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THE NUREMBERG WAR CRIMES TRIAL

From November 20, 1945, until October 1, 1946, an International Military Tribunal convened in the Palace of Justice at Nuremberg with the goal of trying high Nazi officials for actions committed during World War II that contravened the accepted laws of war. Among the practices condemned were plotting and waging aggressive war, using slave labor, looting occupied countries, and abusing and murdering civilians (especially Jews) and prisoners of war. The Big Three powers (the United States, USSR, and Great Britain) had met at conferences in Moscow, Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam and agreed to try and to punish those responsible. 

Judgment at Nuremberg is a fictionalized account of those trials, but does not focus on the political elite that led the Third Reich down the path to war and crimes against humanity. Instead it explores a smaller corner of the trials: the prosecution of certain members of the German judiciary – the so-called Justice Trial. These judges had served on the bench in the years leading up to the war and during the Nazi regime. The play posits that the prosecutions of these jurists, though held in the shadow of the major war crimes trials, were in a sense the most significant of all. The accused were neither unsophisticated nor too young to grasp the meaning of their actions. As educated members of their society, in place long before the rise of Adolf Hitler, they must have known what they were doing was terribly wrong. In the course of the play, we gain perspective on how ordinary men wrestle with the nature of duty -- and justice – in a time of madness. 

To aid in the understanding of the time of the play and its context, it is helpful to outline the actions of the tribunal as to the architects of the Nazi regime. What follows is an account of those trials: 

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Designated by President Harry S. Truman as United States representative and chief counsel at the tribunal, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson planned and organized the trial procedure and served as chief prosecutor for the U.S. Each of the four Great Powers -- France was now included -- provided one judge and an alternate; they provided the prosecutors, as well. 

The tribunal was actually opened earlier that year on October 18 in Berlin. During that session, the prosecution entered indictments against 24 “major war criminals" and against six "criminal organizations": Hitler's Cabinet; the leadership corps of the Nazi party; the SS (party police) and SD (security police); the Gestapo; the SA (storm troopers, also known as brownshirts); and the General Staff and High Command of the German Army. 

The indictment against them contained four points: conspiracy to commit crimes against peace; planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression; war crimes; and crimes against humanity. 

Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Josef Goebbels had committed suicide by the time of the trials, but key Nazi officials including Hermann Göering, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Alfred Jodl, and Martin Bormann (in absentia) were tried one by one for individually specified crimes. Twenty-one of the 24 defendants were convicted; of these, 12 were sentenced to hang. The remainder were sent to prison. 

THE DEFENDANTS 

·  Martin Bormann was since 1933 head of Rudolf Hess’s staff and chief of the Nazi Party chancellery and Hitler’s closest adviser during the war years. His fate at the end of the war is not entirely clear; he probably died in May 1945 in Berlin. Indicted on three counts, he was found guilty on two counts and sentenced to death in absentia.

·  Karl Dönitz, Admiral of the Fleet. Shortly before Hitler’s death on May 2, 1945, the Fuhrer designated Dönitz as his successor. He was found guilty on two counts and sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment. Released in 1956, he died in 1980.

·  Hans Frank, lawyer, had served as Governor-General of Poland since 1939. Indicted on three counts, he was found guilty on two counts and sentenced to death.

·  Wilhelm Frick, Minister for Internal Affairs, was found guilty on three counts and sentenced to death.

·  Hans Fritzsche, journalist, was head of the news service section in the Press Division of the Ministry for Propaganda since May 1933. At the trial, he was in a way a substitute for Goebbels, who had committed suicide. Indicted on three counts, he was acquitted. In the subsequent de-nazification procedures, he was sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment. Released in the fall of 1950, he died in 1953.

·  Walter Funk, economic journalist, was Minister for Economic Affairs and since 1939 president of the German Central Bank. He was found guilty on three counts and sentenced to life imprisonment. Released in 1957 because of sickness, he died in 1960.

·  Hermann Göering, as Prussian Minister for Internal Affairs, created the Secret Police, which later developed into the Gestapo. He was responsible for the mobilization of the economic resources of the Reich for rearmament. Indicted and found guilty on all four counts, he was sentenced to death. On the night before his execution, he committed suicide by taking potassium cyanide. How he obtained the poison has never been discovered.

·  Rudolf Hess was Hitler’s deputy in the Nazi Party since 1933. On May 10, 1941, he flew on a not yet fully understood mission to Scotland, where he was captured. He was found guilty on two counts and sentenced to life imprisonment. He committed suicide in 1987 at Berlin’s Spandau Prison.

·  Alfred Jodl, general, was head of the military command and adviser to Hitler in strategic and operative matters. Indicted and found guilty on all four counts, he was sentenced to death.

·  Ernst Kaltenbrunner, lawyer, was head of the Security Police (SD). Indicted on three counts, he was found guilty on two of them and sentenced to death.

·  Wilhelm Keitel, general, was Field-Marshal of the Army. Indicted and found guilty on all four counts, he was sentenced to death.

·  Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, industrialist, was indicted on all four counts as representative of German heavy industry and for armament production. He was physically unable to appear in court and the charges against him were dropped. He died in 1950. What is known as the “Krupp Trial” took place before a U.S. military court in Nuremberg in 1948. Krupp’s son Alfred was sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment and to forfeiture of his private property.

·  Robert Ley, chemist, eliminated the free labor unions in 1933 and established the rigidly ideological Labor Front. Indicted on all four counts, he committed suicide in the Nuremberg jail on October 26, 1945.

·  Konstantin von Neurath, diplomat, was the Protector of Bohemia and Moravia from March 1939-43. (In 1941, he was removed from service.) Indicted and convicted on all four counts, he was sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment. Released in 1954 due to illness, he died in 1956.

·  Franz von Papen was vice-chancellor in the first cabinet of Hitler in 1933 and later ambassador in Vienna and Ankara. Indicted on two counts, he was acquitted. In the subsequent de-nazification procedures, he was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment. Released in 1949, he died in 1969.

·  Erich Raeder, admiral, was since 1943 commander-in-chief of the Navy. Indicted on three counts, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Due to illness, he was released in 1955 and died in 1960.

·  Joachim von Ribbentrop, businessman, was Foreign Minister from 1938-45. Indicted and convicted on all four counts, he was sentenced to death.

·  Alfred Rosenberg was Minister for the Occupied Territories in the East since 1941. Indicted and found guilty on all four counts, he was sentenced to death.

·  Fritz Sauckel was Hitler’s plenipotentiary for the mobilization of labor since 1942 and as such was responsible for the more than 5 million men and women from the occupied territories pressed into forced labor in Germany. He was found guilty on two counts and sentenced to death.

·  Horace Greely Hjalmar Schacht, banker, was president of the Reichsbank and Minister of Economics. Since 1944, he had been imprisoned in the concentration camp at Flossenbürg. He was acquitted. German officials imprisoned him until 1948. He died in 1970.

·  Baldur von Schirach was head of the Ministry for Youth and since 1940 Gauleiter (district leader) of Vienna. Indicted on two counts , he was found guilty and sentenced to from four to 20 years’ imprisonment. Released in 1966, he died in 1974.

·  Arthur Seyss-lnquart, lawyer, was the Commissioner for the Occupied Netherlands from 1940-45. Indicted on all four counts, he was found guilty on three counts and sentenced to death.

·  Albert Speer, architect, was General Inspector for Buildings and Construction for Berlin since 1937 and from 1942-45 served as Minister for Weapons and Munitions. Indicted on all four counts, he was found guilty on two counts and sentenced to from four to 20 years’ imprisonment. Released in 1966, he died in 1981.

·  Julius Streicher, elementary school teacher, founded in 1923 the virulently anti-Semitic weekly newspaper “Der Stürmer.” Even after his removal from a regional leadership post in southern Germany in 1940, he remained owner and publisher of this paper. He was sentenced to death. 

In 218 days of trials, testimony from 360 witnesses was introduced, some verbal, some written. Furthermore, about 200,000 affidavits were evaluated as evidence. More than 1,000 personnel (text translators, simultaneous translators, secretaries, etc,) were involved. 

The verdicts were announced on September 30 and October 1, 1946. There were three acquittals, 12 sentences to death by hanging, and seven sentences to life imprisonment or to lesser terms.