The allies agreed at the Tehran Conference that the leaders of the Third Reich should be judged. The final decision was made in Yalta. The victorious powers agreed on everything except one thing. Soviet judges refused to dress up in robes and wigs.
Got under the distribution
Not everyone lived to see the trial. Hitler and Goebbels shot themselves. The head of the SS Himmler poisoned himself after being captured by the British. Borman he died while trying to break out of the encircled Berlin, but this became known many years after the end of the war. The main body of the defendants were members of the Flensburg government, which was to continue to lead the country after Hitler’s suicide.
The warm company was supplemented with Rudolf Hess, who has been in custody in England since 1941, and Hermann Goering, whom Hitler had already deprived of all posts and positions at that time. In addition to them, the former German Chancellor and Ambassador to Turkey, Franz von Papen, were court-martialed, Gauleiter of Thuringia and Commissioner for the Use of Labor Fritz Sauckel, Minister of Foreign Affairs Joachim von Ribbentrop, former finance minister Hjalmar Schacht, ex-editor-in-chief of the Nazi newspaper Das Sturmer Julius Streicher and others
Epilogue
Lawyer Arkady Poltorak he was the secretary of the Soviet delegation at the trial. In the book The Nuremberg Epilogue, he described the last, 407th session of the tribunal on October 1, 1946 as follows: The last, resolute section of the verdict will be announced by the presiding judge himself (Jeffrey Lawrence, the chief judge from Great Britain and the head of the entire process. — approx. AiF.). With a habitual movement, he adjusts his glasses, and at the same moment, noiselessly, as if without touching anyone’s hand, the door behind the dock rolls back on hinges. The well-known figure of Hermann Goering enters the lighted hall from a dark hole. On either side of him are two soldiers.
Goering looks around the tensely hushed courtroom, accusers with a restless gaze and detains him on the judges. He is pale, even more haggard. A month of waiting for the verdict was not in vain! The mask of bravado that the former Reichsmarschall had so diligently maintained throughout the entire process had disappeared from his face. He is given headphones, although Goering’s knowledge of English was quite sufficient to understand the laconic but expressive formula of the sentence: death by hanging.
After listening to her, Goering casts one last angry look at the judges, into the courtroom. How much hatred is in his eyes. He silently takes off his headphones, turns around and leaves the hall. The door closes behind him, only to open again a few seconds later.
Hess appears. This one refuses the headphones offered to him. He still looks like some kind of buffoon. The Tribunal announces his sentence: life imprisonment.
The door closes again and opens again. This time Ribbentrop enters through it. Face like ashes. The eyes express fright, they are half-closed. It struck me that he had some kind of folder with papers in his hands. He won’t need it anymore.
—To death by hanging, — announces Lawrence.
Ribbentrop’s legs feel like cotton wool. It takes effort for him to turn back and disappear into the darkness of the passage.
Enter Keitel (the Chief of Staff of the Supreme Command of the Wehrmacht, or OKW. — approx. AIF). He walks straight as a candle. The face is impenetrable.
— To death by hanging, — sounds in headphones.
Rosenberg completely loses his composure when he hears the same verdict.
But they introduce a Franc (ex-Governor-General of Poland. — approx. AIF). This executioner, who promised to make “minced meat from all Poles”, has a pleading expression on his face. He even stretched out his hands, as if such a gesture could change the sentence already signed: to death by hanging.
Following Frank, Julius Streicher enters, or rather, runs in. Spreading his legs wide apart and stretching his head forward, this pogromist and molester of the souls of thousands and thousands of Germans gives the impression of a man waiting for a blow. And he gets it, he hears the same few words as Frank.
For Streicher — Saukel. And he gets his due: the death penalty.
Alfred Jodl. Photo: Public Domain
Enter Yodel (another general from OKW. — approx. AIF). Having heard about the loop prepared for him, he abruptly takes off his headphones, hisses something viciously and, walking heavily with stiff legs, leaves.
And here is Walter Funk (Deputy Minister of Propaganda. — approx. AIFThis one remembers the gold crowns removed from the teeth of the Auschwitz victims and stored in the safes of the imperial bank, and therefore does not expect anything other than the death penalty for himself. But suddenly he hears the saving words: “life imprisonment”. Funk is clearly confused. It looks like he is sobbing and making a helpless attempt to bow to the judges…
The door behind the dock opened and closed eighteen times. I look at my watch. The silver hands on the dial show 15 hours and 40 minutes. The process is over. The judges are removed.”
.
How did Goering get poisoned?
Three hours before the execution, Hermann Goering committed suicide. Who exactly helped him in this, it became known quite recently. This was admitted by an elderly American Herbert Lee Sivers, who in 1946 served in the Nazi criminals protection company in Nuremberg. In his spare time, he met a pretty German woman and blabbed about what his service was. The girl asked him to give Goering “medicines”, without which he “suffered terribly”. Goering hoped for leniency to the last. The German woman then disappeared forever from the life of a 19-year-old soldier. He himself remained silent until 2005 .
Invitation to execution
US Army Sergeant John Woods was appointed executioner in Nuremberg — a strange uncle 35 years old. Prior to that, he had already hanged about 30 American servicemen who committed crimes after the Normandy landings and were convicted by military tribunals. Woods was philosophical about his duties: “Someone has to do it.” He will go down in history once again when he hangs seven Japanese war criminals after the Tokyo Tribunal in 1948.
The night of execution began for the condemned with the last supper – potato salad, sausages, ham, black bread and tea. Ribbentrop was the first to enter the gym of the Nuremberg prison converted for execution. About one o’clock in the morning on October 16, the head of the prison is a colonel of the US Army Andrews he read the death sentence again. Ribbentrop’s hands were tied behind his back. Two soldiers of the military police went up with him to the scaffold. Ribbentrop was placed on a closed manhole cover and his legs were tied. He was asked if he wanted to say something. After a high-flown tirade, Woods threw a black cap over the criminal’s head and tightened a rope around his neck. Executioner’s Assistant Joseph Malta activated the mechanism, and the hatch doors opened…
On the scaffold, the former leaders of the Third Reich behaved differently. Rosenberg, one of the main ideologists of Nazism, said nothing. Streicher shouted “Heil Hitler”. Zeiss-Inquart said he hoped his execution was the last act of the tragedy of World War II.
In the morning, the bodies of the executed were brought by trucks to the crematorium on the outskirts of Munich. After 2 days, the ashes were poured from the bridge into the nearest river.
