WAR CRIMES: Der Tag

Hermann Göring was first. Slimmed down, limply clad in a grey suit that once fitted him snugly, he strode into the courtroom at Nürnberg, flanked by two white-helmeted military policemen. He stood erect under the glaring lights, fixed headphones to his ears. British Presiding Lord Justice Sir Geoffrey Lawrence looked sternly down on the No. 2 Nazi and pronounced sentence: death by hanging.

It was the last act in the drama of the war crimes trial that had begun ten months before. It moved swiftly. Göring took off his headphones, turned swiftly about, was ushered to the elevator outside. On the way he passed Joachim von Ribbentrop.

The champagne salesman who had risen to become Foreign Minister to Adolf Hitler, stood before the bar, adjusted headphones with shaking hands, listened. Again the sentence: death. Ribbentrop (whose von turned out to be a social-climbing affectation) quivered, seemed about to fall. The M.P.’s helped him from the courtroom.

Now it was the posturing crackpot of the war crimes, Rudolf Hess. He brushed aside the headphones which would have brought him the German translation of Justice Lawrence’s sentence in English: life imprisonment. Not by a flicker of an eyelash did fox-chinned Hess betray surprise at the clemency he had received. The mill ground on.

Sentenced to death:

Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of Adolf Hitler’s High Command.

Ernst Kaltenbrunner, burly, scar-faced No. 2 man to the late Gestapo Chief Heinrich Himmler.

Alfred Rosenberg, high priest of Naziism, publisher of Hitler’s Völkischer Beobachter, ranting preacher of race hatred.

Hans Frank, onetime lawyer, Governor General of occupied Poland.

Wihelm Frick, Minister of the Interior in Hitler’s first cabinet and longtime bureaucrat of the regime.

Julius Streicher, brutish publisher of Nürnberg’s Der Stürmer, No.1 i Jew-baiter of the regime and possessor of what was said to have been the world’s largest collection of pornographic literature.

Fritz Sauckel, boss of slave labor.

Colonel General Alfred Jodl, beady-eyed chief of the General Staff.

Arthur Seyss-lnquart, Austria’s Quisling and Nazi Governor General of The Netherlands.

To the surprise of all who heard (and against the violent dissent of the Russian member of the four-man tribunal) three Nazi bigwigs were acquitted:

Hjalmar Schacht, Hitler’s financial wizard, who had broken with the regime and wound up in a concentration camp.

Hans Fritzsche, No. 2 man to the late Joseph Goebbels in the Propaganda Ministry, whose plea that he was an errand boy to Goebbels apparently was believed by the court.

Franz von Papen, sly oldtime German diplomat, World War I spy, and jobholder under Hitler from 1933 down to the end.

For the rest there was neither death sentence nor acquittal, but prison:

Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, builder of the German Navy; life.

Walther Funk, President of the Reichsbank, Hitler’s press chief and economic adviser; life.

Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz, originator of the submarine wolf-pack tactics, and for eight days at the end of the Nazi regime the Hitler-chosen chief of what was left; 10 years.

Baldur von Schirach, 39-year-old head of the Hitler Youth organization; 20 years.

Albert Speer, munitions minister; 20 years.

Constantin von Neurath, oldest of the defendants (73), onetime protector of Czechoslovakia; 15 years.

Few days before the sentences most of the 21 defendants in the greatest criminal trial in world history had said their farewells to their wives: Emmy Göring, Frau von Ribbentrop, Frau Schacht, et al. Now, for those who had escaped death there was ahead a fast trip to prison. For the rest, the eleven who had been sentenced to death, there was the gallows, reportedly within two weeks “in the Nürnberg area.”