The Pittsburgh Press (November 19, 1945)
Nuernberg trial opens tomorrow
Russians appoint substitute prosecutor
NUERNBERG (UP) – The mass trial of Nazi war criminals will open at 10 a.m. tomorrow, it was announced today after hours of last-minute conferences among representatives of the United States, Great Britain, Russia and France.
The last apparent stumbling block to the beginning of the Nuernberg trial on schedule was removed when Col. Yurie Pokrowski was authorized to serve as chief Soviet prosecutor instead of Gen. Roman Rudenko, who is ill in Moscow.
Col. J. H. Philippmore, spokesman for the British prosecution staff, said that with the trial getting underway tomorrow, all the problems would be solved in due course.
What problems remained to be settled on the eve of the trial were not disclosed. In that last week of preparations, several controversial issues have developed which threatened to cause a delay.
Nazi stricken
The list of defendants who will be in the courtroom was cut to an apparent 20 by the disclosure that Ernst Kaltenbrunner, ace hatchet man of the Gestapo, suffered a cranial hemorrhage in his cell last night and would be unable to appear.
Kaltenbrunner, who has been charged with ordering the deaths of thousands of concentration camp inmates, showed some improvement this morning after doctors had worked over him throughout the night.
Physicians said the hemorrhage resulted from a life-long weakness of the Nazi Gestapo official and could not have been self-inflicted.
Third to leave list
Kaltenbrunner was the third of the 24 original defendants stricken from the rolls by death or illness. Nazi Labor boss Robert Ley hanged himself in his cell. Gustav Krupp, the aged munitions maker, was removed from the blanket indictment because of a critical illness which made his appearance in court impossible.
A fourth defendant, former deputy Fuehrer Martin Bormann, will be tried in absentia, although some Allied investigators have expressed the belief that he was killed while trying to escape from Berlin last May.