In February 1945, FDR, Churchill and Stalin decided there would be no summary executions of the surviving Nazi leadership.
They would instead be held as defendants in an international criminal trial.
Prosecutors and jurors would come from the four Allied powers, who would cobble together and apply the world’s first precepts of international criminal law.
Nuremberg’s elaborate Palace of Justice was chosen as the trial venue because it had no war damage and had ample courtroom and prison facilities.
The trial began on this day in 1945.
The evidence presented at the trial came from the Nazis’ own records, including their own films, records, memoranda, private journals, diaries, and photographs.
The defendants were given lawyers, with office space, stenographers and office supplies.
And they were shown the evidence against them so they could prepare a defense.
Printed trial transcripts were made.
And the trial was filmed, creating an authentic, comprehensive record of Nazi crimes.
This film was to be shown in Germany as part of the ‘de-Nazification’ of the German people.
They would for themselves images of the war’s destruction and the mass slaughter of civilians, and they would hear former German leaders admit their guilt.
This film was intended to be shown to Americans, too, so they’d better understand why their own wartime sacrifices and hardships were necessary.
But, by the time the Nuremberg trials ended in late 1946, the world had changed.
The Allies’ initial postwar goal had been to dismantle the German industrial state, limiting the German people to subsistence living in an agrarian economy.
Consideration was even given to dividing Germany permanently into several smaller states and transferring some German lands to European neighbors.
But the destruction of the Third Reich and the war’s devastation in Europe had created a power vacuum in the heart of the continent which the Soviet leadership viewed as an opportunity for empire building.
Soviet troops had remained in areas they had liberated, and the Kremlin intended to spread communism there by installing governments aligned with Moscow.
The US enemy was no longer Germany.
It was the Soviet Union.
So, US foreign policy changed.
Recognizing that a small and weakened postwar Germany would be vulnerable to Soviet domination, the US advocated the emergence of a new, democratic and capitalist Germany aligned with the West which would bolster the economic recovery of the rest of Europe and counter Soviet dominance.
But this new US foreign policy required the support of the American people.
The images and other evidence of Nazi atrocities contained in the Nuremberg film would inflame the public’s anti-German sentiments.
So, while the Nuremberg trial film was shown for two years to packed theaters in the American and British sectors of occupied Germany, the US War Department refused to release the film in America.
And the visual evidence of the Nazi crimes was left in the past, where it was ignored and sometimes even denied.
When accountability takes a back seat to politics, there is always a price to pay.
******************************
I’ll see you tomorrow.
— Brenda
Share this post