Nurenberg trails revisited
Sitting in a small jail cell in the shattered city of Nuremberg, the philosophical center of the Third Reich, Hermann Göring, once chief of the Luftwaffe and Hitler's designated successor, predicted in 1945 that within fifty years there would be statues of him throughout Germany: grand ones in the parks and small statuettes in every home. Half a century later, the vainglorious, bombastic Göring has been proven wrong. Not only were the statues never erected, but his name is still a source of deep shame in Germany linked-,as it always will be-, with the dark history of the Nazi regime. But if Göring was wrong in his crystal-ball gazing, he was not alone. Flushed with victory, the Allies tried Göring and another 21 leading Nazi warlords at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity carried out during their years in power, and when the trial ended 50 years ago this month, many believed the world was on the threshold of a new and enlightened era in international justice. "While this law is first applied against the German aggressors, if it is to serve a useful purpose it must condemn aggression by any other nation, including those which sit here now in judgment," said American Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, the leading American prosecutor, in his final address at the trial. People the world over hoped the judgments at Nuremberg would set precedents to deter future aggression and hold would-be tyrants accountable for their actions. In the years since, that hope has proved sadly misplaced, mocked by the more than 100 wars, insurrections, civil conflicts, and revolutions which have claimed an estimated 22 million lives worldwide. "The dream did exist and seemed to blaze so brightly for a while," says Dr. Klaus Kastner, vice-president of the Nuremberg Regional Court (Oberlandesgericht) and author of Der Nürnberger Prozess with former U.S. Army photographer Ray D'Addario. "But the world quickly learned this was not reality. By the 1950s, you had to conclude that the hope was destroyed, especially when you saw what the Allies themselves did in Algeria, Hungary, over the Suez Canal, and in Vietnam. It showed the dream was nothing but that, -an illusion." But if neither Göring's vision of monuments to his eternal glory nor Jackson's vision of Nuremberg as asign post for the future came to pass, what did the Nuremberg trials achieve? Nuremberg now promotes itself as the home of Lebkuchen and Albrecht Dürer, but the history of this pretty city on the Pegnitz River is far more complex. Chosen as the official axis of the Nazi movement, site of the technicolor rallies immortalized on film by Leni Riefenstahl and later the place where the victorious Allies satin judgment, no other German city bookends the nightmare of the Nazi years as precisely as Nuremberg. Tourists walking the medieval streets of the Altstadt may find it difficult to believe that at the end of the Second World War Nuremberg was little more than ash and rubble. Yet modern Nuremberg is a skilled and loving reconstruction of an ancient city, for much of Nuremberg's famed gothic splendor was lost during the eleven bombing raids the city suffered during the Second World War. By the final capitulation, Nuremberg was more than 91 percent destroyed. Just as in Munich, whose Nazi-era buildings managed to escape the Allied saturation bombing campaign, Nuremberg retains a piece of its pernicious past. Outside the old city wall in the Luitpoldhain Park lies a large group of buildings which escaped undamaged. This massive complex, built in a debased Neoclassical style, served as a backdrop to the Nazi's massive militaristic rallies throughout the 1930s. It is still possible to stand at the podium from which Adolf Hitler addressed the German nation during the hypnotic spectacle of the Reichsparteitage. Known in English as the Nuremberg Rallies, these events lasted up to a week and featured torchlight parades, giant bonfires, and thousands of jack-booted SS men goose-stepping to blaring Wagnerian overtures. At night, ranks of powerful searchlights shone into the sky creating what one observer described as "an ethereal cathedral of ice." Look out today across the wide, empty space of the Zeppelin Field and only a few scraps of paper can be seen blowing in the wind. In rooms underneath the podium the ceremonial searchlights lie rusting, while the few cars parked on the Grand Avenue seem lost in its two-kilometer-long, 60-meter-wide expanse. The huge Congress Hall, designed to seat about 50,000 people but never finished, is now home to the local symphony orchestra and serves in part as a warehouse. The Nazis were attracted to Nuremberg by the city's long association with empires. During its glory days in the 15th and 16th centuries, Nuremberg was a leading European center of art and science, as well as the unofficial capital of the Holy Roman Empire. The first pocketwatch (the Nuremberg Egg), the first globe, and the first clarinet were all produced there, while famous artists such as Veit Stoss and Albrecht Dürer labored in the city's workshops. Although Nuremberg, like many other European cities, declined in importance after the establishment of maritime trading routes, memories of its glory days lingered within German consciousness. In the 19th century, Nuremberg came to symbolize the German national ideal for a generation of young Romantics decades before Germany was actually united into a single country. One hundred years later the Nazis arrived, seeking not German unification, but the forcible inclusion of most of central Europe in a Greater German Reich. They hoped Nuremberg would legitimize their Third Reich by providing a sense of historic continuity, while the medieval atmosphere suited the movement's fondness for Wagnerian mythos. The Reichsparteitage staged there throughout the following decade were the most potent of Nazi ceremonies, designed to showcase their power both at home and abroad. They were also occasions where new decrees were issued, such as the anti-Semitic and racial purity laws of 1935, which deprived almost one million German Jews of their citizenship and their rights. These laws, which provided a fictive legal foundation for the horror of the Final Solution, became known as the Nuremberg Laws. Redemption came when the Allies chose Nuremberg for their own symbolism. As Nuremberg was once the hub of Nazi beliefs, it was considered the appropriate place for the world to repudiate Nazism. Room 600of the Justizgebäude (Palace of Justice), a large, brooding building on the outskirts of Nuremberg, was the scene of what was described at the time as the greatest trial in history. Beginning in October 1945, and throughout ten months of exhaustive hearings and legal wrangling, Jackson and the other Allied prosecutors comprehensively and systematically detailed the outrages committed by the National Socialists. The 22 Nazi leaders in the dock were accused of being architects of the aggression that sparked World War II, and were charged with crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The indictment, which stemmed from the London Agreement signed by the Allies in August 1945, included such offenses as killing hostages, using slave labor, torturing and murdering prisoners of war and civilians in occupied territories, and persecuting people on religious, racial or political grounds. Among the accused were Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, Julius Streicher, -a fanatical anti-Semite whose newspaper, Der Stürmer, was published in Nuremberg-, and Albert Speer, a cultured architect and Hitler's armamentsminister. Other defendants included Hans Frank (Hitler's lawyer and the Governor General of Poland known as the Butcher of Krakow), foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, and philosopher Alfred Rosenberg, who was regarded as the intellectual high priest of the Nazi movement. Once an entire continent had trembled before these men. But when they appeared in Room 600 stripped of medals and uniforms, standing at attention in carpet slippers and hiding their eyes behind dark sunglasses, they appeared to be no more than a broken group of misfits and fanatics. In many ways the result was a forgone conclusion. The evidence was clearly against the accused. As Jackson said in his opening address, "We will not ask you to convict these men on the testimony of their foes. There is no count in the indictment that cannot be proven by books and records." The accused, he noted, shared the Teutonic passion for thoroughness in putting things on paper. Evidence came from personal diaries, such as Hans Frank's statement, "The Jews must be eliminated. Wherever we catch one, it is his end." Evidence came from German military reports such as "The Destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto," describing how flame-throwers were used on apartment buildings. People either jumped from upper levels to their death or were shot as they ran from the exit. Evidence also came from SS films, such as one recording the incineration of more than 200 men in a barn near Leipzig. Prosecutors also referred to documents relating to sterilization, castration and abortion programs, and enslavement, assassination and murder in countries occupied by the Nazis. Further damning evidence also came from high officials. Dieter Wisliceny, a deputy of Adolf Eichmann (head of the Anti-Jewish Office of the Gestapo), provided detailed accounting of the 5,250,000 Jews, -not including those from the Soviet Union- who had been murdered. Erich von dem Bach-Zelewsky, the chief of antipartisan forces, confessed to the indiscriminate slaughter of the innocent. Rudolf Höss, a former commandant of Auschwitz, described how he improved the productivity of the gas chambers there until he finally disposed of an estimated two and a half million people. Significantly, not one of the accused ever denied the charges; they only denied personal knowledge of the events, -and in all cases it was certainly a lie. On 30 September 1946, the Nazi defendants entered the courtroom for the last time. The International Military Tribunal (IMT), a panel of judges drawn from each of the four main victorious Allies, handed down its verdicts. Twelve defendants received Tod durch den Strang (death by hanging) of which only ten were carried out; Göring committed suicide with a cyanide capsule and Hitler's deputy, Martin Bormann, who disappeared in Berlin in the last days of the war, was sentenced in absentia. Three were released and the others given sentences ranging from ten years to life. Those sentenced to death were hanged 16 days later in the early hours of the morning in a gym at the rear of the prison attached to the Justizgebäude. The bodies were cremated and the remains taken to a mortuary in a villa in the Munich suburb of Solln. A group of U.S. Army officers later watched as mortuary staff emptied the ashes into the Contwentzbach, a small stream running behind the house into which they quickly sank from sight. That act, was the final curtain on the events of World War II. "Victor's justice," Göring had sneered at the Nuremberg proceedings and in some ways he was correct. Not only were the Allies prosecutor, judge and executioner, but there were no real precedents in international law for some of the charges. Critics have since questioned the justice of convicting the defendants ex postfacto for offenses not clearly defined as illegal under international law before World War II. In part, Nuremberg was a show trial, a necessary remedy for a world exhausted after seven bloody years of total war. Still, the Nazi leaders were not scapegoats. Nor was the trial designed simply to establish their guilt and mete out punishment. It was a noble and unprecedented attempt to create new international laws to prevent war and a repetition of the hideous events that marked the Second World War. The United Nations tried to carry on the spirit of Nuremberg and rewrite the rules of war. On December11, 1946, the UN affirmed the judgment of the International Military Tribunal and adopted the principles established in Nuremberg. In 1948 the UN approved the Convention on Genocide, and followed it two years later with the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Basic Freedoms. These conventions, however, have been routinely violated, -often by those very countries which sat in judgment at Nuremberg. Indeed, few of the principles established at Nuremberg can be said to have truly governed the conduct of nations since the war. Worse, Nuremberg never fulfilled one of its brightest promises, the creation of a code of international criminal law and a permanent international tribunal for war crimes. It is only recently, with the establishment of the UN International Criminal Tribunal that addressed war crimes in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda, that this idea has again taken tangible form. While this is the first big international effort since Nuremberg to pass judgment on man's savagery, the prospects for justice are not promising. The tribunal investigating the war crimes in Yugoslavia has indicted 75 suspects but only seven are in custody today. Fifty years later is the Nuremberg dream condemned to be, as one commentator described it, a beautiful idea murdered by a gang of ugly facts? Might, it seems, is still right. Therefore war will continue to exist, to be brutal, and to be filled with injustice. In retrospect, it seems naive to have expected the conduct of war to be modified in any meaningful way. The real significance of the Nuremberg trial is not, however, its failures, but its very occurrence. At Nuremberg, the victors rejected revenge and the summary execution of their enemies that had been urged by, among others, Winston Churchill. Instead, they decided to try their defeated enemies and gave them a fair trial with the right to defend themselves. The conduct of the trial and adherence to principles of law set a precedent which raises prospects, however slim, for effective future war-crime trials and hope for a world where reason may carry more weight than force. If nothing else, the Nuremberg precedents should cause politicians and generals to think twice before going to war.