October 16, 1946 - the day when the ashes of eleven main war criminals - the Nazis, sentenced to death by the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal - were poured into one of the tributaries of the Isara River (near Munich). The victors decided that absolutely nothing should be left of the ashes of the Nazi leaders. Izara, Dovana, the Black Sea … - the ashes of the condemned had to dissolve and disappear into the world's waters.
The decision to condemn the main war criminals of Germany was made by the victorious countries (USA, USSR and Great Britain) at the Potsdam Conference (from July 17 to August 2, 1945). Never before have there been trials in which the leaders of a country that has lost the war would have been put on the dock. In the euphoria of victory, many politicians and lawyers decided that it was possible to judge by a fair trial, but in reality it turned out to be more of a parody.
A specially created international military tribunal, which began its work in Nuremberg on November 20, 1945, accused 24 people but convicted 22 (one of them in absentia) of the main Nazi war criminals. German Fuehrer Adolf Hitler, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and SS Reichsfuehrer Heinrich Himmler have already committed suicide. The leader of the German Workers' Front, Robert Leigh, also took his own life, and the manufacturer Gustav Krupp could not be tried due to illness. The death sentence by hanging was announced to 12 defendants (Reichsmarschall, “Nazi number two” Hermann Goering at the last moment managed to commit suicide, but the head of the Nazi Party Chancellery Martin Bormann, not knowing that he had already died, was sentenced to death in absentia). The fraudulent remains of 11 convicts were later cremated.
… it is impossible to hang the Reichsmarshal of Germany
Together with statesmen, functionaries, officials and the military, eight other organizations were tried in Nuremberg: the German government, the Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei - state secret police), SS (Schutzstaffel - security service), SD (Sicherheitsdienst - security service), SA (Sturmabteilungen - strike forces, stormtroopers), the political leadership of the Nazi party, the General Staff and the Supreme Directorate of the Armed Forces (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht).
Shortly before the start of the trial, the defendants were charged with four categories of crimes: seizure of power by conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity. In the process, it turned out that the charges of the first two categories were very weakly reasoned. The defendants' defenders easily proved that it is at least strange to consider the members of the internationally recognized government as conspirators, with which the countries-judges (USA, Great Britain, USSR and France) have concluded different agreements. The Soviet Union found itself in a particularly unpleasant situation, which at the initial period of the Second World War was an ally of Nazi Germany.
The evidence for allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity was compelling. Many documents testified to the brutal occupation policy of the Nazis, the Holocaust, mass extermination of people in death camps and mass executions.
The decisions of the tribunal were different. Sometimes so difficult to comprehend that they caused surprise. The banker Halmar Schacht, the head of the radio department of the Ministry of Propaganda Hans Feiche and the vice-chancellor of the first Hitler government, Franz von Papen, were acquitted. The German government, the General Staff, and the main command of the armed forces were also acquitted. Six defendants (for example, the Deputy Fuehrer in the affairs of the Nazi party - Rudolf Hess, Grossadmiral Erich Raeder, Minister of Arms and Ammunition Albert Speer) were given different terms - from ten years to life imprisonment. Twelve Nazi leaders, as mentioned, were sentenced to death. Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Governor General of Poland Hans Frank, Minister of the Occupied Eastern Regions Alfred Rosenberg and six other people ended their lives on the gallows.
Many defendants were shocked by the painful method of the death penalty. In a letter to the Council of Allied Control (a body of the highest government in Germany), which is dated October 11, 1946, “the main military aggressor” (as indicated in the verdict) Hermann Goering wrote: “Without further ado, I would allow you to shoot myself! But it is impossible to hang the Reichsmarshal of Germany! I cannot allow this - for the sake of Germany itself (…). I did not expect that I would not be allowed to die the death of a soldier."
Nuremberg trials: pros and cons
The Nuremberg Trials set a legal precedent that would serve as a model for future international military tribunals. In judicial practice, a new conclusion has appeared, indicating that the order of the superiors does not exempt a person from responsibility for the crimes committed.
From the very beginning of the process, very harsh criticism sounded. Many lawyers did not consider it acceptable that the accusations at Nuremberg were inherently ex post facto. They believed that there can be no sentence without a law - a person cannot be tried if at the time of the commission of a crime there was no law qualifying his actions as a crime. The Nuremberg Trials were unambiguously a political process, an instrument of action by the victorious countries. Its main drawback is that it limited itself to considering only Nazi crimes. The process did not allow for an objective consideration of war crimes and crimes against humanity in general.
Soon after the tribunal began its work, representatives of the USSR, Great Britain, the USA and France concluded a secret treaty. He noted that the process would not touch upon issues unpleasant for the allies. The tribunal, for example, did not accept for consideration the secret protocol signed between the USSR and Germany on August 23, 1939, on the division of spheres of influence in Eastern Europe, which marked the beginning of World War II and destroyed the independence of the Baltic countries.
Prosecutors in Nuremberg can be blamed for deliberately disfiguring history, distorting and hiding the truth. For example, the process did not consider the bombing of cities by the German Air Force, because the "bomb war" would not only become an object of accusation, but also a double-edged sword: in this case, it would not have been possible to prevent an unpleasant debate about the much more destructive raids by British and American aircraft on German cities.
Most of all, the process in Nuremberg was discredited by the participation of the Soviet Union. From the very beginning, there was a principle in international law: if any of the parties during a war performs any illegal actions, it has no right to incriminate similar actions to its enemies. In this regard, the Stalinist USSR had absolutely no right to judge Nazi Germany! But what did Moscow do? According to Stalin's instructions, Soviet prosecutors, during the preparation and at the beginning of the trial, brought charges of the murder of Polish officers in Katyn, claiming that it was the Germans. Only when the defendants' lawyers managed to prove that the facts presented by the prosecution were blatantly falsified, and the trail leads to the USSR, the Soviet side quickly dropped the charges.
And the behavior of the Western powers in this case was undoubtedly immoral and difficult to justify. Even before Nuremberg, the head of the British Foreign Ministry, Alexander Cadogan, in his diary in connection with the murder in Katyn, wrote the following words: “This is all extremely disgusting! How can we turn a blind eye to all this and, as if nothing had happened, discuss with the Russians the issues of "German war criminals"?
But the Nuremberg Tribunal took a different position. He refused to even consider the Katyn episode, pointing out that he only considers the crimes of the Nazis. Yes, British, French and American judges did not want to put the Kremlin in a desperate situation then, because it would have cast a shadow on the Western democracies, but in the name of historical justice it was necessary to do it! Then in today's Moscow, speaking about Nuremberg, at least, they would not try to turn the judgments and reasoning of the tribunal into a "gospel" and treat it as a "holy scripture."
Nuremberg is still the main bastion of the one-sided and unscientific "version of the winners" about the Second World War. But the time has come to dispute this version long ago.
At the Nuremberg Trials, the prosecution had 4,000 documents, 1809 legally certified written evidence and 33 witnesses. The Nuremberg verdict then cost $ 4,435,719 (at current prices - 850 million euros). The materials of the Nuremberg Trials, which were published in 1946, occupied 43 volumes.
