First judgments at Nuremberg
Gestapo and SS criminal, but high command and general staff groups acquitted
1 October 1946
Twenty-one Nazi leaders in the Nuremberg courtroom yesterday heard the first judgments of the International War Crimes Tribunal. To-day they will reappear separately in the dock and hear the findings against themselves individually, the sentences being expected this afternoon. The main points in yesterday’s judgment were –
Aggressive war had been established beyond all doubt as the Nazi party’s objective since its formation twenty-five years ago. The tribunal rejected the defence pleas that a common plan could not exist because Hitler was a dictator. The judgment declared that Hitler could not have made aggressive war without the cooperation of statesmen, military leaders, diplomatists, and businessmen.
The tribunal has declined to declare “criminal” the German General Staff and High Command, the Reich Cabinet, and the SA. But evidence of criminality against many members of the General Staff and Command is “clear and convincing.” They have been a disgrace to the honourable profession of arms.
War crimes had been committed on a vast scale never before seen in the history of war. Fatalities among Soviet war prisoners were the result a systematic murder survey on a great scale. There was evidence of systematic rule of violence, brutality and terror towards civilian populations.
The decision on the Gestapo and other Nazi organisations judge “criminal” affects between 1,500,000 and 2,000,000 Germans, numbers of whom may now be brought before national military or occupational courts as a result of yesterday’s verdict.
Nazi leaders to die on October 16
2 October 1946
The Nazi leaders who were condemned to death by the Nuremberg international tribunal yesterday will be hanged in Nuremberg Gaol on October 16, the Allied Control Council decided last night. Prison sentences will be served in a four-Power Berlin prison.
It was indicated last night by counsel for several of the condemned prisoners that appeals for clemency might be lodged with the Control Council which has the power to reduce any sentence, but not to increase it. Twelve of the twenty-two Nazi leaders (including the absent Bormann) were sentenced to death by hanging. Three were sentenced to imprisonment for life and four to shorter terms, while three were acquitted and discharged. The sentences were:
Hermann Göring (52), ex-Luftwaffe chief and successor-designate to Hitler. Guilty on all four counts in the indictment. To die by hanging.
Rudolf Hess (52), Hitler’s former deputy, who flew to Scotland during the war to propose peace terms. Guilty on counts 1 and 2. Imprisonment for life.
Joachim von Ribbentrop (53), Hitler’s Foreign Minister and ex-Ambassador to London Guilty on all four counts. Death by hanging.
Continue reading
Editorial: the sentences
2 October 1946
As we were promised, the chief surprises of Nuremberg lie in the sentences. When twelve men must hang it seems odd that Schacht and Von Papen should escape even imprisonment and be acquitted. Fritzsche, mere tool of the dead Goebbels, hardly merited a place in the dock beside the great evil-doers, but Papen will stand as a sinister figure in German history. He symbolised the reactionary forces behind Hitler; he created the unholy alliance by which Hitler was brought to power. He nearly lost his life in the purge of 1934, but he remained to do Hitler’s bidding. Schacht, however much he later sought to remove himself from the inner ring, supplied the mind that laid the material foundations of the “conspiracy.” Was that shrewd man ignorant of the ends served by his talents?
It is interesting that the Russian dissenting judgment took note of these exceptions and that Mr Justice Jackson, the United States prosecutor, also regretted the acquittal of Schacht and Papen. Speer’s twenty years of imprisonment ironically removes a man who would, had his record been different, have been able to do much to reconstruct Germany; he is the supreme instance of that mass of technical skill which the Control Commission has to do without because it is politically tainted. The ancient plea of “superior orders” did not avail Keitel and Jodi. The Tribunal’s charter itself excluded it except as a mitigating circumstance, and the judgment has upheld Sir Hartley Shawcross’s argument that no individual may carry out orders “manifestly contrary to the very law of nature from which international law has grown.” But the natural law is a two-edged weapon. If subjects may appeal to the natural law against State orders which are repugnant to conscience, as was held in medieval times, we might see strange results in our day. In Russia, for instance, it could hardly become a general or a popular doctrine.
Whatever we may think of the means that were chosen to bring the Nazi leaders to justice, little pity can be felt for those who in the day of their power showed none. In considering these sentences it is not of the condemned that we should think but of our own name and of the future. Severe punishment there should be, but death is not the severest. As Goring went back to his cell he remarked, “I have got the best sentence of all,” and even if this were bravado he was right – right for himself and, in the Nazi view of things, right for Germany.
Men who die make more converts than men who live. And we ourselves may ask, after so much blood has flowed, Why more? It advantages no one, except to cast a faint gleam of glory, for those who wish to see it, on the utterly inglorious; it is bare retributive punishment, without a trace of that reformative element which enlightened opinion – and Nuremberg is supposedly a leap forward in enlightenment – holds that every penalty should possess. It would be no act of clemency to allow these wretched men, bitterly at odds among themselves, to drag out their testy, senile days on some St Helena. That would be to deny them an opportunity of performing a last service to their dead master through execution at our hands. It adds nothing to the dignity of the Powers or to a great act of international justice that what is done finally should be through a hangman’s hands. The sentences, of course, are not the sole responsibility of this country. We are one of four, and two have suffered in ways we know nothing of. If they demand a brutal penalty which is yet hopelessly inadequate we may not gainsay them.
Göring prime mover in Nazi preparations: Tribunal’s findings on individual prisoners
2 October 1946
