Mercy tempers justice in Nuernberg sentencing
By Newbold Noyes Jr., Star staff correspondent
This is a complete description of the sentencing of the Nazis, parts of which were published in yesterday’s early editions.
NUERNBERG, Oct. 1 – Justice was strongly tempered with mercy in this afternoon’s 40-minute climax to the unprecedented international trial which has been in progress here since last November 20. The proceedings were packed with drama, as much for what did not happen as for what did.
One by one 18 of Hitler’s henchmen were brought to face the judgment the world imposed on them. Not one gave evidence of the terrible tension which each must have felt in his 30-second appearance.
Each entered the prisoner’s dock through elevator doors at the rear and stood quietly to listen to Lord Chief Justice Lawrence’s words through earphones. Most did not realize that they would hear only one brief sentence and therefore failed to remove the headset when the judgment had been pronounced. Military guards then signaled that the ordeal was finished and the condemned men took off the earphones and went quietly back into the elevator.
Significance in proceedings
What happened here today had a significance in comparison to which the actual defendants meant little. In this courtroom the conscience of a world sick of tyranny and the war it breeds asserted its right to judge and to punish duly constituted rulers who have done it violence.
The spectators who packed into the courtroom at the Palace of Justice witnessed a parade of men who stood for all the things the world must overcome if it is to succeed in its quest for peace. They were ill there, the big ones and the less big, the gentlemen and the thugs, the smart ones and the stupid. Each had his function in the system that was Nazism. Each in his way was in indispensable ingredient of Hitler’s terrible brew.
Just before three o’clock the doors at the rear of the prisoners’ dock opened to admit two American military police who took up positions on either side of the entrance. A moment later, Hermann Goering walked into the room.
The former Reichsmarshal successor-designate to Hitler, Luftwaffe chieftain and president of the Reichstag, whose fabulous ambitions, acquisitions, failures and crimes have made his name infamous in the earth’s farthest corners – hesitates for a moment, standing alone.
This was the man who in 1938 spurred on the workers in German aircraft factories by telling them he wanted bombers big enough to stop those “arrogant mouths” in New York and Washington.
Thought he was strong
That he failed to get them is not the point. The point is that Goering elected, while the rest of the world sought peace, to argue with bombs and tanks instead of with words and ideas – not because he was stupid, but because he thought he was strong.
This man was Hitler’s right hand. He has been singing psalms in his cell of late, but much of the old arrogance, the swaggering misguided courage, is still with him at this moment. As soon as he has put on his earphones, Justice Lawrence starts reading the sentence, Goering stops him with a wave of the hand. His headset is not working.
Apparently perfectly calm he stands by for a full two minutes while soldiers tinker with the apparatus. At last the difficulty is straightened out and Justice Lawrence’s words, in German translation, come through to Goering: “On the counts of the indictment on which you have been convicted, the International Military Tribunal sentences you to death by hanging.”
Rudolf Hess next
Next to be brought to the dock is Rudolf Hess, the man who, in his day, followed Hitler more closely and blindly than all the rest. Two months ago he told this court, “If I were once more at the beginning I should act once more as I did act even though I knew that at the end I should meet death on a bonfire.”
If Hess is not crazy, he is a great actor. He could be either – or both. This heavy-browed, frizzle-haired man of 47, with his sickly pallor and permanent 5 o’clock shadow condition, gave the war one of its most dramatic episodes in his 1941 flight to Britain.
He gave this trial its most dramatic episode when he told a shocked courtroom last December 30 that his “hysterical amnesia,” attested to by some of the world’s foremost physicians, had been faked for “tactical” reasons. Whatever his present condition – officially, he is adjudged sane – Europe is where it is today, among other reasons, because men like Hess could be swayed to put blind trust in other men forsaking all thought of principle.
Hess has a fanatic’s faith. He also has a highly developed sense of drama which is still functioning. Hess steps to the front of the dock and assumes a stance looking at the visitors’ gallery. Twice the guards try to get him to put on earphones – twice he brushes them angrily aside. He does not hear when the president announces his sentence: Life imprisonment. He walks casually out of the box without having bothered to find out what is to become of him.
Joachim von Ribbentrop, as they bring him in, still looks more like a champagne salesman, which he used to be, than like a foreign minister, which he became. There is no distinction to this man – it is hard to picture him dealing in destiny. Now he is pale as milk and there are black circles under his eyes. This man was the direct agent of Hitler’s designs against the outside world. Death, says Justice Lawrence.
Keitel a fine figure
Next to take the stage is a fine figure of a man, handsome, erect, substantial, gray-haired and gray-mustached Wilhelm Keitel, former field marshal, former chief of the Wehrmacht’s high command, to serve as Hitler’s self-confessed tool on the field of battle, he had to compromise drastically with his own concept of a soldier’s honor.
From his orders stemmed atrocities which sickened the world.
“I believe I erred,” he told the court. “That was my guilt.”
For his guilt, Prussian Soldier Keitel, standing stiffly at attention, now learns the penalty – death. He leaves silently.
It is the turn of Ernst Kaltenbrunner, deputy to the suicided Himmler as boss of the Security Police and sadistic brain behind Nazi concentration camps and death factories. He looks the part. At 43, he stands 6 feet 4 inches in height. The angular, ugly head with its long nose and hollow eyes, is seamed with scars.
This is the man who, according to testimony, laughed heartily at executions in the Nazi murder mills. He did not? join the other defendants in the dock until December 10 – he suffered a stroke on the eve of the trial, after having wept hysterically for several weeks. A capillary let go in the lining of his brain, causing blood to seep into his spinal fluid. He recovered, but still does not look his jovial best as he stands stiffly bowing to the court. Now the slouching triggerman who did Hitler’s dirtiest work hears the world judgment, spoken by Justice Lawrence – death. He makes another deeper bow before leaving.
Looks like professor
The fatal doors now open for Alfred Rosenberg. He is handsome, intelligent-looking and suave. At 53 he looks as if he might have gone far as a professor. The Nazis’ official ideologist and anti-Semitic theorist, he edited the Voelkischer Beobachter for Hitler and wrote a book called “Myth of the Twentieth Century.” He was one of the Fuehrer’s earliest associates.
This man’s active brain contributed to a project which would have destroyed the Slav race by forced abortions, compulsory birth control and the depopulation of cities through mass epidemics. His sentence is death.
Rosenberg takes off his earphones so quickly he musses his hair. Then he is gone.
Frank is smiling when he comes in. He adjusts his head set, bites his lip and nods as the president starts reading. On Frank’s conscience is the murder of an estimated 2,300,000 Poles and Jews during his tyrant tenure as Nazi governor general of Poland. He is repentant. He probably most repents the fact that he kept a 38-volume diary. Three times before this trial began, he tried to commit suicide. He looks tough – and he was.
It is Frank who said, In his diary, “One cannot kill all lice and Jews in a year.” It is also he who said, later, “A thousand years will pass and this guilt of Germany will not be erased.” Justice Lawrence says “death.”
Frank looks up at the celling a moment, then removes the earphones and nods to a guard while leaving.
Wilhelm Frick now stands stiffly at the bar of justice. He was Hitler’s minister of the interior. His face is craggy and sour and almost as gray as his crewcut hair. He wears a loud sports jacket. Frick’s counsel has depicted him as a bureaucrat who knew nothing of what was going on. Dr. Robert Kempner, the American prosecuting his case – a former German citizen whom Frick once threw into a concentration camp – saw it somewhat differently. He described his one-time oppressor as the administrative genius behind Hitler’s machine which Frick lubricated with the blood of millions of victims. Justice Lawrence is reading: Death by hanging. Dr. Kempner sits quietly watching as Wilhelm Frick starts back to his cell.
Stretcher generally hated
It is lucky for the next Nazi that he is not a sensitive man. Jew-baiting, pornography-collecting, gum-chewing Julius Stretcher, gauleiter of Franconia and editor of Der Stuermer, is so generally regarded as a stinker that not even his 20 co-defendants have had anything to do with him.
Yet his entry is pompous and he clicks his heels and haughtily lifts his eyebrows when a soldier hands him the earphone. Justice Lawrence intones his sentence – death.
Somebody in the courtroom whistles, and a flicker of surprise seems to cross Streicher’s absurd piglike face. Then he was led back to the jail, where no one is likely even to ask him how he fared. He is not useful to those with brains anymore.
Now we have Walther Funk, Hitler’s finance minister, short, bald, soft looking, smart looking, with deep pouches beneath his eyes and a lopsided twist to his mouth. How did he know those jewels in the Reichsbank came from victims of the Nazi gas chambers and that much of the gold was from their teeth?
He cried when he saw the horror movies. It was a big surprise to him to learn what the men were – the Nazis with whom he worked, as one of their number, for 13 years. Funk apparently is also surprised by the sentence he now receives – life imprisonment – for he turns back toward the bench as though he had something to say, before the guards lead him out.
Still come the men who sought and created war. Two admirals, Karl Doenitz and Erich Raeder, receive sentences of 10 years and life imprisonment, respectively. They are accused of building and directing Hitler’s navy in violation of existing treaties. Doenitz receives his sentence with a tiny twitch of apparent relief at the corners of bis tight drawn mouth. Raeder, however, scowls at the judges’ bench before making his exit.
The elevator yields up a handsome young man – Baldur von Schirach, Nazi youth leader whose face is grave as he takes his place. He is another of the repentants. He only tried, he has said, to teach Hitler’s youth the “good” parts of the Nazi doctrine, and he is sorry things turned out so badly.
The tragedy of Von Schirach’s position is that he can now no longer be a harm even to the millions of young fanatics who learned his bitter lesson so well. He folds his hands meekly while Justice Lawrence reads his sentence – 20 years’ imprisonment. But before he leaves, his lip curls in a slow and deliberate sneer.
Fritz Sauckel, who follows him, had charge of enslaved foreign workers during the war. Despite his lengthy titles, this bald, round-headed little man with his Hitleresque mustache was definitely a small fry in the Nazi hierarchy – almost as small as Stretcher. All through the trial he has been torn between protesting his innocence and revealing his inner elation at the thought that at last he is receiving recognition as a big shot.
Now Sauckel learns the form his hard-won recognition will take. “Death,” says Justice Lawrence.
So it goes. A third generation Prussian military professional, Alfred Gustav Jodl, who planned and waged the Fuehrer’s war with ruthless, dishonorable cunning, gets death. So does Arthur Seyss-Inquart, who helped turn over Austria to Hitler and ruled the beaten Netherlands.
Albert Speer, Nazi armaments minister, bows deeply as the court lets him off with 20 years. Constantin von Neurath, top flight diplomat who was “protector” of Bohemia and Moravia, glares angrily at his 15-year sentence. He is 73 years old.
Acquitted trio absent
The three defendants whom the court had earlier ruled innocent and ordered released – Hjalmar Schacht, Franz von Papen and Hans Fritzsche – were absent in this final lineup before the bar of justice. They had listened impassively before the court recessed as the judges summarized their cases during agonizingly suspenseful moments, and at the news that they were free men had concealed their inner feelings to an astounding degree.
It was Von Papen’s acquittal that caused the biggest stir in the courtroom as well as in the prisoners’ dock. As the reading of his judgment started, this 67-year-old diplomatic gentleman, to whom people and nations have always simply been things to do things with, riveted his eyes on the back of Rosenberg’s neck. He never took them away while the reading went on. His face was a sickly yellow, but it was completely impassive.
He had told the court he worked only for peace. He had been working, for his kind of peace for a long time. He was a spy in the United States during World War I and was identified in connection with the Black Tom explosion. He is the man who is said to have offered Texas to Mexico if Mexico joined the war on Germany’s side.
At last Justice Lawrence reaches the end of his reading, announcing that the court finds Papen not guilty and orders the marshal to release him. At these words, Von Papen’s sleek silver head jerks involuntarily but almost imperceptibly backward and forward several times, but he does not look up, though almost every member of the prisoners’ dock turns to look at him.
Schacht received the news like one who expected it but was relieved that his judges had sufficient intelligence to recognize his innocence. The world well knows the tall spare figure, the choking collar, the wizened mouth, the conscious air of superiority of this money genius who put Germany on her economic feet in the critical days when Nazism was taking hold and starting to rebuild the German war machine. Schacht, who thought Hitler might be a useful tool in the hands of a man of his intelligence, outlived his usefulness as a tool in Hitler’s hands and wound up in Dachau. He settles back contentedly in his seat when the court announces his innocence.
The third acquitted Nazi, Fritsche, head of the Propaganda Ministry’s radio division and editor in chief of DNB, a German news agency, claimed through the trial he was a nonentity. He looks like one. He was in the dock only because Goebbels was not. Without men like him, Hitler could not have succeeded. He and his associates, smart men with the gift of gab who considered journalism a service to their bosses rather than to the people, twisted into knots the mind of a whole nation.
