Nuremberg: A personal record of the trial of the major Nazi war criminals

By Airey Neave

On 18 October 1945, a day that would haunt him for ever, Airey Neave personally served the official indictments on the twenty-one top Nazis awaiting trial in Nuremberg – including Hermann Goering, Rudolf Hess and Albert Speer. With his visit to their gloomy prison cells, the tragedy of an entire generation reached its final act.
The 29-year-old Neave, a wartime organiser of MI9 and the first Englishman to escape from Colditz Castle, had watched and listened over the months as the trials unfolded. Here, he describes the cowardice, calumny and in some cases bravado of the defendants – men he came to know and who in turn would become known as some of the most evil men in history.
A milestone in international law, the Nuremberg trials prompted uncomfortable but vital questions about how we prosecute the worst crimes ever committed – and who is entitled to deliver justice. Challenging, poignant and incisive, this definitive eyewitness account remains indispensable reading today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Biteback Publishing
• Release date: Feb 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781785906749

Airey Neave

Airey Neave worked as an intelligence officer for MI9 in World War Two before serving with the International Military Tribunal at the Nuremberg trials. After the war he became Member of Parliament for Abingdon. The author of several highly acclaimed books on the Second World War, he was assassinated by the Irish National Liberation Army in a car bomb attack at the House of Commons in 1979.

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‘A brilliant writer … Rises splendidly to the grim story he has to tell.’

The Spectator

‘A book which ought to have its place on the permanent record.’

Financial Times

‘Expanded and gripping detail.’

Daily Telegraph

‘As a personal record with a clear message this book could hardly be bettered.’

British Book News

‘A monumentally gripping book … Endlessly fascinating.’

Scottish Daily Record

‘Who better to recall the passions and revive the memories … than Mr Neave, one of the most gallant and decorated soldiers of World War II.’

Evening News

Contents

Title Page

Foreword by Rebecca West

Preface to the third edition by Baroness Airey of Abingdon

Preface

Part One: My Path to Nuremberg

1: Out of Step in Unter den Linden

2: At the Villa Huegel

3: Slave Labour at Essen

4: The Palace of Justice

Part Two: The Day of the Indictment

5: The Iron Doors

6: The Reichsmarschall

7: Rudolf Hess and the Second Bismarck

8: The Beast of Nuremberg

9: Baldur and the Unloved Philosopher

10: Frank, Funk and Frick: The Three Fs

11: Two Alcoholics: Kaltenbrunner and Ley

12: The Slave Merchants

13: A Tale of Two Gentlemen

14: The Gentle Judas

15: Hitler’s Banker

16: A Competent Officer

17: Lakaitel

18: A Question of Naval Honour

Part Three: To the Day of Judgment

19: ‘A Fair Trial for the Defendants’

20: The Judges

21: ‘The Greatest Trial in History’

22: Jackson v. Goering

23: The Art of Cross-Examination

24: Criminal Organisations

25: The General Staff and High Command

26: Closing Speeches

27: The Day of Judgment

28: Time to Reflect

Appendix: Table of Verdicts and Sentences

Index

About the Author

Copyright

Foreword by Rebecca West

From Mr Airey Neave’s Nuremberg: A Personal Record of the Trial of the Major Nazi War Criminals in 1945–46, I learn that he was twenty-nine years old when I met him at that trial, and I will own that I then took him for a man of forty, and rather worn at that. But then his twenty-nine years had been rather more than most people’s twenty-nine years. He had taken an Honours Law Degree at Oxford before going to war and collecting an MC and DSO and a wound and becoming inflamed with enthusiasm for the sport of escaping from German prisons. He successfully found his way out of Colditz to England and escaped from other places on several occasions. He struck me then as dividing his attention between ideals of a sort that refused contentment, amusement at the world, and a puzzled interest in the persistent weakness of man. I noted as the years went by that in the interstices of a busy political career he managed to become a company director in the nuclear industry and chairman of the Parliamentary Select Committee of Science and Technology, and that he is now the opposition spokesman on Northern Ireland. He has always seemed to me to have an admirably balanced attitude to life. It is, I think, against his principles to care much about danger but he would do all he could to spare the rest of us unnecessary risk. It became apparent at Nuremberg that a number of people who had had dealings with him during the war thought more highly of him than he did himself.

I welcome this book from him, because I gained the impression at Nuremberg that he was as conscious as anybody there of the true meaning of the trial. That trial was a sort of legalistic prayer that the Kingdom of Heaven should be with us; but the answer was, like all answers to prayers, coming in not as clearly as it might be. As for me, I know why the prayer was being directed towards Heaven. When I went to Nuremberg on two occasions as correspondent of the Daily Telegraph and the New Yorker, I had had my fair share (no more but no less) of the tumbling about and senseless but nevertheless utterly necessary interruption of my life which the Second World War meant to the civilian. I had then gone out to Nuremberg and seen that the war had been worse for the Germans than it had been for me.

Spending two nights on my way down to Nuremberg, I walked out of the press hostel into a long street, as long, it seemed to me, as the road from Piccadilly Circus to Kensington High Street; and it was a trench of nothingness, the houses on each side of it had disappeared. In another street, not so drastically punished, there were walls standing at the base of blasted buildings, and on these were stands with notices pinned all over them, inscribed with the names of families scattered by the Blitz, giving their whereabouts and begging for news of their kin; and people were standing still and reading these notices in animal eagerness, tilting their faces up and forwards as my Labrador used to stretch up his muzzle towards the tea table. At other places I looked down over barricades at hollow squares dug down into the depths of the earth, where a building had been, where its foundations were now being picked out by a frail and scrawny army of old women doing navvies’ work. They were a puddle of survivors, collected at the centre of a vast expanse of earth, stretching to the northern seas and the sunken mountains, where their menfolk were either stranded in defeat above the ground or buried beneath it.

In another part of the city I was to see a proof that because we had won the war we were not immune from mortal wounds. I was taken by a member of the Allied Control Commission, an old friend of mine, on a drive round the city, and at one point he got out to visit a German official in a ministry situated on a low rise of the land; and he told me to go to a balustrade and look over the skeletonised city. I had every right to be there, for it was in the British Sector and I had papers giving me a free run of the area, but I suddenly heard from behind me a strange sound, a mixture of a yell and a shout and a scream, expressing fear and rage. A very young captain in British uniform was making a strained and sobbing demand as to what the hell I was doing there, staring at me as if I had a bomb in my hand; and towards him there was hurrying a sergeant, who caught my eye, rolled his and tapped his head with his forefinger, and cast a look at the young captain in which there was tender concern but no respect at all. Respect or no respect, the war had been too much for one soldier. Our group looked like one of Goya’s ‘Disasters of the War’, and that was just where we were.

We were living through an agony: old and new. There was the fundamental horror that comes in when peace goes out. What, have we to kill strangers lest strangers kill us, and not even be sure it will work out that way round? Can God not be on our side? Is there not something locked away inside the process of life that will recognise that there is something special about us, and save us? These are questions that people flailed by the inexhaustible artillery of history have always asked. But there is a novelty in our situation which makes it all worse. The soldiers of the past took war for granted, and had few opportunities to rise above the level in which they were born, to live past middle age and greatly better themselves. Their twentieth-century successors looked on war as an anachronism which should long since have been abolished, and felt that if they were slain in battle they had almost certainly been done out of a long and happy life. Also there was a political change in our minds. The soldiers of the past who had fought in wars were sent into battle by kings whom they respected as anointed by the Church, or as rebels against such kings as had acted against Christ. The armies of today are sent to war by governments whom they themselves make and depose; and the men who had been recently at risk had heard Hitler, obviously not sacred, baying like a sad hound on the radio.

To arrive at Nuremberg was like stepping on to the set of a science fiction film: the extreme of unreality, and at that extremely prosaic. The name of the town was familiar but nothing else. The picturesqueness which had impressed its image on the minds of the world was now a core of rubble, surrounded by grim suburbs threaded through with overcrowded trams. There was an unpalatable lesson here: the gross wastefulness of aerial warfare. The destruction of the old town could have served no military purpose, but the new suburbs, which were intact, consisted of factories and offices and tenements, which it would have been useful for us to destroy, and the same lesson was taught by the fields all over Germany, pockmarked with bombsites. Other curious evidence was given by the atmosphere of the American and Allied community of soldiers and officials and the press correspondents who seemed at first sight to be in what looked like a euphoric mood caused by joy at being alive, but who proved to be about as little elated as any conquerors can have been since wars had become long. They were gay for moments but were permanently depressed. Every one of them longed to go home to his native country, though they were still in a state of privation. Their eagerness for repatriation was frantic. Those who were free to leave when the trial was over had cleared their desks daily for weeks in advance, and as soon as was decent after the prisoners left the dock they ran out of the courthouse like children going home for the holidays, for a holiday from war.

It is the virtue of the Nuremberg trial that it was conceived in hatred of war and was nurtured by those starved of peace. To realise how grateful we should be for this birth, consider the alternative. Towards the end of the war Churchill, Eden, Lord Simon and some members of the Foreign Office held that should the Allies be victorious they should deter Germany from future war-making by the summary execution of Nazi leaders to the number of fifty to 100. The Cabinet would never have anything to do with this foolishness, and no wonder. Every one of the Nazis thus dispatched would have become a martyr; and indeed as they were not to be tried, there would have been ample opportunity for miscarriages of justice. Moreover we would not have had the extraordinarily full and detailed view of the Hitler regime which was given us by the oral and documentary evidence which was brought forward and discussed by the prosecution and the defence during the Nuremberg trial.

Of course the trial was botched and imperfect. How could it be anything else? It took place within the same year as Germany’s defeat. It had to deal with new crimes for which there was no provision in national law or international law, but which were obviously crimes, and no humbug, since they had left on the scene many corpses which would have preferred to be alive. But when it came to punishing these crimes there was a need for very complicated thinking. The Nazi leaders could not have murdered or imprisoned the innocent had they not been upheld by the hosts of followers who had called them to power and acted as their assassins and their jailers, and it was necessary that the population should be deterred from forming such dark loyalties ever again. The problem of how to do this had to be answered by recourse to the English and American concepts of conspiracy, which are not judged to be too convenient on their home grounds. The judges themselves were not of the same legal pattern, and therefore found it hard to agree; and as for the prisoners in the dock and German public opinion, the legal preconceptions made the court proceedings almost incomprehensible to them. In German courts, the accused person is not expected to give evidence on oath in his own defence; and is not obliged to plead guilty or not guilty. There are a number of differences, and of these one was of great importance. In Germany accused persons are commonly granted bail, even for serious offences, and it seemed an act of spite that at Nuremberg prisoners who included generals and admirals and men of high political rank should not be living in a dignified form of house arrest, but should be spending days and nights in cells and eating prison food. This reaction was a source of surprise to the prosecution; and it is an index of the unforeseen difficulties which, almost overnight, had to be solved.

The difficulty of the task, and the spirit in which it was performed, are described by Mr Airey Neave as few other people could have done it. He was a much decorated soldier and his unique war service had given him an eyeball-to-eyeball view of Hitler’s military organisations; he was a trained lawyer; also he possessed in abundance that quality which the Romans called pietas. My recollection of him made me smile when some time ago I read a too simple-minded and fashion-determined work by Mr Bradley F. Smith named Reaching Judgment at Nuremberg and came on a passage relating to the letters of Colonel Bernays, one of the originators of the American trial plan:

There is a breathtaking moment in the summer of 1945 when Colonel Bernays walked through the streets of devastated Nuremberg as part of his job of appraising the suitability of the Palace of Justice for the trial. In a letter to his wife, he chatted about his work and then gave a long and sensitive description of the mass destruction in the city and the helpless confusion and suffering of the German civilians. One waits almost breathlessly for Bernays to ask himself whether the Allies had not lost the right to sit in judgement because of the fact that they had used such patently inhumane methods of warfare. But the mood of the times created a moral tunnel vision that was too strong…

It might be Mr A. J. P. Taylor who was writing. Of course Colonel Bernays was not so stupid as Mr Bradley Smith supposes; and neither was Mr Neave. Nor were most of the other legal personages at Nuremberg. They wished not only that Germany might not do again what it had done, but that they need not do again what they had had to do in self-defence against the Germans. If one has any imagination at all one sees that it really cannot have been easy for them; and it occurs to one also as a great pity that their pains were wasted when, before Vietnam, nobody troubled to remember Nuremberg.

Rebecca West

May 1978

Preface to the third edition by Baroness Airey of Abingdon

When Airey and I were married in 1942 we were both deeply involved in the war effort. Airey commanded agents behind the lines and I worked in equally secret operations. We both understood the dangers, fully aware that the Gestapo would have no mercy if Airey were caught in enemy territory. It was a bittersweet time, when the gnawing anxiety would be relieved by the joy of a sudden reunion and our unflagging optimism that the war could not last for ever.

Peace was declared, friends returned, but Airey was summoned to Nuremberg. I was invited to join him there once the trial had begun. As I descended the steps from Montgomery’s small ’plane I saw Airey on the tarmac and my overwhelming thought was that we had never before met in peace and without danger. Yet in Nuremberg, the complications of war were inescapable. As we drove through the devastation of the ancient city, I thought of my baby, safe at home. How many German children had been buried beneath these ruins after the Allies’ air-raids? The murder of 4,000 Polish officers at Katyn in 1940 raised similar questions: for how long would the Russians deny their part in the massacre? Yet on the first day of the trial, when I saw the legendary figures sitting in a dishevelled row, my pity was submerged by thoughts of friends who had perished under the Nazi command.

As the days went by, those equivocal feelings re-emerged. During the week we heard stories of unimaginable corruption but at the weekend we enjoyed the luxury of a splendid villa at Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Only very recently the nearby concentration camp had been relieved by the Allies and, standing in the opulent bedroom of the former German owners, I wondered whether they had known of the suffering there. In the evening the party dined on fine wines and food which had been virtually unobtainable since rationing began, and later we listened as the Americans sang ‘Jimmy Crack Corn’. We should have felt warm and happy but everyone was on edge, and inevitably the conversation turned to the prospect of the dismal task ahead. Airey spoke passionately of justice and everyone was convinced of the trial’s necessity. But at the back of our minds was the spectre of Katyn.

Baroness Airey of Abingdon

London, 1982

Preface

When I finished this book in March 1978, over thirty-two years had passed since I marched into the cells at Nuremberg to deliver the indictment to the main Nazi war criminals. I was inspired in writing my account by my wife Diana, without whose encouragement and devotion I could not have completed it.

This is a personal story of the prisoners and how I saw them, at the age of twenty-nine. I write as a witness of the closing scenes in the tragedy of a whole generation.

Why did I not write it before? I thought it best to wait and look back over the years until the dark passions of 1945 had cooled. This is my fifth book on my wartime adventures which ended at Nuremberg.

The account is based on notes made at the time and my memorandum of 24 October 1945 to the General Secretary of the International Military Tribunal, now in the Public Record Office. I had many conversations with Marjorie Lady Oaksey, widow of the President, and others who took part in the trial. I was helped in my research by Sybil Welch, Venetia Pollock, Marian Yass, Elizabeth Hennessy and my secretary Joy Robilliard. I am also grateful to Maureen Rissik and Dr John P. Fox for their many excellent suggestions. I also wish to thank the House of Commons Library, the Imperial War Museum, the Public Record Office and the Wiener Library. The book was typed by Mildred Carter and Carmen Moore.

The bibliography of the trial is enormous and I have referred to numerous historical and legal works. There are not many books which describe the tribunal, its proceedings and personalities. I found the following of the greatest help to me:

Rebecca West: A Train of Powder (Macmillan, 1955).

Bradley F. Smith: Reaching Judgment at Nuremberg (Deutsch, 1977).

Eugene Davidson: The Trial of the Germans (Macmillan, 1967).

Burton C. Andrus: The Infamous of Nuremberg (Frewin, 1969).

This book shows the Nazis as I saw them. Perhaps it will serve as a warning of the consequences of the collapse of democracy.

Airey Neave

PART ONE

MY PATH TO NUREMBERG

1

Out of Step in Unter den Linden

I shall never forget the tramp of feet that warm evening in Unter den Linden. It was the first week of September 1933 and Hitler had been Chancellor of Germany for eight months.

The mass march of the sport organisations started from the Lustgarten in Berlin at ten o’clock. Our team formed the centre of a vast procession towards the Brandenburg Gate. I was in the front rank of twelve with Dietrich. Preceding us was a band of the SA¹ in brown shirts with swastika armbands of red, white and black. They were playing military music, sometimes breaking into Nazi songs in which the members of the sports clubs joined. The right- and left-hand marcher in each rank carried a flaming torch. I could see the swaying lights far ahead as we passed the Berlin Opera House with its huge, naked muses in zinc.

I was seventeen and not easily impressed by military ostentation, but this grandiose night march was thrilling. On either side of the street, silent crowds stood at the Hitler salute. Their faces glowed in the light of the torches with excitement and pride. Perhaps they did not know with what brutality Hitler had celebrated his entry into office. These were revolutionary times. They were exalted by the splendid parade of banners and the vibrant music.

Dietrich was the elder son of the family with whom I stayed for that fatal summer at Nikolassee, west of Berlin. For a time, I attended school with his younger brother, already a member of the Hitler Jugend. At the entry of the teacher each morning we were expected to give the Hitler salute, but as a foreigner I was excused. I was an unconventional pupil and at first an object of derision. I sat at the back of the class. My hair was much longer than that of the German boys and I wore a decadent yellow tie with black spots. Not once did I feel the need to conform with the growing Nazification of the school.

Dietrich was at the university and he admired my independence though he thought it dangerous. Already people had begun to disappear from their homes to concentration camps. He was afraid of my light-hearted comments on the platform at Nikolassee. I once sniggered at a fat, brown-booted storm trooper. Dietrich hastily manoeuvred me out of sight. I can remember the bloodshot pig eyes of the storm trooper glaring towards us.

My parents had sent me to Berlin to learn German, but my mother, who was of liberal sympathies, would have been horrified, had she realised the true significance of Nazism. She would have recalled me instantly. There were few in Britain that complacent summer who believed that Hitler would last. Who, outside his circle, realised that this was his promised hour and the beginning of the Thousand-Year Reich? The dark rumours of persecution and murder were ignored. Churchill seemed to warn in vain. The world appeared spellbound or indifferent until six years later, in 1939, they were confronted with war.

Looking back on that September night in Berlin, it is easy to see that Hitler was preparing the youth of Germany for a war which he had always intended. It took me years to understand this. I had paid too little attention to Mein Kampf, which I read laboriously in 1933.

On 22 August 1939, Hitler shouted to his service chiefs, assembled at the Obersalzberg: ‘I shall give a propagandist reason for starting the war, no matter whether it is plausible or not… Close your hearts to pity. Act brutally. Eighty million people must obtain what is their right. Their existence must be made secure. The strongest man is right. The greatest harshness.’²

In ‘degenerate’ Britain, these words were dismissed as infantile rhetoric. His claim that a ‘biologically valuable’ nation had the right to suppress and exterminate ‘inferior’ races was ignored by the selfish, easy-going society in which I grew up. Our blindness and incapacity became the epitaph of millions.

Dietrich was not a member of the Party. He belonged to a sports club in Charlottenburg where I was enrolled as an honorary member. I was no athlete, but I ran fast enough to be a member of the relay team. When the Festival of Sport was proclaimed for early September, the club was ‘advised’ to take part.

The Nazis had not yet gained control of all sporting events and organisations. In Berlin many clubs were still openly sceptical. Participation in the torchlight march was seen as something of a joke. Dietrich insisted on my inclusion despite the frosty disapproval of Party-minded officials.

Dressed in civilian suits we marched off with light hearts. As we joined the uniformed Nazis with their band, our mood changed. I felt as if I was being drawn into a vortex. The young men beside me who, minutes before, had been joking, started singing. Suddenly the Festival of Sport had become religious and the marchers expectant.

We marched past the royal palace of Kaiser Wilhelm I and the Prussian Ministry of the Interior at No. 73 where Captain Hermann Goering had recently established the Gestapo.³ Suddenly I broke step with the others.

There was an angry shout from Dietrich: ‘Can’t you march in step?’

It happened again before the march ended and there were signs of annoyance in the ranks. I found it difficult to keep in step. Something subconscious was drawing me away.

We reached the huge Brandenburg Gate which had been our goal for nearly half an hour. Floodlit, and adorned with Nazi pennants, it looked like the gateway to some theatrical Valhalla. We wheeled to the right and marched towards the Reichstag. The skeleton of the great dome stood out starkly against the beams of the searchlights. The fire of 27 February 1933 had left the spars of the roof blackened and exposed to the sky.

As we neared the rostrum where the speeches were to be held, the bands struck up the ‘Horst Wessel Lied’, the most famous of Nazi marching songs. I felt carried along by the emotion. Bright-eyed, the doubting and the cynical raised their hands in salute. Some were on the verge of tears. Afterwards, I realised that they were lost for ever to the Revolution of Destruction, whereas I would escape.

The singing died. Reichssportkommissar von Tschammer und Osten stood at the rostrum. He spoke for half an hour. Even the thrill of the massed bands could not suppress for me the tedium of his voice. His banal slogans about sport and the Fatherland seemed to me a maddening anti-climax. I fidgeted.

I looked around at my companions. They were intellectuals, university students, writers and artists. To my amazement, they were listening to this bull-necked Prussian in his brown uniform with fixed attention. When at last he stopped, the huge crowd sang ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’ as the banners swayed in the breeze. The fervour of the women was breathtaking. It was an unforgettable occasion, but on the march back I found myself more and more out of step.

1 Sturmabteilung : Nazi storm troops.

2 See Documents on German Foreign Policy , D. Vol. VII, Doc. 193.

3 Geheime Staatspolizei : the secret police.

2

At the Villa Huegel

Berlin, that fatal summer of 1933, equipped me for war. I learned to speak and read German quite well. When I was captured at Calais in May 1940 and imprisoned by the Germans, the knowledge became a considerable asset. It helped in my escapes, as a Dutch electrical worker, a German corporal and finally as a German artillery lieutenant. I made the first successful escape from Colditz to England on 5 January 1942.⁴

Until the end of the war, I was immersed in the cause of Resistance and the organisation by MI9 of underground routes in Europe by which thousands of Allied servicemen escaped. My exit from Colditz prompted the generous Benchers of the Middle Temple to excuse me my final Bar examinations in recognition of this feat. I was called to the Bar in 1943 while still in the army.

In 1945, I was twenty-nine, speaking German, and with some knowledge of the law. I had also an understanding of international law which I had gained for my degree at Oxford. I had personal experience of Nazi methods of interrogation. I had been grilled by the Gestapo more than once. I had considerable information on their treatment of prisoners, including captured agents. I was thus considered a suitable candidate for the British War Crimes Executive established in August 1945, to gather evidence against the principal surviving members of Hitler’s government.

The Allied powers had been collecting lists of suspected Nazi war criminals since 1943 and the Germans were warned that retribution would follow their inevitable defeat. Rumours of the mass extermination of Jews and other atrocities were widespread. The Allies sought therefore to establish an agreed war crimes policy.

At first, there were two camps. A plan made by the United States Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau Jr, proposed that major war criminals should be identified and shot as Allied soldiers advanced into Germany. Winston Churchill and Lord Simon, the Lord Chancellor, also advocated summary execution. Stalin and Roosevelt favoured a trial. Stalin, because he feared that he, Roosevelt and Churchill would be accused of killing Hitler and the Nazi leaders out of personal revenge. In America, the Morgenthau Plan was dropped.

Although the question of summary execution was never finally decided by the Cabinet, the British were opposed to a trial until 3 May 1945 when Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, capitulated at the San Francisco conference in the face of Soviet and American pressure. It was some time before they could look upon plans for a major war crimes trial with any enthusiasm.⁵

In the talks which followed in London during the summer of 1945, Americans, led by Justice Robert H. Jackson of the Supreme Court, developed their plans for a trial based on a ‘conspiracy to dominate Europe’. The theory of a conspiracy by leading Nazis, the charge of ‘waging aggressive war’, and the proposal to try, among others, the German General Staff and High Command as a ‘criminal organisation’, aroused the deepest misgivings among international lawyers.

After several weeks of tense negotiation, the Charter of the International Military Tribunal was signed by the United Kingdom, America, France and the Soviet Union on 8 August 1945. The charter laid down the crimes which the tribunal were to try under the headings: ‘crimes against peace’, ‘war crimes’ and ‘crimes against humanity’. Three of those who formulated these laws in London later became members of the tribunal. This was a slightly indelicate position and from the outset of trial, the judges found it necessary in various ways to make clear their independence of the prosecution.

The International Military Tribunal was also set up in August 1945 and held its opening session in Berlin in October which, as a result of Russian insistence, became its ‘seat’. With the destruction of the city, there was no prison suitable to hold prominent war criminals in single cells. After much argument, Nuremberg, where the prison was intact, was chosen for the place of trial.

Hitler was dead. Goebbels and Himmler too. Goering and Ribbentrop and many other prominent Nazis were in Allied hands. Further discussion produced a list of twenty-four defendants who were named in a lengthy indictment signed on 6 October by the chief prosecutors of the four Allied powers. What did the victorious Allies hope to gain by these proceedings? The Russians, with 20 million dead, undoubtedly wanted revenge. They wanted to see the Nazi ringleaders hanged, for their losses were more terrible than any other country’s.

The French, deeply embittered by the events of 1940, had suffered greatly from Nazi occupation. On the sidelines, urging vengeance, were the Dutch, the Belgians, the Norwegians, the Poles, the Yugoslavs and smaller nations, ravaged by occupation.

The Americans and British had not experienced the horrors of Nazi occupation. They often misunderstood the depth of feeling in liberated countries. At the heart of the Anglo-American case was a sincere but naive attempt to apply the rule of law to those who had perpetrated untold acts of brutality against ordinary human beings. For many the trial presaged a new era of international law against tyranny and unprovoked aggression.

Nuremberg sought to establish an ordered system of justice between nations. If that attempt has not yet succeeded, it was not the fault of the trial or the principles on which it was based. Those who seek to excuse or ignore Nazism as something best forgotten should look at the record. Nuremberg revealed to the world the terrible crimes committed by the followers of Hitler, unexampled in the history of the world.

To my generation, the Nazis were objects of pure horror. Today the world observes their crimes from the standpoint of history. No reconstruction can convey the true extent of their infamy.

The trial revealed, in plain language, the character of the Nazis’ system. Without the evidence, the world might never have known the full truth of the Jewish extermination plan and the slave labour programme of Albert Speer. It demonstrated what kind of people perpetrated these colossal racist abominations.

They were not supermen. They were ‘ordinary people’, doctors, lawyers, architects, professional soldiers, politicians and businessmen, invested by Hitler with unbridled power. They were artists and intellectuals, who prostituted their gifts in pursuit of the Nazi Revolution of Destruction.⁶

Most of these men and women began life in ordinary circumstances. As their power increased, they learned to wield it without restraint. Manipulation, perversion and corruption of the law, allied to absolute rule unchecked by legal or democratic sanction, turned many of them into beasts.

In 1945 and 1946, Nuremberg forced the Nazis to condemn themselves out of their own mouths. Long after Allied prosecutions of Nazi war criminals ceased in 1949, the Germans continued to try them. It is a pity that these later trials have not received wider publicity.

Many of the Nazi officials were weak, easily led and toadies to Hitler. They were the products of disillusionment in a country ruined by the inflation and acute unemployment of the ’20s. When Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany in January 1933 and began his efforts to establish a totalitarian regime, they became petty tyrants under his leadership. Local party bosses, SS concentration camp guards, Gestapo and SD⁷ officials enjoyed total authority.

We should remember that the Nazi Party achieved this power through the ballot box. In the Reichstag elections of 1933, the system of proportional representation gave them only 43.9 per cent of the total vote. Uncomprehending of the true nature of Nazism, political parties, save the Social Democrats who fought bravely, agreed to their own dissolution. By the end of July 1933 democracy was dead. The terror increased as Hitler had often threatened. By October 1933 there were no political parties save Hitler’s and 26,000 of his opponents were under the