forces they directed that any tenderness to them is a victory and an encouragement to all the evils which are attached to their names. Civilization can afford no compromise with the social forces which would gain renewed strength if we deal ambiguously or indecisively with the men in whom those forces now precariously survive.
These men created in Germany, under the “Führerprinzip,” a National Socialist despotism equaled only by the dynasties of the ancient East. They took from the German people all those dignities and freedoms that we hold natural and inalienable rights in every human being. The people were compensated by inflaming and gratifying hatreds towards those who were marked as “scapegoats.” Against their opponents, including Jews, Catholics, and free labor, the Nazis directed such a campaign of arrogance, brutality, and annihilation as the world has not witnessed since the pre-Christian ages. They excited the German ambition to be a “master race,” which of course implies serfdom for others. They led their people on a mad gamble for domination. They diverted social energies and resources to the creation of what they thought to be an invincible war machine. They overran their neighbors. To sustain the “master race” in its war-making, they enslaved millions of human beings and brought them into Germany, where these hapless creatures now wander as “displaced persons.” At length bestiality and bad faith reached such excess that they aroused the sleeping strength of imperiled Civilization. Its united efforts have ground the German war machine to fragments. But the struggle has left Europe a liberated yet prostrate land where a demoralized society struggles to survive. These are the fruits of the sinister forces that sit with these defendants in the prisoners’ dock.
In general, our case will disclose these defendants all uniting at some time with the Nazi Party in a plan which they well knew could be accomplished only by an outbreak of war in Europe. Their seizure of the German State, their subjugation of the German people, their terrorism and extermination of dissident elements, their planning and waging of war, their calculated and planned ruthlessness in the conduct of warfare, their deliberate and planned criminality toward conquered peoples—all these are ends for which they acted in concert; and all these are phases of the conspiracy, a conspiracy which reached one goal only to set out for another and more ambitious one.
Among the nations which unite in accusing these defendants the United States is perhaps in a position to be the most dispassionate, for, having sustained the least injury, it is perhaps the least animated by vengeance. Our American cities have not been bombed by day and by night, by humans, and by robots. It is not our temples that had been laid in ruins. Our countrymen have not had their homes destroyed over their heads. The menace of Nazi aggression, except to those in actual service, has seemed less personal and immediate to us than to European peoples. But while the United States is not first in rancor, it is not second in determination that the forces of law and order be made equal to the task of dealing with such international lawlessness as I have recited here.3
His summation at the end of the trial is equally admired for its judicial wisdom. Here are several excerpts.
The dominant fact which stands out from all the thousands of pages of the record of this Trial is that the central crime of the whole group of Nazi crimes the attack on the peace of the world was clearly and deliberately planned. The beginning of these wars of aggression was not an unprepared and spontaneous springing to arms by a population excited by some current indignation. A week before the invasion of Poland Hitler told his military commanders: “I shall give a propagandist cause for starting war never mind whether it be plausible or not. The victor shall not be asked later on whether we told the truth or not. In starting and making a war, it is not the right that matters, but victory.
Nor were the war crimes and the crimes against humanity unplanned, isolated, or spontaneous offenses. Aside from our undeniable evidence of their plotting, it is sufficient to ask whether 6 million people could be separated from the population of several nations on the basis of their blood and birth, could be destroyed and their bodies disposed of, except that the operation fitted into the general scheme of government. Could the enslavement of 5 millions of laborers, their impressment into service, their transportation to Germany, their allocation to work where they would be most useful, their maintenance, if slow starvation can be called maintenance, and their guarding have been accomplished if it did not fit into the common plan? Could hundreds of concentration camps located throughout Germany, built to accommodate hundreds of thousands of victims, and each requiring labor and materials for construction, manpower to operate and supervise, and close gearing into the economy could such efforts have been expended under German autocracy if they had not suited the plan?
What these men have overlooked is that Adolf Hitler’s acts are their acts. It was these men among millions of others, and it was these men leading millions of others, who built up Adolf Hitler and vested in his psychopathic personality not only innumerable lesser decisions but the supreme issue of war or peace. They intoxicated him with power and adulation. They fed his hates and aroused his fears. They put a loaded gun in his eager hands. It was left to Hitler to pull the trigger, and when he did they all at that time approved. His guilt stands admitted, by some defendants reluctantly, by some vindictively. But his guilt is the guilt of the whole dock, and of every man in it.
Hitler ordered everyone else to fight to the last and then retreated into death by his own hand. But he left life as he lived it, a deceiver; he left the official report that he had died in battle. This was the man whom these defendants exalted to a Führer. It was they who conspired to get him absolute authority over all of Germany. And in the end he and the system they created for him brought the ruin of them all.4
Robert H. Jackson, for his role at the Nuremberg trials, has gone down in history as a judicial and prosecutorial hero who expatiated in clear language the many crimes the Nazis had committed and why they should be held accountable in a court of law. Jackson, who was an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, was unlike his judicial colleagues in that he learned the law by what’s known as “reading the law”: while working for a lawyer (just as Abraham Lincoln had). Unlike Lincoln, however, Jackson managed to attend law school for an abbreviated time. Prior to his decision to become a lawyer, he wanted to be a writer and practiced daily for that craft. The combination of law and writerly skills may be one reason he is well known for two aphorisms: “Any lawyer worth his salt will tell the suspect, in no uncertain terms, to make no statement to the police under any circumstances,” and about the Supreme Court, “We are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final.” Prior to serving on the Supreme Court, he served in the administration of President Roosevelt as solicitor general, then as attorney general. He was nominated to and confirmed as an associate justice of the Supreme Court in 1941 and served until 1954. In 1945, President Truman appointed him chief American counsel at the first Nuremberg Trial and so Jackson took a leave of absence from his position on the court.
Jackson invited Thomas J. Dodd, an outstanding young attorney, to join his prosecutorial team. Thinking that he would serve on the team for only a few months, Dodd accepted the offer but wound up serving as a prosecutor for fifteen grueling months. Initially Jackson named Dodd a senior member of the trial board but then so impressed was Jackson by Dodd’s excellent legal skills that when he had to return to Washington, he named Dodd acting chief of counsel. Though Jackson is highly regarded, Dodd is considered to have been much more skillful in his cross examinations of several of the war criminals. His efforts resulted in numerous convictions. After the trial, he was awarded the Medal of Freedom and the Certificate of Merit by President Truman.
That Dodd would achieve such renown did not seem predestined, for early in his career as an FBI agent, he bungled a planned capture of John Dillinger. However, he repaired his reputation following a successful prosecution of the Ku Klux Klan and then another against five Axis spies who had attempted to steal classified army and navy information.
The brilliance of his legal skills at cross examination became apparent not only to the judiciary, the other prosecutors, and defense counsels, but also—much to their regret—to the criminals who were sentenced to death or long prison terms after Dodd devastatingly portrayed them as moral monsters who had committed some of the most heinous crimes in the history of civilized nations.
Those sentenced to death included Wilhelm Keitel, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Fritz Sauckel, Wilhelm Frick, Alfred Jodl, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Julius Streicher, and Arthur Seyss-Inquart. Who were these men?
Upon viewing the prisoners, all members of the Nazi hierarchy, slumped and tired in defeat, William Shirer wrote,
In the dock before the International Military Tribunal they looked different. There had been quite a metamorphosis. Attired in rather shabby clothes, slumped in their seats, fidgeting nervously, they no longer resembled the arrogant leaders of old. They seemed to be a drab assortment of mediocrities. It seemed difficult to grasp that such men, when last you had seen such men, had wielded such monstrous power, that such as they could conquer a great nation and most of Europe.5
The arraignment of men who created and executed acts of psychopathic criminality formed a contingent of second-rate thugs, power-mad gangsters, amoral politicians, and homicidal maniacs.
Wilhelm Keitel was a field marshal who served as chief of the Armed Forces High Command, the highest-ranking officer of the Nazi Germany armed forces. He was regarded as a loyal martinet to Hitler. He was a thoughtless sycophant about whom Hitler commented, “You know he has the brains of a movie usher … (but he was made the highest ranking officer in the army) … because the man’s as loyal as a dog.” Hermann Goring added that Keitel had “a sergeant’s mind inside a field marshal’s body” and had been promoted for his loyalty to Hitler. Behind his back, Keitel was known by military officers as “Lakeitel,” a pun composed from the German word for “lackey” and his surname.6
At Nuremberg he was indicted for conspiracy to commit crimes against peace; planning, initiating, and waging wars of aggression; war crimes; and crimes against humanity. He was convicted on evidence Dodd showed the court that consisted of Keitel’s signature on dozens of orders and memos that demanded that captured soldiers and political prisoners be killed. When given an opportunity to speak, he said he had only been following orders based upon his loyalty to Hitler. Yet he admitted that what he had done was illegal. Upon being sentenced, Keitel asked if his death sentence could be carried out by firing squad; his request was denied because the court said he had not acted as a military man but as a criminal. He went to the gallows on October 16, 1946. The trap doorway, through which he shot downward, was small, and as he descended his head swung back and forth like a silent bell, banging against the sides of the drop. Blood dripped over him as his body dangled. He fell a short distance (known as a short drop), as did the other defendants sentenced to death. As a result, his neck was not broken; instead, the rope—like a boa constrictor’s muscles, slowly tightened and strangled the life out of him for twenty-four minutes.
Alfred Rosenberg was the head of the NSDAP Office of Foreign Affairs during the twelve-year rule of the Third Reich and was head of his own organization, known as the Rosenberg Bureau. The bureau issued proclamations on Nazi cultural policies and surveilled those whom it considered enemies of the state. Once war broke out, Rosenberg was put in charge of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories. Following Germany’s surrender, Rosenberg was arrested and soon put on trial at Nuremberg. There he was convicted of crimes against peace; planning, initiating, and waging wars of aggression; war crimes; and crimes against humanity. Additionally, he was named a principal planner of the invasions of the Soviet Union and Norway. He was further accused of plundering commodities from occupied countries. At trial it was noted that he had been a key theorist of Nazi ideology that included the necessity for exterminating Jews in Germany and all of Europe and the need for Lebensraum. He had also written that the Nazis should reject all aspects of Christianity; indeed, he hated Christianity almost as much as he hated Jews.
In a speech he said,
Some six million Jews still live in the East, and this question can only be solved by a biological extermination of the whole of Jewry in Europe. The Jewish Question will only be solved for Germany when the last Jew has left German territory, and for Europe when not a single Jew stands on the European continent as far as the Urals … And to this end it is necessary to force them beyond the Urals or otherwise bring about their eradication.7
While on trial, he wrote a self-justifying memoir that was published after his execution by hanging. As with all the executed defendants, his corpse was cremated in Munich and his ashes were carried by a cold October wind, scattering his remains in the Isar River.
Hans Frank, a lawyer, did not use his position as Hitler’s legal advisor to benefit anyone but himself and his boss. In fact, he got Hitler to appoint him head of the government in Poland during the war. Prior to that, in June 1933, Hitler named him Reich leader of the Nazi Party, then promoted him to be a member of the cabinet with the title Reich Minister. As a war criminal, he came into his own as governor of Poland, instituting a reign of terror against the civilian population, particularly against the Jews, whom he ordered to be liquidated. He took particular pleasure in overseeing four extermination camps where thousands of Jews were daily killed.
On December 16, 1941, in a speech to the officers under his command, he stated, “Gentlemen, I must ask you to rid yourself of all feelings of pity. We must annihilate the Jews wherever we find them and whenever it is possible.”8
Frank was the Samuel Pepys of the Third Reich. His diary was forty-three volumes long, and he proudly turned it over to the Americans following his capture on May 4, 1945. In addition to a record of his two failed suicide attempts, the diaries are a forthright record of all of his crimes. Prosecutors, including Dodd, were able to use Frank’s own words to condemn him. It may be the longest written confession in judicial history. Hearing the inevitable sentence of death pronounced by the court, Frank admitted some of his crimes then expressed remorse. To amplify his remorse, he let it be known that during the trial he had converted to Roman Catholicism. Journalist Joseph Kingsbury-Smith wrote of Frank’s execution,
Hans Frank was next in the parade of death. He was the only one of the condemned to enter the chamber with a smile on his countenance. And, although nervous and swallowing frequently, this man, who was converted to Roman Catholicism after his arrest, gave the appearance of being relieved at the prospect of atoning for his evil deeds. He answered to his name quietly and when asked for any last statement, he replied “I am thankful for the kind treatment during my captivity and I ask God to accept me with mercy.”9
On the recommendation of the notorious Martin Bormann (Hitler’s private secretary), Ernst “Fritz” Sauckel worked directly under the even more notorious Hermann Göring as general plenipotentiary for labor deployment—a euphemistic title for being in charge of slave labor. He was charged with forcibly bringing more than 4.5 million Polish and Russian workers to Germany. Concentration camp workers were regularly beaten for not working fast enough or for not achieving their production quotas. Their lives were made even more miserable by the starvation diets that barely kept them alive. Many did not survive. Sauckel made his point in a letter to Alfred Rosenberg: “All the men [prisoners of war and foreign civilian workers] must be fed, sheltered, and treated in such a way as to exploit them to the highest possible extent at the lowest conceivable degree of expenditure.”10
He, like Frank, was condemned by his own words, found guilty and hanged like the others. Just before the hangman’s noose was placed around his neck, he stated, “I die an innocent man, my sentence is unjust. God protect Germany. May it live and one day become great again. God protect my family.”
Wilhelm Frick began his rise in the Nazi Party as early as 1923 when he participated in Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch. By 1933, Hitler had appointed him Reich Minister for the Interior then promoted him again to the position of Reichsleiter, the second-highest political rank in the Nazi Party. His upward rise continued, and in May 1934 he was appointed Prussian Minister of the Interior (head of the police) under Minister-President Hermann Göring. By 1935 he also had near-total control over the local government.
But his crimes against humanity were based on his drafting numerous laws against Jews (e.g., Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service) and the notorious Nuremberg Laws. The laws he originated and implemented resulted in the forced sterilization of those with mental and physical disabilities and progressed to massive acts of euthanasia. At trial, he was one of only two defendants who refused to testify in his own defense. The other was Rudolf Hess. Frick was convicted not only of planning, initiating, and waging wars of aggression and committing war crimes and crimes against humanity but also for formulating the Enabling Act and the Nuremberg Laws. Those laws had been used to deport millions of people to their deaths in the concentration camps. And the very existence of those camps was attributed to Frick. Of Frick’s execution, Kingsbury-Smith wrote,
The sixth man to leave his prison cell and walk with handcuffed wrists to the death house was 69-year-old Wilhelm Frick. He entered the execution chamber at 2.05 am, six minutes after Rosenberg had been pronounced dead. He seemed the least steady of any so far and stumbled on the thirteenth step of the gallows. His only words were, “Long live eternal Germany,”11 before he was hooded and dropped through the trap.
Alfred Jodl, a high-ranking general in the Wehrmacht, was chief of staff during the invasions of Denmark and Norway. His own death sentence grew out of his signing the Commissar Order of June 6, 1941, which stated that all Soviet commissars were to be shot. Another order would eventually add weight to Jodl being convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity. It was the Commando Order of October 28, 1942, which stated that all Allied commandos, including those in uniforms as well as those in civilian clothes, were to be shot without trial if caught behind German lines.
Jodl saw himself as a strict military man who was above lowering himself to the status of a mere criminal. It was as a military officer and representative of the German high command that he signed Germany’s unconditional instrument of surrender on May 7, 1945. As a top general, he was shocked that he was condemned with those who ran the extermination camps. His Commando and Commissar Orders would confirm his guilt. When presented with evidence of the shootings of Soviet prisoners of war, Jodl stated that the prisoners shot were “not those that could not, but those that did not want to walk”12—in other words, recalcitrant prisoners who had the gall to defy SS orders to march. Jodl’s callousness was reflected back to him in the stern expressions of the judges. As if the two orders were not sufficient cause for him to be found guilty, he was presented with evidence of his signature on an order to transfer Danish citizens, including Jews, to concentration camps. Like many unremorseful Nazis who deemed themselves patriots of the Third Reich, he shouted from the gallows, “I salute you, my eternal Germany.”13
As a high-ranking SS official, Ernst Kaltenbrunner was a hydra-headed criminal who had been in charge of three vastly powerful organizations: the Gestapo (the secret state police), Kripo (the criminal police), and SD (the security service). He oversaw them from January 1943 until Germany’s surrender in 1945. He was as vociferous and fanatical an anti-Semite as his childhood pal, Adolf Eichmann, and as loyal to Hitler as one of the Führer’s German shepherds. He was feared by many, including Himmler, who was intimidated by Kaltenbrunner’s fiery temper and his imposing appearance: 6'4" and a face etched with numerous fencing scars. He was the highest-ranking SS member on trial at Nuremberg.
According to Leni Yahil, Kaltenbrunner accelerated the Jewish genocide for “the process of extermination was to be expedited and the concentration of the Jews in the Reich itself and the occupied countries was to be liquidated as soon as possible.”14
In addition to being violently anti-Semitic, Kaltenbrunner hated homosexuals, and in 1943 he demanded that the Ministry of Justice mandate compulsory castration of all homosexuals. More than six thousand homosexual members of the Wehrmacht were tried and imprisoned on his orders.15
Following Germany’s surrender, Kaltenbrunner took off like a rabbit at the sound of a shotgun. He, his adjutant, and a pair of SS officers, using falsified papers, made their way to a mountaintop cabin in Austria. He was soon captured by members of the U.S. Army Intelligence Corps and the Eightieth Infantry Division, Third U.S. Army. They had been tipped off by an assistant Burgermeister named Johann Brandauer. The corps members and soldiers climbed over ice-covered terrain and jagged rocks for six hours before reaching the hideout. Once there, the corps leader announced that Kaltenbrunner and his comrades were surrounded and they should exit the cabin. There was a brief standoff, but unable to escape, the quartet surrendered on May 12, 1945. Kaltenbrunner pretended to his captors that he was a doctor but as he was being led off to prison, his mistress Countess Gisela von Westarp called out his name. The jig was up. Kaltenbrunner’s lover had lifted the veil that concealed his real identity. When put in the dock at Nuremberg, Kaltenbrunner, no longer inspiring fear in anyone, desperately claimed that all the decrees that the prosecution used as evidence contained only his rubber-stamped signature that was applied by his Gestapo underling. He knew nothing about it. He even claimed that he had urged Hitler to end the genocide of the Jews. Nevertheless, he was found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging, which took place on October 16, 1946, at 1:15 a.m.
As ambassador to the Court of St. James, Joachim von Ribbentrop was said by an American reporter to have the dreary, dead eyes of someone with a bad hangover. He was a hapless blunderer, the Inspector Clouseau of the Nazi foreign service who mouthed Hitler’s most outrageous comments as if they were his own. They were like a ventriloquist and his obedient dummy. Hitler marveled at such loyalty. Yet Ribbentrop’s buffoonery and faux pas earned him the derision of many of the Nazi top leaders. Two examples will suffice. In November 1936, while serving as ambassador to Great Britain, Ribbontrop accompanied the Seventh Marquess of Londonderry to Durham Cathedral for a Sunday morning religious service. As the organist played Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken, Ribbentrop leapt to his feet and gave the stiff-armed Nazi salute. The marquess, flushed with embarrassment, grabbed his outstretched arm and yanked it down as if it were the handle on a gallows that the executioner thrusts downward dropping a hanged man to his death. Ribbentrop, a look of annoyance on his normally placid face, reluctantly sat down, his face now set in an angry grimace. The following year, Ribbentrop was invited to Buckingham Palace to meet King George VI. Upon hearing the conclusion of the formal introduction of the king, Ribbentrop again gave the stiff-armed Nazi salute: as the king approached his guest, he was nearly knocked over by an underhanded smack to his chin. He quickly backed up a few steps as Ribbontrop lowered his outstretched arm. Göring once said of Ribbentrop that he was like a mechanical soldier whose Nazi salute popped up at the most inauspicious times. Ribbontrop’s own secretary said that his employer was “pompous, conceited and not too intelligent and utterly insufferable to work for.” To Hitler, Göring commented that Ribbentrop was a “stupid ass.” Yet Hitler was deeply appreciative of Ribbentrop’s loyalty and came to his defense, saying, “But after all, he knows quite a lot of important people in England.” Göring replied, “Mein Führer, that may be right, but the bad thing is, they know him.”16
Asked how Hitler could have promoted such a fool to high office, a German diplomat stated, “Hitler never noticed Ribbentrop’s babbling because Hitler always did all the talking.”17
Yet this foolish man with an IQ of 129, the tenth-highest of those on trial, had proved to be an effective negotiator, his efforts resulting in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact) and the Pact of Steel alliance with Italy. He was so deeply involved in executing Nazi ideology and its resulting crimes that he was charged and convicted of crimes against humanity, crimes against peace, and war crimes. As an advocate for the highest levels of productivity, he had ordered that all diplomats in Axis countries speed up the extermination of Jews. Like many homicidal criminals, murder for him was as easy as swatting flies. That he supported the execution of American and British airmen who had been shot down over Germany did not strike him as immoral. He was such a devotee of Nazi ideology and Hitler that he told his guard at Nuremberg that if Hitler came to him then, he would still do what he was asked to do. However, once he knew that he faced a death sentence, he told the judges at Nuremberg that Hitler had deceived him about his aggressive intentions. On October 16, 1946, he was the first of the Nuremberg defendants to be hanged.
Julius Streicher was considered extreme even by some of the most extreme members of the Nazi hierarchy. Author John Gunther wrote that Streicher was “the worst of the anti-Semites.”18 A raving, raging anti-Semite with the heart of an insatiable entrepreneur, he became a millionaire publisher by printing viciously anti-Semitic tracts and books for adults and children that warned of the dangers of Jewry and preached the need for the extermination of all Jews. Such assaults resulted in large sales and bountiful profits. While his publishing company was raking in millions of Reichsmarks, Streicher’s newspaper, Der Stürmer, a weekly tabloid that he began in 1923 and published until the end of the war, was also making millions from a combination of advertising and subscriptions. Its headlines screamed fabricated cases of Jewish criminality, and its news stories consisted of blood libels about Jews killing Christian children to make matzos. Der Stürmer also attracted readers by publishing pornographic cartoons of Jewish men raping German maidens. Its editorial screeds regularly demanded the extermination of Jews. The paper was so popular that it was read by many German immigrants in the United States, Canada, and several South American countries and had a circulation of more than 600,000; but, of course, its largest circulation was in Germany.
For Streicher’s relentless incitement against Jews, Hitler appointed him Gauleiter in the Bavarian area of Franconia. In that position Streicher ordered that 250 Jews be arrested and forced to mow a grassy field by using their teeth to pluck up all the blades of grass. It’s not surprising that Hitler declared Der Stürmer his favorite newspaper and made sure that Germans were able to read it in countless public venues.
Streicher was so psychopathic in his advocacy of extermination of the Jews that he proved an embarrassment to many Nazis who endeavored to camouflage their anti-Semitism with euphemisms such as “the Final Solution.” Streicher’s most critical enemy was Hermann Göring, who ordered his staff never to read Der Stürmer and never permitted a copy to be seen in his offices. In 1940, Göring helped to engineer the loss of much of Streicher’s power; yet Hitler wanted Streicher to keep publishing anti-Semitic books and Der Stürmer. Hitler considered Streicher a brilliant journalist, and Streicher gladly accepted the evaluation, though his IQ was 106, 23 points lower than Ribbentrop’s and the lowest of all those sentenced to death at Nuremberg.
Following his capture after the war, he was indicted and convicted of crimes against humanity for inciting others to exterminate millions of Jews. Throughout the trial he vehemently complained that all the judges were Jews and on that account were prejudiced against him. When the trap door opened and he dropped at the end of a rope, he descended wildly kicking and squirming, which caused the noose to loosen around his neck. Rather than quickly dying he slowly strangled to death, his legs still kicking, his body squirming, trying to escape the fate he had brought on himself.
In contrast to Streicher’s limited intellectual abilities, Arthur Seyss-Inquart was the smartest of those condemned to death. He had an IQ of 141. By profession, he was a lawyer. However, being a successful lawyer did not reflect his image of himself as an important personage in the history of Germany. He began promoting himself to political importance by opportunistically joining the Nazi Party in 1938. Hitler was impressed by the man’s devotion to Nazi ideology and to the Führer himself. He was rewarded with an appointment as governor of Austria, which had become a German province known as Ostmark following the Anschluss (the annexation of Austria by Germany on March 12, 1938). As governor of Austria, Seyss-Inquart ordered the confiscation of all Jewish property and later arranged for Jewish deportations to concentration camps. From his position as governor, Seyss-Inquart was promoted to Reichskommissar of the Netherlands. In that position, he instituted a reign of terror during which most of the Dutch Jews were deported to concentration camps. Of the 140,000 Jews who were deported, only 30,000 were still living at the end of the war.
As the Allies were closing in on a losing Germany, Seyss-Inquart insisted he would not surrender. He told General Walter Bedell Smith that no surrender was possible. In response, Smith told him that he would be shot, to which Seyss-Inquart arrogantly responded, “That leaves me cold.” Smith grinned and said, “It certainly will.”19
Not living up to his word, Seyss-Inquart was arrested on the Elbe Bridge in Hamburg. He did not offer any resistance nor did he ask to be shot. One of the two men who arrested him was a member of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers named Norman Miller, who had been saved as a fifteen-year-old by the famous Kindertransport that bought him to England. He was the only survivor of his family, all of whom had been killed in Riga, Latvia, in 1942.
Seyss-Inquart was put on trial and convicted of planning, initiating, and waging wars of aggression; war crimes; and crimes against humanity. One of his most famous victims was a sixteen-year-old-girl named Anne Frank. When the guilty verdict was read and Seyss-Inquart was sentenced to death by hanging, he said, “Death by hanging… . Well, in view of the whole situation, I never expected anything different. It’s all right.”20
Two of those indicted and sentenced to death, but who escaped the hangman’s noose, were Martin Bormann and Hermann Göring.
Bormann was power hungry, officious, and so sycophantically devoted to Hitler that he accompanied his master wherever he went. He was always so close to Hitler that Göring said he could have been the Führer’s shadow. As expected, the Führer was delighted to have such a devoted acolyte as his private secretary. Bormann, ever hungry for authority, was rewarded for his loyalty by being given final approval over all civil service appointments. In addition, he reviewed and approved legislation, and by 1943 he had control over all German domestic matters. Bormann, as a Nazi ideologue, was not only an ardent anti-Semite, he advocated the persecution of Christian churches and clergy too. As the end of the Third Reich became imminent, Bormann did not fade in his devotion to Hitler: he followed his master to the Führer’s bunker in Berlin on January 16, 1945. They could hear the pounding of Russian artillery and the crack of gunfire as the Russians closed in on Berlin. Hitler was a nervous wreck. The apocalypse was fast approaching, dooming the one-thousand-year Reich that Hitler had promised. Hitler, though possessed of a messianic view of his destiny as Germany’s leader, was sufficiently a realist to know that if the Russians got hold of him, he would be arrested as a war criminal, put on trial in Moscow, and executed. Or the Russian hordes might get him first, kill him, then hang his corpse upside down, as happened to his ally, Benito Mussolini. Better to commit suicide.
After Hitler had killed himself, a rattled Bormann took off like a horse from a burning barn. He hoped to evade capture by the Russians and perhaps find a safe haven in South America via the rat lines. He was as fearful of capture as Hitler had been. He knew that Russian soldiers wanted revenge for the millions of their fellow citizens who had been murdered by the Nazis. In the end he seemed to disappear, though the Allies surmised that he had probably committed suicide. Bormann, tried in absentia at Nuremberg, was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. If he were found, he was to be executed by hanging. A body thought to be Bormann’s was found near Lehrter station and was buried on May 8, 1945, though it wasn’t officially identified as Bormann’s until 1973. In 1998, DNA tests confirmed that it was indeed Bormann’s body. He had apparently killed himself by biting into a cyanide capsule. His body was cremated and his ashes scattered in the air over the Baltic Sea on August 16, 1999.
Whereas Bormann was sycophantic, a weaselly Uriah Heep, Göring was arrogant and often spoke candidly to Hitler. And unlike all the other defendants, Göring was the only one who could boast a heroic past from his participation in World War I. He had been an ace fighter pilot, a recipient of the prestigious Blue Max award, and a commander of the Jagdgeschwader, a fighter group that had previously been led by the celebrated Red Baron, Manfred von Richthofen (whose daughter married the novelist D. H. Lawrence). Yet Göring was drawn to the former dispatch runner of the Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, Adolf Hitler, whose oratorical skills impressed him. Göring, along with Rudolf Hess, Ernst Rohm, and Alfred Rosenberg was an early member of the Nazi Party. He participated with Hitler in the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 and suffered a severe wound to his groin. He was taken to the hospital, where surgery was performed. Göring was given regular doses of morphine to alleviate the pain, and from that time until he was tried at Nuremberg, he was addicted to the drug. He would evolve to become the second-highest-ranking Nazi after the Führer.
On his way to increased power, he oversaw the creation of the feared Gestapo. He later let Heinrich Himmler run the organization. However, he was best known as the commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, and after the Nazi victory over France, he was made Reichsmarschall, head of all the German armed forces. He was also a kleptomaniac and secured vast wealth for himself by stealing paintings, sculpture, and valuable artifacts from Jews; paintings and sculpture from the museums of defeated nations; and jewelry, cash, and homes from those whom the Nazis murdered throughout Eastern Europe. However, as the war progressed and the Nazis suffered a series of defeats, Göring’s star began to dim. So certain was he of the power of the Luftwaffe to control the skies over Germany that he once proudly bragged that if the Allies were ever to bomb Germany, you could call him “Meyer” (i.e., a name usually associated with Jews). As the bombardment of Germany increased, many airmen surreptitiously referred to him as Meyer. He began to withdraw from active commitment to Germany’s defense not out of shame for his failures but because he wanted to devote more time to his insatiable klepto-mania—and of course, the escapist pleasures of morphine. Yet he still thought of himself as the second-most-powerful man in Germany, so when he learned that Hitler intended to commit suicide before he could be captured by the Russians, Göring sent the Führer a telegram asking to be appointed head of the Third Reich. Hitler flew into a rage, frenziedly waved his arms, shouted that Göring was a traitor and should immediately be expelled from the Nazi Party. He then ordered Göring’s arrest for treason, and Bormann followed up by ordering that Göring be shot. Knowing that Germany’s collapse was imminent, Göring rushed to the American lines, hoping to reach them before he could be taken by the Red Army, for the Russians would have either shot him on sight or made him a humiliated figure in a show trial in Moscow. After such a trial, which would have been filmed and shown throughout the Soviet Union, execution would have been sure to follow. Instead, the soldiers of the U.S. Thirty-Sixth Infantry Division arrested him near Radstadt on May 6, 1945. He was grateful to be taken into custody and even joked with his captors as if the war had been a game badly played by the Germans. Göring pretended to be a good loser, a good sport to the end.
He remained an arrogantly proud man who felt he should have been the highest-ranking Nazi at the Nuremberg trials and not Admiral Karl Donitz, whom Hitler had appointed Reich president. Yet Göring stylishly set himself apart from the other defendants by wearing a powder-blue uniform with polished metal buttons but stripped of its array of colorful medals. The once obese Reichsmarschall, who once weighed more than three hundred pounds, sat in the first row of the prisoners’ dock diminished by his sickly loss of weight and vaporous prestige. In earlier days he never would have been seen in such an ill-fitting uniform, certainly not like the one he now wore with its shoulder pads drooping over his upper arms and excess fabric bunched around his soft belly. He was indicted on the following charges: conspiracy; waging a war of aggression; war crimes such as the plundering and removal to Germany of works of art and property; and crimes against humanity, including the disappearance of political and other opponents under Hitler’s Night and Fog Decree; the torture and ill-treatment of prisoners of war; and the murder and enslavement of civilians, including what was at the time estimated to be 5,700,000 Jews. To all charges of the indictment, Göring pleaded not guilty. He regarded his codefendants with contempt, for he stated they were not up to his high standards and historical importance. Only he should be on trial, he asserted to an army psychiatrist. Yet Göring proved to be a clever defendant and was able to outwit Robert Jackson, who was the first prosecutor to cross-examine him.
According to Airey Neave, the attorney who indicted Göring and author of Nuremberg,
Jackson was certainly ill-prepared for this contest. He did not realize he was dealing with a subtle master of European affairs and the form and substance of many of his questions were an invitation for Goering to repeat his indictment of the Versailles Treaty… . The cross-examination had not proceeded more than ten minutes before Jackson was in trouble. It was obvious that Goering would soon be master. He saw the intention behind each fumbling question. Soon Jackson was overwhelmed by his documents and his resonant voice. Goering offered to help him.21
Neave goes on,
Goering had won the first round but he lost the next decisively to the British. On the following day, Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe rose to cross-examine and he pressed Goering about his knowledge of the murder of the fifty RAF officers after their escape. Goering immediately looked frightened and ashamed. Soon with clenched fists and red with anger, he denied that he or Field Marshall Milch knew anything about it. For many in the courtroom the affair of the Great Escape sounded the death knell for Goering.22
It was the beginning of the end for Göring, and his defense crumbled like a deserted building under Allied bombardment.
Jackson, though failing to break down Göring’s defenses during cross-examination, delivered a devastating summation that unnerved the defendant: “Goering was equally adept at massacring opponents and at fanning scandals to get rid of stubborn generals. He built up the Luftwaffe and hurled it at his defenseless neighbors. He was among the foremost in harrying Jews out of the land.” Jackson added that Göring was “half militarist and half gangster.”23
The court found Göring guilty on all counts, and he was sentenced to death by hanging. The judgment stated,
There is nothing to be said in mitigation. For Göring was often, indeed almost always, the moving force, second only to his leader. He was the leading war aggressor, both as political and as military leader; he was the director of the slave labour programme and the creator of the oppressive programme against the Jews and other races, at home and abroad. All of these crimes he has frankly admitted. On some specific cases there may be conflict of testimony, but in terms of the broad outline, his own admissions are more than sufficiently wide to be conclusive of his guilt. His guilt is unique in its enormity. The record discloses no excuses for this man.24
Upon hearing that he was to be hanged he asked the court that he be executed by firing squad as befitting a soldier of his rank. The court declined his request and affirmed that he should be hanged. Confined to his cell, he committed suicide by biting down on a potassium cyanide capsule that had been smuggled to him by an American soldier.
The man who put the nooses around those who didn’t escape death was Master Sergeant John C. Woods. In 1929 he had gone AWOL from the U.S. Navy and was subsequently court-martialed. Prior to his trial, military psychiatrists had diagnosed him as suffering “constitutional psychopathic inferiority without psychosis.” The navy concluded that he would be of poor service and so discharged him. Then in 1943 he was drafted by the U.S. Army. He eventually was promoted from private to master sergeant and sent to the Paris Disciplinary Training Center, where he was proud to be the primary executioner, hanging thirty-four American soldiers. The army, however, reported that he participated in at least eleven bungled hangings of U.S. soldiers between 1944 and 1946. Such bungles did not halt or deter his career as an executioner. He was a man proud of his prowess and professionalism. Following the executions of the war criminals at Nuremberg, Woods told a reporter from Time that he was proud of his work. “The way I look at this hanging job, somebody has to do it … 10 men in 103 minutes. That’s fast work.”25 On July 21, 1950, while repairing a lighting set, Woods managed to electrocute himself. He is buried in Toronto, Kansas.
After it was all over, the prosecutors returned to their homelands. Many Nazi criminals had been executed or sentenced to prison terms. Many more returned to their pre-war jobs as if the war and their crimes had never taken place. Back in the United States, Thomas Dodd said of the Nuremberg trials that he had performed “an autopsy on history’s most horrible catalogue of human crime.”26