At Queens College Forum: Eyewitness To Hell

Queens Colleges forum on "Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial" last week brought together journalists, a prosecutor who tried the historic case and a physician in charge of the health of the doomed Nazi defendants.
The panelists were introduced by Allen Lee Sessoms, outgoing president of Queens College.
Walter Cronkite, who covered major news events for 60 years, and "60 Minutes" commentator Andy Rooney agreed that the "story of a lifetime" didnt live up to its reputation because of the prosecutors technique of repeating documentary evidence time and time again to establish Nazi war crimes.
"We had to keep digging for new angles because of the repetitious nature of the testimony," said Cronkite, the retired CBS news anchor. "They just kept re-introducing the same evidence."
Cronkite said that reporters even had trouble getting copies of the documents.
"Joseph E. Persico, author of the book, "Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial," and a member of the forum held at the Museum of Broadcasting in Manhattan, said that testimony ran to more than 6 million words and 42 volumes.
His book will be the basis of a TNT special on the historic trials next summer. Excerpts of the documentary starring Alec Baldwin as Robert Jackson, the chief U.S. prosecutor and an associate justice of the Supreme Court were shown.
Rooney was one of the first reporters to enter the Buchenwald concentration camp when the war ended. He said he was "aghast" at the horrors he saw, but he would not offer many details.
"I recall vividly," he said, "the outlines of a chessboard scratched on the walls of the dormitories where the Nazi victims played chess at night."
He attended the trial as a correspondent for the Army newspaper, "Stars and Stripes," while Cronkite covered the trials for United Press International.
"There were 21 archvillains on trial," Rooney said. "At one point, the defendants were in tears as the damning testimony piled up."
The panelists agreed that the judges had to contend with charges that the proceeding was a vengeful act by the Allies. They also ruled that the Nazi generals, Jodl, Ribbentrop and the others "pursued an aggressive war and were consequently war criminals."
Persico made the point that the British wanted to summarily execute the defendants, but the U.S. and Russia favored a trial. He said his book took root when he was a teenager and first read about the Nuremberg trial.
"I could find no publisher years later when I completed the book," he said. "But when Saddam invaded Kuwait and the question of a trial for war crimes arose, publishers showed interest in the book."
Persico said that Gallup polls showed that 22 percent of those surveyed didnt believe that the Holocaust happened.
The Queens College panel included Dr. John Lattimer, a former Columbia Presbyterian urologist assigned by the Allies to monitor the Nazis health while the trial was under way.
"I got to know Herman Goering and found him to be of above level intelligence," Lattimer said. "He was competent, vigorous and could have run the country better than Hitler. But he was under the influence of drugs."
Lattimer said that the Allied judges were distressed when Goering cheated the hangman by swallowing a cyanide pill.
"He completely fooled security at the prison by secreting the cyanide capsule in a jar of skin cream," Lattimer said. "He had a skin condition and no one was suspicious of the jar."
Goering took the cyanide pill two and one-half hours before he was destined for the hangmans noose.
"I havent been afraid of death since I was 12 years of age," Goering told his defense counsel in the middle of the trial.
The Nazi defendants died on the gallows at the hands of Master Sergeant John Woods.
"I hanged those 10 Nazis and Im proud of it," he said. "I did a good job of it, too. Everything clicked. I hanged 347 people and I never saw one go off better. I wasn’t nervous. I haven’t got any nerves. A fellow can’t afford to have nerves in this business."
When asked by a reporter what he had done immediately after the executions, he replied, "Had me and my boys a stiff drink." He smiled. "We earned it."