Paul Roland - The Nuremberg Trials: The Nazis and Their Crimes Against Humanity

The Nuremberg War Crimes Trials began on 20 November 1945 and ended on 13 April 1949. At the first trial, twenty-four leading Nazis were indicted, but only 21 defendants made an appearance. On 9 December 1946, 12 subsequent trials of lesser war criminals were held by the Americans. A summary of these hearings will be found in the final chapter.

W hy another book about the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials? It is true that the story has been re-told many times, but it bears repetition because with the passing of time the Nazis have assumed an almost mythic status in the minds of those who did not experience the war, or the horrors of the concentration camps. There is a very real danger that for subsequent generations they will be reduced to two-dimensional villains no more real than the sinister SS caricatures in the Indiana Jones films.

Of more importance, though, is the fact that the lessons of Nuremberg do not appear to have been learned. There are still those who deny the Holocaust despite the fact that Holocaust denial is now a crime in many European countries including Germany but they do so in the face of the facts that are presented in this book, where the personal testimonies of eyewitnesses are verified by the words of the accused themselves.

Heinrich Himmler was one of the prime architects of the Holocaust and oversaw the concentration camp system. The first to be opened in March 1933 was Dachau, which he is here seen inspecting with other SS officers.

Another reason why I felt compelled to write this account was that I have managed to unearth several personal recollections that to the best of my knowledge have never been published in book form. They are not of great length, nor even of great significance from a historical point of view, but they reveal certain aspects of the trials, and the personalities involved, that are not generally known. But of more importance, they underline the impression that all of the characters in this human catastrophe were quite ordinary people, who were living through extraordinary times. And that includes the defendants.

Adolf Hitler meets his adoring public. He dreamed of a Europe ruled solely by the Ayrian master-race.

The Nazis continue to hold a morbid fascination for many people. However, when they were stripped of their Satanic symbolism, and dispossessed of the power over life and death that fed their fanatical arrogance, Hermann Goering, Albert Speer, Joachim von Ribbentrop and the rest of the Hitler gang were reduced to their essence which in many cases was as pitiable as it was disturbing. Here was the banality of evil laid bare. Hitlers followers were the very embodiment of Untermenschen (the subhumans of Aryan master race mythology), who blindly obeyed immoral orders without recourse to their own conscience. They were men of diverse backgrounds able military leaders, petty bureaucrats and mechanical functionaries. Some of them should have known better but they all willingly sold their souls to bring a madmans nightmares to reality, feeding his neuroses and propagating his paranoid racist propaganda without considering the inevitable consequences of their actions. Deprived of the pretence of Teutonic heroism, and denied the ritual staging of their Wagnerian party rallies, the Nuremberg defendants were finally forced to face the sordid reality of the damage that their racist ideology and extreme nationalism had wrought upon the world.

It is a disquieting fact that we tend to find villains more interesting than their victims in fiction and in reality but the Nuremberg Trials revealed that in real life criminals and murderers are invariably colourless individuals, who lack personality as well as compassion and conscience. It is their victims who frequently display courage and endurance beyond normal human experience. And that aspect of human nature has, I hope, been brought out in this account of the trials. For the final reason for writing this account was to give voice to the survivors of Nazi atrocities those who had witnessed unimaginable horrors but had still found the courage to continue with their lives. Women such as Clara Greenbaum