Monday, Dec. 10, 1945

Monday, Dec. 10, 1945
Day of Judgment

(See Cover)

The men in Nürnberg's dock smiled more than they had for years. They were generally more relaxed and in better health. But most of them knew they would not live to see another spring in Germany.

Some faced it with bravado—like ex-Fighter Pilot Hermann Göring, who gestured and postured and smiled his dimpled smile. Others tried to ignore it—like Colonel General Alfred Jodl who, contrary to rules, hid his head at night under the blankets in his cell. Still others fought it alternately with cool logic and indignant tantrums—like Banker Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht.

All were puzzled by their fate. Beyond the unhappy realization of having been on the losing side of a war, they could not quite grasp the meaning of the court's quiet, determined fairness, or of the hard working prosecution's meticulous attention to detail. The Nazis had never done things that way.

The rowdies, the Storm Troopers, the policemen among them could easily see a connection between themselves and the charges against them. But Alfred Rosenberg could protest that he was just a quiet philosopher, and Julius Streicher a plain newspaper editor, and Joachim von Ribbentrop a diplomat who served his country.

Nevertheless, as the prosecution told its story to the court, they began to realize that they were on trial not only for a hundred children murdered here, a thousand women tortured there (the French and Russians would take up these charges later in the trial), but for their parts in the Great Conspiracy. Like spokes to a wheel, the prosecution joined propaganda to atrocity, atrocity to law and finance, and all of these to the Nazi plan to rule all Europe and lands beyond.

Burden of Proof. The U.S. had shouldered the task of formally proving the existence of this conspiracy. It was a difficult, delicate and important effort; in all the world's history such a thing had never been tried before.

Bale after bale of documentary evidence, records, diaries, transcripts, memoranda, all kept and carefully stored by methodical Germans, entered the record. Here in a single trial was historical evidence which, under other circumstances, might require 50 years of research to compile.

The documents were read slowly, so that the translators could keep pace. The accused dropped their initial air of boredom, strained to hear every word. As the relatively "innocent" and "detached" ones, such as Schacht, were drawn into the story, the defendants began to understand the scope of the case.

There was Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, who sat stony-faced, trying to maintain the comfortably superior attitude of an officer and a gentleman. His was the first sobering shock: the prosecution's account (compiled from German Navy archives) of his pre-Hitler (1932) efforts to rebuild the German Navy in defiance of Versailles. The record read: German submarines had been constructed in Spain and Finland; crews had been trained in The Netherlands.

Then there was Banker Hjalmar Schacht who, so far, had been as stiff in court as his famous, forbidding four-inch collars. Always a solid citizen, a self-made man who had risen from a small clerkship to the presidency of the Reichsbank, a clubman of quiet but expensive style, he held aloof from riffraff like Göring—whom, he said, he would now gladly kill with his own hands. The record read: Schacht was host at a special meeting of German industrialists called to raise money for the Nazi Party before the March 1933 elections. If Hitler won, Göring had assured him amiably, it would be the last election in Germany. (Göring grinned and nodded with pleasure at the recollection, Schacht screwed up his face in disgust.) The record continued: Schacht had untiringly aided Germany's rearmament, had raised millions of marks for the German war machine through inflation.

The Nazis had names for the separate parts of the Great Conspiracy. The name for the seizure of Austria was "Plan Otto," for Czechoslovakia "Plan Green," for France "Plan Red," for Poland "Case White," for Russia "Barbarossa Contingency."

Plan Otto. The record read: in 1937 the Nazis began specific preparations for a two-front war. They told the people they were merely preparing to defend Germany. Yet the evidence showed that Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg, as War Minister, had given this official appraisal:

"Germany need not expect an attack from any side."

Then, in 1938, the Reich was ready to lead Austria home. As the story of the Anschluss was retold in court, many a spectator in the press gallery—remembering the enthusiasm with which most Austrians had hailed Hitler's motorized legions, and the indifference with which most western statesmen had watched the annexation—wondered why this should now be considered a crime. As the story unfolded, they realized how the deceitful cynicism of beerhall Machiavellis had corrupted Austria into accepting annexation.

The real story was told almost entirely in transcripts of telephone conversations.

17:00 o'clock, March 11, 1938. Göring (to the German ambassador in Vienna): "By 19:30 o'clock [an Austrian National Socialist] Cabinet must be formed."

(The old Austrian Government did not like the idea.)

17:25 o'clock. Göring (to Austria's leading Nazi, Arthur Seyss-Inquart): "Tell the Federal President that if [our conditions] are not accepted immediately, German troops . . . will march in. . . ."

(Next day Göring advised Joachim von Ribbentrop, then ambassador in London: "Tell Halifax and Chamberlain ... it is not true that Germany has given any ultimatum.")

20:48 o'clock. Göring (to Germany's special envoy Wilhelm Keppler in Vienna, after Schuschnigg had finally resigned): "The following telegram should be sent here by Seyss-Inquart. Take notes: 'The [new] Austrian Government . . . considers it its duty to establish peace and order. . . . For this purpose it asks the German Government to send German troops.' "

Keppler: "But everything is quiet."

Göring: "Our troops will cross the border today."

(To Ribbentrop, he said next day: "Seyss-Inquart asked us expressly, by phone as well as by telegram, to send troops. . . . The weather is wonderful here. A blue sky. I am sitting on my balcony. . . . The birds are twittering. . . .")

Göring's ample belly shook with laughter as the testimony recalled the scenes. Most of the other defendants joined in. But Austrian Seyss-Inquart looked pained.

Plan Green. The documents piled up. Hitler had announced his "unalterable decision to smash Czechoslovakia," and the docile High Command promptly prepared for a blitz invasion according to Plan Green. D-day had been set for Oct. 1, 1938 and preparations had been made against possible reprisals on the part of France. Hitler was fully prepared to risk war. Cololnel General Alfred Jodl (who liked to compare his Führer to Napoleon) personally drew up a plan to bomb Prague without warning.

Plan Green also provided for an "incident" to provoke German intervention. One idea: to kill Germany's minister to Prague and blame it on the Czechs. The timely intervention of Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier at Munich saved Minister Dr. Ernst Eisenlohr's life.

"Bunch of Firemen." The flow of German documents with their dry, block-long sentences gave way to the living, somewhat strained voice of the trial's first witness. To the microphone came a tall, cadaverous-looking man whose bald head shone brightly under the floodlights; dark glasses and earphones gave him a horror-story air. He was Major General Erwin Lahousen, aide to the late, little-known Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, chief of the Wehrmacht's counterintelligence. After the unsuccessful bomb attempt on the Führer's life in July 1944, Canaris was slowly strangled with piano wire.

The witness had other things to tell:

¶ Hitler, with the full knowledge and approval of Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, had ordered the systematic killing of war prisoners on the eastern front. The executions were not to take place in front of German soldiers, because that would be bad for their morale. (Keitel, one of Hitler's most devoted yes-generals, who had never succeeded in crashing the tight circle of "real" Junkers, had defended himself through his lawyer by declaring that he had merely done his ordinary duties as a soldier.) As Lahousen spoke, he squirmed uncomfortably. Earlier in the trial, he had complained to his colleague Colonel General Alfred Jodl: "The court just doesn't seem to realize the principle of 'orders are orders.' . . . It's not up to the Wehrmacht staff to question the Führer principle. If we did, we would have a bunch of firemen, not a Wehrmacht"

¶ At a meeting with Hitler in 1939, Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Keitel outlined the kind of strategic terror they intended to use in the Polish war. Plans were made for the complete liquidation of Poland's intelligentsia, nobility, clergy and resistance movements. Ribbentrop's pet project was a "spontaneous" revolt of Ukrainians, during the course of which a considerable number of Poles would be slaughtered.

Later, at lunch, Ribbentrop fretfully asked his fellow prisoners: "What shall I do?" Göring had the oldtime Nazi spirit: "That traitor! That's one Kerl (guy) we forgot to dispose of!"

The Governor Wept. It was not all the prosecution's show. The defendants had their moments. There was a half hour of bickering between defense and prosecution over whether Rudolf Hess, supposedly an amnesia victim, should be tried. Hess rose, informed the court that he had faked his amnesia for tactical reasons, that he wanted to be tried with his comrades. Said he: "Mr. President ... as of now, my memory is again in order."

Göring laughed, bowed, took notes, eyed pretty girl reporters in the gallery. He gave an interview to the Associated Press in which he defiantly proclaimed himself a "true paladin of my Führer" and declared that, if he had the choice, he would do the whole thing over again. Generally, his courtroom poise was much better than it had been twelve years ago, when Communist Georgi Dimitroff made a fool of him at the Reichstag fire trial.

Then came the most impressive piece of evidence of all, an hour-long film record of German concentration camps.

The courtroom lights were dimmed for the first time since the trial started, and the defendants sat in semidarkness. Across a motion picture screen moved, in light and shadow, what veteran correspondents called the most terrible pictures of mass slaughter and torture they had ever seen. It was an endless stream of corpses—single corpses and small mountains of them, corpses lying still and corpses being carted away by bulldozers, corpses shrunk by starvation and corpses battered by boots or clubs, staring corpses and corpses which, miraculously, had still some life left in them and feebly moved about before the camera.

The accused in the dock were gripped by the horror they had created. Hess watched in tense fascination. Göring reddened when the film was three-quarters through, gazed fixedly at his lap until the film was over. Keitel mopped his brow and covered his eyes. Alfred Rosenberg, the philosopher, looked away frequently, nervously picked with his nails at splinters in the guard rail before him. Ribbentrop remained calm, shook his head in disbelief. Hans Frank, ex-Governor General of Poland, wept.

Only one of the defendants refused to look at the massive show of death: Solid Citizen Schacht sat with his back turned to the screen from beginning to end.

When the lights went up, the courtroom was silent. One of the defendants retched. In the gallery, someone muttered: "Oh, God, why can't we shoot the swine now?"

The Only Way. These 20 strangely dissimilar men in Nürnberg's dock had been drawn together by the forces that shaped Germany after World War I and by Adolf Hitler. For all the German people knew or cared last week, Hitler was in hell or in Valhalla. Nor did they care about the 20 or their punishment. In Berlin, where Allied loudspeakers relayed the trial news in public squares, most pedestrians did not even stop to listen. In a Berlin poll last week, Grete Schweinchen, a social worker, expressed a widespread German reaction: "It's carrying 'democracy' too far if you punish generals for waging war...."

Whether or not Germans were impressed, the trials were the only way humanity had found to bring Hitler's heirs to judgment.