Forbidden History - The Nuremberg Trials: The Real Story

Episode Date: October 6, 2026

Historian Nigel Jones takes us inside the Nuremberg Trials, where leading Nazis faced justice. What did it take to hold the men behind the Holocaust to account? Cast List: Eric Meyers: Narrator Nigel Jones: Historian Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Book hot fairs and vacation packages today. Nice travels. Welcome to the Forbidden History podcast. Be sure to catch our Patreon exclusive Inner Circle series, featuring live expert interviews and deep dives into your favorite topics. Thanks for supporting the show. By late 1942, Nazi Germany's years of extraordinary military success are at an end. In North Africa, British-led forces defeat their German counterparts at El Alamein.

While in the east, a Soviet counter-offensive encircles an entire German army at Stalingrad. As the Allies increasingly dare to hope for victory, one question is becoming more and more urgent. How should the Nazis pay for their crimes? Broadly speaking, Stalin, ruthlessness of the Russians, wanted to take actual revenge on the Germans right down to quite low levels. If Stalin gets his way, many thousands of Germans will simply be shot, executed, or worked to death in cold blood. Britain's Prime Minister favours a more measured approach, but only just. Churchill was for summary executions of the leaders and the leaders only. He didn't want this sort of rough justice visited on the whole population.

Standing in the way of the leaders paying for blood are the Americans, who are asking for the Americans, argue that the leading Nazis should face a courtroom trial in front of the world's press. They wanted there to be an actual moral difference between their form of justice and what the Nazis had just perpetrated. The idea of a trial sounds simple and obvious, but actually making one work in practice is anything but. How do you put an entire regime in the dock? Who do you prosecute?

What do you charge them with? When the victors write the rules without turning justice into revenge, these questions will be answered on the long road to Nuremberg, where a series of trials will change the meaning of international justice to this day. To take us through the story is author and historian Nigel Jones. They seem to want to pick someone representing each aspect of the Nazi regime. They wanted to show the Nazi crimes to the world. They wished to show the enormity of the Nazi crimes.

The general attitude to the defendants was, this is victor's justice. Welcome to the podcast series that explores the past's darkest corners, sheds light on the lives of intriguing individuals, and uncovers the truth buried deep in history's most controversial legacies. I'm Eric Myers. And this is forbidden history. To us today, and to the Allies who had only recently liberated Nazi Germany's concentration camps, the criminality of the Nazi regime seems beyond question. But in 1945, as the victorious Allies assemble in London to create the framework for the upcoming trial, moral certainty collides with legal reality.

Some of the crimes the Nazis had committed broke laws that already existed. existed. The rules of war prohibit actions such as murdering prisoners, killing hostages, or abusing civilian populations. But Nazi criminality has gone far beyond what international law is equipped to deal with. I think they wanted to nail the Nazis as having committed crimes that have never ever been committed by a state before, that the Nazi crimes went beyond acts of war that have been committed before and I think they wanted to sail this was the worst regime in modern history. No state had ever done this before. No states had ever set out to actually deliberately

exterminate members of a race of a racial and religious group purely on the grounds that these people were born, Jewish say. And no state had deliberately set out to inflict war as a sort of atrocity against another state for ignoble reasons. want to prosecute individual Nazis for starting an aggressive war, something usually only handled on the level of a state. More than that, some of the Nazis' atrocities had been committed against civilians under Germany's own authority. Nazi Germany had its own domestic legal system, and traditionally what a government does

to its own people is largely considered its own business. law is not clearly equipped to prosecute them. The solution is audacious. If existing international law isn't sufficient, the Allies will have to push it somewhere. It has never been before. And body of new law was set up specifically for Nureberg and for the tribunals, and these laws had never existed before. And so we were saying, look, we are making these new laws, crimes against humanity, levelling war crimes. There were four. categories like that, which we are going to try you for. The key legal innovations in the Charter include the concept that an individual can now be

prosecuted for planning, starting or waging an aggressive war. It also creates the concept of crimes against humanity. A government cannot escape international responsibility simply because its own laws permit atrocities against civilians. And crucially, individuals. individuals themselves can be held responsible under international law. Being a government leader does not protect them, and simply claiming you are following orders does not protect them either.

The Charter gives the Allies the legal framework they need, but some of its innovations are controversial, and that argument isn't going to go away. With the legal framework in place, the next question is a more practical one. where should the trials be held? The answer will give the proceedings their name and carry a potent historical irony.

Nuremberg. But the reason for its selection is a practical one. It had a jail and a courtroom attached, which had escaped bombing, although most of the centre of Nuremberg had been heavily bombed and eviscerated. Actually, the courtroom and jail had miraculously escaped destruction,

so it was a very convenient place to both detain the Narsely. Nazi war criminals and to put them on trial. The symbolism of trying Nazi criminals in a place of such importance to the Nazis cannot be missed either then or now. It was a very important city for the Nazis. They had held their annual party rallies there every September until the outbreak of World War II and Hitler regarded it as one of his favorite cities in Upper Bavarian Franconia.

And it was also in the center of Germany. It wasn't in the east which was occupied by the Soviets or in the far west, which was largely occupied, but it was occupied the Western powers, but it was in the geographical center of Germany. As well as being, of course, a very symbolic Nuremberg town. You had all these legends which the Nazis made much of, like the master singers of Nuremberg and that it was a very historic medieval center

of German civilization, if you like. Each of the four victorious allied countries, appoints a judge and an alternate judge who will attend proceedings and step in if the principal judge becomes ill or otherwise unable to continue. The rulers of France put forward French legal experts, legal justices. There were generally people who obviously had no taint of any sort of sympathy for the Nazi regime. You know, there wouldn't have been a British law who'd been a member of Mosley's fascist blackshirts, for example, or a French judge who'd been a collaborator with the Nazis and also someone with some knowledge of jurisprudence and the background to the charges

that were being laid against the defendants. And it also helped, of course, if they spoke a foreign language, either German or Russian or something like that. Now they need to choose which Nazis to put in the dock. With it simply not practical to put an entire country on trial, the Allied prosecutors assemble a group intended to represent the political, military, and economic machinery of the Nazi state. They seem to want to pick someone representing each aspect of the Nazi regime.

Well-known figures are Joachin von Ribbentrop, the Nazi foreign minister, formerly the Nazi ambassador in Britain, Albert Speer, who had been, first of all, Hitler's favorite and personal favorite, and later on the munitions

minister, who, by the use of slave labor, get Germany in the war, probably for as long as maybe two years longer prolong the war than it would otherwise have done. And Kaltunner, who was the surviving chief man in the SS Gestapo state, he had succeeded Reinhardt-Hydrich as the chief of the SS under him. The leading criminal there, both in terms of the position he held in the Third Reich, as number two to Hitler, and his combative, intelligent personality was Hermann Goering.

In all, the Allied prosecutors eventually select 24 of the surviving Nazi leadership to face trial. Where the most senior figures are dead or missing, they cast their eyes further down the hierarchy. Goebbels committed suicide with his wife and children in the Berlin bunker along with Hitler, just a couple of days after Hitler's death, so he wasn't available for trial. Instead, they put up a radio broadcast, and it was nothing more than a voice behind a microphone. called Frischer. And most of the other defendants in Nuremberg had no idea who this man was.

Likewise, they put up a man named Stryker, who was the editor of a racist propagandist sheet called de Stürmer, the Stormer, which had been particularly notorious for its hostility for whipping up anti-Semitism against the Jews. So they wanted to put him as a symbolic anti-Semitic figure, i.e. the chief Jew baiter of Nazi Germany, even though he had never had a really important role in the administration.

The Nazis are initially incarcerated together at a holding center in Luxembourg before being taken to Nuremberg and held in prison to await trial. They were all in solitary confinement in cells. They were pretty stringently kept there. They were all assigned a lawyer, a German lawyer, and if they didn't choose one, they were assigned one. And they did have limited meetings with their wives, with their families, but not many, and they were monitored at all times by guards outside.

And this is an ordinary jail, it's still used as a jail today, right next door to the court. To ensure they are fit to stand trial, they are psychologically assessed. Two American psychiatrists, one of them at least was Jewish, were assigned to interview all the Nazi war criminals in their cells before the trials and during the trials, and right assessments, right reports of their psychological state. They also were compelled to take IQ tests, and I believe that Speer and Goering came top of the IQ test, and Stryker, the editor of De Stürmer, the fanatical anti-Semite,

he came last. I can't remember what his actual score was, but he was generally reckoned to be the least intelligent. The industrialist Gustav Krupp is deemed medically unfit to stand trial due to poor health. Labor Minister Robert Lay will avoid the courtroom by committing suicide in its cell, while Martin Borman, Hitler's private secretary, is missing and will be tried in absentia. The trial is set to open on the 20th of November 1945.

But before it does, invitations are sent to the world's media, for this trial will not be held behind closed doors. They wanted to show the Nazi crimes to the world's, world. They wished to show the enormity of the Nazi crimes, particularly the Holocaust, the extermination, attempted extermination of the Jewish race in Europe in which up to 6 million Jews were murdered. They wanted to show that for the absolutely unprecedented atrocity that it was, and they wanted to show this before the cameras of the world so that as many people as possible could see this for themselves. And so, as the camera's roll, the trial begins.

On the second day, the defendants are called individually and enter their pleas. Without exception, each pleads not guilty. Then the case for the prosecution begins with the chief prosecutor for the United States. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson. Visit BetMGM Casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. 19 plus to wager.

Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor, free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. Jackson was an American lawyer, had established a reputation as a very strong prosecutor with a Christian background with a very moral framework. and he was considered an ideal lead prosecutor.

He was a strong speaker, he was eloquent, he was a clever man. In his opening speech, Jackson characterizes the Nazi regime as the product of a conspiracy to seize power, transform Germany according to Nazi ideology, and then make war on the world. And the defendants, even those who do not speak English, can understand his every word, thanks to new technology.

thanks to new technology that allows for the live translation of proceedings. All the defendants had real time had earphones on, they were simultaneously hearing a translation from the native journey. Not all of them spoke English, they weren't all that educated. And they were hearing this in a system, a simultaneous system, which had been developed by the computer company, the giant IBM, and had never ever been used in a trial before. And this was yet another breakthrough,

moment in international jurisprudence, if you like that. After explaining the theory of the case, over the next three months, the Allies produce evidence to back up their charges. In a testament to German efficiency, the Nazis' proclivity for record keeping comes back to haunt them. Much of the evidence of their crimes comes from archives preserved by the Nazis themselves. These were records of, for example, of meetings at which Hitler had threatened to make war, first of all, on Czechoslovakia and then on Poland.

These records existed. There have been memorandums written about acts like that. So that was useful in the crime of planning war, planning an aggressive war against other countries, at which certain officials had been present. Others were, for example, the statistics of slave labourers who had been put to work in the various projects like building the Atlantic War, which was useful in the indictment. of Speer, who'd be the munitions minister, so they couldn't really deny the evidence there. The prosecution then calls on eyewitnesses from across Germany and the former Third Reich.

These include survivors of extermination camps and Nazi occupation, as well as members of Germany's own armed forces. Witnesses were brought in from all over occupied countries such as witnesses from the French resistance. Another important witness was Field Marshal Paulus, who had been in charge of the Sixth Army in Stalingrad and eventually gone over to the Russians and become an anti-Nazi. And people like this were brought in to give evidence from inside the Nazi regime of the crimes in the Nazi regime. To illustrate the scale and the depravity of the Nazis' atrocities, the prosecution goes a step further, dimming the lights and projecting footage

that was filmed as Allied forces liberated concentration camps. They, like the trial, would be shown to audiences around the world. They actually had newsreels of the liberation of the camps and piles of bodies being bulldozed into pits. German civilians weeping as they came out of the camps where they had seen the crimes that had been committed on their behalf. So these were the most shocking of all. If you like, this was the first shocking.

shocking atrocity news story that was going to go ahead of many, many of Vietnam and Iraq. And we all used to seeing crimes and atrocities and horrors on our screens these days. But before Nuremberg, nothing like that had ever been seen by a worldwide audience before. For more than three months, the prosecutors tell the story of the Third Reich through captured documents, witnesses and film. And by early March, 1946, their main case is complete. Now the men in the dock will have to answer for it. From March to July, 1946, the defense presents its counter-arguments.

So how do Nazis argue that they're innocent? Well, one approach is a simple one. It's encapsulated in that well-known phrase, I was only obeying orders. They were carrying out the law as they understood it as the existing state law. The Nazis were writing the laws. They were merely carrying those out, so they had committed no crime. That was their defense broadly. The London Charter had already dealt with this line of defense.

An order from above does not automatically absolve the person who carries it out. A second related line of defense is that what they're being accused of were not crimes when they committed. them. Nuremberg is retrospective international justice, the laws having been written after the fact. The general attitude of the defendants was, this is victor's justice. The Nazi regime was the legally constituted authority of the state and they had to obey the laws as they were then, and there was no international system of justice that they were breaking. Others seek to distance themselves from the regime's worst crimes, claiming that

claiming ignorance or limited responsibility. Speer adopts perhaps the most sophisticated version of this defense. Speer was the only one, the only one of the indicted, who actually confessed that, yes, Nazism was evil, yes, I was seduced by Hitler, I was dazzled by the glamour, the false charisma and glamour of the Nazi regime. And these crimes were committed, although he falsely denied the worst of the crimes. In fact, he had been quite aware of both the Holocaust.

and the deaths of slave laborers. I absolutely think that Speer made a fool, both of the judges in the tribunal, and of journalists who examined his case in his lifetime. Some even hold a mirror up to the Allies themselves, arguing they had also committed crimes. You shouldn't really be trying us for so-called crimes that were committed in war, and you committed them as well.

The Soviet Union, in particular, had committed equivalent atrocity. Stalin's burges, which were partially known about at that time, and things like the mass rape of German women in Eastern Germany at the end of the war, crimes like that were on an equivalent scale of what the Nazis. In fact, probably more Russians died in Stalin's regime than were killed by the Hitler regime. Certainly that was the case. And so there was certainly a lot of accusations of hypocrisy

And another possible war crime, which has been mentioned a lot, was the mass bombing of German cities, largely by the Anglo-Americans, by the RAF during the night and the American Air Force, the USAF by day, which had leveled many of the major German cities to ruins and rubble and had killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, including, of course, women and children and non-companence. Arguably, the best performer is Hermann Goering. Goering wasn't some Nazi functionary. He had commanded the Luftwaffe, helped create the Gestapo, overseen Germany's rearmament, and stood as Hitler's designated successor.

And he takes to the dock, determined to command the room. Goering had always been personally the most popular member of the Nazi regime because he had a certain rough self-deprecating humor that everyone laughed about. He lost a lot of his notorious weight. notorious weight, and they weaned him off drugs. He'd been addicted to morphine and other drugs throughout his time in the Reich, which is partly why he lost his personal position, if you like, at Hitler's side. He had recovered a lot of his former intelligence and mental acuity.

Unlike his fellow defendants, when confronted with his crimes, Gurring does not deny being a leading Nazi, nor does he waver in his loyalty to Adolf Hitler. Instead, he focuses on minimizing his personal responsibility for crimes committed, while also defending the Nazi project. He ran rings round Robert Jackson by sheer cleverness. He was saying, this happens in war. You committed these crimes as well. What on earth are you doing?

You're only putting me on trial because you won the war, those sort of arguments. When he's challenged about Germany secretly preparing for mobilization, he retorts, I do not believe I can recall the publication of the preparations of the United States for mobilization. And while he accepts that terrible mass murders occurred, he claims neither to have ordered nor in some cases even known about them. Visit BetMGM Casino and check out the newest exclusive. The Price is Right Fortune Pick. BetMDM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly, 19 plus to wager.

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After the case for the defense is presented, the judges withdraw to deliberate. Finally, on the 1st of October, the defendants are brought back into the courtroom individually to hear their sentences pronounced. Of the 22 defendants whose cases were adjudicated, 12 received death sentences. The death sentences notably were Gerring himself, Stryker, the head of de Stürmer, Ribbentrop, the foreign minister, Kaltunner, the head of the SS Gestapo, were the main ones. Three are sentenced to life imprisonment.

Rudolf Hess was given a life sentence must against the wishes of the Russians, But he got off, A, because he looked absolutely and behaved and looked like a madman and people thought he was generally insane. And B, because he had defected to Britain or flown to Britain in 1941 quite early on before the worst crimes of the Holocaust had been committed. Four received fixed prison terms. Sir Albert Speer, the munitions minister and Baldav von Schirak, the head of the Hitler youth, were given 20-year sentences. and Karl Dernitz, the head of the Navy who had become a furor in Hitler's will, was given a 10-year sentence. Only three of the defendants are acquitted, including Franz von Pappen,

the man who had helped maneuver Hitler into the office of Chancellor 13 years earlier. He had actually brought Hitler to power by doing a backroom deal by which he went into coalition with Hitler, and he was later, he narrowly escaped death in the night of the Long Knives, and he was placed as ambassador first to Ostrom, finally to Turkey. The Germans disliked him. He was a very arrogant, aristocratic chap. The other acquittals are Hewemar Schacht, former president of the Reichsbank,

and Hans Fritsche, an official from the propaganda ministry. And with the sentences handed out, they are released. The seven to be sent to prison remain incarcerated at Nurember before being transferred to Spandau Prison in Berlin. For those sentenced to death, they returned to prison to await their fate, death by hanging, scheduled for October the 16th. But one of the condemned is determined to die on his own terms. Gering got the last laugh because although he accepted that he had been sentenced to death, he wanted what he called a soldier's death, which was execution by firing squad. And he thought hanging was a degrading criminal offense than that he wasn't a criminal.

he had been a soldier who just committed military activities. So on the night before he was due to be executed, they were monitoring his cell, of course, but they missed the fact that he managed to slip a cyanide capsule into his mouth, and by the time they heard him choking and saw him in his writhing on his cot in his cell, it was too late and he was already dead. To this day, no one can prove how Gering had obtained the cyanide or whether he had it all along.

But on the 16th of October, those that remain are led out to their executioner, John C. Woods, a man who appears to have lied about his qualifications. The hangman was an American staff sergeant called Woods, and unfortunately the executions were terribly botched. He got the length of the rope wrong, and instead of breaking the necks of the victims as they dropped, they were slowly strangulated to death, or some of them were anyway. The witnesses and the press were called into the gym, some members of the press to actually see the execution state base,

heard the ghastly sounds of strangulated noises as they were hanging and slowly strangling beneath the gallows. And so, with the executions complete, the first Nuremberg trial is over. The death sentences carried out by a man who had essentially lied on his resume. This will not be the end of the reckoning for the Nazis. Over the next three years, 12 further trials at Nuremberg will prosecute doctors, judges, SS commanders and senior military figures. But as the wheels of justice continue to turn, the horrors of Nazi Germany start to be overtaken by the new realities of the post-war world.

Many of the sentences imposed at Nuremberg will later be reduced. The Cold War was beginning and it was realized that the new enemy of the West allies and of Germany, Western Germany, was going to be the Soviet Union, Stalin's Russia, and they needed people who were competent, were technically competent, people who might have been tainted by their involvement in the Nazi regime, they needed them to staff the Cold War against Russia. Nevertheless, 177 more people stand trial, producing 24 death sentences, 20 life sentences, and 98 prison sentences of varying length. Nuremberg was never beyond controversy.

In the final event, it had been the victors that had created the court, selected the defendants, and even helped define the crimes for which they were tried. Crimes defined while carefully skirting around their own conduct. And yet, from this imperfect beginning, came a powerful legacy. were at success insofar as they did take a very public revenge against the leadership of the Nazis. And most of the notorious leaders of the Nazis died, were dead within two years the end of the war, either by their own hand or by the hand of the hangman at Nuremberg. So to that extent they were a success, they were also a success in establishing an international legal framework,

which whether you agree with it or not is an existence in the modern world. Those principles endure to this day. No office is high enough and no order absolute enough to put an individual beyond the reach of international law. Thanks for exploring the past with us today. If you like this episode, don't forget to leave a comment below and feel free to leave us a rating or review. Your feedback helps us reach more listeners like you. Thanks for listening. Advertising on Spotify with audio and display ads.

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