The Nuremberg Trials

The Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders were conducted by a tribunal of military representatives from the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. U.S. Supreme Court Justice (and former Attorney General) Robert Jackson was the chief prosecutor, with Army Colonel Telford Taylor acting as chief prosecution counsel. Each of the four participating nations provided two judges, one of whom was an alternate.

The trials officially started on November 20, 1945, just a few months after the end of the war. However, the punishment of war criminals actually started a few weeks earlier—sometimes at the hands of the Allies, sometimes self-inflicted. On October 6, Dr. Leonardo Conti, one of several German doctors who had conducted heinous medical experiments on concentration camp inmates, took his own life in his prison cell in Nuremberg. A short time later, Pierre Laval, the former French foreign minister found guilty of treason by a Paris court, also attempted suicide. He failed, however, and was executed by a firing squad on October 15.

Figure 16-1 German defendant at the Nuremberg war crimes trial.

Photo courtesy of the National Archives (238-NT-592)

On October 20, twenty-four Nazi officials were indicted on four charges: (1) a common plan or conspiracy to seize power and establish a totalitarian regime to prepare and wage a war of aggression; (2) waging a war of aggression; (3) violation of the laws of war; (4) crimes against humanity, persecution, and extermination. Of those charged, twenty-two actually stood trial. Robert Ley, an early Nazi supporter and proponent of the mass extermination of Jews, committed suicide in his cell before the trial started, and Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, whose armaments factories used slave labor throughout the war, was judged physically unfit and mentally incompetent to stand trial.

Because no buildings in Berlin were structurally sound enough to act as a courthouse, the principal war crimes trials were moved to Nuremberg, with other trials conducted at the sites of concentration camps. In the days before the Nuremberg trials, national trials were held in various European cities. In Oslo, Norway, for example, Vidkun Quisling, a Norwegian Nazi sympathizer, was found guilty of “criminal collaboration” with Germany and was executed on October 14, 1945.

Nazi Loyalists

Many defendants remained steadfastly loyal to the Nazi cause, and their testimony, often delivered in a frightening, matter-of-fact monotone, suggested a complete lack of remorse for their actions. Consider this excerpt from the affidavit of Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz, who was later sentenced to death:

The Camp Commandant at Treblinka . . . used monoxide gas, and I did not think that his methods were very efficient. So when I set up the extermination building at Auschwitz, I used [Zyklon-B], which was a crystallized prussic acid which we dropped into the death chamber from a small opening. It took from three to fifteen minutes to kill people. . . .We knew when the people were dead because their screaming stopped. . . . After the bodies were removed, our special commandos took off the rings and extracted the gold from the teeth of the corpses.

Another improvement we made [was that] at Treblinka, the victims almost always knew that they were to be exterminated, and at Auschwitz, we endeavored to fool the victims into thinking that they were going through a delousing process. Of course, frequently they realized our true intentions, and we sometimes had riots and difficulties due to that fact. . . . We were required to carry out these exterminations in secrecy, but of course the foul and nauseating stench from the continuous burning of bodies permeated the entire area, and all of the people living in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations were going on at Auschwitz.

To present the history of the Holocaust and to preserve the memory of the millions of Jews, Gypsies, dissidents, and others who died as a result of Nazi persecution, the U.S. Congress authorized in 1980 the construction of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Since opening in 1993, it has become one of the most frequently visited museums in the area.

A variety of disturbing evidence was presented during the trials, including a paperweight made from the shrunken head of a concentration camp inmate and a swatch of tattooed skin removed from a prisoner. At Buchen-wald, the tribunal was told, particularly nice examples of tattooed skin were given to Ilse Koch, the wife of camp commandant Karl Koch, who had them fashioned into lampshades and other items.

Trial Results

The Nuremberg trial took one year, from October 1945 to October 1946. When the verdict was read on September 30, the court acquitted members of the General Staff and High Command and, as groups, the SA and members of Hitler’s cabinet. However, units within the Nazi secret police—the SS, SD, and Gestapo—were declared criminal groups. Following are the verdicts on the twenty-two high-ranking Nazis tried at Nuremberg.

• Martin Bormann, aide to Hitler. Found guilty and sentenced to death in absentia. Declared officially dead by a West German court in 1973.

• Karl Dönitz, naval officer and Hitler’s successor. Found guilty of counts 2 and 3, sentenced to and served ten years in prison.

• Hans Frank, governor general of Poland. Found guilty of counts 3 and 4. Hanged.

• Wilhelm Frick, Reich minister of the Interior from 1933 to 1943, author of the Nuremberg Laws legalizing persecution of the Jews. Found guilty of counts 2, 3, and 4. Hanged.

• Hans Fritzche, deputy minister of propaganda. Acquitted.

• Walther Funk, economics minister and Reichsbank president. Conspired with Heinrich Himmler to put money, gold fillings, and other items looted from death camp victims into a false bank account. Found guilty on counts 2, 3, and 4. Sentenced to life in prison, released in 1957.

• Hermann Goering, commander of the Luftwaffe. Found guilty on all four counts. Sentenced to death by hanging, committed suicide in his cell just hours before his execution.

• Rudolf Hess, deputy führer before he flew on an unauthorized mission to Scotland. Found guilty on counts 1 and 2. Sentenced to life in prison, died in Spandau Prison in 1987.

• Alfred Jodl, chief of the operational staff of the High Command of the Armed Forces. Found guilty on all four counts. Hanged.

• Ernst Kaltenbrunner, director of the Reich Central Security Office after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. Found guilty on counts 3 and 4. Hanged.

• Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the High Command of the Armed Forces. Found guilty on all four counts. Hanged.

• Baron Constantin Freiherr von Neurath, foreign minister from 1932 to 1938 and Reich protector of Bohemia and Moravia from 1939 to 1943. Found guilty on all four counts. Sentenced to fifteen years in prison; released in 1954.

• Franz von Papen, Nazi diplomat and career politician. Acquitted but later found guilty of wartime criminal conduct by a German de-Nazification court.

• Erich Raeder, commander in chief of the German navy. Found guilty on counts 1, 2, and 3. Sentenced to life in prison; released in 1955.

• Joachim von Ribbentrop, minister of foreign affairs from 1938 to 1945. Found guilty on all four counts. Hanged.

• Alfred Rosenberg, minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories. Created the Institute for Scientific and Cultural Research as a cover for the theft of Jewish art collections and libraries. Found guilty on all four counts. Hanged.

• Fritz Sauckel, director of slave labor. Found guilty on counts 3 and 4. Hanged.

• Hjalmar Schacht, former Reichsbank president and minister of economics. Originally acquitted but later declared a major offender by a de-Nazification court, then exonerated by an appeals court.

• Baldur von Schirach, leader of Hitler Youth from 1931 to 1940 and an adoring fan of Hitler. Found guilty on count 4. Sentenced to and served twenty years in prison.

• Artur Seyss-Inquart, Nazi chancellor of Austria and administrator of occupied Netherlands. Found guilty on counts 2, 3, and 4. Hanged.

• Albert Speer, Hitler’s chief architect and later minister of armaments and war production. Found guilty on counts 3 and 4. Sentenced to and served twenty years in prison.

• Julius Streicher, publisher of an anti-Semitic magazine. Found guilty on count 4. Hanged.

Those sentenced to death were executed on October 16, 1946, by U.S. Army Master Sergeant John Woods, who was an experienced hangman. Goering’s body and those of ten others were taken by truck to the concentration camp at Dachau, where they were cremated in the camp’s infamous crematoriums. Their ashes were dumped in a stream in Munich.

The Nuremberg trials were not the last war crimes trials to be conducted in Germany. For years afterward, numerous “de-Nazification” trials were conducted in an effort to hold all war criminals accountable for their actions. Defendants were divided into five categories:

• Major offenders subject to death or life in prison

• Activists, military criminals, and profiteers, who could receive sentences of up to ten years in prison

• Lesser offenders, such as people who entered the Nazi Party at a young age. Those convicted could receive sentences of up to three years in prison.

• Nazi “followers,” who were subject to a hefty fine

• Nazis who had resisted the murderous activities of the party and were persecuted for their efforts. These individuals were usually acquitted.

From December 1963 to August 1965, a West German court in Frankfurt tried twenty-one former SS officers at the Auschwitz death camp. The men were charged with complicity in thousands of murders; nineteen of them were found guilty and received sentences ranging from three years to life in prison.

The Tokyo Trials

An international military tribunal was also convened in Tokyo to prosecute Japanese military officials accused of war crimes. A total of twenty-five high-ranking Japanese officers were tried, most of them charged with crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, and atrocities.

Unlike the Nuremberg trials, which were closely watched by most Americans, the trials in Japan drew little interest. The most popular trial was that of Japan’s prime minister, Hideki Tojo, who was the Japanese equivalent of Adolf Hitler in the eyes of most Americans. The trials lasted for nearly three years. At the end, Tojo and six others were found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging; sixteen others were sentenced to life in prison. Additional war crimes trials were conducted in other Far East nations, where another 900 Japanese military officials were sentenced to death.

The Doctors’ Trial

Separate war crimes trials were held for twenty-three SS physicians and scientists from December 1946 to August 1947, this time before a U.S. military tribunal. During these trials, the world learned the true extent of the Nazis’ cruelty, with charges ranging from mass “euthanasia” of the mentally and physically unfit during the early years of the Nazi era to heinous medical experiments conducted at Nazi concentration and death camps.

The emphasis was placed on those doctors and scientists who worked for the SS, but physicians who were part of the German medical establishment were also involved. Most prominent among them was Karl Brandt, Hitler’s personal physician and Reich commissioner for health and sanitation. Brandt worked his way into Hitler’s inner circle by endorsing and encouraging the Führer’s scheme of eugenic murder as a way of cleansing and strengthening the Aryan race. However, the Nazis realized that their work would not sit well with the world at large, and so they worked in secret and spoke in euphemisms. Noted one document introduced into evidence at the trials: “Thirty thousand attended to. Another hundred thousand to one hundred and twenty thousand waiting. Keep the circle of those in the know as small as possible.”

That particular document concerned the Generation Foundation for Welfare and Institutional Care, which carried out Hitler’s directive to cleanse the Aryan race by killing everyone with physical or mental defects or carrying an inheritable disease. The program, administered by the Reich Committee for Scientific Research of Hereditary and Severe Constitutional Diseases, required all doctors and midwives to report the birth of all children afflicted with a congenital malformation. An estimated 5,000 mentally or physically disabled children were killed from 1939 to 1944, and a total of 70,000 people are believed to have been killed through the program.

Family members of these “imperfect” individuals were usually told that the victims had died of pneumonia or some disease and that the body had been cremated to prevent the spread of illness.

Mentally handicapped adults were removed from institutions and taken by trucks to killing centers, where they were murdered with poisonous gas. The SS was placed in charge of this duty and carried it out with ruthless efficiency—more than 80,000 people were eliminated over the course of the Nazi racial purification program. Again, next of kin were sent a simple form letter telling them of their loved one’s passing. If any explanation was offered, it was a lie.

Medical Experiments on Humans

Over the course of the war, Nazi physicians and scientists performed a host of horrifying medical experiments on death camp and concentration camp prisoners. These men and women were treated worse than guinea pigs and were subjected to excruciatingly painful, degrading, and often deadly procedures, all in the name of “science.” For example, some were placed in a pressure chamber and subjected to extended oxygen deprivation to see the effects of high-altitude flight on aviators. Other prisoners were placed in freezing water for long periods to study hypothermia.

Anton Pacholegg was a prisoner at Dachau who worked as a clerk at the experimental station where other prisoners were tortured in the name of Nazi science. He offered the following testimony during the war crimes trials:

The Luftwaffe delivered a cabinet constructed of wood and metal measuring one meter square and two meters high. It was possible in this cabinet to either decrease or increase the air pressure. . . . Some experiments gave men such pressure in their heads that they would go mad and pull out their hair in an effort to relieve the pressure. . . . They would tear their heads and face with their fingers and nails. They would beat the walls with their hands and head and scream. These cases generally ended in the death of the subject.

After a group had been killed, the skin from their bodies would be removed from their thighs and buttocks. Rascher (the head scientist) would pass on them before they were tanned. I saw the finished leather later made into a handbag that Mrs. Rascher was carrying. Most of it was for driving gloves for the SS officers of the camp.

Four of the defendants at the Doctors’ Trial were acquitted, and seven were sentenced to death. Among the condemned was Karl Brandt, who was hanged in June 1948. Dr. Karl Clauberg, who performed some of the most notorious and repulsive medical experiments in Experimental Block 10 at Auschwitz, died in 1955 before standing trial; he had been held by the Soviets in the years immediately after the war. Clauberg was a monster who killed countless women while trying to develop a new high-speed form of sterilization. Most of his experiments involved injecting caustic chemicals into the uteri of his subjects; the lucky ones died.

The Angel of Death

Most infamous of the Nazi doctors was Josef Mengele, who became known among the inmates of Auschwitz as the Angel of Death. Mengele held a doctorate in both medicine and anthropology and was assigned to Auschwitz in May 1943 after being wounded on the eastern front, where he was a medical officer.

The Japanese also conducted heinous medical experiments, many of them on prisoners of war. Some of the most horrifying involved injecting patients with bacterial agents and observing how they suffered.

Mengele was a vicious anti-Semite who saw the Jews as little more than lab animals. In one notorious incident, a mother refused to be separated from her teenage daughter and attacked the SS guard who was trying to keep them apart. Enraged, Mengele pulled out his revolver and shot both mother and daughter on the spot, then ordered the other men and women he had culled for experimentation to be executed immediately.

Figure 16-2 Josef Mengele, “The Angel of Death.”

Getty Images/Hulton Archive/Stringer

Mengele was particularly intrigued by twins and saved them for special experiments to determine if twins really had any kind of special physical or mental bond. In one incident, he ordered twin boys killed just so he could perform autopsies to settle a disagreement he had with another SS physician.

Knowing he faced certain death if captured by Allied forces, Mengele left Auschwitz shortly before it was liberated. He lived in West Germany for several years, then escaped to South America, where he was protected by Nazi sympathizers. Over the years, the legend of Josef Mengele grew, and “Mengele sightings,” most of them bogus, became commonplace.

Despite the efforts of Israel’s best Nazi hunters, Mengele remained free. He is believed to have moved from Paraguay to Brazil in 1960 and drowned while swimming at a beach in 1979. His death was controversial, but a team of pathologists who examined his remains were able to confirm his identity.