American Experience (1988–…): Season 18, Episode 6 - The Nuremberg Trials - full transcript
The story of the Nuremberg Trials and Robert Jackson, the chief prosecutor.
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The wrongs which we seek
to condemn and punish...
The year World War II
finally ended,
a courtroom
in Nuremberg, Germany,
became the scene
of what would be called
the greatest trial in history.
For the first time,
leaders of a nation
would be tried for war crimes.
Chief prosecutor Robert Jackson
declared:
"We will show these men
to be the living symbols
"of racial hatred, terrorism
and violence
and of the arrogance and cruelty
of power."
The highest-ranking Nazi
to survive the war,
Hermann Göring,
was the lead defendant.
"Everybody knows this is not
a trial," Göring proclaimed.
"This is just an arrangement
where the victors will take
revenge on the defeated."
Six years of war
had left 55 million dead.
Now, in Nuremberg,
before the eyes of the world,
the victorious Allies
would attempt
to stay the hand of vengeance
and follow a difficult
and uncertain path to justice.
On November 20, 1945,
the elevator in Nuremberg's
Hall of Justice rose slowly
from the cellblock
to the courtroom.
Hermann Göring,
founder of the Gestapo
and heir apparent to Hitler,
strode confidently
into the prisoners' dock,
followed by the commander
of the German Navy,
Admiral Karl Dönitz,
Nazi party secretary Rudolf Hess
and 18 other leaders
of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich.
Supreme Court Justice
Robert Jackson
would lead the American
prosecution team.
Jackson was determined that
the Nazis pay for their crimes,
yet fearful
that Hitler's henchmen
could use
this high-profile forum
to reignite Nazism in Germany.
Attention...
Tribunal.
In a courtroom flooded by lights
for the newsreel cameras,
500 spectators
and 21 defendants,
some shielding their eyes from
the glare behind dark glasses,
waited for the unprecedented
trial to begin.
Sitting there for the first time
and seeing these 21 men
who had caused such horror
in the world,
I actually felt sick, kind of.
They had come into the dock
as if this was not
a fair proceeding...
as if they knew
they were going to hang already,
why go through all this thing?
As the eight judges,
led by Lord Geoffrey Lawrence
of England,
took their places on the bench,
the air was thick
with anticipation.
The international tribunal
was empowered to decide the fate
of each defendant,
including a sentence of death.
The first to enter his plea
was Hermann Göring.
The tribunal cut him short
and said:
"You are here to plead guilty,
not guilty
or guilty with an explanation."
And with that remonstrance,
he said,
shouted, "Nicht schuldig."
That was an indication
of his ability
to try to find an opening
to present what he wanted to say
rather than
what he was being asked.
Wilhelm Keitel.
Ich bekenne mich nicht schuldig.
Each defendant pleaded
"not guilty."
Robert Jackson then made his way
to the podium.
May it please the tribunal...
He had labored over his
opening statement for weeks.
The privilege of opening
the first trial in history
for crimes
against the peace of the world
imposes a grave responsibility.
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.
That set the tone
not only for the speech
which followed,
but for the entire trial.
This was not a trial
of Germans alone.
This was a trial for humanity.
This was a trial
to prevent tyranny
from raising its head again
in any place in the world.
The trial unfolding in Nuremberg
was not without controversy.
In the months leading up
to Allied victory,
voices calling for vengeance
had been numerous and forceful.
As the long and bloody war
in Europe was winding down,
Allied leaders began to address
what should be done
with the Nazis.
When the Allies met in Yalta
in February 1945,
British prime minister
Winston Churchill
favored swift executions
of top Nazi leaders.
Soviet premier Joseph Stalin
preferred show trials,
followed quickly
by mass executions.
President Franklin Roosevelt,
his health failing badly,
was hearing conflicting opinions
from his cabinet.
Roosevelt's influential treasury
secretary, Henry Morgenthau...
Jewish, and enraged
by Nazi atrocities...
Argued for summary executions
of those he called
"the arch-criminals
of this war."
Secretary of War
Henry Stimson was adamant
that Nazi leaders
be put on trial.
"The punishment of these men
in a dignified manner,"
Stimson wrote,
"will have all the greater
effect upon posterity."
Stimson advanced a plan
developed
by a young Jewish lawyer
on his staff, Murray Bernays,
to try the Nazi leaders
as a criminal conspiracy,
like an organized
crime syndicate.
"The atrocities were not single
or unconnected," wrote Bernays,
"but were the inevitable outcome
"of a conspiracy
based on the Nazi doctrine
of racism and totalitarianism."
That was the concept:
that we would charge these
leading defendants
with conspiring, getting
together and plotting
to seize control
of the German government
and subjecting the German people
to its dictatorial control,
making the German people
themselves victims, if you like,
and eliminating freedom
in Germany,
eliminating democracy,
establishing
a ruthless dictatorship,
and then, having done that...
That's the conspiracy...
Then committing the crimes
that they did in the name
of the German people.
It was difficult
for the political figures
to come to the view
that after this rather brutal,
long-out war,
that something as refined
and patient
as a legal process
should be pursued,
but if someone is a prisoner
of war,
they're not supposed
to be executed and, indeed,
they are supposed to be given
considerable protection.
So it would have violated
at least the best versions
of American law and British law
to have summary execution.
Roosevelt came to favor
the Stimson-Bernays plan,
but in April, he died.
His successor, Harry Truman,
asked Robert Jackson,
an associate justice
of the Supreme Court,
to serve as chief
U.S. prosecutor
for the war crimes trials.
Jackson was wary.
The trials would explore
uncharted legal territory;
convictions
were by no means certain.
"You must put no man on trial,"
Jackson warned,
"if you are not willing to see
him freed if not proved guilty.
"If we want to shoot Germans
as a matter of policy,
"let it be done as such,
but don't hide the deed
behind a court."
Jackson hears from colleagues
on the Supreme Court
and friends and contacts
in the government,
and he encounters
a lot of skepticism
about the time and difficulty
of accomplishing this,
skepticism about the benefits
at the end of the process
in terms of justice,
in terms of deterrence.
Still, Jackson was drawn
to the challenge.
The son of
a small-town businessman,
Jackson never attended college.
He had risen to become
attorney general,
then a Supreme Court justice.
Robert Jackson
was a lawyer's lawyer
at each stage of his career,
for 20 years
in private practice,
trials and appeals
and tremendous success.
And then Jackson on the bench
of the Supreme Court
being a very active and witty
and colorful speaker
in the courtroom
and thinker and writer
in his opinions,
so this was an enormous
legal figure.
Now, at age 53,
Jackson exuded self-confidence
and ambition
and was frustrated
at being on the sidelines
during World War II,
the century's great drama.
On May 2, he accepted
Truman's offer.
I am convinced
that we have an opportunity
to bring to a just judgment
those who have thought it safe
to wage aggressive
and ruthless war.
The Supreme Court would soon
adjourn for the summer.
Jackson was sure he'd be back
in time for the fall session,
but he also knew that the trials
would be controversial
and might hurt his chances
of one day being named
chief justice.
As Jackson assembled
his legal team in Washington,
the U.S. Army was gathering
evidence of Nazi atrocities,
the extent of which
was finally being understood...
The use of slave labor, the
horrific extermination camps,
the millions of murdered Jews.
I was coming in there
to prove the crimes.
We would come in, prepare
a list of the evidence,
proof of what transports
had come into the camp,
how many people had been
registered as being killed
on the various dates,
the supposed cause of death,
which was obviously fictitious,
such as
"auf der Flucht erschossen"...
"shot while trying to escape"...
Or listing one disease
page after page.
My mind just refused to grasp
what my eyes saw.
These people who were
lying in the dirt,
mostly, you couldn't tell
if they were dead or alive.
They didn't look like
human beings, many of them.
They looked animal-like almost,
or like skeletons.
On May 6, 1945,
Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring
surrendered to American troops.
He had brought his prized
possessions...
17 truckloads worth...
And expected to be treated
like a dignitary.
"War is like a football game,"
he remarked.
"Whoever loses gives
his opponent his hand,
and everything is forgotten."
Göring had been
one of the most conspicuous and
notorious figures in Germany.
A flying ace in World War I,
he had taken over command
of Hitler's bodyguards,
the S.A., in 1922.
The following year,
he became addicted to morphine
while recovering
from injuries sustained
during a failed Nazi coup.
His addiction led to
manic-depressive behavior
that twice forced him
to be hospitalized.
After Hitler seized power
in 1933,
Göring was at the center
of everything.
He established
the secret police, the Gestapo,
instituted concentration camps
for political opponents,
and commanded the Luftwaffe,
Germany's air force.
Some in Hitler's inner circle
thought Göring
mentally unstable,
but he soon became
the Führer's second-in-command.
He was cunning, ostentatious,
larger-than-life...
Regarded by many as
the Sun King of the Third Reich.
He changed clothes
several times a day,
favoring
brightly colored jackets,
gaudy jewelry
and archaic
Bavarian hunting outfits.
In his estate outside Berlin,
Göring lived a life of luxury,
surrounded by exotic pets
and stolen art treasures,
as he spearheaded the buildup
of the Nazi war machine.
Now he was the highest-ranking
Nazi prisoner of war.
Hitler and his propaganda chief
Joseph Goebbels
had killed themselves.
When the Nazis
were put on trial,
Hermann Göring
would be defendant number one.
The day after Göring turned
himself in, Germany surrendered.
Now, Robert Jackson could send
in civilian investigators
to search for a paper trail
of Nazi crimes.
The results were stunning.
I visited many Gestapo offices,
and I found documents
lying around on the floor,
saying,
"This man should be executed."
I picked them up
right off the floor.
There were many, many documents
that were not destroyed
that we obtained
and were incriminating.
"I did not think men
would ever be so foolish,"
Jackson wrote,
"as to put in writing some of
the things the Germans did.
The stupidity and the brutality
of it would simply appall you."
In June, Jackson flew to London
to establish the ground rules
for the international tribunal,
joining counterparts
from France, Great Britain
and the Soviet Union.
He was unsure how difficult
the negotiations would be,
but expected them to be brief.
The Allies quickly came
to agreement on a key point.
The tribunal would not allow the
Nazis to defend their actions
by claiming the Allies
had also committed crimes,
such as killing civilians by
carpet-bombing German cities.
They just came up
with kind of a blanket rule:
We will find it no defense
to say, "But you did it, too."
It is no defense to murder
to say other people
have murdered.
But the talks soon bogged down.
The Soviets wanted
speedy trials.
Prosecutors would simply
outline charges
and judges hand down sentences.
Jackson insisted there be time
for the accused
to defend themselves
and that judges be free to
determine guilt or innocence.
He reminded everyone
the United States held
most of the Nazis to be tried
and the evidence to be used
against them.
After a month of tough
negotiations, he prevailed.
The trials would be conducted
on Jackson's terms.
In July, Jackson flew to
the Army's choice of a location
for the trials:
the ancient southern German city
of Nuremberg.
It was devastated...
totally devastated.
The rubble was everywhere.
Buildings were down.
Those that were standing
were gutted.
The stench of bodies
was in the air.
However, the Palace of Justice
was standing
and was relatively undamaged.
Though the largest courtroom
was in disarray,
Jackson was sure
it could be restored to its
former grandeur in time,
and the symbolic value
of this place was undeniable...
Nuremberg had been
the cradle of Nazism.
Between 1933 and 1938,
the Nazis had held
massive party rallies
in Nuremberg every September.
It was here that Hitler
displayed his growing power.
The city's history
appealed to Jackson.
Where it all began,
it was to end.
In bombed-out Nuremberg,
preparations go forward
for the trials of
Germany's major war criminals.
In August,
newsreels brought the unfolding
story of the Nuremberg trials
to movie screens across America.
German prisoners work
at enlarging
and rebuilding the courtroom.
Under American supervision,
they install broadcasting
booths and press facilities
to carry the proceedings
throughout the world.
Robert H. Jackson,
associate justice
of the United States
Supreme Court,
made preliminary arrangements
for the trial.
From the jail to the courtroom,
a covered corridor
has been erected.
The war criminals will be
screened from sight,
except in the courtroom,
protected and safe
for the disposition
of United Nations justice.
The big names
of Hitler's Third Reich
are kept under heavy guard.
Behind the Palace of Justice
loomed a massive prison,
capable of holding
1,200 detainees.
The first group
of Nazi defendants
was brought to the prison
on August 12.
Each prisoner was housed
in a separate cell
and not permitted to speak
except during interrogations.
Göring's cell
was tiny and barren.
He was allowed only a few books
to pass the time.
His garish clothing and jewelry
were now in the hands
of the U.S. Army.
Jackson met with him briefly
that September.
He found that Göring was
no longer addicted to morphine.
The Nazi warlord was fit,
focused, lucid
and fiercely unapologetic.
Jackson knew he was up against
a formidable adversary.
Jackson's concern
was that the defendants,
and Göring first among them,
would use it as a platform
to stimulate some resurgence
of Nazism in Germany, that this
was a virus that was not dead,
that the defeat and death
of Hitler did not mean forever
the end of Nazism, and that
Jackson was dealing
with a very volatile, dangerous
prospect of the Nazi future
as he dealt
with these defendants.
Since accepting his assignment,
two things had become clear
to Robert Jackson:
He would not get back
to the Supreme Court
for its fall session,
and the trial
that lay before him
would be the most difficult
of his life.
On October 19, 1945,
the German leaders held
in the cellblock of Nuremberg
were indicted for the crimes
the Allies had agreed upon:
conspiracy to wage
aggressive war;
the waging of aggressive war,
known as crimes against peace;
war crimes, such as
mistreatment of prisoners;
and crimes against humanity,
which included
what later would come
to be called
genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Göring was indicted
on all four counts.
Göring was very businesslike.
He was not visibly upset.
He still radiated this feeling
this is nothing but a charade,
but a show,
a victory of the victors.
Some of the others were shocked,
but Göring showed no obvious
sign of shock at all.
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.
This tribunal...
On November 21,
the packed courtroom
in Nuremberg fell silent
as Robert Jackson opened
the case against the Nazis
with a speech
of nearly four hours.
That four great nations,
flushed with victory
and stung with injury,
stay the hand of vengeance
and voluntarily submit
their captive enemies
to the judgment of the law
is one of the most
significant tributes
that power
has ever paid to reason.
The power of it
was immediate and enormous.
The defendants were
sort of knocked back in the box
and were a very depressed lot
as they returned
to their lunchroom
in the middle of it,
and to their cells
at the end of the day,
because this was really
their first experience
of Jackson in action
in the courtroom.
And they,
in a new way, understood
that they were up against it.
"My spine throbbed," William
Shirer of CBS News noted,
"as Jackson used the power
of language to build up
"his masterly case
against the Nazi barbarism.
"We have heard today
one of the great
trial addresses of history."
The next day, prosecutors began
introducing evidence
contained in the stacks
of documents
now filling several storerooms
in the Palace of Justice.
They cited the darkest
and most incriminating
of the thousands of orders
issued by the Nazis.
The process was tedious.
Jackson feared
the trial would get bogged down.
Each document had to be read
in its entirety
and translated
into four languages.
Jackson is sitting there
through it,
and the tribunal's requirements
about how the documents have
to be read
before they can be accepted
into evidence.
The delay caused
by the translation system
is a kind of numbing
that he's experiencing, too.
He is quickly persuaded
that other types of evidence,
particularly film evidence,
should be played sooner
rather than later
as a way of dramatizing and, uh,
pumping up the proceedings
a little bit.
One day early in the trial,
Jackson projected a film
made from clips
of German propaganda.
It showed how the Nazis
had systematically
violated treaties,
rearmed Germany, and attacked
neighboring countries
with the criminal intent
to subjugate and pillage them.
When the lights came up,
Göring was ecstatic.
"They don't have to show films
to prove that we rearmed
for war," he boasted.
"Of course we rearmed!
I rearmed Germany
until we bristled!"
The film had been so rousing,
Göring declared,
that prosecutor Jackson
would now surely want
to join the Nazi party.
Göring's mood
was noticeably different
when another film was shown
as evidence
of crimes against humanity.
Dachau: factory of horrors.
Dachau, near München,
one of the oldest
of the Nazi prison camps.
The Nazis said it was a prison
for political dissenters,
habitual criminals
and religious enthusiasts.
This is the Brausebad,
the shower bath.
Inside the shower bath:
the gas vents.
On the ceiling:
the dummy shower heads.
Cyanide powder... lethal smoke.
This was Bergen-Belsen.
As soon as the defendants
saw the pictures,
the film
of the concentration camps,
they began to wither.
And, as a matter of fact,
several of them cried.
They weren't crying,
I don't think,
for the Jewish people
who were lost.
They were crying
because they knew
that when those pictures
were seen in the world,
they had no way
to escape execution.
One member
of the prosecution team
who had urged Jackson
to use films was Thomas Dodd.
An experienced lawyer
from Connecticut,
Dodd was a former FBI man
with a flair for the dramatic.
What he had learned while
preparing for the trials
horrified him.
The inhumanity just stunned him.
My father talked about it
a lot, the lessons of it.
He felt very strongly that
we ought to be well informed,
as a generation,
of what can happen.
And, uh, well-educated,
sophisticated people...
When things go wrong,
and people can do things
they'd never think about doing,
that they did.
And, uh, and he wanted us
to be very conscious of that.
On December 13,
Dodd presented shocking evidence
of Nazi crimes against humanity.
The Nazi conspirators
were generally
meticulous record-keepers,
but the records which they kept
about concentration camps
appear to have been
quite incomplete.
Perhaps the character
of the records resulted
from the indifference
which the Nazis felt
for the lives
of their victims...
As Dodd spoke,
all eyes were riveted
on a small table covered
with a white sheet
that he'd placed
in the front of the room.
For the most part,
nevertheless, the victims
apparently faded
into an unrecorded death.
Finally, the shroud was lifted.
This exhibit is a human head
with the skull bone removed,
shrunken, stuffed and preserved.
The Nazis had one of their
many victims decapitated
after having had him hanged,
apparently,
for fraternizing
with a German woman.
The shrunken head had been used
as a paperweight
by the commandant
of Buchenwald
concentration camp.
The courtroom was aghast.
When we are talking statistics,
no one pays much attention,
but if I can show you one person
who gets murdered,
you know, you're more apt
to pay attention to that,
and my father,
by boiling this stuff down
to, in that particular case,
one of the atrocities,
one individual...
If I talked about thousands
who lost their lives
in Buchenwald,
your eyes might glaze over.
I hold this up in my hand,
and say,
"This is what happened,"
you know.
Even a seasoned judge...
it's hard to ignore that.
One of the biggest challenges
for Jackson
and his team was linking
individual defendants
to Nazi crimes.
"It would be relieving
to hear one of them admit
some blame for something,"
Dodd wrote to his wife.
"They blame everything
on the dead or the missing."
Zeroing in on Nazi leaders,
the prosecution called
General Erwin Lahousen,
an officer
in the German intelligence unit
who'd participated
in a key meeting with Hitler
to plot the invasion of Poland.
Do you also see
Keitel in the courtroom?
Now to the best
of your knowledge
and recollection,
will you please
explain what took place
at this conference
in the Führer's train?
Lahousen recalled a meeting
in September 1939
when the destruction
of Warsaw was planned.
Hitler and Göring called
for the German air force
to bomb the Polish capital
on the heels of the invasion.
Lahousen's testimony
connected Göring
explicitly to the launching
of a war of aggression,
a crime against peace.
Jackson's team then began
to lay out its case
that Göring had committed crimes
against humanity
over the course of a decade.
In September 1935,
the organized persecution
of Jews in Germany intensified
with Göring's proclamation
of the "Nuremberg Laws."
Göring did many, many things
that nobody else would dare do
because he was an enormous power
in Germany.
Göring made also the decision
that "I say who is Jewish."
Prosecutors described
how Hitler and Göring began
excluding Jews
from the economic activity
of Germany,
driving many out of the country,
stripping them
of their belongings.
On November 9, 1938,
Kristallnacht...
The night of broken glass...
Raging mobs burned synagogues
across Germany.
Over 8,000 Jewish businesses
were destroyed,
and at least 91 Jews killed.
Following Kristallnacht,
Hitler made Göring
the coordinator
for "the Jewish question."
Göring disallowed
insurance claims
by Jews who'd lost property
to arson and looting.
The victims themselves must pay
for the damages, he declared.
The Jews had to pay
for the value
which was destroyed.
They had to pay
one billion Reichsmark
in order to, uh...
atone for their sins
for having permitted
those values to be destroyed.
That was Göring's order.
The most damning evidence
against Göring
was a document from July 1941
authorizing the "final solution
of the Jewish question"...
the systematic murder
of all European Jews.
We said to Göring, uh,
"Did you issue this
and did you sign it?"
And he said, "How do you expect
me to know anything
about a little old document
out of Würzburg?"
And we said, "Well, it happens
to have your name on it."
On January 3, 1946,
prosecutors called SS officer
Dieter Wisliceny to the stand.
Wisliceny described how,
in the wake of Göring's order,
he had helped to organize
the deportation of Jews
to extermination camps.
What became of the Jews to whom
you've already referred,
the approximately 250,000?
450,000?
You mean they were killed?
Göring was infuriated
that his countrymen had
testified against him.
"It is sickening," he raged,
"to see how Germans
sell their souls to the enemy."
During the first two months
of 1946,
French, British
and Soviet prosecutors added
to the case
the Americans had laid out.
Then, in March, the defense
phase of the trial began.
Göring was called to the stand
by his German defense attorney
on the 13th.
Jackson feared that the judges
wouldn't rein Göring in,
giving him a stage from which
to defend and glorify Nazism.
He was arrogant...
Considerably arrogant.
There was no attempt
to placate the courtroom.
Uh, he was telling his story
his way,
and, of course,
in telling the story,
he was justifying
what had happened
as best he could.
Pretty hard to justify that,
but he was skipping over
the worst and, uh,
defending the need
for the Third Reich
at the time it came.
Göring testified
on his own behalf
that he'd only been serving
the best interests
of Germany,
that all his actions had been
to protect his homeland.
For five days, he held
the courtroom in thrall.
Jackson knew he needed
to regain control.
Jackson's not very worried
about carrying his burden
of proof on the crimes charged.
He doesn't need confessions
from Hermann Göring.
They have an extensive
documentary record,
including many things
Göring had signed.
But Jackson is very concerned
about not letting Göring
rally the German people
to a renewed enthusiasm
for Nazism.
With hindsight, I think
that was greatly exaggerated.
It wasn't the danger
that they thought.
The German people
were not poised
to fight again or somehow
elevate Hermann Göring
as a future leader.
It was a depressed, beaten,
desperate, starving country
without a government
is really what the situation
was outside the courtroom,
but in the courtroom,
they didn't
fully understand that.
They had an exaggerated sense
of the danger, politically,
that Göring posed as a witness.
The Palace of Justice
was jam-packed
when, on March 18,
Robert Jackson began
his cross-examination.
I want to get what's necessary
to run the kind of a system
that you set up in Germany.
And concentration camps
was one of the things you found
immediately necessary upon
coming to power, was it not?
And you set them up
as a matter of necessity,
as you saw it.
As Jackson pressed him,
Göring saw what was going on,
and he became
very wordy and evasive.
And his answers
were long explanations.
He would say, "Well, you do the
same thing in the United States,
in Great Britain," and so forth.
"There's no difference,"
and so on.
But all of these things
were necessary things,
as I understood you,
to protect...
And I assume that that is
the only kind of government
that you think
can function in Germany
under present conditions.
The press, like Jackson himself,
had a sort
of prizefight mentality
about the event
that they were watching.
They expected another knockout,
a crushing blow
and a collapse, a confession,
something of that
dramatic order.
Instead, what they saw
was a great lawyer
running into a great,
powerful, brilliant witness
and a combative examination
that was something of a draw
whenever they tried
to talk about
the great topics
and the ultimate questions.
Let's omit that.
I haven't asked for that.
If you'll just
answer my questions,
we'll save a great deal of time.
You did prohibit all court
review and considered it
necessary to prohibit
court review of the causes
for taking people into what
you called protective custody.
That is right, isn't it?
Justice Jackson
then sought the help
of Chief Justice Lawrence
in restricting Göring
to making direct answers
to Jackson's questions.
The difficulty is that
the tribunal loses control
of these proceedings
if the defendant
in a case of this kind...
Where we all know propaganda
is one of the purposes
of the defendants...
Is permitted to put
his propaganda in.
Unfortunately, as it happened,
Lord Lawrence,
who was the Chief Judge,
sensitive to history itself,
elected to allow Göring
pretty much unlimited freedom
in his responses.
"Göring obviously
enjoyed himself,"
a reporter
for Life magazine wrote.
A judge observed
that Göring "quickly saw
the elements of the situation
"and as his confidence grew, his
mastery became more apparent.
Jackson looks beaten
and dead tired."
The first day
of cross-examination
ended triumphantly for Göring.
He had answered the chief
prosecutor's questions
calmly and directly,
and the tribunal had
allowed him to launch
into several self-serving
orations.
Jackson was furious.
But as the second and third days
of cross-examination unfolded,
Jackson gradually gained
the upper hand,
as point by point,
he listed Göring's crimes
and verified each with evidence.
When we got Göring into the
matter of the specific crimes
that he committed, such as
the persecution of the Jews,
well, then he collapsed,
then he collapsed.
He was a done witness,
I'll tell you,
because we had him so, so
devastated on the Jewish issue
that he had nothing to say.
You, Hermann Göring, published
a decree imposing a fine
of a billion marks
for atonement on all Jews.
It was you, was it not,
who signed a decree
to make the plans
for the complete solution
of the Jewish question.
Now that document is signed
by you, is it not?
Göring then leaves the stand
not the next Führer,
which had been Jackson's fear.
And he leaves
the stand convicted
by his own admissions, which was
Jackson's immediate objective.
So, with a sort of sober
endpoint assessment,
an observer, I think,
could understand
this had not been a good day
or a good series of days
for Göring.
Over the next four months,
most of the other Nazi leaders
testified in their own defense.
Some claimed they had merely
been following orders.
A few admitted responsibility
for crimes.
The defense finally rested
on July 25, 1946.
The next day,
Robert Jackson delivered
his long-anticipated
closing argument.
Mr. President and members
of the tribunal,
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.
It is against such a background
that these defendants
now ask this tribunal to say
that they are not guilty
of planning, executing
or conspiring to commit
this long list of crimes
and wrongs.
They stand before the record
of this tribunal
as bloodstained Gloucester stood
by the body of his slain king.
He begged of the widow,
as they beg of you:
"Say I slew them not!"
And the queen replied,
"Then say they were not slain,
but dead they are."
If you were to say of these men
that they are not guilty,
it would be as true to say
that there has been no war,
that there are no slain,
that there has been no crime.
On September 2,
after 216 days in court, the
international tribunal retired
to deliberate
the fate of the accused.
Four weeks later, the defendants
were brought up to the courtroom
for the last time.
The overflow crowd
hushed in anticipation
as Lord Lawrence read out
the judgments
the tribunal had reached.
Defendant
Hermann Wilhelm Göring,
on the counts of the indictment
on which you have been
convicted,
the International Military
Tribunal
sentences you
to death by hanging.
Defendant Rudolf Hess,
on the counts of
the indictment...
Göring and ten others
were to hang.
Seven defendants received
prison sentences.
Three were acquitted.
Göring's wife and daughter
were allowed a final visit.
Emmy Göring believed that they
would never hang her husband,
but intern him on an island,
like Napoleon.
Göring demanded a firing squad...
An execution, he thought,
more befitting his rank.
"They will not hang me,"
he vowed.
His request was denied.
At 10:45 p.m. on October 15,
two hours before Göring was
to hang, a guard noticed him
put an arm to his face
and begin to choke.
He had managed to get hold
of a capsule
of potassium cyanide.
Within a few minutes,
the Nazi warlord was dead.
"I decided to take my own life,"
Hermann Göring had confided
in a letter to his wife,
"lest I be executed
in so terrible a fashion
by my enemies."
His body was taken secretly
to Munich and burned,
the ashes scattered
in a local river.
Over the next
two and a half years,
the courtroom in Nuremberg
saw 12 more trials
of another 184 Nazi officials,
including physicians, judges,
bankers and industrialists.
24 were sentenced to death.
Robert Jackson returned
to the U.S. Supreme Court
after the first trial, where he
served until his death in 1954.
He was never appointed
chief justice.
Jackson's hope, that an
international system of justice
would deter war crimes and
crimes against humanity,
has yet to be realized.
But Nuremberg did establish
an important precedent.
Those responsible
for atrocities,
even heads of state,
could be brought to trial.
And if the hand of vengeance
were stayed,
justice could prevail over evil.
There's more about
the Nuremberg trials
at American Experience on-line.
View historic footage
of Hermann Göring's surrender,
track World War II events
on a timeline,
and see photos
of occupied Germany.
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The wrongs which we seek
to condemn and punish...
The year World War II
finally ended,
a courtroom
in Nuremberg, Germany,
became the scene
of what would be called
the greatest trial in history.
For the first time,
leaders of a nation
would be tried for war crimes.
Chief prosecutor Robert Jackson
declared:
"We will show these men
to be the living symbols
"of racial hatred, terrorism
and violence
and of the arrogance and cruelty
of power."
The highest-ranking Nazi
to survive the war,
Hermann Göring,
was the lead defendant.
"Everybody knows this is not
a trial," Göring proclaimed.
"This is just an arrangement
where the victors will take
revenge on the defeated."
Six years of war
had left 55 million dead.
Now, in Nuremberg,
before the eyes of the world,
the victorious Allies
would attempt
to stay the hand of vengeance
and follow a difficult
and uncertain path to justice.
On November 20, 1945,
the elevator in Nuremberg's
Hall of Justice rose slowly
from the cellblock
to the courtroom.
Hermann Göring,
founder of the Gestapo
and heir apparent to Hitler,
strode confidently
into the prisoners' dock,
followed by the commander
of the German Navy,
Admiral Karl Dönitz,
Nazi party secretary Rudolf Hess
and 18 other leaders
of Adolf Hitler's Third Reich.
Supreme Court Justice
Robert Jackson
would lead the American
prosecution team.
Jackson was determined that
the Nazis pay for their crimes,
yet fearful
that Hitler's henchmen
could use
this high-profile forum
to reignite Nazism in Germany.
Attention...
Tribunal.
In a courtroom flooded by lights
for the newsreel cameras,
500 spectators
and 21 defendants,
some shielding their eyes from
the glare behind dark glasses,
waited for the unprecedented
trial to begin.
Sitting there for the first time
and seeing these 21 men
who had caused such horror
in the world,
I actually felt sick, kind of.
They had come into the dock
as if this was not
a fair proceeding...
as if they knew
they were going to hang already,
why go through all this thing?
As the eight judges,
led by Lord Geoffrey Lawrence
of England,
took their places on the bench,
the air was thick
with anticipation.
The international tribunal
was empowered to decide the fate
of each defendant,
including a sentence of death.
The first to enter his plea
was Hermann Göring.
The tribunal cut him short
and said:
"You are here to plead guilty,
not guilty
or guilty with an explanation."
And with that remonstrance,
he said,
shouted, "Nicht schuldig."
That was an indication
of his ability
to try to find an opening
to present what he wanted to say
rather than
what he was being asked.
Wilhelm Keitel.
Ich bekenne mich nicht schuldig.
Each defendant pleaded
"not guilty."
Robert Jackson then made his way
to the podium.
May it please the tribunal...
He had labored over his
opening statement for weeks.
The privilege of opening
the first trial in history
for crimes
against the peace of the world
imposes a grave responsibility.
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.
That set the tone
not only for the speech
which followed,
but for the entire trial.
This was not a trial
of Germans alone.
This was a trial for humanity.
This was a trial
to prevent tyranny
from raising its head again
in any place in the world.
The trial unfolding in Nuremberg
was not without controversy.
In the months leading up
to Allied victory,
voices calling for vengeance
had been numerous and forceful.
As the long and bloody war
in Europe was winding down,
Allied leaders began to address
what should be done
with the Nazis.
When the Allies met in Yalta
in February 1945,
British prime minister
Winston Churchill
favored swift executions
of top Nazi leaders.
Soviet premier Joseph Stalin
preferred show trials,
followed quickly
by mass executions.
President Franklin Roosevelt,
his health failing badly,
was hearing conflicting opinions
from his cabinet.
Roosevelt's influential treasury
secretary, Henry Morgenthau...
Jewish, and enraged
by Nazi atrocities...
Argued for summary executions
of those he called
"the arch-criminals
of this war."
Secretary of War
Henry Stimson was adamant
that Nazi leaders
be put on trial.
"The punishment of these men
in a dignified manner,"
Stimson wrote,
"will have all the greater
effect upon posterity."
Stimson advanced a plan
developed
by a young Jewish lawyer
on his staff, Murray Bernays,
to try the Nazi leaders
as a criminal conspiracy,
like an organized
crime syndicate.
"The atrocities were not single
or unconnected," wrote Bernays,
"but were the inevitable outcome
"of a conspiracy
based on the Nazi doctrine
of racism and totalitarianism."
That was the concept:
that we would charge these
leading defendants
with conspiring, getting
together and plotting
to seize control
of the German government
and subjecting the German people
to its dictatorial control,
making the German people
themselves victims, if you like,
and eliminating freedom
in Germany,
eliminating democracy,
establishing
a ruthless dictatorship,
and then, having done that...
That's the conspiracy...
Then committing the crimes
that they did in the name
of the German people.
It was difficult
for the political figures
to come to the view
that after this rather brutal,
long-out war,
that something as refined
and patient
as a legal process
should be pursued,
but if someone is a prisoner
of war,
they're not supposed
to be executed and, indeed,
they are supposed to be given
considerable protection.
So it would have violated
at least the best versions
of American law and British law
to have summary execution.
Roosevelt came to favor
the Stimson-Bernays plan,
but in April, he died.
His successor, Harry Truman,
asked Robert Jackson,
an associate justice
of the Supreme Court,
to serve as chief
U.S. prosecutor
for the war crimes trials.
Jackson was wary.
The trials would explore
uncharted legal territory;
convictions
were by no means certain.
"You must put no man on trial,"
Jackson warned,
"if you are not willing to see
him freed if not proved guilty.
"If we want to shoot Germans
as a matter of policy,
"let it be done as such,
but don't hide the deed
behind a court."
Jackson hears from colleagues
on the Supreme Court
and friends and contacts
in the government,
and he encounters
a lot of skepticism
about the time and difficulty
of accomplishing this,
skepticism about the benefits
at the end of the process
in terms of justice,
in terms of deterrence.
Still, Jackson was drawn
to the challenge.
The son of
a small-town businessman,
Jackson never attended college.
He had risen to become
attorney general,
then a Supreme Court justice.
Robert Jackson
was a lawyer's lawyer
at each stage of his career,
for 20 years
in private practice,
trials and appeals
and tremendous success.
And then Jackson on the bench
of the Supreme Court
being a very active and witty
and colorful speaker
in the courtroom
and thinker and writer
in his opinions,
so this was an enormous
legal figure.
Now, at age 53,
Jackson exuded self-confidence
and ambition
and was frustrated
at being on the sidelines
during World War II,
the century's great drama.
On May 2, he accepted
Truman's offer.
I am convinced
that we have an opportunity
to bring to a just judgment
those who have thought it safe
to wage aggressive
and ruthless war.
The Supreme Court would soon
adjourn for the summer.
Jackson was sure he'd be back
in time for the fall session,
but he also knew that the trials
would be controversial
and might hurt his chances
of one day being named
chief justice.
As Jackson assembled
his legal team in Washington,
the U.S. Army was gathering
evidence of Nazi atrocities,
the extent of which
was finally being understood...
The use of slave labor, the
horrific extermination camps,
the millions of murdered Jews.
I was coming in there
to prove the crimes.
We would come in, prepare
a list of the evidence,
proof of what transports
had come into the camp,
how many people had been
registered as being killed
on the various dates,
the supposed cause of death,
which was obviously fictitious,
such as
"auf der Flucht erschossen"...
"shot while trying to escape"...
Or listing one disease
page after page.
My mind just refused to grasp
what my eyes saw.
These people who were
lying in the dirt,
mostly, you couldn't tell
if they were dead or alive.
They didn't look like
human beings, many of them.
They looked animal-like almost,
or like skeletons.
On May 6, 1945,
Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring
surrendered to American troops.
He had brought his prized
possessions...
17 truckloads worth...
And expected to be treated
like a dignitary.
"War is like a football game,"
he remarked.
"Whoever loses gives
his opponent his hand,
and everything is forgotten."
Göring had been
one of the most conspicuous and
notorious figures in Germany.
A flying ace in World War I,
he had taken over command
of Hitler's bodyguards,
the S.A., in 1922.
The following year,
he became addicted to morphine
while recovering
from injuries sustained
during a failed Nazi coup.
His addiction led to
manic-depressive behavior
that twice forced him
to be hospitalized.
After Hitler seized power
in 1933,
Göring was at the center
of everything.
He established
the secret police, the Gestapo,
instituted concentration camps
for political opponents,
and commanded the Luftwaffe,
Germany's air force.
Some in Hitler's inner circle
thought Göring
mentally unstable,
but he soon became
the Führer's second-in-command.
He was cunning, ostentatious,
larger-than-life...
Regarded by many as
the Sun King of the Third Reich.
He changed clothes
several times a day,
favoring
brightly colored jackets,
gaudy jewelry
and archaic
Bavarian hunting outfits.
In his estate outside Berlin,
Göring lived a life of luxury,
surrounded by exotic pets
and stolen art treasures,
as he spearheaded the buildup
of the Nazi war machine.
Now he was the highest-ranking
Nazi prisoner of war.
Hitler and his propaganda chief
Joseph Goebbels
had killed themselves.
When the Nazis
were put on trial,
Hermann Göring
would be defendant number one.
The day after Göring turned
himself in, Germany surrendered.
Now, Robert Jackson could send
in civilian investigators
to search for a paper trail
of Nazi crimes.
The results were stunning.
I visited many Gestapo offices,
and I found documents
lying around on the floor,
saying,
"This man should be executed."
I picked them up
right off the floor.
There were many, many documents
that were not destroyed
that we obtained
and were incriminating.
"I did not think men
would ever be so foolish,"
Jackson wrote,
"as to put in writing some of
the things the Germans did.
The stupidity and the brutality
of it would simply appall you."
In June, Jackson flew to London
to establish the ground rules
for the international tribunal,
joining counterparts
from France, Great Britain
and the Soviet Union.
He was unsure how difficult
the negotiations would be,
but expected them to be brief.
The Allies quickly came
to agreement on a key point.
The tribunal would not allow the
Nazis to defend their actions
by claiming the Allies
had also committed crimes,
such as killing civilians by
carpet-bombing German cities.
They just came up
with kind of a blanket rule:
We will find it no defense
to say, "But you did it, too."
It is no defense to murder
to say other people
have murdered.
But the talks soon bogged down.
The Soviets wanted
speedy trials.
Prosecutors would simply
outline charges
and judges hand down sentences.
Jackson insisted there be time
for the accused
to defend themselves
and that judges be free to
determine guilt or innocence.
He reminded everyone
the United States held
most of the Nazis to be tried
and the evidence to be used
against them.
After a month of tough
negotiations, he prevailed.
The trials would be conducted
on Jackson's terms.
In July, Jackson flew to
the Army's choice of a location
for the trials:
the ancient southern German city
of Nuremberg.
It was devastated...
totally devastated.
The rubble was everywhere.
Buildings were down.
Those that were standing
were gutted.
The stench of bodies
was in the air.
However, the Palace of Justice
was standing
and was relatively undamaged.
Though the largest courtroom
was in disarray,
Jackson was sure
it could be restored to its
former grandeur in time,
and the symbolic value
of this place was undeniable...
Nuremberg had been
the cradle of Nazism.
Between 1933 and 1938,
the Nazis had held
massive party rallies
in Nuremberg every September.
It was here that Hitler
displayed his growing power.
The city's history
appealed to Jackson.
Where it all began,
it was to end.
In bombed-out Nuremberg,
preparations go forward
for the trials of
Germany's major war criminals.
In August,
newsreels brought the unfolding
story of the Nuremberg trials
to movie screens across America.
German prisoners work
at enlarging
and rebuilding the courtroom.
Under American supervision,
they install broadcasting
booths and press facilities
to carry the proceedings
throughout the world.
Robert H. Jackson,
associate justice
of the United States
Supreme Court,
made preliminary arrangements
for the trial.
From the jail to the courtroom,
a covered corridor
has been erected.
The war criminals will be
screened from sight,
except in the courtroom,
protected and safe
for the disposition
of United Nations justice.
The big names
of Hitler's Third Reich
are kept under heavy guard.
Behind the Palace of Justice
loomed a massive prison,
capable of holding
1,200 detainees.
The first group
of Nazi defendants
was brought to the prison
on August 12.
Each prisoner was housed
in a separate cell
and not permitted to speak
except during interrogations.
Göring's cell
was tiny and barren.
He was allowed only a few books
to pass the time.
His garish clothing and jewelry
were now in the hands
of the U.S. Army.
Jackson met with him briefly
that September.
He found that Göring was
no longer addicted to morphine.
The Nazi warlord was fit,
focused, lucid
and fiercely unapologetic.
Jackson knew he was up against
a formidable adversary.
Jackson's concern
was that the defendants,
and Göring first among them,
would use it as a platform
to stimulate some resurgence
of Nazism in Germany, that this
was a virus that was not dead,
that the defeat and death
of Hitler did not mean forever
the end of Nazism, and that
Jackson was dealing
with a very volatile, dangerous
prospect of the Nazi future
as he dealt
with these defendants.
Since accepting his assignment,
two things had become clear
to Robert Jackson:
He would not get back
to the Supreme Court
for its fall session,
and the trial
that lay before him
would be the most difficult
of his life.
On October 19, 1945,
the German leaders held
in the cellblock of Nuremberg
were indicted for the crimes
the Allies had agreed upon:
conspiracy to wage
aggressive war;
the waging of aggressive war,
known as crimes against peace;
war crimes, such as
mistreatment of prisoners;
and crimes against humanity,
which included
what later would come
to be called
genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Göring was indicted
on all four counts.
Göring was very businesslike.
He was not visibly upset.
He still radiated this feeling
this is nothing but a charade,
but a show,
a victory of the victors.
Some of the others were shocked,
but Göring showed no obvious
sign of shock at all.
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.
This tribunal...
On November 21,
the packed courtroom
in Nuremberg fell silent
as Robert Jackson opened
the case against the Nazis
with a speech
of nearly four hours.
That four great nations,
flushed with victory
and stung with injury,
stay the hand of vengeance
and voluntarily submit
their captive enemies
to the judgment of the law
is one of the most
significant tributes
that power
has ever paid to reason.
The power of it
was immediate and enormous.
The defendants were
sort of knocked back in the box
and were a very depressed lot
as they returned
to their lunchroom
in the middle of it,
and to their cells
at the end of the day,
because this was really
their first experience
of Jackson in action
in the courtroom.
And they,
in a new way, understood
that they were up against it.
"My spine throbbed," William
Shirer of CBS News noted,
"as Jackson used the power
of language to build up
"his masterly case
against the Nazi barbarism.
"We have heard today
one of the great
trial addresses of history."
The next day, prosecutors began
introducing evidence
contained in the stacks
of documents
now filling several storerooms
in the Palace of Justice.
They cited the darkest
and most incriminating
of the thousands of orders
issued by the Nazis.
The process was tedious.
Jackson feared
the trial would get bogged down.
Each document had to be read
in its entirety
and translated
into four languages.
Jackson is sitting there
through it,
and the tribunal's requirements
about how the documents have
to be read
before they can be accepted
into evidence.
The delay caused
by the translation system
is a kind of numbing
that he's experiencing, too.
He is quickly persuaded
that other types of evidence,
particularly film evidence,
should be played sooner
rather than later
as a way of dramatizing and, uh,
pumping up the proceedings
a little bit.
One day early in the trial,
Jackson projected a film
made from clips
of German propaganda.
It showed how the Nazis
had systematically
violated treaties,
rearmed Germany, and attacked
neighboring countries
with the criminal intent
to subjugate and pillage them.
When the lights came up,
Göring was ecstatic.
"They don't have to show films
to prove that we rearmed
for war," he boasted.
"Of course we rearmed!
I rearmed Germany
until we bristled!"
The film had been so rousing,
Göring declared,
that prosecutor Jackson
would now surely want
to join the Nazi party.
Göring's mood
was noticeably different
when another film was shown
as evidence
of crimes against humanity.
Dachau: factory of horrors.
Dachau, near München,
one of the oldest
of the Nazi prison camps.
The Nazis said it was a prison
for political dissenters,
habitual criminals
and religious enthusiasts.
This is the Brausebad,
the shower bath.
Inside the shower bath:
the gas vents.
On the ceiling:
the dummy shower heads.
Cyanide powder... lethal smoke.
This was Bergen-Belsen.
As soon as the defendants
saw the pictures,
the film
of the concentration camps,
they began to wither.
And, as a matter of fact,
several of them cried.
They weren't crying,
I don't think,
for the Jewish people
who were lost.
They were crying
because they knew
that when those pictures
were seen in the world,
they had no way
to escape execution.
One member
of the prosecution team
who had urged Jackson
to use films was Thomas Dodd.
An experienced lawyer
from Connecticut,
Dodd was a former FBI man
with a flair for the dramatic.
What he had learned while
preparing for the trials
horrified him.
The inhumanity just stunned him.
My father talked about it
a lot, the lessons of it.
He felt very strongly that
we ought to be well informed,
as a generation,
of what can happen.
And, uh, well-educated,
sophisticated people...
When things go wrong,
and people can do things
they'd never think about doing,
that they did.
And, uh, and he wanted us
to be very conscious of that.
On December 13,
Dodd presented shocking evidence
of Nazi crimes against humanity.
The Nazi conspirators
were generally
meticulous record-keepers,
but the records which they kept
about concentration camps
appear to have been
quite incomplete.
Perhaps the character
of the records resulted
from the indifference
which the Nazis felt
for the lives
of their victims...
As Dodd spoke,
all eyes were riveted
on a small table covered
with a white sheet
that he'd placed
in the front of the room.
For the most part,
nevertheless, the victims
apparently faded
into an unrecorded death.
Finally, the shroud was lifted.
This exhibit is a human head
with the skull bone removed,
shrunken, stuffed and preserved.
The Nazis had one of their
many victims decapitated
after having had him hanged,
apparently,
for fraternizing
with a German woman.
The shrunken head had been used
as a paperweight
by the commandant
of Buchenwald
concentration camp.
The courtroom was aghast.
When we are talking statistics,
no one pays much attention,
but if I can show you one person
who gets murdered,
you know, you're more apt
to pay attention to that,
and my father,
by boiling this stuff down
to, in that particular case,
one of the atrocities,
one individual...
If I talked about thousands
who lost their lives
in Buchenwald,
your eyes might glaze over.
I hold this up in my hand,
and say,
"This is what happened,"
you know.
Even a seasoned judge...
it's hard to ignore that.
One of the biggest challenges
for Jackson
and his team was linking
individual defendants
to Nazi crimes.
"It would be relieving
to hear one of them admit
some blame for something,"
Dodd wrote to his wife.
"They blame everything
on the dead or the missing."
Zeroing in on Nazi leaders,
the prosecution called
General Erwin Lahousen,
an officer
in the German intelligence unit
who'd participated
in a key meeting with Hitler
to plot the invasion of Poland.
Do you also see
Keitel in the courtroom?
Now to the best
of your knowledge
and recollection,
will you please
explain what took place
at this conference
in the Führer's train?
Lahousen recalled a meeting
in September 1939
when the destruction
of Warsaw was planned.
Hitler and Göring called
for the German air force
to bomb the Polish capital
on the heels of the invasion.
Lahousen's testimony
connected Göring
explicitly to the launching
of a war of aggression,
a crime against peace.
Jackson's team then began
to lay out its case
that Göring had committed crimes
against humanity
over the course of a decade.
In September 1935,
the organized persecution
of Jews in Germany intensified
with Göring's proclamation
of the "Nuremberg Laws."
Göring did many, many things
that nobody else would dare do
because he was an enormous power
in Germany.
Göring made also the decision
that "I say who is Jewish."
Prosecutors described
how Hitler and Göring began
excluding Jews
from the economic activity
of Germany,
driving many out of the country,
stripping them
of their belongings.
On November 9, 1938,
Kristallnacht...
The night of broken glass...
Raging mobs burned synagogues
across Germany.
Over 8,000 Jewish businesses
were destroyed,
and at least 91 Jews killed.
Following Kristallnacht,
Hitler made Göring
the coordinator
for "the Jewish question."
Göring disallowed
insurance claims
by Jews who'd lost property
to arson and looting.
The victims themselves must pay
for the damages, he declared.
The Jews had to pay
for the value
which was destroyed.
They had to pay
one billion Reichsmark
in order to, uh...
atone for their sins
for having permitted
those values to be destroyed.
That was Göring's order.
The most damning evidence
against Göring
was a document from July 1941
authorizing the "final solution
of the Jewish question"...
the systematic murder
of all European Jews.
We said to Göring, uh,
"Did you issue this
and did you sign it?"
And he said, "How do you expect
me to know anything
about a little old document
out of Würzburg?"
And we said, "Well, it happens
to have your name on it."
On January 3, 1946,
prosecutors called SS officer
Dieter Wisliceny to the stand.
Wisliceny described how,
in the wake of Göring's order,
he had helped to organize
the deportation of Jews
to extermination camps.
What became of the Jews to whom
you've already referred,
the approximately 250,000?
450,000?
You mean they were killed?
Göring was infuriated
that his countrymen had
testified against him.
"It is sickening," he raged,
"to see how Germans
sell their souls to the enemy."
During the first two months
of 1946,
French, British
and Soviet prosecutors added
to the case
the Americans had laid out.
Then, in March, the defense
phase of the trial began.
Göring was called to the stand
by his German defense attorney
on the 13th.
Jackson feared that the judges
wouldn't rein Göring in,
giving him a stage from which
to defend and glorify Nazism.
He was arrogant...
Considerably arrogant.
There was no attempt
to placate the courtroom.
Uh, he was telling his story
his way,
and, of course,
in telling the story,
he was justifying
what had happened
as best he could.
Pretty hard to justify that,
but he was skipping over
the worst and, uh,
defending the need
for the Third Reich
at the time it came.
Göring testified
on his own behalf
that he'd only been serving
the best interests
of Germany,
that all his actions had been
to protect his homeland.
For five days, he held
the courtroom in thrall.
Jackson knew he needed
to regain control.
Jackson's not very worried
about carrying his burden
of proof on the crimes charged.
He doesn't need confessions
from Hermann Göring.
They have an extensive
documentary record,
including many things
Göring had signed.
But Jackson is very concerned
about not letting Göring
rally the German people
to a renewed enthusiasm
for Nazism.
With hindsight, I think
that was greatly exaggerated.
It wasn't the danger
that they thought.
The German people
were not poised
to fight again or somehow
elevate Hermann Göring
as a future leader.
It was a depressed, beaten,
desperate, starving country
without a government
is really what the situation
was outside the courtroom,
but in the courtroom,
they didn't
fully understand that.
They had an exaggerated sense
of the danger, politically,
that Göring posed as a witness.
The Palace of Justice
was jam-packed
when, on March 18,
Robert Jackson began
his cross-examination.
I want to get what's necessary
to run the kind of a system
that you set up in Germany.
And concentration camps
was one of the things you found
immediately necessary upon
coming to power, was it not?
And you set them up
as a matter of necessity,
as you saw it.
As Jackson pressed him,
Göring saw what was going on,
and he became
very wordy and evasive.
And his answers
were long explanations.
He would say, "Well, you do the
same thing in the United States,
in Great Britain," and so forth.
"There's no difference,"
and so on.
But all of these things
were necessary things,
as I understood you,
to protect...
And I assume that that is
the only kind of government
that you think
can function in Germany
under present conditions.
The press, like Jackson himself,
had a sort
of prizefight mentality
about the event
that they were watching.
They expected another knockout,
a crushing blow
and a collapse, a confession,
something of that
dramatic order.
Instead, what they saw
was a great lawyer
running into a great,
powerful, brilliant witness
and a combative examination
that was something of a draw
whenever they tried
to talk about
the great topics
and the ultimate questions.
Let's omit that.
I haven't asked for that.
If you'll just
answer my questions,
we'll save a great deal of time.
You did prohibit all court
review and considered it
necessary to prohibit
court review of the causes
for taking people into what
you called protective custody.
That is right, isn't it?
Justice Jackson
then sought the help
of Chief Justice Lawrence
in restricting Göring
to making direct answers
to Jackson's questions.
The difficulty is that
the tribunal loses control
of these proceedings
if the defendant
in a case of this kind...
Where we all know propaganda
is one of the purposes
of the defendants...
Is permitted to put
his propaganda in.
Unfortunately, as it happened,
Lord Lawrence,
who was the Chief Judge,
sensitive to history itself,
elected to allow Göring
pretty much unlimited freedom
in his responses.
"Göring obviously
enjoyed himself,"
a reporter
for Life magazine wrote.
A judge observed
that Göring "quickly saw
the elements of the situation
"and as his confidence grew, his
mastery became more apparent.
Jackson looks beaten
and dead tired."
The first day
of cross-examination
ended triumphantly for Göring.
He had answered the chief
prosecutor's questions
calmly and directly,
and the tribunal had
allowed him to launch
into several self-serving
orations.
Jackson was furious.
But as the second and third days
of cross-examination unfolded,
Jackson gradually gained
the upper hand,
as point by point,
he listed Göring's crimes
and verified each with evidence.
When we got Göring into the
matter of the specific crimes
that he committed, such as
the persecution of the Jews,
well, then he collapsed,
then he collapsed.
He was a done witness,
I'll tell you,
because we had him so, so
devastated on the Jewish issue
that he had nothing to say.
You, Hermann Göring, published
a decree imposing a fine
of a billion marks
for atonement on all Jews.
It was you, was it not,
who signed a decree
to make the plans
for the complete solution
of the Jewish question.
Now that document is signed
by you, is it not?
Göring then leaves the stand
not the next Führer,
which had been Jackson's fear.
And he leaves
the stand convicted
by his own admissions, which was
Jackson's immediate objective.
So, with a sort of sober
endpoint assessment,
an observer, I think,
could understand
this had not been a good day
or a good series of days
for Göring.
Over the next four months,
most of the other Nazi leaders
testified in their own defense.
Some claimed they had merely
been following orders.
A few admitted responsibility
for crimes.
The defense finally rested
on July 25, 1946.
The next day,
Robert Jackson delivered
his long-anticipated
closing argument.
Mr. President and members
of the tribunal,
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.
It is against such a background
that these defendants
now ask this tribunal to say
that they are not guilty
of planning, executing
or conspiring to commit
this long list of crimes
and wrongs.
They stand before the record
of this tribunal
as bloodstained Gloucester stood
by the body of his slain king.
He begged of the widow,
as they beg of you:
"Say I slew them not!"
And the queen replied,
"Then say they were not slain,
but dead they are."
If you were to say of these men
that they are not guilty,
it would be as true to say
that there has been no war,
that there are no slain,
that there has been no crime.
On September 2,
after 216 days in court, the
international tribunal retired
to deliberate
the fate of the accused.
Four weeks later, the defendants
were brought up to the courtroom
for the last time.
The overflow crowd
hushed in anticipation
as Lord Lawrence read out
the judgments
the tribunal had reached.
Defendant
Hermann Wilhelm Göring,
on the counts of the indictment
on which you have been
convicted,
the International Military
Tribunal
sentences you
to death by hanging.
Defendant Rudolf Hess,
on the counts of
the indictment...
Göring and ten others
were to hang.
Seven defendants received
prison sentences.
Three were acquitted.
Göring's wife and daughter
were allowed a final visit.
Emmy Göring believed that they
would never hang her husband,
but intern him on an island,
like Napoleon.
Göring demanded a firing squad...
An execution, he thought,
more befitting his rank.
"They will not hang me,"
he vowed.
His request was denied.
At 10:45 p.m. on October 15,
two hours before Göring was
to hang, a guard noticed him
put an arm to his face
and begin to choke.
He had managed to get hold
of a capsule
of potassium cyanide.
Within a few minutes,
the Nazi warlord was dead.
"I decided to take my own life,"
Hermann Göring had confided
in a letter to his wife,
"lest I be executed
in so terrible a fashion
by my enemies."
His body was taken secretly
to Munich and burned,
the ashes scattered
in a local river.
Over the next
two and a half years,
the courtroom in Nuremberg
saw 12 more trials
of another 184 Nazi officials,
including physicians, judges,
bankers and industrialists.
24 were sentenced to death.
Robert Jackson returned
to the U.S. Supreme Court
after the first trial, where he
served until his death in 1954.
He was never appointed
chief justice.
Jackson's hope, that an
international system of justice
would deter war crimes and
crimes against humanity,
has yet to be realized.
But Nuremberg did establish
an important precedent.
Those responsible
for atrocities,
even heads of state,
could be brought to trial.
And if the hand of vengeance
were stayed,
justice could prevail over evil.
There's more about
the Nuremberg trials
at American Experience on-line.
View historic footage
of Hermann Göring's surrender,
track World War II events
on a timeline,
and see photos
of occupied Germany.
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