Dan Snow's History Hit - Nuremberg: The Trial of Major War Criminals

Episode Date: January 28, 2022

Carried out in Nuremberg, Germany, between 1945 and 1949, the Nuremberg trials were held for the purpose of bringing Nazi war criminals to justice. The most widely-known of those trials was the Trial of Major War Criminals, held from November 20, 1945, to October 1, 1946. Judges from the Allied powers of Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States, presided over the hearing of 22 defendants, who included Nazi Party officials and high-ranking military officers along with German industrialists, lawyers and doctors, were indicted on such charges as crimes against peace and crimes against humanity.Sir John Tusa, broadcaster and writer, joins Dan on the podcast. They discuss what led to the Nuremberg trials, the intricate details of the Trial of Major War Criminals, outcomes for subsequently convicted war criminals such as Hermann Göring, and the lasting impact of these trials.This episode is dedicated to the late Ann Tusa, who co-authored with husband John, 'The Nuremberg Trial'.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. This podcast is first broadcast the day after Holocaust Memorial Day 2022.

And so yesterday we heard from a very remarkable survivor of Auschwitz. Today we're going to hear from a great broadcaster, a writer, a towering figure of the arts and cultural world here in the UK, also a descendant of Eastern European refugees who came to Britain during the war. He is Sir John Chaucer. He wrote the Nuremberg trial in 2010 with his late wife, Anne, who we're very happy and proud to be able to dedicate this podcast to. Sadly, she's recently passed away. Following on from yesterday's accounts of the criminality, the barbarism of the Nazi regime, today we're going to talk about the attempt to bring those who perpetrated those crimes to justice. In December 1942, leaders of the US, Soviet Union and Great Britain all issued the

first joint declaration officially noting the mass murder of European Jewry and resolving to prosecute those responsible for violence against civilian populations. The war trials took place at Nuremberg from November the 20th 1945 to the autumn of 1946. Many senior Nazis and military figures were put on trial, probably the most famous among them, Hermann Goering, the man who, well, thought himself to be, and was thought by many to be, Hitler's second in command, really, Hitler's successor. I haven successor and then quite turned out of that but anyway he's commanded the Luftwaffe it was their force and he escaped the hangman's noose after he was found guilty and took poison. So John Chaucer will tell us all about what happened at the trials and who was found guilty and tomorrow we're going to pick this up in a two-parter on the lasting implications of Nuremberg, how that process continued or did not

continue, and what it all means up until the present day. If you want to go and subscribe to History Hit TV, I can thoroughly recommend it. It's a digital history channel. It's like Netflix, but just for history. You go on there, you can watch documentaries about anything from the Stone Age to the Digital Age, and you get all the podcasts ad-free as well. Five, six years of podcasts on there. They're all piling up. Go and check them out. Thousands of podcasts,

hundreds of hours of history documentaries. You're going to love it. Just follow the link in the description to this podcast. In the meantime, everyone, it's Sir John Schuster. Enjoy. John, thanks so much for talking to me about this. What was it about Nuremberg that you found so compelling? I think it was because it told us so much about the Second World War,

both how it began and how it was conducted, and that sense that at the end of the war, you needed some sort of finality. Other people in the late 1970s, early 80s, when this project first appeared also thought this was a good idea and the BBC commissioned three radio programs about it which I made and on the strength of that a publisher said oh Nuremberg that's a good subject in a way people hadn't looked at it very much for 20 years or more so he said oh we'll write a book. Then I realized I couldn't possibly

write the book because I was far too busy as a freelance journalist, and I probably didn't know how to write it anyway. And my wife, who was a teacher, said, well, why don't I write it? She'd never written anything before, but she was a very good storyteller. And she then buckled down and did the research. And the more she read, the more she was absolutely convinced that this was a story about our times. Our world was shaped by the events which made the Nuremberg trial, and the Nuremberg trial marked an end point in it. Is there something about Nuremberg, the ambition,

not just to have victors' justice, to sort of, you know, like Marshall Ney was thrown in a ditch by the Bourbons when they got back after Waterloo and shot in a ditch. You know, is there something about Nuremberg where it's an attempt to establish some kind of rule of law that makes it different to what's gone before? There were two schools of thought, one of which was catch them and shoot them and let them die in a ditch. And Winston Churchill, British Prime Minister, he said, well, they're obviously criminals and worse than criminals,

so why should we afford them any kind of justice? And there were Americans who thought that as well. And incidentally, there were Americans who thought that the whole of Germany should be de-industrialized and turned into an agricultural territory. You know, there were very extreme feelings. So just catching the war criminals as and when you find them and shooting them was one policy. It didn't last long because other people said, listen, you are trying to establish a world of law where people don't break the law, where people don't murder and kill nations. And this trial will be one way of making it perfectly clear that we are now in a new world where nations and people obey the law. And incidentally, it was Goering who said this is Victor's justice.

And the chief American prosecutor, very excellent justice called Robert Jackson, he said on that subject of Victor's justice, the Germans on trial are not here because they lost the war. They are here because they started it. And that is the crucial difference. What were the crimes that they were tried? Was there a focus on the genocide, the crimes against humanity? The just invading somewhere was not considered criminal, right? Well, there were various crimes. There were war crimes, certainly.

There were crimes against humanity. Genocide, by the by, came up comparatively late. Then there was also a general conspiracy, a conspiracy to conduct war crimes and crimes against peace. The American legal system loves conspiracy because this is where they usually get high-level commercial criminals. Or former presidents. Or former presidents. The European and the British legal systems don't like conspiracy. They think it is too vague. And in the end, it's very difficult to say, when did these people sit down and plot something? What the British above all, and there was a very good chief prosecutor,

a man called David Maxwell Fyfe, he was a criminal lawyer. And in the end, the British and the French approach also was, these people committed crimes. They committed murder. And we will therefore charge them with and hope to convict them of murder. The Americans kept on about conspiracy, and a lot of time was wasted on that. But essentially, it was murder and war crimes and crimes against humanity, which were the main charges which were brought against these people. Tell me about the trials themselves. Why was Nuremberg chosen? They couldn't have it in Berlin because Berlin was destroyed.

Nuremberg was also very heavily destroyed, and the way in which the Americans made it a place where you could hold a trial was an extraordinary piece of logistics, really. And after all, there'd been the Nuremberg rallies, the big Nazi-Hitlerite mass rallies of Nazi hysteria and anti-Semitism and warmongering. So where better than to hold the trial which looked at all these matters than the place which had been at the heart of the celebration of militant Nazism? But I mean, most of Germany was destroyed and there was just enough in Nuremberg for it to be possible.

The Americans made it possible. And who's on trial? Because it's the senior people here, isn't it? It was always the intention, and I think it was carried out, to have the major war criminals. Again, Robert Jackson said, we are not here to try janitors and stenographers. These are not petty people who might have done terrible things, but said, we are here to put on trial the people who gave the orders. And by and large, the people in the dock were the people who had made the orders. Martin Borman had disappeared. Robert Lye, a revolting man.

Well, they were all varying degrees of revolting, but he was in charge of forced labor. Hess, everybody thought was probably mad, but he was in the box anyway. Goering ultimately committed suicide. But the people around the army, people around the navy, the people who were the governors general of the various protectorates in Eastern Europe and who did terrible things there, they were on trial.

Goering, the head of the air force, Ribbentrop, foreign minister, and other people who, well, Schacht, who is the head of the central bank. And some people actually said, well, you can't put a banker on trial. And other people said, well, if you're the banker to Nazi Germany, you certainly can. Albert Speer, Hitler's architect. Quite a lot of people said, you can't put Speer on trial. Some people have always had a soft spot for Speer. He was actually involved in all manner of forced labor. Perhaps we'll say something about him later. There's no question, no major Nazi leader, who was still alive by then, was omitted from the people in the dock. If you listen to Dan Snow's history, we're talking nuremberg more coming up

how can toilet training cows help save the planet should we start renting our clothes and why on earth is beds from the happy mondays now keeping bees i'm jimmy doherty tv presenter farmer and conservationist and these are just a few of the questions we'll be answering on my new podcast on Jimmy's Farm from History Hit. Join me on the farm to hear from the likes of the founder of the Eden Project, Sir Tim Smith, Professor Dieter Helm on how to stop climate change, and my old friend Jamie Oliver. Listen to On Jimmy's Farm now wherever you get your podcasts. Now, wherever you get your podcasts. soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes.

Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. And what was the sort of standard of of legal proceedings i mean would it have been evidence obviously hugely important was the equivalent to a court in london at the time in the uk i think it would have felt very similar to that first of all all the evidence was shared between defense and prosecution number one absolutely evenly the defense was shared between defense and prosecution, number one, absolutely evenly. The defense was never starved of information. Secondly, the tribunal appointed the best lawyers they could to defend the people in the dock. And some of the German lawyers were very good. Some were routine, some didn't want to do it. But in other words, there was a proper defense. And thirdly, all the crucial evidence was based on Nazi documents.

One of the curious things about the Nazi regime was that they were incredible pedants about documentary evidence. And there was one very, very interesting case. about documentary evidence. And there was one very, very interesting case. There was a huge naval archive, and the naval archive was being stored in a castle in the Rhineland. And the archivists thought, well, we don't want this to fall into the hands of the Allies. And they had prepared a disused swimming pool into which they were going to dump the archives, pour petrol on them, and burn the entire German naval archive. And Admiral Dönitz, to his credit, said, no, the archive must be handed over. But all the evidence was the writings, the orders, the commands of the Nazi regime.

There were a few individual witnesses from time to time, but it was evidence-based and everybody had the chance to see it and to prepare their case on the basis of that evidence. Trials of this nature, I suppose, are obviously designed to find out whether people are guilty and make them pay for their crimes, but also presumably serve a purpose of warning, educating, engaging the world's population. Did that work? Were people absolutely, new evidence emerging? Were people shocked and appalled around the world? Were they paying attention? There was a lot going on, wasn't there, in 1946? There was an awful lot going on. A lot of the evidence even shocked the people in the dock. It certainly shocked the court. There were attempts to bring the ordinary German public

into the courtroom so that they could be presented and hear for themselves the terrible things that had happened and had been committed by the Nazi regime. There wasn't a huge rush to take this up. And, you know, by and large, in the year after the war, the condition of Germany was so awful that you might say that anybody had other things to think about, rather than saying, this is our war guilt and I'd better come to terms with it. But later and over time, and especially when later trials took place, I think everybody began to realize that there was

an overwhelming case, if there'd been any doubt about it, about the criminal nature and the murderous nature. So I think there was a profound educational role which came from the steady hearing of evidence. And tell me, what was the outcome of these trials? You've mentioned some of the defendants. Yes, well, not everybody was hanged by any means. And I don't think there's any doubt that the people who were hanged deserve to be hanged. And again, what was said was the people who will be hanged are those who are closest to the blood and the deaths. And somebody like Rudolf Hess, who was Hitler's personal emissary, probably bar me, he got life.

Walter Funk, he was an economist, he got life. Admiral Dönitz, the head of the navy, and who for a very brief period was the head of the German state when Hitler killed himself, he got 10 years. And so there's a general feeling that the navy war on both sides was a remarkably clean war. Raeder, who was involved in other things, the other admiral, he got life. Frantz von Papen, who'd been foreign minister, he was actually acquitted. And Fritscher, who was in charge of information, a nasty man, a pathetic man, but he was acquitted. So it isn't as if there's anything like a sort of kangaroo court, which said, we've got 20 people here and we're going to hang all of them. They were well-patterned and well-discriminated sentences. I make a comment

only about Albert Speer, Hitler's architect, who got 20 years, which you may think was a fairly heavy sentence. There are certain people, including Anne Tusser, the author of the book, who felt very strongly that Speer should have been hanged because he was complicit in some appalling dealing with forced labor and just was so close to the regime and everything it stood for. And there's a certain number of people after the war who were almost charmed by Speer. He's such a gentleman. The things he did during the war were not those of a gentleman. But in other words, they were differentiated sentences. And I think, overwhelmingly, they represented how close people had been to murder. We remember more recently, people like Slobodan Milosevic refusing to accept the authority of

international tribunals and courts. Did they participate actively in their own defence? Did they recognise this process? Do you know, they did. They did. And I think partly because they had access to all the evidence, partly because they had good lawyers. It is very interesting that they didn't try the, I don't recognize the court. The trial would have gone on anyway, whatever they had said, and the evidence would have been presented. And in the end, I think all the defendants thought, well, at least I have a chance of presenting my case. So that is what I will do. But in any case, one of the great things about

the Nuremberg Tribunal was they didn't allow time wasting. There was one absolutely crucial rule, no cumulative evidence. Once evidence was on the table, you didn't want and you wouldn't allow people to add to it. And that saved an enormous amount of time. And if you look at the length of time the trial took, by May of 46, people thought, why are we still here? Not because things were being shortcut, but because things had been done so thoroughly. But the tribunal was absolutely, reasonably strict in saying that is irrelevant, that is cumulative or whatever it might be. So they kept the proceedings moving without any impact on the actual justice and fairness of the proceedings. Talks about Goering, sometime deputy to Hitler, had the Air Force.

He was found guilty, but he cheated to hang Man's News, didn't he? He was found guilty, but he cheated to hang Man's News, didn't he? Oh, absolutely. It was Goering who produced a defense when he was being cross-examined by Robert Jackson. And Goering, who by that stage, he'd been in prison for a while. He was on a diet. He was off drugs. He'd lost weight. Goering was a highly able person.

And he was very, very clever. And he made mincemeat of the American prosecutor, Robert Jackson. And everybody in the prosecuting team was saying, what on earth is going on? The case has been demolished by Goering. And Goering was then undermined when he was cross-examined by Sir David Maxwell Fife, a British criminal lawyer who took a completely different approach, a matter-of-fact one of detail, and slowly built up the case against him. But Goering was absolutely central. All the defendants looked to him. Goering knew what was going to happen. And his only victory, you might say, was to say, well, I will not give them the pleasure of hanging me. I'll take my own life. I'm in control. What's been the legacy of Nuremberg? Why do they matter just beyond the immediate

punishment of some of the worst offenders in the Nazi regime? worst offenders in the Nazi regime? It took people quite a while to realize that here they had a precedent for an international criminal court. And finally they did. But for many years, everybody invoked Nuremberg, but then institutionally, they didn't do anything about it. But finally, all manner of institutions were set up. So if you think about it, after 50 or 60 years, the international legal scene is significantly different because people could say, well, look what happened at Nuremberg, look at the principles it established, and look at how valid those principles still are today. So it has had a long and very positive afterlife. And by the way, people sometimes say that it was the Nuremberg principle

which said that the defense of I was only obeying superior orders is not a defense. orders is not a defense. Nuremberg didn't say that. The prosecutors pointed out that every German soldier and serviceman had in their paybook, which had the rules under which they worked, the fact that obeying illegal superior orders was not a defense. So Nuremberg didn't create that. What Nuremberg did was to say everybody has always said that obeying superior orders is not a defense. So to the extent that it highlighted it, I think that was a major and useful step. I'll ask you a personal question as someone who escaped from what is now the Czech Republic as a child. Does the knowledge that some of the people that inflicted so much pain, misery, genocide, barbarity on your community, the community of which you were born into, the fact that justice was meted out, does that bring solace? Does that bring comfort? I think it matters a lot. Not so much, I think, because it brings solace, but because you can say, with this tribunal, we moved very deliberately from a world where arbitrary murder, breaking the law, was how people behaved, to one where we said there is a law for international behavior

which everybody ought to follow. Because in the end, what matters most, certainly I know it mattered to Anne Tusser, was the rule of law and being subject to the rule of law. That is the defining and precious element in democracy and in an ordered society. So it's not so much the solace, but the thought that potentially we live in a better world because of the recognition of how the law matters and how the law must be observed. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished.

Thank you for making it here, this episode of Dan Snow's History. I really appreciate listening to this podcast. I love doing these podcasts. It's a highlight of my career. It's the best thing I've ever done. And your support, your listening is obviously crucial for that project. If you did feel like doing me a favor, if you go to wherever you get your podcasts and give it a review,

give it a rating, obviously a good one, ideally, then that would be fantastic. And feel free to share it. We obviously depend on listeners, depend on more and more people finding out about it, depend on good reviews to keep the listeners coming in. Really appreciate it. Thank you. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would

say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.