Victor H. Bernstein - Final Judgment: The Story of Nuremberg

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Text originally published in 1947 under the same title.

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FINAL JUDGMENT: THE STORY OF NUREMBERG

BY

VICTOR H. BERNSTEIN

With an Introduction by Max Lerner

Contents

This is Selmas book.

....to John P. Lewis and Ralph Ingersoll, who made it possible for me to stay away from New York to write this book; to my hosts at the Nuremberg Press Camp and the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, who made it possible for me to work at Nuremberg; to the Charles Stubings, in whose friendly house this book was begun; to Edith Simon, Research Analyst on the U.S. Prosecution Staff, who found time above and beyond her own manifold duties to research and analyse nearly every word I wrote; to William Strieker, chief of DANA in Nuremberg for help in times of need; to Tom Dodd, U.S. Chief Trial Counsel and many good friends on Justice Jacksons staff and in the Subsequent Proceedings Division, whose brains I picked with shameless greed; to Max Lerner, who thought I should do this book in the first place; and to my wife, with whom and for whom I did.

Using documents from German sources that have become available only in the past year, this book is a revealing X-ray of the whole political, economic, and moral system that the Nazis built up. It uses the Nuremberg trials as its starting point. But it peels away, one after another, the layers of meaning behind Nuremberg.

Anyone who followed the reports of the trials in the American press must have been dismayed by their fragmentary and superficial character. All we got were bits and pieces of the Nazi story. Millions of words were, of course, cabled from Nuremberg by correspondents to the twelve corners of the worldespecially in the first few days. But mainly they were color stuff, portraying the trial as a spectacle. There were pictures of the defendants and detailed accounts of their behavior in jail. There were excerpts from United States Prosecutor Robert H. Jacksons opening indictment, and some scattered debate on the international law at the basis of the trial. And at the end there was a sensational flare-up of think-pieces about how Gring managed to cheat the gallows by concealing his lethal poison. It is some kind of commentary on our press and our ways of thought that the most important trial of our era should have ended on the cheap note of a mystery thriller entitled The Case of the Hidden Poison. Nuremberg is still the Trial Nobody Knows.

In contrast with this surface stuff, Victor Bernstein has written an attack-in-depth on what the Nazis did, and the techniques they used, and what Nazism did to them. The book is a scalpel-dissection of the whole Nazi disease of which the Nuremberg criminals were only the more ulcerous outcroppings. As a good newspapermanand he is one of the best I have ever encounteredthe author does not omit the elements of personal drama. But he is alsoas every first-class newspaperman must bea student of ideas | and social systems, and a human being sensitive to moral values. That is why he has written not only a gallery of portraits of the Nuremberg criminals, but an analysis of the outer predations and inner impulsions of the Nazi system. He lays bare the meaning of what the German nation dida nation led by scoundrels and sadists (but also ready for such leadership, terrorized by them) but with hysterical undertones in its history that seemed to exult in terrorism, indoctrinated by them but ripe for such indoctrination.

We have recently had a spate of now-it-can-be-told stories about the Second World War. But the biggest story of all has up to now been neglectedthe story of how seventy million minds were poisoned and seventy million hearts were hardened beyond human recognition, and the deeds that the poisoned minds and the dehumanized hearts found it possible to do. Now is the time to tell the Fascist storythe story of the men and the forces which turned Europe into a cemetery and the human heart into a petrified forest.

Victor Bernstein is the right man to tell it. He was PMs correspondent at Nuremberg all through the weary months of the trials. He came to his assignment wonderfully prepared for it. He had covered Berlin during the years when Hitler was building his power. He knew Germanyits language, its history, its politics, its people. He had followed closely the whole tragic course of the diplomacy which failed to stop Hitlers aggressions and prevent the war. As a war correspondent in Germany, he witnessed the final collapse of Hitlers power, and saw the concentration camps and the human furnaces which were its ghastly memorial.

And so, when the hidden Nazi documents began to turn upin Nazi headquarters overrun by American troops, or in the vaults and salt mines in which they had been hiddenBernstein knew how to read them, what they meant, how they furnished the final cement to the damning structure of evidence that had been built up for over a decade. He has pieced it all together in this book: how Germany rearmed for war even during the Weimar days, and how Hitler and Gring and the Nazi generals speeded it up as soon as they came to power; how Austria was betrayed from within and conquered from without while Gring directed the psychological terror by telephone; the inner story of how the blow was prepared for Poland and fell on it; the Nazi documents relating to the assault on Norway to the north and Yugoslavia to the south; the top-secret Case Barbarossa , or military operational plan for the invasion of Russia, conceived even before the Nazi-Soviet Pact and prepared during it; the frantic Nazi efforts to draw Japan into the war and divert American attention from the European front.

But the diplomatic and military revelations are not nearly as important as the light that the captured documents shed on the Nazi treatment of its human victims. Here for the first time the material has been put together on how the Nazis planned and carried out the mass extermination of Poles and Russians through their Einsatzgruppen, or military-occupation genocide squads, and how (in the authors words) Germany, seeking Lebensraum , created...the Death Space that is todays Europe; how the Nazis planned and carried through, by assembly-line methods, the work of the extermination camps at Auschwitz, Treblinka, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, which turned millions of human beings into corpses, ashes, and their by-products; how German industrialists competed eagerly for the jobs of supplying the furnaces, and how German businessmen and officials grew rich on the ghouls gold that was torn from the victims; how the Nazi idea for ridding Europe of all its Jewish humanity was conceived and matured and almost completely executed; how foreign slave labor was recruited for the German war machines, and how the Nazi officials carried on their Great Debate between the extermination plans and the needs of war industry for labor; how deeply the German generals were involved in the Nazi guilt, despite their later protestations of being merely neutral professional craftsmen; how the Nazi doctors and the pure scientists experimented on the living bodies of their victims.