The Inconvenient Parchuting of Rudolf Hess
On 10 May 1941 Deputy Führer of the Third Reich, Rudolf Hess, provoked widespread intrigue and speculation when he embarked on an astonishing flight to Scotland.
In one of the most bizarre episodes of World War II, Hitler’s deputy flew solo for almost 1,000 miles from Bavaria in a Messerschmitt Bf110 before parachuting into a field near Eaglesham in Scotland, apparently on a one-man peace mission in the days leading up to Germany’s invasion of Russia.
But heavy fog played havoc with his flight and he ended up bailing out over the moorlands above Eaglesham.
Instead of a duke, he was confronted by a ploughman, who informed the authorities.
When he first landed in Scotland, Hess wrote, the British people “took care of me very well.
They…put a rocking chair near the fireplace and offered me tea.
Later, when I was surrounded by British soldiers, a young Tommy got up and gave me a bottle of milk which he had taken along for his guard duty.”
The next day, Hess requested a meeting with the Duke of Hamilton, in the mistaken belief that the duke would be sympathetic to Hess’ peace plan.
Hamilton said he would inform King George VI, but nothing ever came of it.
Over the next few weeks, Hess was moved from Scotland to a military installation, about 40 miles southwest of London.
Hess Interrogation while in England.
After some time, while still imprisoned in England
Swiss Envoy
In November 1945, Rudolf Hess was among the men sat in the dock of a Nuremberg courtroom on trial for their lives.
Lt. Col. Douglas Kelley ,was handed one of the most sought-after assignments in his profession: examining the most prominent Nazis who’d been taken prisoner of war.
In 1942, Army Major Douglas Kelley called to duty in the United States Army Medical Corps as chief psychiatrist for the 30th General Hospital in the European Theatre.
Along with psychologist Gustave Gilbert he administered the Rorschach inkblot test to the 22 defendants in the Nazi leadership group prior to the first Nuremberg trials.
Kelley authored two books on the subject: Twenty-two Cells in Nuremberg and The Case of Rudolph Hess.
The Bavarian city that spawned the rise of the Third Reich by hosting massive Nazi Party propaganda rallies in the 1920s and 1930s was deemed by the victorious Allies to be a fitting place to stage its symbolic death.
Adolf Hitler intended it to be rebuilt as the ‘party city’. Now many of the leaders of the party were on trial, only a short distance from the grand arena where they had been fêted by the German people.
Although World War II left much of the city in rubble (there was a huge stench at the trials as about 30,000 dead were estimated to still be under the rubble), the Palace of Justice—which included a sizable prison capable of holding 1,200 detainees—remained largely undamaged and was chosen to host the trials, once German prisoners completed the work of enlarging its courtroom.
However imperfect the Tribunal may have been, it led to the definition of international law, and of the very new notion of crimes against humanity.
It established the principle of individual responsibility and a civilized alternative to mob justice.
Germany, its former allies and enemies took the first step on the long road to reconciliation and recovery.
Let’s finally remember some of Justice Jackson’s opening words:
‘The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated.’
- image does not include missing or wounded.
24 major political and military leaders of Nazi Germany, indicted for aggressive war, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, and brought to trial before the International Military Tribunal.
The original defendants came from very different backgrounds … Some, like Hitler’s chosen successor Hermann Goering, were senior politicians – their responsibility clear.
Goering, Hitler’s heir apparent, fell out of favor in the closing days of the war.
Others were there because senior party leaders Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, and Joseph Goebbels, head of propaganda – had killed themselves rather than face capture and trial.
More than 100 additional defendants, representing many sectors of German society, were tried before the United States Nuremberg Military Tribunals in a series of 12 trials known as “Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings.”
Each defendant was accused of one or more of four charges:
- conspiracy to commit crimes, alleged in other counts
- crimes against peace
- war crimes
- crimes against humanity
- crimes in the ordinary sense
- atrocities against prisoners of war
- plundering occupied countries
- please note: After 11 million people were mass murdered by the Nazis in camps alone, the cost of the war ravished on individual countries in Europe and elsewhere is massive.
Specific charges included:
- the murder of over 6 million Jews
- pursuing an aggressive war
- the brutality of the concentration camps
- the use of slave labor
- deportation of civilians or persecution on political, religious or racial grounds.
Until the Nuremberg Trials, there had been no precedent for an international trial of war criminals, though there had been prior prosecutions of war crimes in history, such as that of Confederate army officer Henry Wirz, but those had been conducted according to the laws of a single country.
Rather than use a single judge and jury, the trial of high-ranking Nazi leaders, was conducted by a panel of four judges.
The United States, Soviet Union, France and Great Britain each supplied a main judge and an alternate, while Britain’s Lord Justice Geoffrey Lawrence presided.
The Nuremberg Trials marked the first-ever prosecutions for genocide.
Wiesel recalled the horror of watching the Nazis burn Jewish children alive during his first day at the Auschwitz camp.
I have seen something that will haunt me to the end of my life. That there were children, little children. And what they had done ― ‘they’ I mean the enemy ― they had dug pits. It seems there was no room anymore in the gas chambers. They would throw those children in the flames, alive. That we have seen that and not gone crazy is, that’s a miracle. … For a while I thought maybe I, maybe I was still a prisoner of my nightmare. But then I met friends, and I told them the same images, and I found documents corroborating it. What we have seen, it’s true!
The Nuremberg Trials also served as a precedent for the subsequent prosecution of war crimes in Japan and led to the establishment of the United Nations Genocide Convention and Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 as well as the Geneva Convention on the Laws and Customs of War in 1949.
Tuesday, 1 October 1946, Nuremberg’s Palace of Justice
A little after three o’clock in the afternoon, the wooden door behind the defendants’ dock slid open and Hans Frank entered courtroom 600.
He wore a grey suit, a shade that was offset by the white helmets worn by the two sombre faced military guards, his escorts.
The hearings had taken a toll on the man who had been Adolf Hitler’s personal lawyer and then personal representative in German occupied Poland.
Frank was no longer the slender and swank minister.
Indeed, he was in a considerable state of perturbation, so much so, that as he entered the room, he turned and faced the wrong direction, showing his back to the judges.
Sitting in the packed courtroom that day was the professor of international law at Cambridge University.
Balding and bespectacled, Hersch Lauterpacht perched at the end of a long wooden table, round as an owl, flanked by distinguished colleagues on the British prosecution team.
Seated no more than a few feet from Frank, in a black suit, Lauterpacht was the one who came up with the idea of putting the term ‘crimes against humanity’ into the Nuremberg statute, three words to describe the murder of four million Jews and Poles on the territory of Poland.
Lauterpacht would come to be recognized as the finest international legal mind of the twentieth century and a father of the modern human rights movement, yet his interest in Frank was not just professional.
For five years, Frank had been governor of a territory that included the city of Lemberg, where Lauterpacht had a large family, including his parents, a brother and sister, and their children.
When the trial had opened a year earlier, their fate in the kingdom of Hans Frank was unknown.
Another man with an interest in the trial was not there that day.
Rafael Lemkin listened to the judgement on a wireless, from a bed in an American military hospital in Paris.
Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-born lawyer who served as an advisor to Jackson, is credited with coining the term “genocide” in 1944 to describe the Nazis’ planned extermination of Jews.
In Warsaw, he fled Poland in 1939, when the war brok e out, and eventually reached America where he worked with the trial’s American prosecution team.
He had worked tirelessly to get the crime of genocide into Frank’s trial, but on this last day of the trial he was too unwell to attend.
In studying the materials, Lemkin looked for a pattern of behavior to which he gave a label, to describe the crime with which Frank could be charged, as he was more concerned with the protection of groups which became the definition of the term “genocide” in 1944 to describe the Nazis’ planned extermination of Jews.
The word is an amalgam of “genos,” the Greek word for “tribe” or “race,” and “-cide,” Latin for “killings.”
Lemkin, who lost nearly 50 relatives in the Holocaust, defined genocide as “a coordinated plan of different actions aimed at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.”
The verdicts were announced on October 1, 1946.
18 of the defendants were found guilty , 3 acquitted.
11 of the guilty were sentenced to death by hanging, the remaining 7 received prison sentences ranging from 10 years to life.
The Defendants React to their Sentences
The sentences were finally read in the afternoon of 1 October 1946:
‘Defendant Hermann Wilhelm Goering, on the Counts of the Indictment on which you have been convicted, the International Military Tribunal sentences you to death by hanging’.
The other sentences were:
- Rudolf Hess – imprisonment for life
- Joachim von Ribbentrop – death by hanging
- Wilhelm Keitel – death by hanging
- Ernst Kaltenbrunner – death by hanging
- Alfred Rosenberg – death by hanging
- Hans Frank – death by hanging
- Wilhelm Frick – death by hanging
- Julius Streicher – death by hanging
- Walter Funk – imprisonment for life
- Karl Doenitz – 10 years’ imprisonment
- Erick Raeder – imprisonment for life
- Baldur von Schirach – 20 years’ imprisonment
- Fritz Sauckel – death by hanging
- Alfred Jodl – death by hanging
- Artur Seyss-Inquart – death by hanging
- Albert Speer – 20 years’ imprisonment
- Konstantin von Neurath – 15 years’ imprisonment
Despite the ‘dissenting opinion’ of Soviet judge Nikitchenko regarding Schacht, von Papen and Fritzsche, the 3 of them were acquitted.
Martin Bormann, judged in abstentia, was sentenced to death by hanging (FO 371/57517).
Martin Bormann
Bormann was with Hitler and Goebbels in Hitler’s subterranean bunker on April 30, 1945.
Hitler and Goebbels committed suicide while Bormann and others fled the bunker in an attempt to escape the rapidly advancing Soviet army.
While he was presumed dead or captured, his whereabouts were unconfirmed, at the time of the trials in Nuremberg.
Bormann replaced Hess as Hitler’s Deputy in charge of Party affairs after Hess was asked to resign following his unofficial flight to England, to persuade England to negotiate peace with Hitler.
Bormann’s reputation among members of his own Party and, especially, the German army was very negative.
He was seen as uncivilized, ruthless and brutal.
In his absence from the trial, the Bormann investigation proceeded on the basis of voluminous documentary evidence linking him to the expulsion of millions of Jews to Poland, and the utilization of Ukrainian women as slave labor.
A new paper by Joel E. Dimsdale of the University of California San Diego looks at one of the stranger episodes in the aftermath of WW2 – the use of the Rorschach “Inkblot” Test on Nazi detainees.
Dimsdale notes that “The [Nuremberg] trial was not so much a ‘who done it’ as it was a ‘why did they do it.’”
note: This was only the view of Dimsdale who was not present at the trial.
The court was actually formed to set a precedent of International Law.
On June 11, 1945, a group of medical societies wrote to [the chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg] Robert Jackson requesting urgently that the psychology of the war criminals be studied. The societies were remarkably diverse, including the American Association on Mental Deficiency, the American branch of the International League Against Epilepsy, the American Neurological Association, the American Psychiatric Association and the National Committee for Mental Hygiene…
These medical societies actually concluded their plea with a request that executed Nazis should be “shot in the chest, not the head”, so their brains could be preserved for autopsy.
On that point, they didn’t get their way – the method of execution at Nuremberg was hanging followed by cremation, precluding Nazi neuroscience autopsies.
However, another of the psychologists’ requests was granted: the request that defendants should be examined using “psychological tests such as the Rorschach”.
Rorschach expert, Lt. Col. Douglas Kelley, led the interviews.
He was aided by a young psychologist Gustave Gilbert, who acted as his assistant and translator.
Dr. G. M. Gilbert was a prison psychologist assigned the responsibility of monitoring the behavior of the defendants while they stood trial.
He became intimately familiar with all the defendants and was present when each was escorted from the courtroom to their prison cell after hearing their verdict.
Captain Gustave Mark Gilbert, Nuremberg trials psychologist, observes Rudolf Hess
In their individual cells, the former masters of the Third Reich reacted to the situation according to their own temperament.
Conscious of having to be the big star of the show, in preparation, Goering gathered around him the other prisoners, meeting each day in the canteen, and tried to make them adopt a common line (‘Not one word against Hitler!’).
But there were weaknesses.
As Editor-in-Chief of the venomous antisemitic paper, Der Stuermer, Julius Streicher disseminated hatred and the most virulent strain of anti-Jewish sentiment to be found in all of Germany.
Hitler strongly approved of Streicher’s publication.
The only real trouble he ever got into with the Nazi Party was for raising questions about Goering’s sexual prowess.
When Goering’s wife, Emma, was about to give birth, Streicher suggested that perhaps she had been artificially inseminated (Conot, Justice at Nuremberg, 1983:383).
Daniel Goldhagen (Hitler’s Willing Executioners, 1996:102) describes him as “the most rabid antisemite in Germany.”
Jackson called him “the venomous vulgarian.”however, Streicher was non-military, he was not part of the planning process of the Holocaust, nor of the invasion of Poland or the Soviet Union, yet his role in inciting the extermination of Jews was significant enough, in the judgment of the prosecutors, to include him in the indictment.
On 25 October,
Robert Ley — former head of the Labour Front — hanged himself using a towel attached to the handle of the lavatory cistern in his prison cell.
From then on, a guard watched over each detainee day and night.
The prisoners were asked to undergo intelligence tests in use, by the American army.
Part of establishing whether or not the Nazis were capable of standing trial was the administration of an IQ test.
The Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Test was adapted from English and given in German, and at the time, it was one of the most widely used IQ tests available.
Scores of 65 or less were classified as “defective,” between 80 and 119 as normal, and 128 and above was “very superior.”
Only about 2.2 percent of the population scored in that range.
Some of the questions were altered to get rid of any kind of cultural bias, and the test measured things like memory, mental calculations, picking out objects or details deleted from a picture, and even hand speed.
The average for the 21 Nazis tested was 128. (Ley was already dead by this time.)
The highest score was 143, from Hjalmar Schacht, with Goering,
Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Karl Donitz, Franz von Papen, Erich Raeder, Hans Frank, Hans Fritsche, and Baldur von Schirach all testing 130 or above, and with Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel, and Albert Speer all also falling into the “very superior” category.
Their reaction to IQ testing was even more fascinating, with many of them actually looking forward to the testing and most being pleased with the results.
Even those like Franz von Papen, who were initially irritated with the idea that they needed to subject themselves to a test that was so far beneath them, admitted that it was one of the more enjoyable moments of their captivity.
Perhaps most bizarre was the reaction of Wilhelm Keitel (pictured above) to the test.
He was very impressed by it, even going as far as to say that it was much better than the “silly nonsense that German psychologists resorted to.”
Later, Kelley discovered that Keitel had outlawed all intelligence testing after his son had flunked out, during the tests to enter officer training.
This produced a curious spectacle:
Former powerful men, covered in medals and oozing confidence, queuing up excitedly to prove their intellectual prowess to their jailers.
To their great chagrin, they were all outclassed by the performance of the oldest and least sure of all of them, Dr Hjalmar Schacht, who had an IQ of 143.
Why Hjalmar Schacht was included in the list of defendants is unclear, and he did not like being associated with the Nazi’s , as he himself was placed in a concentration camp.
Hjalmar Schacht was acquitted.
The 216 days of debate left an impression of tedium, interspersed with sensational or tragicomic moments.
Soon the accused were wearing sunglasses, on the pretext that the glare from the floodlights tired their eyes.
In fact, they did this so that they could sleep without being noticed by the guards, and more than one judge must have envied them their ruse.
Rudolf Hess, who had feigned amnesia, suddenly recovered his memory
and belittled his lawyer by admitting that he had just been pretending.
Then, in the middle of the courtroom, he started to do the physical exercises that he was unable to do in his tiny cell.
There was a moment of general mirth in the dock when a bit of evidence on tape recalled the joyful reaction Goering had had when he learned by telephone of the success of the Anschluss. (Anschluss refers to the annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany on 12 March 1938. )
But the next day, the showing of a film on the concentration camps caused panic and discord among the accused.
‘I must at least try and stop them incriminating each other,’ said Goering, who was still insisting on assuming ‘command’, and everyone heard him shout ‘Schweinehund!’ (‘bastard!’) to Bach-Zelewski, the former SS officer who had come to the witness stand to confirm that the fight against the partisans in Russia was only an excuse for the extermination of the Slavs and Jews.
The judges demanded a translation, and the former Supreme Hunter of
the Reich was then deprived of tobacco and exercise for 15 days.
Dimsdale noted:
It is regrettable that in contemporary War Crimes trials we see no continuation of the efforts at scientifically studying the perpetrator.
They embarked upon an intense program of interviews:
His description of each individual reaction provides insight into the mindset of the Nazi hierarchy – though the proceeding against Martin Bormann was tried in absentia, while another defendant, Robert Ley (head of the German Labor Front), committed suicide within a week of the trial’s commencement.
Here are a few of his observations:
Goering came down first and strode into his cell, his face pale and frozen, his eyes popping.
‘Death!’ he said as he dropped on the cot and reached for a book.
His hands were trembling in spite of his attempt to be nonchalant.
His eyes were moist and he was panting, fighting back an emotional breakdown.
He asked me in an unsteady voice to leave him alone for a while.
When Goering collected himself enough to talk, he said that he had naturally expected the death penalty, and was glad that he had not gotten a life sentence, because those who are sentenced to life imprisonment never become martyrs.
But there wasn’t any of the old confident bravado in his voice.
Goering seems to realize, at last, that there is nothing funny about death, when you’re the one who is going to die.
Hess strutted in, laughing nervously, and said that he had not even been listening, so he did not know what the sentence was and what was more, he didn’t care.
As the guard unlocked his handcuffs, he asked why he had been handcuffed and Goering had not.
I said it was probably an oversight with the first prisoner.
Hess laughed again and said mysteriously, he knew why.
(A guard told me that Hess had been given a life sentence.)
Douglas Kelley Sr. concluded that the Nuremberg defendants represented not a specifically Nazi pathology, but that “they were simply creatures of their environment, as all humans are.”
Kelley killed himself on New Year’s Day 1958, swallowing a cyanide capsule in front of his family.
(Goering, too, had taken cyanide, after he was sentenced to hang.)
Hess spent 40 years complaining of the food and his health at Spandau Prison in western Berlin before he succeeded at what he’d tried twice before.
He hanged himself with an extension cord on August 17, 1987.
He was 93.
Ribbentrop
In 1938, Constantin von Ribbentrop was appointed as Hitler’s Foreign Minister, replacing Neurath.
In that position, he was intimately involved in almost all of the actions to wage “aggressive war.”
His record in the area of “crimes against humanity” was extremely damning.
He had recommended and supported the deportation of Jews from France and Italy to the camps in the east and urged their extermination.
Under cross-examination by the British assistant prosecutor, Ribbentrop admitted that he knew of Hitler’s intention to deport all Jews from German territories and that he assisted in that process (cf. Conot, 1983:353).
Ribbentrop wandered in, aghast, and started to walk around the cell in a daze, whispering, ‘Death!-Death!
Now I won’t be able to write my beautiful memoirs. Tsk! Tsk!
So much hatred! Tsk! tsk!‘ Then he sat down, a completely broken man, and stared into space. . .
Keitel was already in his cell, his back to the door, when I entered.
He wheeled around and snapped to attention at the far end of the cell, his fists clenched and arms rigid, horror in his eyes.
Whereas some of the defendants were relatively [difficult] cases for the tribunal because of their minimal involvement, Keitel was relatively easy because of his extensive involvement in the Nazi organization.
He served as Hitler’s military Chief of Staff and, consequently, was directly involved in the planning of the war at the highest level.
His direct involvement in the “terror fliers” policy, which resulted in the wanton downing of British and American planes and the summary execution of the fliers and the “Night and Fog” decrees of 1941 which resulted, over the next three years, in the summary execution without court martial or trial, of military prisoners-of-war, were extremely damaging to his defense.
Even while admitting his complicity in “war crimes,” Keitel declared his loyalty, as a soldier, to his commander-in- chief.
‘Death-by hanging!’ he announced his voice hoarse with intense shame. ‘That, at least, I thought I would be spared.
I don’t blame you for standing at a distance from a man sentenced to death by hanging.
I understand that perfectly.
But I am still the same as before. – If you will please only – visit me sometimes in these last days.’
I said I would.
Frank smiled politely, but could not look at me.
‘Death by hanging,’ he said softly, nodding his head in acquiescence. ‘I deserved it and I expected it, as I’ve always told you.
I am glad that I have had the chance to defend myself and to think things over in the last few months.’
Karl Doenitz:
Deönitz briefly succeeded Adolf Hitler as the head of state of Nazi Germany.
He began his career in the Imperial German Navy before World War I.
In 1918, he was commanding UB-68 when she was sunk by British forces.
Deönitz was taken prisoner.
While in a prisoner of war camp, he formulated what he later called Rudeltaktik (“pack tactic”, commonly called “wolfpack“).
At the start of World War II, he was the senior submarine officer in the Kriegsmarine. In January 1943, Deönitz achieved the rank of Großadmiral (grand admiral) and replaced Grand Admiral Erich Raeder as Commander-in-Chief of the Navy.
On 30 April 1945, after the death of Adolf Hitler and in accordance with Hitler’s last will and testament, Deönitz was named Hitler’s successor as head of state, with the title of President of Germany and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces.
On 7 May 1945, he ordered Alfred Jodl, Chief of Operations Staff of the OKW, to sign the German instruments of surrender in Reims, France.
Deönitz remained as head of the Flensburg Government, as it became known, until it was dissolved by the Allied powers on 23 May.
Despite his postwar claims, Deönitz was seen as supportive of Nazism during the war, and he is known to have made a number of anti-Semitic statements.
Following the war, Deönitz was indicted as a major war criminal at the Nuremberg Trials on three counts:
(1) conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity; (2) planning, initiating, and waging wars of aggression; and (3) crimes against the laws of war.
He was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment; after his release, he lived in a village near Hamburg until his death in 1980.
For nearly seven decades, Deönitz was the only head of state to be convicted by an international tribunal until the conviction of Liberia’s Charles Taylor in April 2012
After Hitler’s rejection of the Versailles Treaty in 1935, Karl Doenitz was made commander of the submarine unit of the German navy (Germany was forbidden submarines by the treaty).
By 1940 he had risen to the rank of Vice Admiral
. He was indicted under Counts One, Two and Three of the Indictment and mainly for that section of the Indictment dealing with War Crimes on the seas, particularly in connection with the charges that German U-Boats had sunk British merchant ships.
His main defense consisted of counter charges that the U.S. had also sunk Japanese merchant vessels. This was not, primarily, a “you are another” defense. Rather, his defense counsel argued for acquittal on the grounds that the German Navy and the U.S. Navy had committed identical military actions and with the same justification — that Japanese and British merchant vessels were part of the military effort of those nations.
There was no strong evidence that Doenitz had attended planning sessions of the German War Department and only minimal evidence that he had been involved in the extermination or enslavement of civilian populations. His guilt was mainly in the area of “War Crimes.”
Karl Doenitz was given 10 years imprisonment at Spandau Prison.
Doenitz didn’t know quite how to take it. ‘Ten years! – Well – anyway, I cleared U-boat warfare. – Your own Admiral Nimitz said – you heard it.’
He’ said he was sure his colleague Admiral Nimitz understood him perfectly
Jodl marched to his cell, rigid and upright, avoiding my glance.
After he had been un handcuffed and faced me in his cell, he hesitated a few seconds, as if he could not get the words out.
Alfred Jodl was Chief of the Operations Section of the Wehrmacht [the regular German Army], under the direction of Blomberg and Keitel. In that capacity, he was involved in the destruction of Czechoslovakia.
During his trial, Jodl asserted that it was the Czechs who initiated it by massing troops on the German border, knowing full well that plans for the invasion of Czechoslovakia were in place at least six months prior to the invasion.
He characterized the invasion of the Soviet Union as a “preventive measure” since Soviet troops were concentrated along the German border.
In regard to “crimes against humanity,” Jodl was strongly implicated in promoting forced labor — particularly against the civilian populations of Denmark, Holland, France and Belgium.
His primary defense was the “higher authority” plea.
At the end of the cross-examination, Jodl stated, “It is not the task of a soldier to be the judge of his Commander in Chief.
May history or the Almighty do that.” (quoted in Taylor, 1992:439).
His face was spotted red with vascular tension. ‘Death – by hanging! – that, at least, I did not deserve.
The death part – all right, somebody has to stand for the responsibility. But that -‘ His mouth quivered and his voice choked for the first time. ‘That I did not deserve.’
Albert Speer:
The following section of Justice Jackson’s cross-examination of Speer clarifies his involvement in the Nazi movement:
JUSTICE JACKSON: You have stated a good many of the matters for which you were not responsible, and I want to make clear just what your sphere of responsibility was. You were not only a member of the Nazi Party after 1932, but you held high rank in the Party, did you not?
SPEER: Correct.
MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: And what was the position which you held in the Party?
SPEER: I have already mentioned that during my pre-trial interrogations. Temporarily in 1934 I became a department head in the German Labor Front and dealt with the improvement of labor conditions in German factories. Then I was in charge of public works on the staff of Hess. I gave up both these activities in 1941. Notes of the conference I had with Hitler about this are available. After 2/8/1942 I automatically became Todt’s successor in the central office for technical matters in the Reichsleitung of the NSDAP.
MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: And what was your official title?
SPEER: Party titles had just been introduced, and they were so complicated that I cannot tell you at the moment what they were. But the work I did there was that of a department chief in the Reichsleitung of the NSDAP. My title was Hauptdienstleiter or something of the kind.
MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: In the 1943 directory it would appear that you were head of the “Hauptamt fur Technik.”
MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: And your rank appears to be “Oberbefehlsleiter”?
SPEER: Yes, that is quite possible.
MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: Which as I understand corresponds 1 roughly to a lieutenant general in the army?
SPEER: Well, compared to the other tasks I had it was very little.
MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: And you attended Party functions from time to time and were informed in a general way as to the Party program, were you not?
SPEER: Before 1942 I joined in the various Party rallies here in Nuremberg because I had to take part in them as an architect, and of course besides this I was generally present at official Party meetings or Reichstag sessions.
MR. JUSTICE JACKSON: And you heard discussed, and were generally familiar with, the program of the Nazi Party in its broad outlines, were you not?
SPEER: Of course.
Albert Speer was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment. He was released from Spandau Prison on September 30, 1966. Speer died in 1981.
Speer laughed nervously.
‘Twenty years. Well; that’s fair enough. They couldn’t have given me a lighter sentence, considering the facts, and I can’t complain.
I said the sentences must be severe, and I admitted my share of the guilt, so it would be ridiculous if I complained about the punishment.’ ”
Speer was a German architect who was, for most of World War II, Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production for Nazi Germany.
Speer was Adolf Hitler‘s chief architect before assuming ministerial office.
As “the Nazi who said sorry”, he accepted moral responsibility at the Nuremberg trials and in his memoirs for complicity in crimes of the Nazi regime, while insisting he had been ignorant of the Holocaust.
Speer joined the Nazi Party in 1931, launching himself on a political and governmental career which lasted fourteen years.
His architectural skills made him increasingly prominent within the Party and he became a member of Hitler’s inner circle.
Hitler instructed him to design and construct structures including the Reich Chancellery and the Zeppelinfeld stadium in Nuremberg where Party rallies were held.
Speer also made plans to reconstruct Berlin on a grand scale, with huge buildings, wide boulevards, and a reorganized transportation system.
In February 1942, Hitler appointed him as Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production.
After the war, he was tried at Nuremberg and sentenced to 20 years in prison for his role in the Nazi regime, principally for the use of forced labor.
Despite repeated attempts to gain early release, he served his full sentence, most of it at Spandau Prison in West Berlin.
Following his release in 1966, Speer published two bestselling autobiographical works.
Inside the Third Reich and Spandau: The Secret Diaries, detailing his close personal relationship with Hitler, and providing readers and historians with a unique perspective on the workings of the Nazi regime.
He wrote a third book, Infiltration, about the SS.
Speer died of a stroke in 1981 while visiting London.
The Executions
The hangings were carried out during the early morning hours of October 16, 1946 in a small gymnasium erected in the prison’s courtyard.
Three gallows filled the room – two to be used alternatively as each condemned man was dispatched and the third to act as a spare.
Hermann Goering:
Goering was perhaps the most influential person, next to Hitler, in the Nazi organization. He was one of only 12 Nazis elected to the Reichstag in 1928. He orchestrated the Reichstag fire on February 27, 1933 and, with Goebbels assistance, used the fire as a propaganda tool against the communists. In the mid-1930’s Goering was in charge of the Aryanization of Jewish property, a policy which extended to Jews throughout Europe following the Anschluss.
After the events of Kristallnacht, November 8 and 9, 1938, Goering (under instructions from Hitler) called a high-level meeting of the party, on November 12, to assess the damage done during the night and place responsibility for it. Present at the meeting were Goering, Goebbels, Reinhard Heydrich, Walter Funk and other ranking Nazi officials. The intent of this meeting was two-fold: to make the Jews responsible for Kristallnacht and to use the events of the preceding days as a rationale for promulgating a series of antisemitic laws which would, in effect, remove Jews from the German economy. An interpretive transcript of this meeting is provided by Robert Conot, Justice at Nuremberg, New York: Harper and Row, 1983:164-172):
“Gentlemen! Today’s meeting is of a decisive nature,” Goering announced. “I have received a letter written on the Fuehrer’s orders requesting that the Jewish question be now, once and for all, coordinated and solved one way or another.”
Kristallnacht turns out to be a crucial turning point in German policy regarding the Jews and may be considered as the actual beginning of what is now called the Holocaust. Following that meeting, a wide-ranging set of antisemitic laws were passed which had the clear intent, in Goering’s words, of “Aryanizing” the German economy. The path to the “Final Solution” had been chosen.
Herman Goering cheated the hangman by swallowing a cyanide capsule and dying in his cell shortly before his scheduled hanging.
After Goering’s suicide, the Allies immediately ordered the remaining 10 condemned men to be handcuffed to guards and dispatched clergymen to administer last rites.
In the early morning hours of October 16, 1946, the Nazi war criminals were hanged one-by-one from a scaffolding erected in a prison gymnasium.
Kingsbury Smith was a reporter for the International News Service and was selected as the sole representative of the American press at the executions.
Here are some of his observations:
The executions, which took nearly 2 hours to complete, were administered by the U.S. Army’s official hangman, Master Sergeant John C. Woods.
“Von Ribbentrop entered the execution chamber at 1:11 a.m. Nuremberg time. He was stopped immediately inside the door by two Army sergeants who closed in on each side of him and held his arms, while another sergeant who had followed him in removed manacles from his hands and replaced them with a leather strap.
It was planned originally to permit the condemned men to walk from their cells to the execution chamber with their hands free, but all were manacled immediately following Goering’s suicide.
Von Ribbentrop was able to maintain his apparent stoicism to the last. He walked steadily toward the scaffold between his two guards, but he did not answer at first when an officer standing at the foot of the gallows went through the formality of asking his name.
When the query was repeated he almost shouted, ‘Joachim von Ribbentrop!’ and then mounted the steps without any sign of hesitation.
When he was turned around on the platform to face the witnesses, he seemed to clench his teeth and raise his head with the old arrogance. When asked whether he had any final message he said, ‘God protect Germany,’ in German, and then added, ‘May I say something else?’
The interpreter nodded and the former diplomatic wizard of Nazidom spoke his last words in loud, firm tones:
‘My last wish is that Germany realize its entity and that an understanding be reached between the East and the West. I wish peace to the world.’
As the black hood was placed in position on his head, Von Ribbentrop looked straight ahead.
Then the hangman adjusted the rope, pulled the lever, and Von Ribbentrop slipped away to his fate.
Keitel entered the chamber two minutes after the trap had dropped beneath Von Ribbentrop, while the latter still was at the end of his rope.
But Von Ribbentrop’s body was concealed inside the first scaffold; all that could be seen was the taut rope.
Keitel did not appear as tense as Von Ribbentrop.
He held his head high while his hands were being tied and walked erect toward the gallows with a military bearing.
When asked his name he responded loudly and mounted the gallows as he might have mounted a reviewing stand to take a salute from German armies.
He certainly did not appear to need the help of guards who walked alongside, holding his arms.
When he turned around atop the platform he looked over the crowd with the iron-jawed haughtiness of a proud Prussian officer.
His last words, uttered in a full, clear voice, were translated as ‘I call on God Almighty to have mercy on the German people. More than 2 million German soldiers went to their death for the fatherland before me. I follow now my sons – all for Germany.’
Hans Frank was next in the parade of death.
He was the only one of the condemned to enter the chamber with a smile on his countenance.
Although nervous and swallowing frequently, this man, who was converted to Roman Catholicism after his arrest, gave the appearance of being relieved at the prospect of atoning for his evil deeds.
He answered to his name quietly and when asked for any last statement, he replied in a low voice that was almost a whisper, ‘I am thankful for the kind treatment during my captivity and I ask God to accept me with mercy.’
Ninth in the procession of death was Alfred Jodl.
With the black coat-collar of his Wehrmacht uniform half turned up at the back as though hurriedly put on, JodI entered the dismal death house with obvious signs of nervousness.
He wet his lips constantly and his features were drawn and haggard as he walked, not nearly so steady as Keitel, up the gallows steps.
Yet his voice was calm when he uttered his last six words on earth:
‘My greetings to you, my Germany.’
At 2:34 a.m. Jodl plunged into the black hole of the scaffold.
The last of the condemned men was executed at 2:38 AM.
Although Herman Goering had escaped the hangman’s noose, his death had to be officially recognized:
…the gymnasium doors opened again and guards entered carrying Goering’s body on a stretcher.
He had succeeded in wrecking plans of the Allied Control Council to have him lead the parade of condemned Nazi chieftains to their death.
But the council’s representatives were determined that Goering at least would take his place as a dead man beneath the shadow of the scaffold.
The guards carrying the stretcher set it down between the first and second gallows.
Goering’s big bare feet stuck out from under the bottom end of a khaki-colored United States Army blanket.
One blue-silk-clad arm was hanging over the side.
The colonel in charge of the proceedings ordered the blanket removed so that witnesses and Allied correspondents could see for themselves that Goering was definitely dead.
The Army did not want any legend to develop that Goering had managed to escape.
As the blanket came off it revealed Goering clad in black silk pajamas with a blue jacket shirt over them, and this was soaking wet, apparently the result of efforts by prison doctors to revive him.
The face of this twentieth-century free booting political racketeer was still contorted with the pain of his last agonizing moments and his final gesture of defiance.
They covered him up quickly and this Nazi warlord had wallowed in blood and beauty, passed behind a canvas curtain into the black pages of history.
But discord was rife not only among the accused.
The Cold War had started between East and West.
Churchill was only making a statement of fact when he proclaimed, on 5 March 1946, in Fulton, Missouri, his famous words: ‘From Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended”.
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