Short History Of... - The Nuremberg Trial

Episode Date: December 8, 2025

⁠A Short History of Ancient Rome⁠ - the debut book from the Noiser Network is out now! Discover the epic rise and fall of Rome like never before. Pick up your copy now at your local bookstore or visit ⁠⁠noiser.com/books⁠⁠ to learn more. As the Second World War ended and those who survived the horrors of Hitler’s violence struggled to process what had occurred, a unique response was demanded from the international community. Its form, the victors concluded, should be the criminal prosecution of those most culpable for the worst crimes of the Nazi regime. Known as the Nuremberg Trial, the first of these prosecutions required a redefinition of the law, and was seen as an important step in the prevention of any possible future revival of the Nazi movement. But how did the Allies work together to establish this unique judicial event? What dramas did the trial itself witness? And what were the consequences for those in the dock, and the world beyond? This is a Short History Of The Nuremberg Trial. A Noiser podcast production. Hosted by John Hopkins. With thanks to James Bulgin, Head of Public History at the Imperial War Museum, and author of Nuremberg, published to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the trial. Written by Dan Smith | Produced by Kate Simants | Production Assistant: Chris McDonald | Exec produced by Katrina Hughes | Sound supervisor: Tom Pink | Sound design by Oliver Sanders | Assembly edit by Anisha Deva | Compositions by Oliver Baines, Dorry Macaulay, Tom Pink | Mix & mastering: Cody Reynolds-Shaw Get every episode of Short History Of… a week early with Noiser+. You’ll also get ad-free listening, bonus material and early access to shows across the Noiser podcast network. Click the subscription banner at the top of the feed to get started. Or go to noiser.com/subscriptions Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Canada's Wonderland is bringing the holiday magic this season with Winterfest on select nights now through January 3rd. Step into a winter wonderland filled with millions of dazzling lights, festive shows, rides, and holiday treats. Plus, Coca-Cola is back with Canada's kindest community, celebrating acts of kindness nationwide with a chance at 100,000 donation for the winning community and a 2026 holiday caravan stop. Learn more at canadaswunderland.com. It is the 15th of April 1945. A young private in the British Army sits in the back of a military truck, part of a convoy rattling through the countryside of northern Germany. With the Second World War in its end game,

the Allies are advancing through the country as the Nazi regime crumbles. Yet there is no sense of triumph in the back of the truck, more simple apprehension as to what they will encounter. The word is that they are to distribute rations to distribute rations to civilian prisoners of war and that many of them are in a poor way. Soon enough, the truck slows at gates set into a perimeter fence that seemed to go on forever, clad in menacing barbed wire and with watchtowers rearing up at regular intervals. Beyond, lie row upon row of wooden huts. Once inside the compound, the driver killed

kills the engine and the soldier and his comrades spill out of the back of the truck, their heavy boots thumping down on the dusty ground. It is the smell that hits him first, a stench of sickness and death, and then the eerie quiet. Though he's been told there are thousands here, it's almost completely silent, as if the life has been sucked out of the place. Soon he spots his first corpse. Emaciated, dressed in a distinctive uniform of striped coarse material, it lies in the dust, flies swirling in the air above. He hardly dares believe his eyes, but then he sees another body and another.

He quickly loses count. Now he and a colleague push open the creaking door to one of the buildings. all about skeletal figures lie motionless, with only the occasional feeble cry or pitiful groan to distinguish who is alive and who dead. A senior officer clamps a hand on his shoulder. There is work to be done, food and medicine to be distributed. The soldier goes back to the truck and heaves a bag onto his shoulder, heading for a hut designated for supplies.

On his way, a young woman steps towards him, her hands cupped before her. He rifles through his pockets for a ration of chocolate. He's about to hand it over when a medic races over and stops him. A system will be too weakened, he explains. If she eats that, she'll likely be dead by tomorrow. Instead, she is led off for a medically approved ration that, hopefully, will slowly build back her strength. So, this is Bergen-Belsen.

Though the soldier had been certain the stories he'd heard about this concentration camp were exaggerated, now he sees the reality is worse than he could ever have imagined. And they say Hitler had a vast network of other camps just like it. The soldier looks for launly about him, wondering how it is possible for anyone to treat their fellow humans like this. For those in the centers of power, in Washington, Moscow, London and Paris, the question is, now that the war is coming to a close, how should the international community respond to such unparalleled crimes?

For as long as human beings have existed, they have committed atrocities against their fellow man. the systematic violence employed by Hitler's regime against anyone it considered an enemy was unprecedented. As the Second World War ended and those who survived struggled to process what had occurred, a unique response was demanded from the international community. Its form, the victors concluded, should be the criminal prosecution of those most culpable for the worst crimes of the Nazi regime. Known as the Nuremberg trial, the first of these prosecutions required a redefinition of the law

and was seen as an important step in the prevention of any possible future revival of the Nazi movement. But how did the Allies work together to establish this unique judicial event? What dramas did the trial itself witness and what were the consequences for those in the dock and the world beyond?

I'm John Hopkins. From the Noiser Podcast Network, this is a short history of the Nuremberg trial. By at least 1942, the Allies have some notion that the Nazi regime is overseeing a program of persecution against various groups based on ethnicity, political and religious belief, sexuality and disability. And of all of his enemies, Hitler considers the Jews to be number 1. Through a mass of intelligence, including intercepted communications and the testimony of

eyewitnesses and defectors, the Allies become aware of camps where inmates are used as forced labor and are dying in vast numbers. Even so, the full extent and nature of the persecution is not yet fully understood. Nonetheless, in December of 1942, 11 Allied nations sign a joint declaration condemning the regime in Berlin for what it calls its bestial policy of cold-blooded extermination. A year later, the three most powerful allied leaders, Joseph Stalin, F.D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill come together to promise that those German officials responsible will be made to answer for their actions. James Bulgin is the Imperial War Museum's head of public history and author of Nuremberg, published to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the trial.

But from 1943 in Moscow, Soviet Union, the US and Britain had issued this Moscow declaration, which committed to the concept of those nations standing in some form of judgment or there being some form of justice. But what the nature of that justice was, was completely undefined. It is only as the war draws to its conclusion and Allied troops serve. through enemy lands that the true scale of the horror comes to light, in particular with the liberation of concentration and death camps. Along with Bergen-Belsen, names like Auschwitz-Burkenau, Dachau, Buchenwald, Ravensbruck and Treblinka become shorthand for unspeakable inhumanity and mass extermination. That pledge of 1943 takes on new immediacy. The

core group of allied partners, the USA, the UK, the Soviet Union and newly liberated France, determine that they will join together to stand in judgment. But how to make such a trial work in practical terms? Legally, this is uncharted territory. In principle, a sovereign nation was essentially free to behave however it wanted to, free of any sense of sort of a higher authority. And it meant that somebody like Hitler could essentially behave within his own borders as he did without the threat of anyone kind of bringing him to justice on an international level. And so this is this really significant moment when nations of the world come together and say, well, actually, no, there are principles which are greater than any of your independent national

convictions, which we all hold to be eternal and essential and true. And we will presume to try and enforce those and stand in judgment of those who don't adhere to them. One problem is that each of the four nations has a different idea of what justice looks like. Churchill initially argues for summary executions of those whose guilt is beyond doubt, without the inconvenience of a trial. Stalin, meanwhile, pushes for a judicial process, but one that virtually assumes guilt. He talks of executing 50,000 or more German officials, although he later claims he said this in jest.

The Americans are keen for the same process as, any other judicial trial. The Americans really advocated for the idea of some sort of formal judicial process, and eventually everybody came on side with that. The challenge was the nuts and bolts of how you reconcile the distinctions between four quite different structures of formal justice. In May 1945, President Truman begins working on the establishment of an international military tribunal, the IMT, to oversee the process.

The following month, delegates from the four nations gather in London to thrash out the details. One of the first issues these lawyers and legal scholars must address is the basis upon which defendants may be tried. What charges can they face when no existing laws seem to fit the bill? I think the big concern, which they were obviously very mindful from the start, everybody was very mindful of, was this question of this fundamental legal principle, but it's it's impossible to be judged on a crime that wasn't a crime that was first committed. They did a lot of wrangling and thinking and theorising to get beyond that one.

And they sort of arrived at the principle that they were kind of de facto crimes that just hadn't necessarily been formally encoded. As well as a simple pursuit of justice, a trial is seen as a means of forcing a confrontation of the truth upon the German population, many of whom claim to have no idea what has been committed in their name. There is a belief among the allies that acknowledging the extent of the horror is a vital step to ensuring that no substitute Hitler can sweep in again. All the while, the ties that so recently bound the USSR and its satellites to its capitalist allies in the USA and Western Europe are already fraying. Few doubt that serious struggles lie ahead,

and the trial is felt to be crucial to drawing a line under the Second World War before facing what is to come. There is a genuine appetite to ensure the legitimacy of the trial. No one wants to be accused of exercising victor's justice. It is agreed that defendants will enjoy the legal assumption of innocence, while a prosecution team attempts to prove guilt beyond reasonable doubt. Instead of a jury, a panel of four judges, one from each of the allied powers, supported by an alternate, will preside over the proceedings.

Over a period of six weeks, the London delegates also hammer out details of the charges. They settle upon four. Firstly, the charge of Conspiracy to Wage Aggressive War, something particularly championed by the Americans, and which covers crimes committed before the war began. This first charge also covers conspiracy. to commit the other three, which are crimes against peace, dealing with the violation of international agreements,

war crimes, encompassing any contravention of the accepted rules of war, and finally, crimes against humanity. The first time such a charge has been brought. What crimes against humanity was doing, which had been advocated for by a lawyer in the British team called Hershal Lauter was the idea that there were inalienable rights that you intrinsically have as a civilian, and that any country which is denying you those rights is acting unlawfully.

That's a really important concept. While genocide is not specifically designated, it falls under the remit of this last charge. On the 8th of August, the London Agreement is published, clearing the path to the proceedings. At Capital One, we're more than just a credit card company. people just like you who believe in the power of yes. Yes to new opportunities. Yes to second chances. Yes to a fresh start.

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That's winter ready. Now, lease at 2026 KixS front wheel drive for 3.49 monthly at 3.9%. Or get $2,000 cash purchase bonus on remaining 2025 models. Visit your local Nissan dealer today or nissan.ca for more details. Leasturn for 48 months with 1,249 down conditions apply. The location for the trial is itself a sensitive subject. Everyone agrees that it must be in Germany, in front of the German people. But the capital, Berlin, is in a terrible condition.

Various other settings are considered before Nuremberg is chosen, a much smaller city within the American-controlled sector of the country. Though it, too, suffered a pummeling, a large courtroom in the Palace of Justice has survived bombardment, as has its complex of prison cells, and there is luxurious accommodation nearby. Crucially, there is a symbolic significance too. They'd hosted these notorious Nuremberg rallies there

through the earlier years of the regime, and they were these big public spectacles with hundreds of thousands of people in attendance and the Hitler standing on this huge podium and speaking. They also, for that reason, because it's where they were announced, became associated with the Nuremberg Laws, which codified who was or wasn't a Jew and prescribed so-called interracial relationships between Jewish and non-Jewish people, etc. With the location and the personnel now decided, the major question remains who should actually

face trial. The number of those who bear some complicity in the death and mistreatment of millions of victims is all but incalculable. The total number of camps is at least in four figures, for instance, and those culpable range from high-level decision-makers to military and administrative staff, not to mention local civilians who turned a blind eye to what was happening on their doorstep. But though there are hundreds of thousands and potentially millions who could be held to account, the decision is taken to pursue a relatively small number, but all with real heft within the

Nazi machine. The idea was that there would be representatives from across the various strata of the Third Reich, so, you know, military, industrial, economic, political, so they wanted to ensure that there was a cross-section. The plan is to put a total of 24 people on trial. There is no great magic to this number. Rather, it is another nod to logistics, as the quarter of the court. in Nuremberg has benches that will accommodate a maximum of two dozen defendants.

The prosecutor said about compiling lists of potential defendants over the summer and early autumn of 1945, but it's far from straightforward. Several of the most obvious candidates are already dead. Hitler took his own life at the end of April as defeat became inevitable. His confidant and propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels followed suit a day later, along with his wife, with whom he also killed their six children. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, also chose suicide after falling into allied hands. By and large, the prosecutors look to those they already have in custody. Already held by the Americans is the next most senior surviving member of the Nazi hierarchy, Herman Goering, head of the Luftwaffe, and for a time Hitler's expected successor.

Hitler's former deputy, Rudolf Hess, meanwhile, has been a prisoner in the UK since 1941, when he crash landed over Scotland, apparently on a secret mission to make peace with the British government. More defendants come from those rounded up by the British in late May following Hitler's suicide. They include the Admiral Karl Dernitz, who briefly served as president after Hitler's death, the armaments minister Albert Speer, the Nazi philosopher come government minister, Alfred Rosenberg and Minister of Foreign Affairs Joachim von Ribbentrop. Martin Borman, Hitler's powerful private secretary, is missing, but is nonetheless selected for trial in absentia.

Aside from that, they started to try to work through who was left, who could be identified. And as you got further down the list, that became less obvious. Among the others, for example, is the broadcaster Hans Fritzscher, a lower-grade substitute for the deceased propagandist in chief. Goebbels. They needed a representative from that department and also because he was in Soviet custody. There was a kind of a politics going on with that. Because of a fear of the Soviet Union, the vast majority of people trying to escape at the end of the Second World War escapes towards the West because they would far rather be in the custody of Britain or America than they would

be in the custody of the Soviet Union, which meant the Soviet Union could offer very few prisoners for the trial. On the 12th of August, a cargo plane lands in Nuremberg, laden with defendants. Military ambulances then transfer them to the prison wing of the city's Palace of Justice. The cells that will become their homes for the duration of the trial are small and primitive, with a toilet in one corner and a single plastic-covered window high up in the thick concrete wall. Furniture consists of a rudimentary bed and a flimsy table and chair, specifically designed to break under the weight of a standing man so as to deter suicide attempts.

Gurring is notably overweight and rumored to be addicted to morphine. But here he receives only the same basic ration as the rest of the civilian population delivered on a tray slotted through an opening in his cell door. The diet, in fact, promotes an upturn in his health. Beyond the cell block, American tanks are positioned ready to repel supporters of the prisoners keen to burst them out, or enemies intent on doing them harm. Indictments are formally issued on the 19th of October. Less than a week later, defendant Robert Leigh, head of the Nazi's labor movement, is found dead in his cell, having strangled himself.

It is a bitter blow to the authorities, who subsequently post a 24-hour guard to every cell. Well, inmates must now sleep with faces and hands visible above their blankets. Even spectacles are banned, for fear that the glass might be repurposed for self-harm. Two American psychologists carry out prisoner assessments on a regular basis and feed intelligence back to the prosecuting teams. Not long after Leigh's death, it's decided that another defendant, Gustav Krupp, head of the famous Krupp company that has kept the German war machine. stocked with armaments is not well enough to stand trial.

Attempts to replace him with his son, himself a prominent figure in the family business, are rejected by the trial judges. Headed by the British Lord Justice Geoffrey Lawrence, they argue that defendants cannot simply be substituted to suit the prosecution. With lay dead and Bowman's whereabout still unknown, there will now be just 21 defendants sitting in the dock. It is the morning of the 20th of November, 1945. An American guard opens the heavy oak door of Goering's dank cell.

Wearing his grey Luftwaffe uniform, stripped of all insignia, the 52-year-old rises to his feet. The guard turns and leads him down a long wooden corridor specially built to connect the cells and the courtroom. Moments later, they're at the courtroom door. As it opens, the room falls silent. A sea of people, hundreds of them craning their necks to get a look at the accused. Small armies of lawyers, interpreters, court officials, journalists from around the world, and a host of other invited guests. The guard ushers Goering to the defendant's benches, filling up with his co-accused. Some sit stony-faced, others whisper encouragement to each other.

There is even some laughter. A few try on the headsets, or fiddle with the dials of the groundbreaking new communication system, which offers simultaneous translations of every word of the proceedings into English, French, Russian and German, a world first for a major event. All the while, behind the men, stand a row of white-helmeted guards. Despite the dark wooden panelling that lines the courtroom, the guard finds himself squinting against the brightness in there. Some of the defendants are even wearing sunglasses. Improvements have been made to the lighting, partly to make life easier for the film camera operators spread around the room,

visibly prepping their machinery ahead of the start of the action. There is something almost theatrical about the setting. And Guring seems at home on this stage, a focal point for his fellow prisoners. It's almost 10 a.m. And the guard hears the whir of cine cameras springing into life. A marshal instructs the court to rise. Amid the scraping of chairs and shuffling of papers, four judges, one from each of the allied nations, enter the courtroom and take their seats.

Lawrence, the chief judge, raises his gavel and brings it down, crisply on the bench in front of him. The trial of the century is underway. Day one sees the reading of the vast, detailed, unprecedented indictment. When the defendants then respond, every single charge is met with a plea of not guilty. Goering, however, now attempts to use his brief first moment to make an impromptu speech. He tries to make a statement and he was cut off. immediately, I think, about Justice Lawrence.

So there was this sort of, I suppose, this clear statement from the court immediately to say this isn't an opportunity for you to bend these proceedings to your will. The second day begins with a spellbinding opening statement by the lead American prosecutor, U.S. Supreme Court Judge Robert H. Jackson. Over three and a half hours, he delivers one of the great courtroom orations. The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored

because it cannot survive their being repeated. While the strength of the prosecution team is never in doubt, it had been a concern that the accused would struggle to find decent representation. But despite the unheralded depravity of those on trial, recruitment turns out not to be a problem. After all, lawyers have the enticement of great living conditions here in Nuremberg. Put up in local hotels and requisitioned villas, they dine opulently and enjoy dances, cocktail evenings, nights around the pool.

There was a sort of a bonding experience that occurred for the people who were there. It was a very social thing. They were all in a different country. And in this sort of environment, there was a lot. of socialising and drinking and that kind of thing happening in the evening. The result is a courtroom stocked with top-level lawyers on both sides, motivated to perform at the peak of their game. But after the initial wave of public fascination, interest ebbs and flows.

The truth is that much of the proceedings are dry. With Jackson at the helm, the prosecutors are determined not to rely on witness testimony, which, while shocking, could be undermined by skilled defenders. Jackson decides instead to build his case around documents, thousands upon thousands of them. Everything from orders, reports, and correspondence from the highest levels of the German regime to camp inventories and train schedules used by the SS to organize the transportation of victims to camps. Although they pooled their resources, the four national prosecution teams worked to some

degree independently of one another. The decision was made that they would sort of divided the defendants across the prosecution teams. So each prosecution team would have a given number of defendants that they would build the case for. But it was a critical provision of the trial that any other team would also have the right to cross-examine that witness. So each defendant could be cross-examined four times. In the second week of the trial, the prosecution shows a film, featuring the work of allied photographers at various liberated concentration camps. As the lights are dimmed and a projector

wers into life, many in the courtroom succumbed to tears at the shocking images. They show instruments of torture, including whips and cudgels wound with barbed wire, the interiors of gas chambers where millions were slaughtered. Piles of skeletal corpses and vast open burial pits. Processions of the liberated, their figures emaciated, and their faces haunted even as they walk to freedom. The horror of their experiences inescapable. And that footage had a seismic impact on the people who were there.

Virtually all of them wrote about it afterwards. And the defendants certainly afterwards were very clearly aware that it was going to be very difficult for them to sort of wriggle out of the weight of what the film testified to it. It was a big moment. Similarly hard-hitting is evidence presented on the 13th of December from the Buchenwald concentration camp. This includes samples of tattooed human skin taken from the dead, allegedly to be used by the camp commandant's wife to make lampshades and other household furnishings. Also presented is the shrunken head of a murdered Polish prisoner that has been used as a paperweight.

There are instances of spell-binding witness testimony too, from both victims and perpetrators. In the first few days of January, taken to the stand is Otto Olendorf, the former head of Ainsatzgruppe D., a mobile death squad of the SS, responsible for the deaths of some 90,000 people in Eastern Europe. He might consider himself fortunate not to be among the accused. For now, he appears as a defense witness. But the prosecution seizes the opportunity to use his testimony to prove that mass murder was official Nazi policy.

He acknowledges that as far back as 1941, he knew of the intention to murder, or liquidate, as he prefers, Jews and communists as part of Germany's Soviet campaign. And Otto Ullandoff, who, you know, absolute despicable individual, his testimony at the IMT was chilling in its kind of cold discussion of mass murder of civilians and men, women and children. A month later, it is the turn of a very different character to testify, the celebrated Yiddish poet Abraham Sutskava. One of only three Jewish witnesses to give evidence, he attests that in his town of what is now Vilnius in German occupied Lithuania, only 600 of 80,000 Jews have survived the war. Among the victims is his own son, born in contravention of a German order

banning Jewish women from bearing children. His wife, he explained, witnessed the infant having his face smeared with an unknown substance before being flung back onto the bed by a laughing Nazi officer. The child died shortly afterwards. It was one of those moments that clearly made an impression because it acknowledges the specificity of Jewish persecution which the irony was never about, you know, that the Holocaust hadn't emerged as a sort of discrete entity

in the same way at the same time, but the sort of the dignity of Suskeva in that moment clearly had its own significance. Now, on the 8th of January, 1946, the prosecution moves from establishing the general, general criminality of the Nazi regime to focusing on individual defendants. The following weeks throw up more startling evidence, including from Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, best known for his surrender to the Soviet to the Battle of Stalingrad.

His testimony regarding German atrocities in Eastern Europe particularly implicates Goering and two other defendants, the military chiefs of staff Wilhelm Keitel and Alfred Yodel. By now, Goering's behavior both in and out of the courtroom is becoming unmanageable. Identified as the ringleader of the defendants, he does everything he can to cajole them into a united front. When there is a comment about the Allies' condemnation of his country's wars of conquest, he roars with laughter and points out that each of the Allies have undertaken plenty of such wars of their own.

He refuses to follow simple orders, too, like cleaning his own cell. To limit his influence, he is now prevented from eating with the other defendants on the days the court meets, though he still sits with him in the dock. Nonetheless, he receives an unexpected boost on the 5th of March, just a day before the prosecution rests. A speech given elsewhere by Winston Churchill warns of the growing division between the West and the Soviet East, and talks of an iron curtain descending across Europe. Goering and the defense team seize upon his words as evidence of disunity among the prosecuting nations and a glimmer of hope for the accused.

Maybe, they theorize, by exploiting this rift and highlighting the moral precarity of the involvement of the Soviets in the trial, they can manipulate the Allies into looking more favorably on the Nazi defendants. his big moment arrives on the 13th of March, 1946, a few days after the defense begins. With his eyes gleaming and his hair slicked back, he is determined to defend his beloved nation, and perhaps even more importantly, his own reputation. While he's careful not to take direct responsibility for specific atrocities, he speaks with pride about his role in building up Nazi Germany. When he is asked about his part in Germany's

rearmament, which violated post- First World War agreements, he says he is only sorry that they did not rearm more. Moreover, he considers Germany's various invasions to have been nothing more than a means to get back what is rightfully theirs anyway. He even quotes an observation by Winston Churchill that, in a struggle for life and death, there is no legality. For many Germans, Goering becomes a figurehead. fighting back against the perceived iniquities of justice imposed by the victors. After five days of watching his self-justification, Jackson gets the chance to cross-examine. Goering in all of his public statements was pretty clear about the fact that he thought that he was definitely going to be found guilty and executed. He went about the trial with a view to making his case and trying to get himself acquitted.

You know, he didn't go in there nailing his. credentials to all of the crimes involved and stuff. He was trying to sort of excuse himself. Gurring responds to Jackson's measured questions with long monologues that break his opponent's momentum and picks up the interrogator on any slight inaccuracy in the evidence, relishing the theater of it all. When Jackson questioned Gurring about the Nazi's secret pre-war plan to invade the Rhineland, Gurring mockingly responds that he cannot remember the Americans publicizing their own mobilization plans. The court erupts in laughter, and Jackson rips the headframes from his ears in frustration,

and even considers abandoning his cross-examination altogether. But Jackson gradually gets his case back on track. Goering is rattled when a document bearing his name is produced, authorizing plans for the final solution, planned extermination of the Jews. His defense that he used the term total solution, not final solution, rings hollow. As does his claim that what went on in the concentration camps was kept secret from both him and Hitler. When it is seasoned British lawyer David Maxwell Fife's turn to cross-examine, he too is successful

in linking the German to specific war crimes. In particular, he implicates the defendant in the massacre of 50, British Royal Air Force officers after their unsuccessful attempt to escape a prisoner of war camp, in due course immortalized as the great escape. There is worse to come for Gurring. On the 1st of April, the Commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp testifies about some of the horrors perpetrated by him and his underlings. He confirms how selections were made when each new train of prisoners arrived, so that anyone

not deemed fit to work, including almost all children, were immediately separated from the others. Told they were to be de-laust, instead they were exposed to cyclone B gas that killed them in under 15 minutes. After that, their bodies were sent to be burned, but not before their valuables, including even gold teeth, were extracted. Even so, he claims that officers like Kim were merely following orders, having been indoctrinated that the Jews were to blame for everything. The court listens to his evidence in stunned silence. Many eager to know when he too will face justice. So one of the strange things about the IMT, which sometimes gets forgotten, is that some of the most notorious perpetrators of what we now call the Holocaust appeared in the IMT as witnesses.

As the evidence against him continues to grow, even Gurrey. Goering's confidence wanes. On the whole, the defendants who follow Goering pale in the light of his Brewer performance. The lines of defence they adopt take on almost monotonous familiarity. The two core defences are, I didn't know anything about this. That comes up all the time, completely implausible. It would have been plausible then, certainly in terms of what we are now,

completely unsustainable, but that's certainly something which came up a lot. And then the other one was, I was just following orders. Interestingly, that defence has been more persistent, despite the fact that within the German military handbook, you know, distributed to servicemen, it explicitly says you're not allowed to follow orders, which are illegal, contravene, you know, the laws of the lands and laws of war.

But for some reason, that kind of got forgotten and they still tried to maintain this. But also, in many respects, they weren't following orders. They were sort of defining orders for themselves. This idea that they had absolutely no agency, or authority over their own decision-making every and all instance. It's highly convenient for them as a defence, but it also doesn't bear any close scrutiny whatsoever.

What also emerges is how most of these men, responsible for a genocide of almost unimaginable scale, are, on a personal level, utterly underwhelming. Hitler's former deputy, Rudolf Hess, cuts a particularly disconcerting figure, often distracted, gazing into the middle distance, as if completely detached from proceedings. one moment he claims to be suffering from amnesia

the next to be cured it is difficult even for the psychologists to get a firm grip on the real state of his mental health there's a lot of discussion of saying God can this really be these kind of supermen of the great German Reich they just look so mundane in these settings

obviously they weren't allowed to wear full uniforms etc so when they're stripped of all of those trappings and all of that sort of self-defined status They're almost kind of disappointingly normal. Perhaps the only defendant to rival Gering for impact is the youthful, well-born and debonair Albert Schwerer, an architect by profession who served as Hitler's Minister of Munitions. Testifying in June, seven months into the trial,

he at once accepts his share of collective responsibility while distancing himself from Hitler personally and any specific crimes. Where Goering has refused to apologize for being part of the generalized Nazi machine, that seems to be exactly what Speer is doing. He's saying, oh, of course, this is terrible that this was happening, and I knew about this, but I didn't know about this. And he's just finding ways to sort of navigate the complexities in a way that were clearly more digestible to people at the time.

The last of the defendants completes his testimony in late, late June. And after both sides sum up, Jackson closes with another memorable address. It is impossible, in summation, to do more than outline with bold strokes the vitals of this trial's mad and melancholy record, which will live as the historical text of the 20th century's shame and depravity. At the end of August, each of the defendants is allowed to present a final statement, then the judges convene to consider their verdicts. There is now a curious calm before the storm that blows in on the 1st of October when the

verdicts are handed down. Twelve of the defendants are sentenced to death by hanging. Among them are Goering and Booman, though it will later transpire that the latter has actually been dead since May, killed in uncertain circumstances. Seven others are convicted and given prison sentences of between ten. 10 years and life. Spears' strategy has worked to some extent when he is given 20 years, while one of his deputies is among those to face execution. Three men, a junior propagandist Hans Fritzcher, pre-war chancellor Franz von Pappen, and Yalma

Shaqt, formerly a prominent banker for the regime, are all acquitted. There's three acquittals, which I think probably was unexpected in a lot of places, and from the perspective of the prosecuting teams, undesirable and also embarrassing, that means that they hadn't successfully made their case. Those who work with, particularly Rhehama Schacht, was absolutely incensed. You know, he did a press conference shortly afterwards, absolutely incensed that he was ever there and obviously pleased to have been acquitted. Even so, the acquittals add credibility to the proceedings,

proving that this has been no show trial. Though the process has taken more than ten months, things now move quickly. Within ten days of the verdicts, all appeals are rejected. Now it is time to wait for the executions. Gurring considers death by hanging entirely beneath him. His legal team argue that he and other defendants with military backgrounds should meet their end in a more fitting way, by firing squad. But the demand is refused.

On the evening of the 13th of October, inmates and guards hear trucks arriving in the courtyard beyond their cells, unloading what it turns out is equipment for their gallows. Though their leader often boasted of a third Reich to last a thousand years, those who helped him in his project now have just hours left. It is the 15th of October. The guard stationed outside Guring's cell shivers imperceptibly, as an autumn chill courses through the prison block. There is the usual thrum of activity in the corridors, the noise of guards coming on and off-shift,

the occasional request for something or another from this cell or that, a senior officer discreetly giving orders to whoever needs to hear them. But there is a strange tension in the air tonight, a feeling that something might be afoot. And with the block bathed in light, it doesn't even feel like night time, although when the guard checks his watch it is just after half-past ten. He shines his light through the hatch in the door and peers in at his ward, reclining on his straw mattress, face and hands visible as required. Dressed in black silk pyjamas and a blue overshirt, he has been in a bad temper since receiving

the news that the firing squad idea has been quashed. At 10.40 p.m., the guard looks in again, but there is something wrong. Gerring's hand is up near his mouth, his face a rictus of pain. What's more, he appears to be choking. The guard calls for help and bursts through the cell door. But as panicked doctors arrive, shooing the guard out of the way, the prisoners' agonized spasms give way to a deathly stillness. The guard helplessly watches the medics try to resuscitate him. But it's soon clear, he is dead. Commanding officers now pile onto the scene, demanding to know what has happened.

The guard is taken aside, questions fired at him one after another. But he can only shrug in reply. Someone says Gurring has bitten down on a cyanide capsule, but he can make no sense of it. How could the poison possibly have found its way into the cell? The young man is ushered away for a more formal debrief. the disbelief in the corridor behind him, giving way to something more like resignation and anger. Gherring escapes his punishment by the narrowest of margins, as the executions have indeed been scheduled for this very night. There's various different theories about how that had occurred, but what it did mean is that he had this sort of final statement from him, I suppose.

In reality, it didn't change anything. You know, he still died, and he died, you know, within an hour of when he would have died anyway. But from his perspective, clearly he took some degree of something, what we might call it, satisfaction from knowing that he denied his captors the opportunity to kill him themselves. None of the other prisoners evade the fate to which they have been sentenced. In the early hours of the morning, the condemned are led one by one from their cells to the nearby gymnasium, where a wooden gallows has been specially constructed.

There they face justice in front of a small crowd of guards, military officials, and medical personnel, as well as a handful of designated witnesses and representatives of the press. After the last man succumbs to the hangman's noose, Gerring's corpse is also carried down on a stretcher so that his death may be formally recorded. His body photographed like the others before being taken to Munich to be cremated. The ashes are scattered into the local river. Those sentenced to incarceration, meanwhile, are moved to Spandau prison in West Berlin. The work of the International Military Tribunal is done.

Most of the international teams quickly pack up and return to their normal lives, but a group of Americans stay behind. The United States military government for Germany announces the first of 12 subsequent military tribunals that will try to still more officials, from doctors and judges to administrators and members of death squads. These hearings, known as the Nuremberg trials, as distinct from the Nuremberg trial that has just been, end only in 1949. 142 of a total of 177 defendants are convicted and 25 condemned to execution. There will be many more hearings against Nazis across Europe and beyond in the years and decades to come. Some even mop up witnesses from the original Nuremberg trial, like the Auschwitz

commandant and the head of the SS Mobile Death Squad, both of whom ultimately pay for their crimes with their lives. But these later hearings are administered by individual countries. The original Nuremberg trial, an astonishing logistical feat taken from conception to completion in less than 18 months amid all the upheaval of the immediate post-war period is a unique affair. It was the only truly international trial at Nuremberg, which involved the UK, the US, France and Soviet Union coming together to devise this kind of new process of justice in order to pursue the people that they considered to be most responsible for what happened during the Second War and the crimes that had occurred during the war. The trial held to account just a tiny proportion of all those that perhaps deserved to answer for Nazi crimes. Fewer than two dozen stood, for tens or hundreds of thousands, or perhaps even millions. But symbolically, it brought a measure of justice to that regime's legions of victims

and forced the German people to confront the horror of what had been done in their name and in many cases with their cooperation. In formulating new legal charges, the International Military Tribunal also laid the groundwork for human rights legislation that continues to evolve to the current day, including the expansion and strengthening of the Geneva Conventions and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It paved the way too for the International Criminal Tribunals, established in the 1990s, to prosecute crimes arising from the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda. In 2002, the International Criminal Court was founded in the Netherlands,

the world's first permanent international court permitted to hold individuals to account for genocide, crimes against humanity and other war crimes. 80 years on, Nuremberg remains the benchmark for international trials. The Second World War threw up horrors, including the systematic murder of millions of non-combatants that demanded redress. Rather than allow the terrible truth of the Nazi death machine to be buried, the trial made sure these crimes were confronted so that the philosophies underpinning them might never take hold again. For victims and their loved ones, it provided a measure of justice.

For the German people, a chance to take responsibility, reflect and learn. A process it notably embraced. The Nuremberg trial could never provide a miracle cure, but it could at least begin the process of healing. In some respects, it did offer a means of, in the purest possible sense, bringing a form of justice to these individuals. There was also an opportunity to make a statement to the contemporary world and to history about how these people should be kind of framed and considered.

Essentially it was for the moment, but it was also for history. And it's interesting to me that in the moment, they were thinking with the eyes of history on them. Next time on Short History of, we'll bring you a short history of Venice. Venice is unique and it's beautiful and everyone has an image of it in their mind. And so of course it's natural that everyone wants to experience it for themselves. I would say that the average tourist probably doesn't know that this is the birthplace of modern capitalism, that the world that we know of is largely possible because of the innovations from the city. And that's okay. It's a beautiful place and it should be experienced on that level as well.

that's next time if you can't wait a week until the next episode you can listen to it right away by subscribing to noiser plus head to www.com forward slash subscriptions for more information