We recall the little-known pages of the grandiose trial of German war criminals. Photo: Evgeny Khaldei / TASS
The film “Nuremberg” was released on Russian screens, dedicated to the most high-profile trial of the 20th century – the tribunal of Nazi war criminals. The process took almost a year, its archive consists of more than 100,000 documents, thousands of boxes of film and 25,000 photographs, and the complete transcript of 403 meetings took up 17,000 pages.
Three quarters of a century later, researchers find new, sometimes unknown facts about what happened in 1945-46 in Nuremberg for 316 days.
death as a symbol
It is believed that the choice of Nuremberg as the venue for the trial of high-ranking Nazis was due to the fact that neither in Berlin, nor in Munich, nor in other large German cities, at that time, there was not a single building. left that could accommodate such a number of judges, clerks, defendants, guards, but the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, next to which there was also a large prison for 1200 places, was not damaged by the bombing, so it was decided to hold meetings . of the international court there. In fact, the Allies chose the Bavarian Nuremberg for a different reason – it was this city that at one time became the birthplace of the Third Reich, it was in Nuremberg that the first mass Nazi rallies took place. Therefore, it was decided that fascism should also accept a symbolic death here.
equal and fair
For the first time in history, the trial was held with the participation of judges from all four victorious countries: the USSR, Great Britain, France and the United States. And the judges did not replace each other, but met collectively. In the West, they still do not write about this, but they persistently repeat that the court was ruled by the British Lord Geoffrey Lawrence. But he was just the chairman of the board, who had no veto power. From the USSR, the court judge was Major General of Justice Iona Nikitchenko.
In fact, the Allies chose the Bavarian Nuremberg for a different reason – it was this city that at one time became the birthplace of the Third Reich, it was in Nuremberg that the first mass Nazi rallies took place.
Photo: GLOBAL LOOK PRESS
In every sense
The Nuremberg Trials could have lasted four years instead of one. The simultaneous translation system helped to significantly reduce the time. The now familiar interpretation booths, microphones and headphones in the hall first appeared in Nuremberg, making it possible to speed up proceedings four times due to instant translation. The American company IBM, which supplied and connected the necessary equipment, mentions this fact at every opportunity, declaring its participation in the fight against Nazism. But long before the Nuremberg trials, IBM prefers not to recall any active cooperation with the fascist regime, but they are reluctant to admit that, among other things, special punch cards were supplied to Germany that were used to account for Jews. There were many Americans among the simultaneous interpreters, which angered the British judges: they were upset by the use of American English. The words “argumentation”, “activation” and “display” Judge Birket even called “a crime against humanity.”
Not subject to jurisdiction
It is rarely mentioned that the trial of 24 high-ranking Nazi criminals was not the only one held at Nuremberg. In the period from 1946 to 1949, 12 more trials were held there, during which doctors who conducted experiments on prisoners of war, German lawyers and judges accused of implementing Nazi programs of racial purity, military and civilians who mocked brutally from concentration camp prisoners, industrialists who profited from prisoner slave labor and theft from Nazi-occupied countries. Only the Germans were tried. The American, British and Swedish collaborators of the Nazis were not touched. But shares of a German company that held patents for the production of cyclone gas, which was used to destroy concentration camp prisoners, were listed on the New York Stock Exchange, racial purity programs were funded by American Carnegie and Rockefeller funds, and Swedish funds banks issued loans to German industrialists.
sinister neologism
The word “genocide”, which in recent years, unfortunately, has been repeated more and more in connection with the crimes committed by the Ukrainian regime against the population of Donbass, was officially heard for the first time within the walls of the Palace of Nuremberg Justice. But it was invented earlier: In 1944, lawyer Rafael Lemkin, who worked as a counsel to the prosecutor-turned-US prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, composed this word by combining the Greek “genos (people, race)” with the Latin ending “ -cide (murder)”. The Pole Lemkin, who lost about fifty of his relatives during World War II, defined genocide as “an agreed plan of various actions aimed at destroying the foundations of the life of national groups in order to destroy these groups.” The Nuremberg trials were the first genocide trials in human history.
The word “genocide”, which in recent years, unfortunately, has been repeated more and more in connection with the crimes committed by the Ukrainian regime against the population of Donbass, was officially heard for the first time within the walls of the Palace of Nuremberg Justice.
Photo: TASS
terrible truth
The USSR Prosecutor’s Office presented the judges with products made from processed human skin and samples of soap made from human bodies. College members and prosecutors on the sidelines said the Soviets were exaggerating that “this is simply impossible.” Then the attention of the British, French and Americans was brought to the attention of a documentary newsreel filmed in the Nazi concentration camps. American Judge Parker, after seeing him, fell into hysterics, and then into depression. The National Archives of the United States have a record that, after seeing the terrible images, he was unable to return to his duties for several days, “not finding the strength to get out of bed.”
last two hours
Half of the 24 Nazis who appeared before the Nuremberg international tribunal were sentenced to death. It was very recently that the protocols, which recorded that all the executions lasted just under two hours, were declassified. It was all led by the official US Army executioner, Sergeant Major John Woods, who said he “wasn’t nervous at all, because you can’t be nervous in a case like that.” Witnesses present at the executions noted in the protocols that “the executions were cruel and inept”: the ropes were too short and the hatches through which the hanged fell were narrow. Some of those executed became trapped in them, which “turned hanging into a slow and painful strangulation.” It was decided never to publish the photographs of the hanged.
werewolves of history
Jurists and historians are unanimous that the Nuremberg trials were the largest trials in history and set the precedent for subsequent war crimes prosecutions, as well as leading to the adoption of the United Nations Convention against Genocide and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But recently in the West, the voices of “human rights activists” are increasingly heard, arguing that the sentences handed down at Nuremberg must be reviewed and the Nazi criminals … justified. In defense of this requirement, for example, such an argument is given: they say that those convicted at Nuremberg did not have the opportunity to appeal against their sentence.
