Justice's victory, not victor's justice

The 'Nuremberg process' tried 22 Nazis. Picture / Reuters

NUREMBERG - Former Allied prosecutors and witnesses yesterday returned to the Nuremberg courtroom where Nazi leaders were put on trial, to mark the 60th anniversary of the tribunals that set a global precedent for bringing war criminals to justice.

Whitney Harris, one of the chief US prosecutors at the Nuremberg trials that convicted 19 Nazi leaders of crimes against humanity, joined former lawyers and German reporters who took part in the historic proceedings that began on November 20, 1945.

Harris, now in his 80s, admitted that before the trial started, he and his colleagues had little idea of the enormity of the Nazis' crimes.

"I did not have the slightest idea of the scale of the genocide. We did not have much solid evidence when we started our investigations," he said.

Key evidence about the Nazi Holocaust was gained at the trial through Harris' questioning of Rudolf Hoss, who admitted turning Auschwitz into a Jewish extermination centre.

During the trials, the court heard evidence from Holocaust victims and was shown films of the piles of emaciated corpses and skeletal survivors found in the liberated camps.

Harris said it had taken him 20 years to cope with his memories of the trial. "Even now it affects me. But all these gruesome crimes are not exclusively a German phenomenon."

The first day of the trial was taken up entirely by the Allied chief prosecutor's reading of a 24,000 word indictment against Nazi leaders.

They included Nazi Air Marshall Hermann Goering, Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess and the Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop.

Goering, who committed suicide in his cell shortly before he was due to be executed, was among 12 Nazis sentenced to death. Three were acquitted.

The remainder, including Rudolf Hess and Albert Speer, Hitler's architect, were sentenced to prison terms. Hess committed suicide in Berlin's Spandau prison in 1986.

Markus Wolf, 82, the former head of Communist East Germany's intelligence service, covered the trials for a German radio station in 1945.

"I had seen the photographs of all these Nazi leaders in all their pomp and glory," he said. "Then in Nuremberg, I saw normal people sitting in the dock. They seemed like staff in a railway station or post office."

Wolf recalled how Goering and Speer turned their heads away as the court was shown evidence of the death camps. "In just the same way, many Germans did not want to hear anything about the camps," he said.

Despite the trials' role in setting an international precedent for the legal prosecution of war criminals, recent evidence has shown that in Germany its findings were largely dismissed as "victors' justice" for decades.

A secret opinion poll by the US published only three years ago found that a majority of Germans did not consider the trials fair until the 1970s.

Yesterday the German media was universal in its praise of the trials. "Without Nuremberg, the International Court of Justice in the Hague would have been unthinkable," Berlin's Der Tagesspiegel said.

"Sixty years after Nuremberg, Germany no longer has to argue about victors' justice. It can stand up for justice's victory."

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