Dan Snow's History Hit - The Nuremberg Trials: 75th Anniversary

Episode Date: December 2, 2020

Tom Bower joined me on the podcast to discuss the history and legacy of the Nuremberg Trials.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History here. You thought the Second World War anniversaries were over, but they're sort of not really, because 75 years ago this month, the Nuremberg Trials opened in the city of Nuremberg in Germany. The great powers came together and decided it would punish major criminals of the European axis for war crimes. So 200 German war crime defendants were tried at Nuremberg and there would be almost 2,000 tried elsewhere through traditional channels of military justice. The

Soviets wanted to do it in Berlin, the capital of what they call the fascist conspirators. But Nuremberg was chosen partly for prosaic reasons because the Palace of Justice there was very big and largely undamaged by the bombing and the occupation of Germany. And also because Nuremberg was the, let's remember, the ceremonial birthplace of the Nazi party, if you like, where the party had those gigantic propaganda rallies in the 1930s. It's there, as we learned the other day, talking to Frank Madonna on the rise of Hitler, the Nuremberg laws were passed by the Reichstag while it was in session in Nuremberg, which laid the foundations of the Holocaust, effectively. It banned intermarital intercourse between Jews and other Germans and began that process that would end up in racial

genocide. So Nuremberg it was. On this podcast, I have got Tom Boer. He's a journalist, a writer here in the UK. He's written many best-selling books, many hard-hitting investigations over the years. Years ago, he wrote a book called Blind Eye to Murder about the Nuremberg trials, and I thought I'd get him on for the anniversary. You can watch all of our Second World War content, if you like, at History Hit TV.

It's a digital history channel like Netflix. Get over there, use the code POD1, P-O-D-1. You get a month for free in your second month, which is one pound, euro or dollar. Pretty sweet deal. In the meantime everybody enjoy listening to tom boa tom thank you very much for coming on the podcast what are the big lessons that we should be thinking about on this anniversary of the nuremberg trial should we be patting ourselves on the back and talk about international law and precedence? Or should we remember

some of the hypocrisy and the politics that got in the way? Well, I think we should first of all remember that it was an amazing feat to establish the court and to establish the guilt. And that was because the prosecution very well established their guilt through documents and through oral evidence. Of course, there were a lot of hiccups on the way during the trial, but my feeling is that if we hadn't had the Nuremberg trial, anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial would be far more rampant now than if we'd not had the Nuremberg trial. the legacy of the Nuremberg trial was that we know for certain that the Germans deliberately tried to murder the Jews, that the Germans waged an aggressive war, that they conspired to cause mayhem across Europe and dominate Europe. And that was established very conclusively in the trial.

Why did the trials take place? Was it a new idea? Well, the trial took place very much as an American idea. Churchill and the British government wanted to shoot the top 50 Nazis without trial at the moment they were captured. And they resisted what was entirely an American idea, very much till the last moment in 1945. It was born in Washington, where undoubtedly some of the greatest British common lawyers live and work and they just thought that they had to have a

venue to establish the guilt, originally the conspiracy by the German government, German establishment to cause war and murder. It developed in America over two years before they actually got the ideas, but they roped in some amazing legal minds. And so by the time at the end of the war in June, the British gave up their opposition to a trial. The Russians always wanted a trial. The French just followed on. And it was a hodgepodge, not least because Germany was in ruins. And there was obviously a huge suspicion by the Americans, not least the British too, of the Russians, what they'd done under Stalin. So it wasn't an easy trial, but it was a wonderful example of justice. Let's talk about some of the accused. You've got Martin Bormann,

Karl Dönitz, who was in charge of the accused you got martin borman karl durnitz who was in charge of the navy from 43 onwards and ended up briefly being hitler's successor goering of course did they acquiesce to the process they take part in the process the selection of the defendants was not only on the basis of their notoriety like goering who clearly was one of the great leaders and hess of course the the deputy leader, but also because they wanted to have representatives of each of the so-called criminal parts

of the Nazi German state. So they wanted someone connected to the SS, someone connected to the army, someone connected, as you say, to the Navy, someone connected to the Gestapo. So it went through an industry of course although of course people like kaltenbrunner very incriminated a gestapo officer he was there because he was a

very evil man and rightly hanged at the end or hans frank the governor of poland where he murdered several million these were people who were certainly evil. So it was a mixture. And of course, the other side were people like Speer, Albert Speer, the architect, so-called, who was also Minister of Armaments, and his deputy, Sauckel. And it got to an extraordinary situation where Speer, who effectively was in charge of German industry using slave labor, was given a 20-year sentence, whereas his deputy, Sauckel, who was a very common working-class man who did what Speer told him to do, was hanged. And of course, there were acquittals. There was Schacht, the head of the bank, the Reichsbank, who undoubtedly had financed Hitler and represented financiers in the trial, who had a lot to answer for, of course.

But he'd ended the war in a concentration camp. So you could easily plead that he'd been a resistance to Hitler and in the end he was acquitted. 75 years ago this month, the first session is presided over. Under what law were they being tried? Well, they're being tried under international law, so-called, but also it was a very nebulous law. Crimes against humanity, which has become very fashionable now, was completely unknown at the time. There was a war of aggression, which had really started in the First World War and came out of an agreement called the Kellogg-Brion Pact. The Americans were very keen on that. There was the crimes of conspiracy. It was all the very

beginnings of international law in many ways, but that's nothing wrong with that. It was an unprecedented war. And the key was that you needed, at the same time, unprecedented law to cope with that terrible crime that the Germans had committed. Did they recognise the authority of the court, these defendants? Well, they were forced to. One of the tricks of the prosecution was not to give the defence much chance to defend themselves. Although they spoke often at great length in their own defence, they weren't able to get hold of documents and call many witnesses to plead for their innocence. In that sense, it was a show trial. But I think they understood that the victors were going to have their day in court, so to speak.

And they played along with it. After all, they hoped, probably all of them, that they were going to get away with it. And, of course, the Germans would say that the blanket bombing of Nuremberg itself, but also Dresden, was itself a war crime. But also, I think the defendants very much saw it as a somewhat of Jewish conspiracy against them, Jewish revenge, because a lot of the American lawyers were Jewish. So that's where they were fascinated and obviously had a good motive, wanted to bring these people to court. They sat under the spotlights. They took part. Very often, the judges got very fed up with it all. Very often, the prosecutors got fed up with it all. Very often the prosecutors got fed up with it all.

It was very difficult. Many languages, translations. The Germans didn't understand the procedures that well. The Anglo-American war procedures, disputes between the judges. It wasn't an easy trial, but the result was very important for history and for Europe. Did any of them manage to put in a good performance, quote unquote? Were they tried as a group or did some individuals have more success than others? No, very much an individual trial. In that sense, I think it was pretty, in inverted commas, honest. I mean, as I said,

Speer, a middle class, very educated, erudite architect, he convinced the judges that he should be not executed, but his deputy was. Goering was going to be executed whatever happened, as were the two generals Keitel and Jodl, because they had under them invaded Russia, aggressive war, allowed a lot of mass murders to happen under their control. They're very much architects with Hitler. So they weren't going to impress the judges. Schacht, the banker, did impress the judge. And even Sir Paul Hess, after all, he flew to Britain in 1940, and therefore he could plead that he had tried to stop the war. So I think it was individuals. It was in that sense, it wasn't mob rule. And the judges, according to their own notes, had fierce debates about the fate of the 22 in the courtroom, and disagreed and

then took a vote. Did some of them use the dock to actually continue their Nazi agenda? Yes, I think not just Streicher, but also Goering too. One of the points you don't find in that trial is any repentance. These were grown mass murderers. These were criminals. These were gangsters. They were not people who were going to in any way apologize for what they'd done. They were very keen on justifying their behavior and challenging the prosecution. whether the German people were listening and taking, absorbing the criminality of the people they'd, many of them, most of them had followed for the previous 13 years. And the evidence is that very little of the trial after the first week actually reached the German people who were obviously struggling to survive anyway. But the trial did not have, even in history, a great resonance in Germany itself. Did the trial, as it went on, because it went on from now in 1945 for about a year, did it get overtaken by the geopolitics, by the frosting of the relationship between the Allies?

And did it change, did its purpose change, the politics of the trial change through its duration? Absolutely. I think as the year 1946 progressed and the differences developed between the Allies, which were already there obviously before and during the war, but became more exacerbated, there was great suspicion. The condition of Germany was such that the Allies had to find a way to sustain the country so it didn't starve. There were political differences between the three Western Allies and Russia. So the Nuremberg trial became forgotten, not least because it was going on for so long and the continent was struggling to get over the war. So to that extent, it did become a victim of the developing Cold War. it did become a victim of the developing Cold War.

And worst of all, I think, was that the British were never keen on prosecutions and they were never keen on denazification. And the British then became somewhat of a safe haven for very incriminated Nazis, whereas the Americans throughout most of 1946 were still hunting down Nazis and kicking them out of positions of government and courts and things like that. So there was an underlying tension even between Britain and America about the fate of the Nazis. Why was Britain more friendly to Nazi war criminals?

I think the British firstly never really understood what was happening in Nazi Germany. They didn't really understand what had happened to the Jews in Eastern Europe or what had happened to the Eastern Europeans. The Americans were a bit more sensitive, but still also quite ignorant. There was an extraordinary moment

where the prosecutor was talking about the Reich Marshal in the Nuremberg trial, and Lawrence, the British judge, said, who are you referring to? And he said, Reich Marshal Goering. I mean, the ignorance was remarkable. So the British judge, said, who are you referring to? And he said, Reich Marshal Goering. I mean, the ignorance was remarkable. The British were more sympathetic because they just saw it as another war. The Americans had come to Europe to cleanse. They'd come to build a new society. But even in that sense, neither Britain nor America really had much of a plan to rebuild Germany. It was a huge undertaking. And the British were more pragmatic. They thought the people who'd done any job, whether it was a police chief or the head of a court or a teacher for the previous 13 years, would leave them in charge because otherwise you'll get someone who doesn't know the job, even if he was an incriminated Nazi. The Americans

for the first year weren't prepared to do that. You've written a book and you actually say that they turned the blind eye. I mean, are you referring to the trial of these senior Nazis themselves? Or is this more generally in German society when, for example, cases were tried by the German courts, a blind eye was turned to murder? Well, I think the blind eye to murder went right through the German society until probably the early 70s. And it started with the British very much. They allowed Nazis to be reinstated. The Americans as well gradually had to do the same, although they did prosecute after the main Nuremberg trial. They had the subsequent Nuremberg trials of doctors, industrialists, bankers, very incriminated SS men. And they

really did try to bring justice to the country and to get the guilty to face their crimes. But even at the end of the process, towards the end of the 40s, they brought in judges from America who were sympathetic to the Germans. And the sympathy started really from anti-Semitism amongst the judges and amongst the British and American administrators of post-war Germany, it must be said, and also fear of communism. The Germans were a bulwark against the Russians, and therefore it was wrong to alienate people who needed as allies. So that was the mix at the end of 46, 47.

Let's come to the end of the process. Men like Frick, Ribbentrop, Keiteljodl, they were hanged. They were hanged. I don't think anyone had any regrets about their fate. I think it was important for Germany. Those sort of people couldn't survive, so there'd be some sort of heroes in the wings. There was great thoughts, of course, how Hitler, when he'd been locked up after the putsch in 23, he then came out the hero with a book. They didn't want to have any locked up heroes, so to speak. So it was important to start that cleansing process. And I think in hindsight, no German or anyone would say

that those lives were worth preserving, considering the monstrosities of their crimes. I think Nuremberg set an amazing precedent in terribly difficult circumstances, thanks to some astonishingly good American lawyers. And I think that the subsequent history of Germany was in the balance. the subsequent history of Germany was in the balance. Blind Eye to Murder was written in the late 70s when most of German society was still run by incriminated Nazis, whether industry or the courts or government,

the schools, the doctors. It was awful. But somehow, with the process of time and the death of those people and also realisation, after the Eichmann trial, and after the kidnapper murder of Hans Martin Schleuer in the late 60s, which was a very important moment, he was an industrial leader. He'd also been in the SS in Czechoslovakia. He was kidnapped and murdered by the Baader-Meinhof group. Haider-Meinhof group. The Germans began to realize that what had happened at Nuremberg, the judgment that Germany had faced, was not complete. By any reckoning, there were at least 100,000 people in Germany guilty of murder during the Third Reich, and only a fraction. Most of them were reinstated and given their lives back and their prosperity, and kept the property which they'd stolen. That was the appalling blind eye, so to speak.

They profited from the war and they kept it. So that was why I wrote the book. And it shocked the Germans. And more importantly, it shocked many British officials who'd been part of that process. That generation's dead now. And all that survives is the legacy. And that is what Nuremberg is. It's the legacy of that is what lorenberg is it's the legacy of that if you do wrong you must be punished goring managed to slip out of the noose didn't he poison

himself shortly before he was to be hanged and probably got the poison for an american i don't think that really matters he's dead thank goodness he's dead i mean what's so fascinating is that none of the leaders of Nazi Germany really survived other than Speer. And I would contend that it was not to society's benefit that Speer came out after 20 years, wrote some books which were hugely popular, became a celebrated ex-Nazi, became a celebrated ex-Nazi, fortificating about the Third Reich, cleansing his role, cleansing terrible deeds,

which had happened under Hitler. It would have been better if we hadn't had that opportunity, in my view. But there we are. It hasn't damaged us. You feel that a lofty aspiration to Nuremberg, that it would teach leaders

and dissuade people from committing war crimes. I mean, obviously, there have been many terrible, savage acts of genocide and war crimes in the second half of the 20th century and this one, but you feel that Nuremberg remains important? Nuremberg remains important because it wasn't going to prevent Milosevic committing his crimes in Yugoslavia. But anyone who follows Milosevic now knows that the court of The Hague is there, and it is only there to mete out justice to these murderous leaders because of Nuremberg. It was a mess, Nuremberg, in many ways. You can easily criticize it as victor's vengeance or whatever. extraordinary principle of international justice and peace. It was a terrific triumph for a group of American lawyers who worked terrifically hard to put it together, to understand what to do. And I think we should be very grateful for it, despite all its flaws. The flaws have disappeared, the principle has survived, and that's what's good about it.

Well, thank you very much indeed for coming on the podcast. As you say, your most recent book is not about Nuremberg, it's about Boris Johnson making ways, which we should perhaps get you on to talk about again. But that book is out now, is it? That's out now, yeah. The Gambler. How's that gamble paying off for him? Well, we'll see.

There's another history lesson. Too soon to see. Well, make sure you go and get The Gambler, everybody. Have a look at that. So thank you so much, Tom Boyer, for coming on the podcast. Thank you. on the podcast.

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