Nuremberg Trials: An Eyewitness Report

In 1946, the trial of major war criminals before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and the subsequent trials before American military tribunals focused world attention on the crimes of the German state and the Nazi Regime. The Tribunal was designed to try the major Nazi war criminals and to advance the reach of international law. In the city of Nuremberg the four Allied Powers tried the leaders of the Nazi movement for crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
The following eye-witness account by Henry Lea provides additional evidence for historians, political scientist and jurists as they continue to use the evidence assembled for these crimes to study the Holocaust and to understand the concepts "war crimes" and "crimes against humanity." Dr. Henry Lea is a professor emeritus of German Language and Literature from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

In the spring of 1947 I went to Nürnberg as a civilian employee of the US government, in response to a newspaper article that translators were needed for the war crimes trials. After the international trial of Hermann Göring and other leading Nazis was concluded in October 1946, twelve war crimes trials were held in Nürnberg from 1946 to 1949 before American military courts. The defendants were high-ranking officers of the German Army and SS, physicians, industrialists, judges and prominent members of the Nazi regime. Each court consisted of three civilian judges who heard the cases without a jury.
After passing an interpreter's test from German to English I was assigned to the Einsatzgruppen Case. The Einsatzgruppen were "special task forces" sent to Russia in order to kill certain groups of people whom the Nazis considered racially or ideologically inferior: mainly Jews, Roma, Sinti, and Communist officials. The number of their victims is difficult to determine; the eminent Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg estimates the number of Jewish victims at 564,000.

The 22 defendants were high-ranking SS officers who pleaded "not guilty" because they were acting under orders, but not a sole defendant made a convincing case for being forced to obey the killing order. And there was not a single case in which an SS officer was punished for disobeying or evading this order, other than being passed up for promotion or transferred to an undesirable post. At no time did any defendant express remorse for his actions.

The court imposed fourteen death sentences and various prison terms, but many of these sentences were commuted in 1951 by the US High Commissioners for Germany, John J. McCloy, as a result of German pressures and American eagerness to rehabilitate Germany.

The evidence in this case consisted entirely of meticulously detailed reports sent by the Einsatzgruppen to Berlin, where they were found by Allied forces. The most shocking of these reports reads as follows: "On 29 and 30 September 1941 in Kiev, Commando 4a, together with the group staff and police units, killed 33,771 Jews and confiscated their clothing and valuables." This was the massacre at Babi Yar, the ravine near Kiev where these killings took place. The SS commander at Babi Yar testified that his men suffered more from nervous exhaustion than the victims.

To translate this material is possible only because simultaneous interpretation demands such intense and unremitting concentration that the content doesn't fully register. And the human mind isn't capable of absorbing it all at once. It took eight years before I fully awoke to what I had heard in Nürnberg. The same experience happened to another interpreter at this trial, the German author Wolfgang Hildesheimer, whose writings are filled with echoes of this case but not until ten years after this trial. Neither of us realized then that this Einsatzgruppen case would haunt us to our old age.

Henry Lea
University of Massachusetts (Amherst)

1945

• January 22
  Henry Stimson, Edward Stettinius, Jr., and Francis Biddle propose a trial plan to Roosevelt.
  
  
• April 12
  Death of President Roosevelt.
  
  
• April 30
  Hitler and Goebbels commit suicide
  
  
• May 2
  Truman appoints Robert Jackson American chief prosecutor to prepare charges against those accused of war crimes.
  
  
• May 3
  American representatives present a trial proposal to British, French, and Soviet representatives at San Francisco.
  
  
• May 9
  Field Marshal Keitel signs the unconditional surrender of Germany at Berlin.
  
  
• June 26
  London conference of American, British, Soviet, and French representatives begins.
  
  
• August 8
  Four-power agreement for a trial signed in London, to which is appended a charter of the International Military Tribunal.
  
  
• October 6
  Indictment of the major German war criminals and six German organizations.
  
  
• October 29
  International Military Tribunal holds its first full meeting at Nuremberg.
  
  
• November 19
  Defense counsel petitions the Tribunal.
  
  
• November 20
  Nuremberg trial begins.
  
  
• November 21
  Robert Jackson's opening speech.

1946

• August 31
  Defendants make their final statements to the court.
  
  
• September 30 - October 1
  Judges read their judgement.
  
  
• October 15
  Hermann Goering commits suicide.
  
  
• October 16
  Execution of the condemned defendants.

Timeline adapted from Marrus, Michael R. The Nuremberg War Crimes Trial 1945-1946: A Documentary History. Boston: Bedford Books, 1997.