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How do you achieve justice after such horrific injustice? How do you honor the 11 million dead and mollify their sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, aunts, uncles and grandparents? How do you rectify the fact that millions were displaced across the globe and millions more were physically and psychologically scarred for life?
The difficult question for the Allied powers - the U.S., Great Britain, the Soviet Union and France - who sought to prosecute the Nazis after World War II was how best to minimize the natural urge for revenge and maximize legality within a court of law. The effort was seemingly undermined because the mastermind, Adolf Hitler, had committed suicide, eliminating himself from the equation after attempting to exterminate the Jewish race. Reason had to be stripped of emotion - a cruel and impossible task for many.
On November 20, 1945 the International Military Tribunal (IMT), comprised of a panel of Allied judges and prosecutors, began trying 21 major war criminals on charges of crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and conspiracy to commit such crimes. Nuremberg, Germany was chosen as the location for the trials, because it was, at the time, in Germany’s American zone and the city’s Palace of Justice was sufficiently spacious and had a jail attached to it. Symbolism also played a factor, however; Nuremberg was the site of massive Nazi rallies dating back to Hitler’s emergence in 1933.
“A lot of people looked on that trial as revenge,” recalled Richard Sonnenfeldt, chief interpreter and an interrogator at the Nuremberg Trials, who explained that even as late as July 1945, the roster of Nazi defendants had not been finalized, nor had the location of the trial been set.
“But we tried to make it a fair, legal trial,” said the 83-year-old Port Washington, New York resident who is by many accounts the last person alive who spoke at length to the top Nazi perpetrators.
When Sonnenfeldt arrived at Nuremberg in August of 1945, the city, like many other German municipalities, had been left a crumbling, decaying mess by the Allied troops.
“There was not a house standing between the airport and the courthouse,” Sonnenfeldt noted.
Most German men of military age had become prisoners of war and the few who roamed the streets were often the elderly and the victims of bombings who hobbled around on one leg. Women, grubbing for potatoes and scooping up muddy water from puddles, dove after cigarette butts discarded by American soldiers, Sonnenfeldt recalled.
The scene inside the courtroom provided a stark contrast to the surrounding urban decay. In his opening statement for the American prosecution, Justice Robert Jackson said everyone should be honored by the privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against world peace and humbled by the “grave responsibility” the unique opportunity presented.
“The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot…survive their being repeated,” Jackson said.
In the absence of Hitler, Hermann Göring was the chief defendant, the highest-ranking Nazi who had survived the war. In 1935, Göring had been put in charge of solving “The Jewish Question,” which led to his 1935 installation of the Nuremberg Laws, stripping German Jews of their rights as citizens. Later, Göring’s “solution” evolved into a calculated mass extermination using Zyklon B gas.
Indeed, Göring and his fellow Nazis were so malignant and their brutality so devastating that Sonnenfeldt couldn’t help but harbor hostility toward them. Sonnenfeldt, a Jew from Germany, managed to escape to England before Kristallnacht, but, before he left, endured his fair share of anti-Semitism.
“I was unbiased in my work but I felt contempt for these people,” he said, admitting that he was so busy interpreting and interrogating some of the major defendants that he “didn’t have much time for personal feelings.”
However, Sonnenfeldt recalled feeling uneasy when Göring, at one point, winked at him from across the courtroom.
Right up to the end in October of 1946, many of the accused feigned ignorance of the atrocities they had perpetuated, an appalling slap in the face to many involved in the trials and to victims, dead and alive, across their world.
Ultimately, 10 Nazis were hanged. Göring, who would have been the eleventh, killed himself with a cyanide pill, which, in Sonnenfeldt’s opinion, was a final act of defiance. Seven of the defendants received jail sentences and three were exonerated due to a lack of evidence.
The outcome could have been different, Sonnenfeldt admitted. But how do you ever produce a just outcome when you are reeling in the wake of genocide? Any verdict would likely have been viewed as lenient.
The Nuremberg Trials were nevertheless unprecedented in the scope of criminal acts they dealt with.
“There’s no question there was justice,” Sonnenfeldt said.
MAJOR DEFENDANTS AT NUREMBERG
Karl Dönitz (10 years)
Commander in Chief of German War Navy after Erich Raeder; Reich President after Hitler’s suicide.
Hans Frank (death)
Governor General of Nazi-occupied Poland
Wilhelm Frick (death)
Reich Minister of Interior; Reich Protector for Bohemia and Moravia (after von Neurath)
Hans Fritzsche (acquitted)
Head of Radio Division of Propaganda Ministry
Walther Funk (life)
Minister of Economics; President of Reichsbank
Hermann Göring (death)
Commander in Chief of Luftwaffe; President of Reichstag; Director of Four Year Plan
Rudolf Hess (life)
Deputy Party Leader, Nazi Party
Alfred Jodl (death)
Chief of Armed Forces High Command Operational Staff
Ernst Kaltenbrunner (death)
Chief of Reich Security Main Office (RSHA); Chief of
Security Police
Wilhelm Keitel (death)
Chief of Staff of Armed Forces High Command
Konstantin von Neurath (15 years)
Foreign Minister of Germany (until 1938); Reich
Protector for Bohemia and Moravia
Franz von Papen (acquitted)
Reich Chancellor prior to Hitler; Ambassador to
Austria; Ambassador to Turkey
Erich Raeder (life)
Commander in Chief of German Navy
Joachim von Ribbentrop (death)
Foreign Minister
Alfred Rosenberg (death)
Chief Nazi Philosopher; head of Nazi Party’s Foreign Affairs Department; Reichminister for Eastern Occupied Territories
Fritz Sauckel (death)
Plenipotentiary General for Deployment of Labor
Hjalmar Schacht (acquitted)
Reichsbank president (until 1939); Plenipotentiary General for war economy (before war)
Baldur von Schirach (20 years)
Leader of Hitler Youth (1933-1940); Gauleiter in Austria (1940-1945)
Arthur Seyss-Inquart (death)
Reich Governor of Austria; Deputy Governor of Occupied Poland; Reichskommissar for German occupied Netherlands
Albert Speer (20 years)
Hitler’s architect; Reich Minister of Armaments and Munitions (from 1942)
Julius Streicher (death)
Anti-Semitic Editor of Der Sturmer newspaper; organizer of 1933 Jewish business boycott
