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In the middle of the desert of rubble that was once Nuremberg, there was a feeling that everything was going to be fine that day. Journalists from around the world had come to experience the beginning of a new era here in Nuremberg on November 20, 1945, starting at 10 a.m. “Warm, luxurious, everything glows with a silky light,” said writer John Dos Passos, who traveled from the United States, describing the atmosphere in the improvisedly repaired Palace of Justice: Before the “International Military Tribunal” of the victorious allied powers, now would take place the “trial of the main war criminals” against the leadership of the Nazis begin.
“The reorganization of the world through law,” said US chief prosecutor Robert Jackson, “the restoration of humanity, to which we also belong,” said German writer Alfred Döblin, who fled the Nazi regime to France because of its Jewish roots. : That could have been a big problem. But the Christmas feeling of this day should soon give way to leaden anxiety. The great ideas of Nuremberg were buried by the growing insensitivity to pain of Germans who did not want to admit their murderous past, by zeal for the persecution of the victorious powers, by the emerging hysteria of the Cold War, in which the criminals of Yesterday’s war as tomorrow’s fighters against world communism were called upon.
Twenty defendants were shoved into the silky light of the film’s spotlights on November 20. Judges and prosecutors in the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and France would hold the main surviving culprits of Hitler’s dictatorship accountable. Hermann Göring, the “Reichsfeldmarschall”, sat in the dock, along with prominent military men like Alfred Jodl and Wilhelm Keitel, thugs like Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the Reich Central Security Office, politicians like the Interior Minister of the Reich, Wilhelm Frick, Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s confidant and weaponry. Albert Speer. Plus, little lights like Hans Fritzsche, author of the Perseverance Comments on the radio. There were three acquittals in October 1946, when verdicts were reached, seven defendants received lengthy prison terms, the rest were awaiting “death by hanging.”
The lightning impact of the Nuremberg rulings shook the foundations of world order, as Chief Prosecutor Jackson had wanted. For the first time in history, the war of aggression had been declared a crime by the Nuremberg ruling and, for the first time, politicians and top military officials were held personally responsible for it, taken to the gallows. Since the sentences were based on the international criminal law agreed by the allies especially for Nuremberg and were imposed by a supranational “international criminal court”, the most sacred thing that had developed in the world of states during the last 300 years was in gambling: state sovereignty, the sovereign’s right to wage war on other states at any time and to deal with his own subjects according to self-imposed law, even if it is a murderous injustice. The old “Order of the State of Westphalia” was denounced by the judges of the International Military Tribunal. “International law,” said the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” that October day when lightning struck Nuremberg, “has taken on a new and deeper meaning.”
And now are you okay? Many Germans had somehow hoped that with the trial of the leading Nazis to the applause of the whole world, the millennium crime of the Nazis would end. “After such terrible suffering,” wrote the philosopher Karl Jaspers at the time, the people wanted “to be comforted, but not burdened with guilt.” But that is exactly what the victorious powers did.
Photo: Eddie Worth / dpa
The American occupiers in particular had set out to expose the easy claim of the conquered that only a few in Nazi Germany were responsible for the horror, the world war and the genocide, as a dangerous falsification of history. When the convicts of the Nuremberg Tribunal were executed by hanging in the prison gymnasium and the survivors locked up in the four-power prison in Berlin Spandau, things really began: no longer the reorganization of the world, but the expiation for a crime millennium and the “reeducation” of the Germans, who had cheered Hitler: That was the program that connected with the Nuremberg court.
“Follow-up trials” soon began at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, only under the direction of the United States. The Soviets had long fought with American lawyers forever and started their own trials in their eastern zone, which, following the Stalinist model, became terrorist institutions of the Ulbricht regime. Their main objective was to send alleged opponents to perform forced labor in Siberia as “Nazi henchmen.” In the hot Nuremberg Palace of Justice, the Nazi elites selected by the American prosecutors were now on trial: in the “Trial of Jurists” it was against the leading Nazi judges, in the “Medical Trial” about murderous doctors and their euthanasia program , in the “Workforce Trial” Mass murder by SS officers. Politicians from the Federal Foreign Office responsible for the war and the Holocaust also went to court. Outstanding offender: Ernst von Weizsäcker, AA Secretary of State under Hitler, verdict: seven years in prison.
That was far from everything. In all western areas, the military courts condemned based on the Law of the Allied Control Council No. 10 «War criminals, human traffickers, concentration camp guards. In the postwar years, more than 5,000 defendants appeared before Western Allied military courts and more than 800 death sentences were handed down. The purge seemed to have no end: in the US internment camps alone, 100,000 Germans were initially imprisoned, picked up by the occupiers on suspicion of complicity. No one really knew what to do with them. At the same time, a wave of “denazification” swept across the country, gripping almost everyone. In millions of courtroom proceedings, the winners attempted to systematically select people from those defeated by Nazi involvement, a project that proved impractical and, eventually handed over to the German leadership, ended up as a purely symbolic “Persilschein” award.
The occupiers’ eagerness to pursue aroused resistance from the Germans, who were difficult to educate. In German politics, which was slowly waking up again, according to Jena historian Norbert Frei, “an unprecedented strategy of downplaying, denying and deceiving” the blame for Nazi crimes developed. This included, according to Frei, “the aggressive instrumentalization of the accusation of collective guilt.”
The collective blame trick went like this: Because the Western powers want to destroy the German people, they are trying to “collectively” burden them with the blame for Nazi crimes. The argument, which sounds a lot like Pegida to today’s ears, was, as Frei says, “the commercial basis of all the speeches and actions of the political class in the Federal Republic related to the past.” Above all the churches: the “extermination” of the Germans was intentional by the allies, the Bishop of Münster, Clemens August Graf von Galen, enraged. Wiesbaden church president Martin Niemöller – himself persecuted by the Nazis – called on his pastors to passively “resist” denazification.
War criminals or prisoners of war?
The secular elites had no more discernment. Right-wing intellectuals, constitutional law professors and defense attorneys for the Nazi defendants gathered at the “Heidelberger Kreis” to obtain clemency for the convicted Nazi officers. The main argument of the lawyers against the “victorious justice” of Nuremberg: The sentences are unjust because they use the “war of aggression” to punish acts like crimes that for centuries, until the lightning in Nuremberg, were considered heroic deeds. The unlawful “retroactive effect” argument of criminal law cannot simply be dismissed. However, like the collective guilt claim, it was abused to systematically lie to the perpetrators about the victims.
Desperation over the expulsion of the Germans from the former eastern territories was soon mixed with hatred for the alleged injustice of the Nazi persecution in Nuremberg. The “Association of Dispatched and Private” (BHE), “Private”, was formed, which was the department of “Nuremberg Victims”. With the motto “End denazification”, the BHE, a group of old SS comrades, reached the elections from the Bundestag to the Adenauer coalition government.
Such slogans found many friends in Bonn. When word spread in January 1951 that executions were being postponed several times in the Bavarian Landsberg prison, where many of those sentenced to death by the allies were housed, the CSU mobilized. Members of the Bundestag rushed to Bavaria, the mayor of Landsberg organized a demonstration in the main square. All came to demonstrate for the release of the “prisoners of war.”
»Prisoners of war«: That too was a trick of politics. Of course, there were no captured opposition soldiers, protected from punishment by international conventions, but war criminals convicted of mass murder.
Most of them were pardoned anyway: the start of the Korean War made it likely that West Germany would soon have to fight communism with the United States. Should Americans really be mad at tomorrow’s allies for yesterday’s crimes?
After lengthy negotiations, Adenauer came to a »line«. That was the 1952 “Treaty of Germany” with the Western powers. In it the State recovered part of its sovereignty. And what has been true for a long time in this country remains hidden: the Nuremberg sentences are not recognized by Germany.
It would be more than a decade before the German judiciary took the prosecution of Nazi murderers into their own hands with the Auschwitz trials, and almost half a century before the Germans signed the founding documents of the International Criminal Court in The Hague. , which was based on the principles that were announced on November 20, 1945 in Nuremberg.
