That One Time in Nuremberg

Eighty years ago, the judgments in Nuremberg were pronounced.

When Marshal Göring, the highest surviving member of Hitler’s inner circle, was taken into captivity in Austria, he expected treatment suitable for a VIP such as himself. Instead, the Americans stripped him of his medals and his marshal’s baton and moved him to a POW camp in Luxembourg¹. Worse was yet to come. In Luxembourg, he was at least accomodated in a hotel, but in August 1945, he was transferred to a jailhouse. That jailhouse was located in Nuremberg, where a huge justice palace, barely touched by the war, stood.

Göring had a cell for himself², but the entire row was basically one big meetup of old Parteikameraden. In this finely selected society, Göring again became the informal pack leader. Of all his superiors or equals, only Admiral Dönitz was around³, and Dönitz was a stuffy, boring naval officer with little personal charisma. As far as the other super-VIPs were concerned, Hitler was dead, Goebbels and Himmler as well, Bormann was missing and Heydrich had been killed in Prague more than three years ago.

Nevertheless, the whole pack was sitting in a trap and very nervous about its future.

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The idea of putting enemy leadership on trial was not entirely new, but it was untested in practice. At the end of the First World War, the Allied powers demanded that Germany hand over the fallen Kaiser Wilhelm II, but that proved impossible; the ex-monarch, having absconded to the neutral Netherlands, was beyond the reach of German authorities. After a certain period of uncertainty, the victors decided to leave him alone as long as he did not stir up any problems in Germany proper, which he duly refrained from.

The atrocities of the Second World War were so brutal that some form of retribution against the German leadership was inevitable. Churchill himself preferred to have the captured Parteibonzen simply shot without trial, but cooler heads eventually prevailed and the Nuremberg Tribunal was born. Its mission was not just to punish the evildoers, but to document their crimes for posterity.

The jurisdiction of the Tribunal was limited to German war crimes, because with Stalin on board, any attempt at actual impartial justice would become a travesty. After all, the USSR invaded Finland in late 1939, took the eastern half of Poland even before that, then in 1940 it occupied all three Baltic republics and Romanian Bessarabia - all perfect specimens of wars of aggression, for equivalents of which the German indictees were about to pay with their lives. Its system of penal labor, “the Gulag Archipelago”, was not that different from places like Mauthausen either. But Stalin was among the victors, and the fact that there was never any equivalent of Nuremberg for the USSR, not even after its collapse in 1991, probably contributed to the grisly situation in Eastern Europe today. There is no lasting peace without at least some form of accountability for the sins of the past.

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The defendants in Nuremberg, source: Wikipedia.

Back to the actual Nuremberg. The process took almost a year to complete and, in the meantime, the original set of defendants shrank twice. Gustav Krupp von Bohlen, an industrialist who made enormous money using slave labor, was dropped from the list for being a vegetable (he was 75, senile and paralyzed). Another figure of the German wartime industry, Robert Ley, managed to hang himself with a towel even before the process began. Thus, the final list of defendants contained 22 names, of which 21 were physically present. Whereabouts of the last one, Martin Bormann, were still unknown, but he was widely presumed to have been in hiding; only much later it turned out that he died during a breakout attempt from the Führerbunker, on May 2, 1945.

As it turned out, the relentless bureaucracy of the German government proved to be a real boon to the prosecution, which didn’t suffer from any shortage of paper evidence. (Indeed, the amount of available documents proved too big to be processed easily.) Gaps were few, but one of them helped Albert Speer escape the noose: his claim that he was unaware of the Holocaust because he left the notorious Posen Speech⁴ early could not be falsified. The admiralty (Dönitz and Raeder) escaped with their lives as well, because their American colleague Chester Nimitz admitted openly that the US was waging unrestricted submarine warfare from day one; this was one of the rare occasions when “you did it too” was taken into account by the court. But in general, the case of the prosecution against most of the defendants was ironclad.

The judgments were announced on October 1, 1946. The Soviets wanted everyone to hang, but the final decisions were less harsh. Three defendants were acquitted (Fritzsche, von Papen and Schacht); of them, Hjalmar Schacht, a bespectacled bean-counter who had already fallen out with the Nazis as early as 1937, was a real nobody in the context of the war and his inclusion on the list was probably a mistake. Seven defendants got prison tariffs, ranging from 10 years to life. Twelve (including the absent Bormann) were sentenced to hang.

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Göring was one of the condemned. Always the charismatic schemer, he managed to befriend several of the guards and one of those likely managed to smuggle poison into his cell⁵. A few hours before he was scheduled to go on the gallows, the former Reichsmarschall of Germany successfully poisoned himself. The remaining ten didn’t have any such option and were duly hanged.

Unlike Epstein, Hermann Göring very definitely killed himself. Source: Wikipedia.

There is a long report of the hanging night on famoustrials.com, which tiptoes around the fact that the hangman botched his job. Unlike the British, who asked an experienced professional executioner (Albert Pierrepoint) to dispatch their condemned, the Americans simply asked around and chose certain John C. Woods, a soldier who claimed previous experience with hangings, but in fact had none. This resulted in some heads being bashed and necks being strangled, but given the circumstances, few of the witnesses present were bothered with that.

The remaining seven prisoners were moved to Berlin, as the agreement among the Allies was that while the process itself was to be held in Nuremberg, the actual seat of the relevant authority was to be in the former Reich capital. There, they had an entire prison for themselves, the Spandau Prison. The guards and the personnel rotated regularly, with each of the victorious powers (the UK, the US, the USSR and France) managing the facility for a month at a time. Deep into the Cold War, this was the last common institution still operated by the original Allies.

The list of prisoners slowly shrank as they either completed their sentences or were freed for health reasons. Eventually, in 1966, only one prisoner remained: Rudolf Hess. Hess was never particularly mentally stable and he grew even more unhinged during his imprisonment, but not enough to be considered for reprieve. As a consequence, the entire prison, with its dozens of guards, cooks, janitors and other personnel, was kept in operation because of him, at the estimated cost of almost a million Deutsche Marks a year.

Soviet and American personnel in front of the Spandau Prison (1981). By that time, the entire prison had been a one-man-show for fifteen years. Source: Wikipedia.

The economic absurdity of the situation was obvious, but the atmosphere of the Cold War was not conducive to productive agreements, and all four powers would have to agree to move Hess elsewhere. As they could not, the status quo wore on for a long, long time. Hypochondriacs live the longest, and Hess, bored of waiting for natural death, eventually hanged himself in 1987 at the age of 93.

After his death, the prison could finally be dismantled, and it indeed was, in order to prevent it from becoming a pilgrimage site for neo-Nazis. The justice palace in Nuremberg still exists, though, and the hall in which the trials were held too. It even looks the same way as it once did.

Given the state of the world today, one could probably say that it was underused.

The extent of use of AI in this article: 3 factual errors, 12 grammatical errors and 2 typos fixed. No editing.

1. This involved a funny moment: Göring was so fat that the first plane chosen to fly him to Luxembourg was unable to lift off safely with him on board. Another, more powerful airplane had to be found.

2. Not initially, but he was moved into solitary confinement after trying to influence testimony of others.

3. Dönitz was the last head of a Nazi government, being named as Hitler’s successor in his last will. That government did not even operate in Berlin, the capital being already in the hands of the Soviets. It was seated in Flensburg, an otherwise totally unremarkable town on the German-Danish border.

4. A speech given by Himmler in the occupied Polish city of Poznań (Posen), where he openly described the ongoing Holocaust.

5. In his last letter, Göring claimed to have had the cyanide capsule with him all the time, but this is improbable; more likely, he wanted to protect his actual helper.