The Nuremberg Trial

201

Wiener Kurier (February 4, 1946)

Die Vergewaltigung Hollands vor dem Nürnberger Kriegsgericht

Nürnberg, 4. Februar (DANA) – Wie die Nazi versuchten auch in Holland das Volk geistig zu brechen, schilderte in der Samstagsitzung der von der französischen Anklagevertretung vorgeladene Belastungszeuge Senator Jakobus Vorrink, Vorsitzender der Sozialdemokratischen Partei Hollands.

Die Schlüsselstellungen der Verwaltung seien mit Angehörigen der nationalsozialistischen Bewegung besetzt worden, die von den Nazi als die einzige rechtmäßige Organisation in Holland erklärt worden war.

Die nationalsozialistische Durchdringung Hollands habe sich auf alle Lebensgebiete Hollands erstreckt. Aber weder die holländischen Gewerkschaften, noch die sozialdemokratische Partei habe sich von den Tricks der Nazi, sie für sich zu gewinnen, einfangen lassen. Auch die Judenverfolgungen seien in Holland auf den Protest der Bevölkerung gestoßen. Studenten und Arbeiter in Amsterdam, so berichtete Vorrink, unternahmen einen Sympathiestreik, und auch in anderen Teilen des Landes kam es zu Sympathiekundgebungen. Hunderte von Geistlichen seien in die Konzentrationslager geworfen worden. Von 20, Vorrink bekannten Geistlichen, sei nur einer aus dem KZ nach Holland zurückgekehrt. Der Zeuge schilderte ferner die Eingriffe der Nazi in das Schulwesen und in die Arbeit der Presse und der Künstler.

Der Terror in Dänemark

Der französische Ankläger Faure gab dann eine Darstellung der Souveränitätsverletzungen, die sich die Nazi in Dänemark zuschulden kommen ließen, das doch offiziell nicht als besetztes Land galt, so daß hier die Deutschen nicht einmal vom deutschen Standpunkt aus berechtigt waren, in die Staatsführung einzugreifen. Schon vor dem Kriege habe die nationalsozialistische Propaganda in Dänemark auf das Ziel hingearbeitet die Einheit des dänischen Volkes zu zersetzen. Nach Kriegsbeginn richtete sich die nationalsozialistische Propaganda allmählich auch gegen die dänische Regierung, das Parlament und den König.

202

The Pittsburgh Press (February 4, 1946)

Army blocks plot to rescue Nazi leaders

Tanks sent to guard Nuremberg trial

NUERNBERG (UP) – The U.S. Third Army rushed tank and infantry reinforcements into Nuernberg today on a confidential tip that die-hard German soldiers were plotting a mass prison break and an attack on the city jail housing Hermann Goering and his fellow Nazi leaders.

Sandbag barricades were thrown around the jail. Veteran American Military Police units mounted machine guns inside the building and at the adjoining courthouse.

Tanks and armored cars also took positions commanding all entrances to the two buildings where the surviving rulers of Nazi Germany are being held during the war crimes trial.

Get proof of plot

Third Army Intelligence agents refused to disclose the source of their information. But they intimated strongly that they had uncovered definite proof that a jail delivery might be attempted.

They admitted that the tip-off pointed to a possible break in one or more of the 64 prisoner of war camps surrounding Nuernberg, where 170,438 German prisoners are being held, including some 80,000 tough Nazi SS troopers.

Tension was heightened by the fact that demobilization has forced the Third Army to weaken the guard around the vast depots of American and captured German tanks, shells and guns scattered over the countryside.

Dynamite cache found

A small cache of dynamite and other explosives was found near the railway line in a Nuernberg suburb last week.

Authorities said they also had posted airplane spotters on the roof of the Nuernberg jail. That suggested fear of an attempted paratroop rescue similar to the coup that snatched Benito Mussolini from an Italian prison in 1943.

Third Army spokesmen insisted officially that the measures were normal security precautions to cope with anything that might develop.

Cite 1944 plot

“It’s just a fact that we’d look awfully silly trying to stop machine guns with pistols or by hunting knife,” one high Army officer said.

He and other ranking officers told correspondents that the idea of a jail delivery was not so fantastic as it might seem. They recalled that the German High Command had sponsored a similar but abortive plan for a mass escape by German prisoners in England to coincide with the Ardennes offensive in December 1944.

There the Germans also were depending on raiding British arms and ammunition depots, with the important difference that in England they would have been in enemy territory and unable to depend on help from the local population.

Hold practice alert

The precautionary action followed by only 24 hours the first practice alert in the courthouse area during which radio cars and sentries with fixed bayonets patrolled the district.

Armed guards in each corridor of the vast Palace of Justice were issued a new set of samples of various identification cards against which to check the right of every person to be in the building.

Cites actions in Denmark

Edgar Faure, assistant French prosecutor, began summarizing Nazi activities in Denmark as the trial resumed.

He charged the Germans forced Denmark to intern 300 Communists after the German invasion of Russia and quoted a Danish government report calling the incident “abusive interference” with Danish sovereignty.

203

The Evening Star (February 4, 1946)

Woman friend killed by Himmler’s order to hush tests story

NUERNBERG (AP) – Heinrich Himmler tried to hush up the story of three years of murderous medical experiments on Jews and Catholic priests at Dachau by having his former sweetheart and her “mad doctor” husband shot to death just before American troops took the camp, Allied investigators have established.

Himmler’s secret papers, discovered by Allied Investigators in a cave at Hallein, disclosed that Dr. S. Rascher and his wife, Nina Diehl, a former actress and one-time heart interest of the Gestapo chief, were shot to death by SS men in April 1945 on Himmler’s orders.

The papers told in detail of Rascher’s experiments in reviving unconscious, frozen me» with the heat of nude women’s bodies, of experiments in which he subjected Jews to high-altitude pressure tests in special chambers, and of experiments in which he injected pus into the legs of Polish Catholic priests in order to test a “preparation” he had “discovered.”

Louvain destruction charged

Meanwhile, in the war crimes trial, Prof. van der Essen told the tribunal that German invasion forces “deliberately and systematically” destroyed world-renowned Louvain University library In Belgium in 1940.

Appearing as a prosecution witness, the history professor who also is the university’s general-secretary, said two German artillery batteries were trained on the library, destroyed by the Germans once before in 1914 and rebuilt with the aid of American funds, while 43 planes bombed it on the morning of May 19.

“The fired systematically at the library and only at the library,” he said, adding that one Nazi battery scored four times and another registered seven hits.

Before the World War the library was one of the best in Europe, housing priceless manuscripts and a large collection of books of the 16th and 17th centuries.

Diplomatic abuses cited

The French prosecution also told the court that unscrupulous abuse of diplomatic prerogatives by high-ranking Nazis paved the way to German seizure of Norway and Denmark.

In both countries, prosecutor Edgar Faure charged, a Nazi diplomat was among the key figures in the usurpation of sovereignty. In Denmark, Ambassador Werner Best, who also was an SS leader, was aided by Danish Nazis and secret police.

In Norway, Faure went on, local Nazis under Vidkun Quisling and Reichs Commissioner Josef Terboven played an important part in the suppression of Norwegian nationality legislation and for procedures in favor of National Socialist doctrines.

Arthur Seyss-Inquart and Julius Streicher, two of the 22 defendants, returned to the dock today after brief illnesses.

204

Plot to free Goering denied; Nuernberg jail fortified

NUERNBERG (AP) – Machine guns were mounted today inside the Nuernberg courthouse where 22 Nazis are on trial before the International Military Tribunal, but Brig. Gen. Leroy H. Watson said he was mystified by reports of a plot to rescue Hermann Goering.

Gen. Watson, who is responsible for security of the Nuernberg jail and courthouse, said the additional measures were taken “to protect the Nuernberg Palace of Justice from any possible attack.”

“We aren’t looking for any trouble, but to be on the safe side we are increasing our firepower ‘just in case’,” he added. “Things have been quiet to date and there are no indications that they will be otherwise.”

Discussing an American news service report that there had been a tip that the Nazi underground planned to deliver Goering, Gen. Watson said: “I’ve never heard of anything like that at all. If there is something like that why doesn’t someone say something to me about it?”

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nuremberg.tribunal

Day 51

206

The Pittsburgh Press (February 5, 1946)

UNO asked to bar execution of Nazis

Uruguay urges life for war criminals

LONDON (UP) – Uruguay asked the United Nations today to rule out the death penalty for Hermann Goering and the other top Nazi warlords on trial at Nuernberg. Uruguay asked that their punishment be limited to life imprisonment.

The surprise move threatened to touch off furious debate in the UNO General Assembly.

The Uruguayan resolution, presented on orders from the Montevideo government said public execution of the Nuernberg defendants would be a “demoralizing spectacle” and would be apt to create worldwide sympathy for them.

It argued that life imprisonment is the severest penalty compatible with democratic respect for human life.

In a statement accompanying their formal resolution, the Uruguayan delegates pointed out that Uruguay abolished the death penalty 40 years ago.

207

Victims paid for deportations

NUERNBERG (UP) – French prosecutor Edgar Faure told the War Crimes Court today that the Nazis made French Jews pay the expenses of their own deportation to concentration camps.

M. Faure presented reports by SS leaders which said the French Jews, in addition to being forced to pay their deportation expenses, were deprived of their nationalities because they were quitting France.

208

The Evening Star (February 5, 1946)

Reds claim ‘proof’ that Mihailovich had ties with Nazis

NUERNBERG (AP) – Russian prosecutors are preparing evidence for the International Military Tribunal, which they say will substantiate Soviet assertions that Gen. Draja Mihailovich, leader of the Chetniks and King Peter’s Yugoslav war minister, actually was working with the Germans as early as 1941.

Gen. Mihailovich is a fugitive from the forces of Marshal Tito, premier of the newly established Yugoslav republic.

Informants close to the Russians said they would attempt to show the tribunal that Gen. Mihailovich used Allied arms and money to help the Germans and to crush “authentic” Partisan movements.

These sources said the evidence included documents indicating that Peter’s exiled government in London sanctioned the alleged duplicity.

Other evidence cited

Other evidence was said to have come from the Yugoslav Quisling, Gen. Milan Nedic, captured by the Americans at Munich last year and removed recently to Belgrade for a treason trial. Nedic was said to have told Allied interrogators that Hitler and Joachim von Ribbentrop, former German foreign minister, backed him into a comer on one occasion in Berlin in 1943 and threatened to shoot 1,000 hostages for every German killed by anti-Fascist Yugoslavs.

An informant said Nedic, puppet ruler of Serbia, asserted that he was confronted by three of Gen. Mihailovich’s associates in October 1941 who demanded cooperation in a mission to crash Allied partisan groups in Yugoslavia. Nedic was said to have told questioners that the plan was to coordinate activities with Gen. Mihailovich’s forces, if possible, to kill Marshal Tito and to annihilate his followers.

Plot outlined

The purported plot, as the Russians are expected to charge, continues:

To accomplish this, Gen. Mihailovich needed money and arms. Nedic said he agreed to supply $200,000 a month plus 3,000 rifles, 3,000,000 rounds of ammunition and 500 machine guns, all obtained from the Germans.

“Germany approves your goal,” Nedic was quoted as telling Gen. Mihailovich through the Chetnik chief’s representatives.

The tribunal today rejected a motion by counsel for the German general staff to expunge testimony relative to destruction of the Louvain library and massacre of civilians in the Ardennes offensive on the ground that it was “hearsay.”

“Production of such testimony does not lead to discovery of the truth,” Attorney Hans Laternser protested in demanding that it be stricken from the trial record.

French assistant prosecutor Edgar Faure, who presented Prof. Leon van der Essen, a Belgian university historian, as a witness yesterday, told the court the professor was a member of the official Belgian War Crimes Commission and that his statements were based on facts uncovered by investigation.

209

Practice alert staged at Nuernberg jail

NUERNBERG (AP) – A practice alert was staged by the American command last night, the latest in a series of additional security measures which Brig. Gen. Leroy H. Watson said had been instituted to protect the Nuernberg Palace of Justice “from any possibility of attack.”

Gen. Watson, responsible for the security of the Nuernberg jail and courthouse, denied, however, knowledge of any threat to rescue any of the accused Nazi war leaders facing the International Military Tribunal.

Over the week end the Army increased the guard around the courthouse and the jail. Additional sandbags were brought in to make barricades for machine-gun posts, and new machine guns were to be set up at strategic points in the long corridors of the buildings.

It was reported here that one G.I. has been detailed as “an enemy aircraft spotter” on the roof of the courthouse, but this has not been visually confirmed by correspondents. It was pointed out that not even a glider is known to be in German hands within Germany at the present time.

Col. B. C. Andrus, commander of the internal security detachment which guards the cellblock where Hermann Goering and 21 other former Nazi leaders are interned, denied that any threat of a jail delivery had been received recently.

“Oh, some months ago we got a crank letter about Goering, but nothing has come in lately,” he said. “Crank letters are nothing new. Several have even threatened my life.”