The Sunday Star (September 29, 1946)
Final act of 10-month drama at Nuernberg opens tomorrow
Sentences will be pronounced Tuesday; residents of ex-Nazi capital apathetic
By Newbold Noyes Jr., Star staff correspondent
NUERNBERG, Sept. 28 – The final act of the longest, most ambitious legal drama in history opens here Monday.
Last November 20, in this shattered shrine of Nazism, 21 of the available leaders of Adolf Hitler’s gang and seven organizations through which they worked were called to account for their crimes against the world.
Now, after more than 10 months and over 1,000 hours of sessions – after some 200 witnesses have spoken about 5,000,000 words of testimony, the world is ready to pass judgment.
None knows better than Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, chief American prosecutor, who returned from Paris this afternoon, and the others who have directed this drama through its tedious course, that the sentences expected to be handed down Tuesday afternoon actually will represent only a minor phase of the real work of the International Military Tribunal. But, inevitably, they will be the climax of the show, and official Nuernberg is tense and excited today.
So far as can be seen, however, the Germans of the bombed-out city where the Nazis once held annual party meetings are wholly apathetic to the fate of their former leaders. They appear to enjoy the warm autumn sun as best they can, walking their rubbled streets with little if any interest in what their conquerors decide to do about the men who brought this country to its present state of ruin.
Against this background a steadily growing horde of reporters dashes madly around getting ready for “Operation Judgment,” trying to find out how the defendants are behaving as the climatic phase approaches and to learn anything that can be learned as to what the court’s decision may be.
Although they are writing a good deal, they are not learning much. An official curtain of secrecy has been tightly drawn about the jail adjoining the palace of justice where the court meets. It has been announced that premature publication of the judgment will result in stern measures against the writer responsible. Translators, working feverishly to ready the trilingual judgment for a reading which will probably take two days, are doing so under heavy guard.
As a matter of fact, the court seems to be going to extremes in its attempts to create a hush-hush atmosphere about the conclusion of its labors. Authorized observers not only must have special, new credentials to obtain admittance Monday and until the trial ends, but also must submit to thorough search before they can be passed by the double guard which has been assigned to the court building.
Cameramen excluded
The court, apparently to avoid risking imperiling its dignity, proposes to exclude news photographers and official cameramen from the chamber during the concluding moments when the actual verdicts are read, although photographers have attended every session up to now with no untoward results. No one seems to know what is behind this measure, which is said to have been agreed to unanimously by the tribunal and against which the press group is still protesting tonight.
The speculation among observers here is generally to the effect that all the defendants will be found guilty, but that not all will receive the death penalty.
Two are considered virtually certain to escape with their lives: Hjalmar Schacht, former economics minister, and Hans Fritzsche, former chief of the Propaganda Ministry’s broadcasting division. Others accorded a fair chance of receiving less than the maximum penalty demanded by the prosecutors of the United States, Britain, France and Russia are, in descending order of chance:
Albert Speer, former armaments minister; Baldur von Schirach, leader of the youth movement; Erich Raeder, commander of the German Navy for 15 years; Karl Doenitz, his successor, who followed Hitler as chancellor as Germany surrendered; Rudolf Hess, one time deputy Fuehrer whose “madness” may save him; Alfred Jodl, Wehrmacht chief of staff, and Walther Funk, who took over the Economics Ministry from Schacht.
Death sentence speculation
On the basis of this speculation – and that is all it is – the following are virtually certain to die by hanging or the guillotine 15 days after their sentences are handed down here:
Hermann Goering, Joachim von Ribbentrop, foreign minister; Alfred Rosenberg, Nazi ideologist; Hans Frank, who governed conquered Poland; Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Gestapo chief; Wilhelm Frick, minister of the interior; Julius Streicher and Fritz Sauckel, gauleiters of Franconia and Thuringen, respectively; Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the Wehrmacht’s high command; Franz von Papen, ace Nazi diplomat; Constantin von Neurath, overseer of Bohemia-Moravia, and Arthur Seyss-Inquart, who brought Austria into Hitler’s orbit and ruled the Netherlands for the Fuehrer.
Only 21 defendants will be in the dock Monday, although the revised indictment lists 22. Martin Bormann, who succeeded Hess as deputy party leader, is missing. He is believed to have died in the fall of Berlin. Nevertheless, the tribunal is expected to pronounce his death sentence Tuesday.
Trial success problematical
The truth is that for the men who have conducted this trial its importance does not lie in the decision as to what shall be done with the collection of big and little Nazis in the prisoners’ dock. The tribunal has sought, through these defendants, to present the world with a vast, documented study of the Nazi movement – a study which will make people know what that movement did to Germany and to the world and how it did it.
As the trial draws to its close, it is admitted here that the success of this venture in education is problematical. The lesson of Nuernberg, significantly, seems to have made its deepest impression so far on the defendants themselves.
Scornfully defiant last November all of these men – with the possible exception of Hess – apparently had been brought to a realization of the wrongness of the Fuehrer principle by the time they made their final pleas a month ago.
It seems probable, however, that most of the meaning of the trial has gone over the heads of the people at large in Germany as well as elsewhere. It has been too difficult to spread this over a large enough area to be grasped by any except those who have followed the sessions at close hand, day after day.
But there is confidence that a great contribution has been made to the writing of the history of Nazi Germany and of the Second World War – that the terrible things proved here will be understood and appreciated sooner or later if not today.