The Nuremberg Trial

1022

Die Stimme AMERIKAS

Zum Nürnberger Urteil

Die Presse der Vereinigten Staaten beschäftigt sich in ihren Leitartikeln auch weiterhin mit den Nürnberger Urteilen. Die Kommentare betonen vor allem die Tatsache, daß der Internationale Gerichtshof in Nürnberg zum erstenmal in der Geschichte als einen Völkerrechtsgrundsatz festgestellt hat, daß die Führung eines Angriffskrieges das größte Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit ist. Dieser Grundsatz betrifft nicht nur die nunmehr in Nürnberg Verurteilten, sondern auch alle, die dieses Verbrechen in der Zukunft begehen sollten.

„New York Post“: „Das Gerichtsverfahren an sich war viel bedeutsamer als die Angeklagten, und die Fällung des Urteils ist von größerer Bedeutung als das Urteil an sich.

Die Schaffung des ersten Internationalen Gerichtshofes zur Verurteilung der Verantwortlichen war eine Revolution in der Durchsetzung des Rechtes. Sie war jedoch, und das sei hervorgehoben, keine Revolution des Rechtes, sondern eher seine Wiederbelebung. Aus dem Lippenbekenntnis der Zwanzigerjahre wird nunmehr nach einem Vierteljahrhundert die Wirklichkeit. Was früher nur ein unbestimmtes Streben und ein vager Idealismus war, ist heute sanktioniertes Recht geworden.

„New York Times“: „Das erste und oberste der in Nürnberg verkündeten Prinzipien ist die Tatsache, daß die Führung eines Angriffskrieges als das größte Verbrechen zu werten ist. In der Behandlung dieses Verbrechens ist die nationale Souveränität durch die höhere Souveränität des internationalen Rechtes und der internationalen Organisation ersetzt worden, deren Rechtsprechung sich nicht nur auf die Länder und Nationen erstreckt, sondern auch auf deren Regierungen und politische Absichten.“

„Christian Science Monitor”: „Die Urteile in Nürnberg sollten alle Völker in den anklagenden Staaten wie auch in Deutschland dazu veranlassen, sich an der Erhaltung des Friedens in höherem Maße zu beteiligen. Die Ankläger haben ein Gewissen der Menschheit geschaffen, das über den Ansprüchen der einzelnen Nationen steht und der einzige Richter ihrer Handlungen sein soll. Dieser Prozeß bietet für keinen Angreifer eine Grundlage, seine Opfer zu verurteilen und zu bestrafen. In einem solchen Prozeß würde er sich nur selbst verurteilen.“

„St. Louis Post-Dispatch“: „Die in Nürnberg gewonnenen Beweise bieten die Grundlage für viele neue Anklagen. Laßt uns auch die gleichschuldigen Industriellen anklagen. Führen wir auch die schuldigen Mitglieder des Generalstabes der Bestrafung zu, soweit es die Tatsachen rechtfertigen.“

1023

Letzte Meldung aus Nürnberg:
Schacht und Fritzsche von deutscher Polizei verhaftet

Auf amerikanische Anordnung wieder freigelassen

Nürnberg (UP.) - Im Laufe der vergangenen Nacht wurden Schacht und Fritzsche von der deutschen Polizei verhaftet, in den heutigen Morgenstunden jedoch auf eine Intervention von amerikanischer Seite wieder freigelassen.

Kriminaldirektor Hans Stahl, der die Verhaftungen der Beiden vornahm, erklärte, er könne sich im Augenblick über die Sachlage nicht äußern, müsse aber betonen, daß offenbar ein ungerechtfertigter Eingriff in den Kompetenzbereich der deutschen Polizei vorliegt.

Schacht und Fritzsche haben inzwischen unter amerikanischem Schutz das Nürnberger Gefängnis verlassen und sich in ihre in der Stadt gelegenen Wohnungen begeben, vor deren Haustoren seit heute früh je ein amerikanischer Militärpolizist und ein deutscher Polizist Wache stehen.

1024

The Wilmington Morning Star (October 5, 1946)

Rope nears…
American to place noose around eleven Nazi necks

NUERNBERG, Germany, Oct. 4 (UP) – The 11 condemned Nazi criminals have been isolated in death row and the hangman who will place them on the gallows between now and October 16 already has arrived to begin his work, it was reported Friday.

Army officials kept all details secret, but military policemen confirmed the executioner, believed to be Master Sgt. John C. Woods, 41, San Antonio, Texas, had arrived to make the arrangements for his grim task.

Woods already has executed 37 men in Europe as official Army hangman, bringing his total to 313 in 16 years, and hence said he wished to climax his professional career by placing the rope about the necks of the Nazi criminals who launched World War II.

Appeals had been filed for five of the 11 men condemned to death, for the life sentence imposed on Rudolf Hess and for the criminal conviction imposed on the SS Elite Guard as an organization.

It appeared that the three freed men of Nuernberg – Hjalmar Schacht, Franz von Papen and Hans Fritzsche – may be forced to remain in the American Zone in Bavaria.

1025

The Evening Star (October 5, 1946)

Schacht, Fritzsche spirited out of jail and hidden in homes

Two are free pending trial by Munich denazification court, U.S. officials say

NUERNBERG (AP) – Hjalmar Schacht and Hans Fritzsche, acquitted by the International War Crimes Tribunal, were told today that they were free to come and go as they pleased, but there were indications their freedom might be short-lived.

During the night the former Nazi financier and propagandist were spirited out of the Palace of Justice jail and hidden in private residences in downtown Nuernberg.

Capt. Morris Smith of the public safety department of the American Military Government and Leo Stahl, Nuernberg chief of police, told Schacht and Fritzsche that they were free, under orders of Brig. Gen. Walter Muller, military government chief of Bavaria.

But American military government officials in Munich issued a statement saying the two were free “pending trial” by the principal denazification court in Munich.

The statement added that the men could count on German police to protect them from possible violence.

Franz von Papen, also acquitted, remained in jail. His appeal for permission to enter the French occupation zone was denied yesterday, and he asked officials to try to arrange for his entry into the British zone.

British Army officers, however, announced yesterday that they would not allow any of the three to enter their zone.

Three of the 11 former Nazi leaders sentenced to death or prison by the tribunal allowed the deadline to expire without filing appeals for clemency with the Allied Control Council. All the other defendants asked for mercy.

Failing to appeal were Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Gestapo chief, sentenced to hang, and Albert Speer, armaments producer, and Baldur von Schirach, Hitler Youth leader, both sentenced to 20 years.

Schacht arrested, but freed

Schacht and his wife went to a house on Frelingstrasse, and the aging financier spent the morning pacing up and down, trying to decide what to do next.

Stahl arrested Schacht sometime after midnight, it was learned, but freed him immediately because a proper warrant had not been prepared.

The chief said police would arrest both “later,” when American guards had been withdrawn.

Military police were instructed to protect the former high Nazis from “mob violence.”

German police were told to keep the pair from wandering around the city, lest they be arrested immediately and taken before a denazification court.

Fritzsche tries to surrender

Fritzsche stayed in the home of his attorney, Heinz Fritz. Early today he tried to give himself up to German police, but American MPs would not let him leave the house.

In Frankfurt, a Third Army public relations officer said, “I was told that the military police guarding the houses where they (Schacht and Fritzsche) spent the night were provided at the request of the military government to keep out Americans and news reporters, over whom the German police have no control.”

In Bremen, Wilhelm Hoegner, minister-president of Bavaria, said yesterday he still intended to order the arrest of the three men and place them before denazification panels should they stay in the American occupation zone.

Hoegner, in the city for an interzonal unification conference, declared in an interview, “Schacht, Von Papen and Fritzsche were found innocent of crimes against the Allies. They have not yet answered for crimes they committed against the German people. They must be judged by denazification panels.”

Lawyers’ ouster threatened

A delayed Frankfurt dispatch reported a threat by the German Bar Association to expel the German lawyers who defended the Nazis in the Nuernberg trial.

An article in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung of Munich for Thursday said the bar association intended to expel the lawyers as “sympathizers with the Nazi cause,” it was reported in a Third Army public relations announcement from Heidelberg received in Frankfurt.

Such action would prevent them from practicing law in Germany, where all lawyers are required to belong to the bar association.

Hess was surprised that he was not sentenced to die along with 11 other Nazi leaders condemned by the tribunal, but was not much interested in his fate one way or the other, his attorney said.

Nor was Hess interested when he was told an appeal had been filed from his sentence to life imprisonment and that a new sanity test had been asked for him, said the attorney, Alfred Seidl. The erratic former deputy of Hitler quickly switched the subject to books and asked for a new one by a German writer dealing with naval battles of the Russo-Japanese War.

1026

U.S., British zone Germans demand trial of three

BREMEN (AP) – The highest German political officials of the British and American occupation zones proposed formally today that the three defendants acquitted of war crimes in Nuernberg be tried by a German court on a charge of “crimes against the German people.”

The proposal was put forward in a resolution adopted unanimously at a German unification conference attended by minister presidents from the two zones. Officials from the Russian and French zones were invited but did not attend.

The resolution said the conference was of the opinion that the Nuernberg tribunal had tried the defendants on the basis of international but not domestic crimes.

1027

‘On the Other Hand’…
Foresees American opposition to trial of German industrialists

By Lowell Mellett

Notably missing from the list of Nazis convicted by the International Military Tribunal are those German industrialists who worked hand-in-glove with the Hitler government in planning and making aggressive war. The reason for this is that the industrialists had not been put on trial. The British and French delegations at Nuernberg had successfully opposed the American demands for their indictment.

Now it is said that each of the occupying powers is free to take up any cases it may desire, within its own zone. In view of Justice Jackson’s vigorous efforts to bring the industrialists before the four-power court, it is assumed that those located in the American zone will surely have to defend themselves in an American military court. Pressure to prevent this, however, is likely to be terrific.

The pressure, if it occurs, will not all be German. At least, that is not likely to be the case. Much of it may be American.

Americans, important Americans, were up to their ears in German industry for years before the war began, the years in which the industrial basis of the war was being built. They were in the very industries that made Germany strong enough to attempt world conquest. This is no secret. Antitrust prosecutions by the Justice Department, including cases that have been concluded and cases still pending, have brought out the facts. Additional facts have been published by Sen. Kilgore’s subcommittee of the Senate’s War Investigating Committee.

Cartels established

German industrialists can be charged with building war industries, sometimes disguised as peace industries, in direct cooperation with the German military machine. They can be charged also with strangling the industries of other countries, through the development of international cartels – with the cooperation of industrialists in Great Britain, France and America. Products of some of these industries, which in due time proved vitally necessary to the American war effort, were withheld from America, as they were from Britain and France.

The part the German industrialists played in crippling the war potential of her future enemies was made clear when France and England were attacked. Those countries sought to place orders in the United States for essential war materiel, only, in many cases, to be turned away. For example, range finders, periscopes, gun sights and other military optical goods, badly needed, could not be furnished by the leading American manufacturer because of a cartel agreement with a German firm which gave the latter exclusive rights to the European market.

Synthetic rubber

The desperate lengths to which the American government went to build up a synthetic rubber industry is well remembered. A cartel agreement with an American company had given I. G. Farbenindustrie a tight control over the manufacture of buna. Only a few weeks before Pearl Harbor that American company sued an independent American company for alleged patent infringement because it sought to experiment with the production of synthetic rubber.

Similar stories have been told concerning a long list of vital war items – aviation gasoline, aviation glass, aviation instruments, magnesium, chlorate of potash, carboloy, nickel, electrical goods and so on.

The defense to be offered by the German industrialists if these trials come off – will be interesting. Will they say they did not know what they were doing or will they say, “yes, we did it for the Fatherland. For the Fatherland, we made suckers of the British, the French and the Americans.”

Or will they say, as one German industrialist is already reputed to have said to an American investigator, that the idea of an international cartel in his particular industry – one that worked out advantageously for Germany – originated in America?

These are interesting questions, but not as interesting as the primary question: Will the industrialists actually be tried?

1028

The Pittsburgh Press (October 5, 1946)

Yanks halt German arrest of freed Nazi leaders

Schacht, Fritzsche given protection against de-Nazification warrants

NUERNBERG (UP) – The U.S. Military Government ended an 11-hour agreement with German police today by releasing Hjalmar Schacht and Hans Fritzsche from American house arrest and promising them protection from rearrest by German authorities.

Schacht and Fritzsche were told they were free to leave the separate Nuernberg apartments in which they had been barricaded since their secret departure from the Nuernberg Prison last night.

They cannot be arrested by any German authority “until further notice.”

Orders sped by phone

Telephoned orders from Brig. Gen. Walter J. Mueller, American military governor of Bavaria, in early afternoon cancelled the American house arrest. The two acquitted German leaders had been detained while military government authorities weighed the right of German police to re-arrest them on de-Nazification warrants.

Later, Fritzsche conferred with military government officers and the Nuernberg police chief and decided to give himself up to German authorities for de-Nazification proceedings. He will surrender, but will remain at liberty until his case comes up for hearing.

Schacht and Fritzsche were told they would be assigned American Military Police escorts for trips around Nuernberg if they desired.

Until Gen. Mueller’s order arrived, the two men were barricaded in their apartment buildings by American police.

Appeals filed

Meantime, Hermann Goering, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel and seven other convicted men and appeals to the Control Council shortly before the deadline. This raised the total of appeals to 16.

In Berlin, a British spokesman for Lt. Gen. Sir Brian Robertson said entry applications to the British Zone from Schacht, Fritzsche or Franz von Papen would be denied.

Appeal from pope reported

Dr. Alfred Seidl, attorney for Hans Frank, stated meanwhile that Cardinal Michael Faulhaber of Munich has forwarded to the Allied Council an appeal from Pope Pius XII for mercy for Frank, under a tribunal death sentence.

Dr. Seidl said Cardinal Faulhaber told him he had forwarded the appeal. Frank became a Catholic convert while under arrest.

The others to appeal today were Walther Funk, Karl Doenitz, Arthur Seyss-Inquart and Alfred Jodl.

Franz von Papen, the third German leader acquitted by the international tribunal Tuesday, remained in the Nuernberg prison awaiting a formal reply to his request to enter the British zone.

Schacht arrested, freed

The U.S. Third Army announced that Schacht and Fritzsche left the prison as free men 45 minutes before midnight. The announcement said “both men were furnished transportation to the place where they wanted to spend the night.”

German police had gone to Schacht’s apartment several hours after he left prison and arrested him.

It was reported they had taken him most of the way to the nearby police headquarters when an order forbidding his arrest reached them from American authorities.

1029

Vatican is silent on appeal report

VATICAN CITY (UP) – Authoritative sources in the Vatican secretary of state office today carefully avoided confirming or denying reports that Pope Pius XII had appealed for mercy for Hans Frank, but stressed his “necessary role as peacemaker and pacifier of passions in a case like Nuernberg.”

From detailed questioning, it was the personal impression of the United Press reporter that the Holy Father received a specific request for a clemency intervention for Frank and that he communicated in reply a favorable papal disposition toward mercy which was something less than a direct appeal.

BERLIN (UP) – The office of the Allied Control Council Secretariat said today that no clemency appeal for Hans Frank had been received here from Pope Pius “or anyone else.”

1030

The Chicago Star (October 5, 1946)

Frank-ly Speaking

By Frank Marshall Davis

I doubt whether you had thought of it this way, but it seems to me that we are having our own version of the Nuernberg trials. The location is Lawrenceburg, a small town in the great state of Tennessee. And in this Americanized version, positions are reversed.

At Nuernberg, Nazis were on trial for their “superior race” crimes against Jews and other peoples of Europe. At Lawrenceburg, 25 Negroes are on trial for actually defending themselves from Tennessee exponents of the “superior race” theory.

This is, I think, an almost perfect commentary on our prevailing policies, both domestic and international. Abroad, we seem to fight fascism. At home, we tolerate those conditions that can be described by no word but fascism. This is Grade-A hypocrisy and explains why people in other parts of the world look cynically upon the noble sentiments of democracy our guys mouth at Paris and before the United Nations meetings.

But our foreign and home policies are not actually so far apart as they seem. At Nuernberg we have skimmed only the surface, prosecuting merely those Nazi leaders who carried the mail for fascism. World opinion forced this prosecution, yet there are powerful voices who oppose any semblance of a trial. And it seems now that the big industrialists, cash kinsmen of Wall Street, will not face the international court. These industrialists, remember, supplied the money which shoved Hitler into power and would prove mighty handy in revitalizing Germany as part of the anti-Soviet coalition.

So, you see, there’s a bit of similarity between our failure to punish the German industrialists, who were the backbone of German fascism and are now being kept under wraps as potential allies in the contemplated World War III, and the state prosecution of 25 Negroes who resisted Tennessee fascism.

The truth is that our Big Money Boys, who now make our foreign policy and are determined to save their Nazi counterparts, are likewise responsible for those conditions in Tennessee and other parts of our nation resulting in Negro persecution. The Nazis used anti-Semitism as a means of getting and maintaining control; in America Negro-baiting has served a similar purpose. By splitting the white and black masses on racial lines and setting them against each other, the economic rulers maintain their domination.

But of course this basic fact is covered up. You don’t get it in the press or over the radio or in the films, the main organs of thought control. So most of us go happily along, unwitting victims of Propaganda Paralysis, that mental disease caused through visual and auditory contamination by press, radio and screen.

That is why, I think, we don’t generally realize the kinship between Nuernberg and Lawrenceburg’ and our sham of sounding off for democracy abroad and letting our racists keep control at home.

Paul Robeson told President Truman about it when he went to the White House to ask action on the 41 American lynchings since V-J Day. Truman, you will recall, insisted on divorcing Nuernberg from the anti-Negro terrorism on the ground that there was no connection. I don’t know whether our pitiful President sought by this to serve his Wall Street masters or is actually our No. One victim of Propaganda Paralysis.

But there’s no reason for the rest of us sharing this stupidity. Nuernberg and Lawrenceburg are farther apart on the map than they are ideologically. Organized labor and all liberals and progressives must learn the lessons of both trials and then be guided.

The immediate step is to get registered and vote – right. The ballot is a weapon to whip the congressional servants of the Big Money Boys who block changes which would do away with the conditions that created the Lawrenceburg trials. Sending enough of the right congressmen to Washington would force a change in our foreign policy which today has no intention of putting the financiers of fascism on trial at Nuernberg.

Like everything else, it boils down to a job for all thinking Americans. So let’s do it.