(FILM REEL WHIRRS, SOFT WHISPERING)
MAN: Being German is not really something to be celebrated,
because it always comes with the burden of the past,
the responsibility for past crimes.
MAN: Heil Hitler!
Never again.
Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!
WOMAN: For us Germans, Nuremberg is a special place.
It's shadowed by our darkest days, but after the Second World War
Nazi leaders were tried for war crimes here.
That's when we were reborn as a nation.
MAN: It really was the biggest murder trial in history.
12 million men, women and children murdered in cold blood.
MAN: Hermann Wilhelm Goering.
Are you telling the tribunal that you, the second man in the Reich,
knew nothing about the extermination of the Jews?
MAN: None of them said "I'm guilty". None of them. Not one.
WOMAN: There must be millions who have wondered what in God's name
the Germans could say for themselves on reckoning day.
Now they have started to say it.
(HEAVY DOORS CLANG SHUT)
(FOOTSTEPS)
There is an elevator in the defendants' box
where they all sat.
One by one, they'd come up in the elevator.
As the defendant walks out, takes a seat,
it shuts again and goes down.
A few moments later, another defendant comes up.
Open, shut, open, shut, open, shut.
(MAN GIVES ORDER IN GERMAN)
(DRUM BEAT)
(CROWD CHEERS)
The city of Nuremberg was one of the great symbolic cities
of National Socialism.
Nuremberg was the place they chose for their rallies
and Hitler's wild speeches.
The audience were spellbound and cheered him.
(CROWD CHEERS WILDLY)
GRUNWALD: Nuremberg, a city of 400,000 people,
was devastated by the war.
90% of dwellings were rubble,
and under that rubble
thousands of corpses were quite literally rotting and festering.
FERENCZ: Growing up in Hell's Kitchen in New York,
I had decided very early in life that I didn't want to be a criminal.
I wanted to be a lawyer.
When we went to Nuremberg,
the people were interested in only staying alive.
Food was scarce. They were desperate and frightened.
They had no idea what we were going to do to them.
Many of them thought we were going to seek vengeance.
British soldiers were told
not to engage with the German civilian population
and, quite literally, to see them as accessories
or at least knowing stooges of crime.
As an international lawyer, Nuremberg is an amazing place.
You know, walking into Courtroom 600 sends shivers down my spine.
SANDS: Nuremberg is a special place for me.
My grandparents survived
but they both lost many, if not all, of their family members.
Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union and France
wanted to do justice,
to put the most senior Nazi leaders they could get their hands on
on trial in a rather public spectacle.
And the hunt began to identify, track down,
arrest thousands of individuals.
GRUNWALD: Goering is the most senior defendant,
a key architect of the Final Solution.
He was the most senior Nazi who was caught.
The others had died or been killed -
Himmler, Goebbels, Hitler, of course,
not available to be put on trial.
He acted very much as the defendant leader.
Fritz Sauckel was responsible
for amassing slave labour for the Nazi regime,
which saw the deaths of millions of people.
Walther Funk had been President of the Reichsbank.
He was in charge of all the gold and other property
that was taken away from the murdered Jews.
GRUNWALD: Julius Streicher was a sort of propagandist for Hitler
who ran a couple of particularly foul magazines
that were deeply anti-Semitic.
CLAUSSEN: Albert Speer once said
if Hitler ever had a personal friend it would have been him.
He had been an architect by profession,
but since 1942
was one of the most important organisers of forced labour
and armament production.
GRUNWALD: Hans Frank was the General Governor of occupied Poland,
and as such responsible for the deportation and death
of millions of Jews and Polish citizens
as victims of the Nazi extermination camps.
Another minute and the plane dropped to the heart of the world's enemy.
Nuremberg.
It took not many more minutes to get to the courtroom
where the world's enemy was being tried for his sins.
(OVERLAPPING VOICES SPEAKING FRENCH AND GERMAN)
The ventilation of the court was bad,
and the warm air rose to the gallery.
All German towns stank on hot days in the summer.
(MALE ANNOUNCER SPEAKS FRENCH)
ANNOUNCER: History and law and justice is being made.
The judges representing the major powers,
America, Britain, Russia, France,
with British Lord Justice Lawrence presiding.
The defendants, leaders of Nazi Germany.
They're charged with atrocity and war.
ANNOUNCER: Britain's team of prosecutors
is led by Attorney General Sir Hartley Shawcross.
Each chief prosecutor...
SANDS: You've essentially got four countries
who would prosecute jointly -
a British prosecutor and a French and a Soviet
and an American, and each of the four powers had their own tables.
The styles of each of the prosecutors was very different.
I think for the Soviet leadership, for Stalin in particular,
this was a sort of a show trial.
You'd go through the motions of justice
and then they would all be hanged.
FERENCZ: I was the first American soldier
assigned to do war crimes investigations.
It was the Americans who really carried the lead and said, "Look,
"we have to act only on the basis of law."
And the Russians, they said, "Well, as long as at the end we kill them."
The defendants are to plead guilty or not guilty
to the charges against them.
Hermann Wilhelm Goering.
The defendants are not entitled to make a statement.
You must plead guilty or not guilty.
Rudolf Hess?
Wilhelm Keitel?
Albert Speer?
The defendants were not shamed.
This was all propaganda against them as far as they were concerned.
None of them said, "I'm guilty". None of them. Not one.
Alfred Jodl?
They all said 'nicht schuldig'.
And I never met one all the time I was in Germany that came up to me
and said, "I'm sorry."
AKANDE: I suspect that many of those people would actually have felt
that they were not guilty.
Yes, millions of people are getting killed,
but somehow they sort of distanced themselves from that.
They're not the ones pulling the trigger.
They're not the ones putting people in gas chambers.
You know, they're signing pieces of paper and things are happening,
you know, in other places.
In a word there was high tension.
The prosecutors needed to show the world
what a criminal outfit the Nazis were.
SANDS: Because it was the first ever such international trial,
the British and the American prosecutors were deeply concerned
about an outcome in which not everyone was convicted.
FERENCZ: The crimes were committed by thousands of people
and they picked out people like Hermann Goering.
He was the one who was still alive. Hitler had committed suicide.
Killed his dog and killed his mistress too.
I was the first American soldier
assigned to do war crimes investigations.
People seemed to be coming out of
what looks like something like a camp,
and they all look like they're starving.
They were pleading with their eyes to help them.
We had no idea. We didn't know the word 'concentration camp'.
The impact of my first visit is really indescribable.
Dead bodies covering the ground.
Dead bodies piled up outside the crematory like scored wood.
The stench is in the air, it's a scene of horror.
It's indescribable and unimaginable to a rational human mind.
I peered into hell.
I just isolated my mind from what my eyes saw
and moved fast to collect evidence of the crimes.
The impact of it has remained with me to this day.
The privilege of opening the first trial in history
for crimes against the peace of the world
imposes a grave responsibility.
In the prisoners' dock sit twenty-odd broken men.
As Nazi leaders they once dominated most of the world
and terrified most of it.
Their personal capacity for evil is forever past.
The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish
have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating,
that civilisation cannot tolerate their being ignored,
because it cannot survive their being repeated.
There was a feeling of it was victors' justice
and the defendants themselves were aloof, I would say,
during the trial.
Their attitude was, you go ahead, present your case,
you can sentence us to death or whatever you want to do,
but we're not going to be part of that.
GRUNWALD: The defendants are very open with Gilbert,
and Goering feels the trial is really a political set-up.
He's completely certain of what the overall outcome will be.
He's actually started writing a farewell letter to his wife.
He's certain that, in the end,
the press will do much more to decide the trial than the judges.
I offer, then, our document 1760PS as exhibit USA57.
We haven't got that.
PINE: The first week or so of the trial
after the newspapers' interest and the furore fades away
is quite dull and tedious.
And so the American prosecutor decides to do something
quite unprecedented -
revolutionary really - in a courtroom.
MAN: Hello, recording.
If it please the tribunal, the prosecution for the United States
will at this time present to the tribunal
a documentary film on concentration camps.
SANDS: The prosecutors set up search lights at the ceiling,
which would be switched on only when the films were being played
and directed towards the faces of the defendants
so that everyone in the courtroom
and the movie cameras that were recording the moment
could record the faces of the defendants
as they were watching the films.
We shall proceed with the projection of the film.
ANNOUNCER: These are the locations of the largest concentration
and prison camps maintained throughout Germany
and occupied Europe under the Nazi regime.
The films, taken at Bergen Belsen and elsewhere,
showing the actions taken by Germans
had a dramatic effect in the courtroom.
GRUNWALD: The court psychologist, Gustave Gilbert,
watches the defendants' reactions to the film.
Lime covered bodies are stacked in layers
and the stench is overpowering.
Funk covers his eyes and looks anguished.
Frank swallows hard, tries to hold back tears.
Goering is slumped over the railing, refusing to watch.
Streicher watches, completely still, aside from the odd squint.
Funk starts to cry, wipes his eyes.
Frank groans. "Horrible."
Speer looks sombre, swallowing hard.
The defence attorneys mutter amongst themselves.
"For God's sake."
"Terrible."
As the human skin lampshade appears, Streicher says,
"I don't believe that."
Frank shakes his head and utters another, "Horrible".
It was known in advance that it would have a dramatic effect,
and one of the things that the prosecution team did
was to choreograph the presentation of the films in such a way
that viewers of the Movietone images and films
played in cinemas across the UK
would be able to see for themselves.
Funk, already tearful, puts his hand over his mouth
when the woman's corpses are tossed into the pit.
For the first time, even Streicher looks troubled.
This was Bergen Belsen.
The film ends.
The court's adjourned.
Gilbert describes a deathly silence
as the defendants leave the courtroom.
Frank is agitated, and tells Gilbert that all the top Nazis,
while perhaps ignorant of details, knew very well
there was something terribly wrong with the system.
And this is a really crucial dent in the ignorance defence
that's employed by practically all Nazi criminals.
Although Streicher admits the film was terrible,
Gilbert finds him completely unfeeling.
In the next breath, he demands that his guards be quieter at night,
so he can sleep.
What really annoys Goering about the film
is how it spoiled his show.
He tells Gilbert that it had been a wonderful afternoon.
Everyone had been laughing with him
until what he describes as "that awful film" ruined everything.
ANNOUNCER: The greatest war crimes trial in modern history
proceeds at Nuremberg.
Horror unbelievable.
PINE: This film really makes a big impact in the courtroom
and indeed in the rest of the world.
CHURCHILL: An iron curtain has descended across the continent.
Soviet Russia constitutes a growing challenge to Christian civilisation.
SANDS: People started saying, well, hang on a second -
if this is our new enemy, why are we cooperating with them
in the Nuremberg trial?
MAN: The translation isn't coming through
to some members of the tribunal - Russian into English.
ANNOUNCER: It was of course a very big day
in the history of Fulton, Missouri,
when President Truman and Winston Churchill paid their visit.
CHURCHILL: Ladies and gentlemen, a shadow has fallen upon the scenes
so lately lighted by the Allied victory.
From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,
an iron curtain has descended across the continent.
The Communist parties constitute a growing challenge and peril
to Christian civilisation.
GRUNWALD: Stalin is furious, and he accuses Churchill
of having the same imperialistic ambitions
and race theories as Hitler.
Whatever Churchill's anti-Russian speech sounded like
to the outside world,
it exploded over the Allied courthouse in wrecked Nuremberg
like a large post-war bombshell.
SANDS: That had very significant consequences.
Within the trial it made it more difficult for the French,
the British, the Americans, to be seen to be cooperating
with the Soviets, who were emerging as the new enemy.
People started saying, well, hang on a second -
if this is our new enemy, why are we cooperating with them
in the Nuremberg trial?
FLANNER: We have only one daily newspaper to read, Stars and Stripes,
which gave us the startling headline
"Unite to Stop Russians, Churchill Warns".
In court, we saw the German lawyers
hold the Stars and Stripes high in their hands
so that Goering and their other clients in the prisoners' box
could burst into smiling animation at the glorious good news.
GRUNWALD: When news comes through of Churchill's Iron Curtain speech,
the defendants rejoice, because they see it as a vindication
of their National Socialist worldview,
that finally the Western allies will begin to see
that really they should be grateful to Nazi Germany
for mounting this onslaught on the Soviet Union.
Even though relations between the Soviets and the Allies
are now pretty close to breaking point,
the Russians still don't pull out, because they value the trial.
AKANDE: The defendant has to have an opportunity to defend themselves.
So there's a tension between that and the defendant then using it
as an opportunity to perpetrate hate.
GRUNWALD: Goering is doing everything he can to give the impression
of an affable, likeable man, a jovial gambler,
but it's all but impossible to hide his pathological egotism.
FLANNER: He undeniably looked the bravura personality
with his hard, blue eyes and what is left of the familiar fleshiness
of his mobile, theatrical face.
When you met Hitler he was not content with the defeat of Germany
in the previous war?
The defence of the Nazis has begun.
There must be millions of people,
especially the Europeans that suffered under them for years,
who have wondered with bitter curiosity what in God's name
the Germans could say for themselves on reckoning day.
Now they have started to say it.
And would you specify which acts of which defendants
you claim are beyond the plan of the Nazi Party?
MAN: Mr Justice Jackson, the Tribunal thinks that the question
is somewhat too wide.
SANDS: Robert Jackson, the American chief prosecutor,
spent more than one day trying to cross-examine Hermann Goering.
You did...you did prohibit all court review
of the causes for taking people into what you called protective custody?
That is right, isn't it?
Let's omit that. I haven't asked for that.
If you'll just answer my questions, we'll save a great deal of time.
GRUNWALD: While Goering is never short of justifications for the war,
he claims total ignorance when it comes to the atrocities.
He could be nimble, and funny, but it was all to suggest
an amiable man who couldn't have meant any harm.
You have no recollection of that?
Am I correct so far?
I really feel that the United States is deprived of the opportunity
of effective cross-examination.
I trust the court is not unaware that outside of this courtroom
is a great social question of the revival of Nazism
and that one of the purposes here of the defendant Goering,
I think he'd be the first to admit, is to revive and perpetuate it.
SANDS: The problem with Jackson was that he was a sort of appeals lawyer.
He didn't do trials, he didn't know how to cross-examine,
and I think there was a concern
that the defendants were getting the better of the prosecutors
and that opened up the possibility
of a disastrous outcome to the trial.
The consequence of that was that the British number two,
David Maxwell Fyfe, was wheeled out.
Well, now, just let me remind you,
your service provided the equipment for Dachau.
FLANNER: Sir David was polished, courageous and masterly.
His strength lay in conducting the cross-examination in a manner
that clearly kept Goering guessing about what was coming next,
and each question made his line of thought more baffling.
Are you telling the Tribunal that you, the second man in the Reich,
knew nothing about concentration camps?
Hitler said that the Jews must either be exterminated
or taken to concentration camps.
It's a document dated 22 November, 1943. You've got it?
Yes.
And do you still say neither Hitler or you knew of this policy
to exterminate the Jews?
Will you answer my question?
You didn't know to what degree, but you knew there was a policy
aimed at the extermination of the Jews?
FLANNER: With his bright mind, his vast legal knowledge,
and the added passion of a just inquisition,
he stood behind his lectern and prosecuted the seated Goering
into at least a partial state of destruction.
SANDS: He more or less nailed Goering,
who was very deflated by the end of a couple of days.
Thank you.
He succeeded in doing what had not yet been done.
He forced Goering to separate himself intellectually from the Nazi myth.
He forced him to admit the difference between the glorified Nazi plan
and the ghastly human results.
GRUNWALD: Kaltenbrunner, in charge of the police,
security police, Gestapo and SS.
He is the henchman instituting the Final Solution.
JACKSON: I asked you about an order to kill all inmates
at Mauthausen concentration camp shortly before the end of the war.
Who was responsible for that order? Were you?
Now, this time, you're...
This time you are acquainted with the person
who tells the story, Ziereis -
"The gassing of the prisoners
"was done on the urging of Dr Kaltenbrunner."
I think, for the court, Kaltenbrunner epitomises a very pronounced sense
of coldness and detachment.
So I think Kaltenbrunner knew that he was a dead man walking.
Rudolf Hoess is, believe it or not, a witness of the defence,
and the idea, I think, behind that
is that he will exonerate Kaltenbrunner.
It backfires spectacularly.
CLAUSSEN: Rudolf Hoess was called in to testify
that Kaltenbrunner had never been to Auschwitz.
But then he started to speak about his brilliant work.
So he really turns out to be a disastrous witness for the defence.
JACKSON: You commanded Auschwitz until 1 December, '43,
and estimate that at least 2,500,000 victims were executed
and exterminated there by gassing and burning,
and at least another half million succumbed to starvation and disease,
making a total dead of about 3 million.
At lunch that day, the defendants are silent.
Frank tells the court psychologist
that this has been the low point of the trial.
A man sitting in court and admitting in so many words
that he has exterminated 2.5 million people.
It was something he knows people will be talking about
for a thousand years.
MAN: You are going too fast. Sorry.
When Vaillant-Couturier walks out,
she very pointedly makes eye contact with Goering,
in the full knowledge that she was putting a dagger
through these lies and make-believe of the defendants.
And that she was doing this not just for herself,
but for all those of her comrades who didn't make it.
Poland witnessed the mass murder of millions of people
under Frank's rule.
In 1941, he declared,
"I ask nothing of the Jews except that they should disappear.
"We must destroy the Jews wherever we meet them
"and whenever opportunity offers."
Hans Frank really lived the life of a king.
Driving expensive cars, living in a castle.
It was a huge contrast between his life
and the life of the people who had to starve or died
because he unleashed this policy of terror in Poland.
GRUNWALD: Frank confides to the court psychologist
that he's listened to a Bach oratorio.
When he heard the voice of Christ in the piece
it dawned on him, "I cannot hide the truth from God.
"No, the truth must come out, once and for all."
I hold the original report
of the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto
and Hans Frank was Governor General of Poland.
Showing the people driven before the flames,
women and children and old men.
The masses lined up against the wall for execution.
That they jumped from the windows when the heat became unbearable.
They then tried to crawl with broken bones across the street
into the ruins of burned buildings.
Hans Frank
summarised in his diary in 1944 the Nazi policy thus, and I quote -
"The Jews as a race are a race which has to be eliminated.
"Whenever we catch one, it is his end."
Word got around
that there was a possibility that Frank would accept guilt.
Everyone in the courtroom was enormously excited
that Frank was going to confess.
There was a palpable sense of excitement.
The silence in the courtroom as Frank spoke.
He acknowledged his responsibility as a member of the group.
"We as Germans have done this," he said,
"I as a German am therefore collectively responsible."
He did not accept individual criminal guilt.
His acceptance of collective guilt drew the wrath of Goering
and other defendants.
I think he knew he was going to be convicted
but he entertained the hope
that perhaps he might not be sentenced to death.
He could escape the noose.
Once the court has dealt with those who were directly involved
in the death camps and in the war effort,
the court moves on to examine another layer,
those who had made Nazi policy possible -
bankers, business leaders, economists,
those involved in propaganda, journalists and so on.
JACKSON: ..telling the tribunal that you, as the head of the Reichsbank,
would not know 100,000,000 Reichsmarks were deposited in your bank?
I'm glad you're enjoying this, but let's get on with it a little more.
Gold dentures of dead Jews who'd been exterminated
were in the vaults of your Reichsbank
but you didn't know anything about that strange deposit.
So that you didn't know...
Are you sure you were in the Reichsbank in these days?
I have no other questions.
They were loyal patriarchs
and they didn't feel themselves as being criminals.
They felt themselves as being victims of a war,
which, unfortunately, they lost.
GRUNWALD: It became clearer to what extent
the Nazi system of power had been popular
and engrained into the very fabric,
not just of German politics, but of societies.
The defendants were a curious mix of characters
from the upper echelons of intellectual prowess
to real low-lives.
And probably the lowest life was a man called Julius Streicher
who was a sort of propagandist for Hitler
who ran a couple of particularly foul magazines
that were deeply, deeply anti-Semitic.
MAN: Please sit down.
MAN 2: You will see the headlines.
"Jewish race polluters at work."
"15 years old non-Jewish ravaged."
"A dangerous race polluter."
"Rape of a feeble-minded girl."
Streicher concocts a nasty, lowbrow cocktail of hatred and defamation
playing on sexual and economic stereotypes
and painting Jews as less than human.
What the Nazis did
was to drip-feed this caricature of the Jews as the other,
making them outsiders, brainwashing,
to the extent that the German population would fall behind them.
The Nazis portrayed the Jews as rats in these awful films.
They tried to create a distance between people
and to dehumanise other people.
And that was really the origins of the genocide that we saw in Rwanda,
where, again, you had the Tutsis portrayed as cockroaches,
you know, in the media.
And it's that kind of incitement of hatred
which today continues to be the origin of these kinds of crimes.
After the liberation,
a lot of people were forced to walk into concentration camps
and to see the corpses, the conditions, the atrocities.
They didn't want to be confronted
with the extremes of depravity and death that they had caused.
Actual human artefacts, like the skin lampshades.
I think it's when Germans realised
that they too, in a sense, were in the dock,
that the Allies were treating them as the enablers of Nazi crimes,
and sometimes as collaborators and perpetrators in those crimes.
At the beginning of the trial
around three-quarters of Germans approved of the Nuremberg trials.
By the end, that had flipped
and only about a quarter were in favour of proceedings.
MAN: Name please? Albert Speer.
If Hitler ever had a friend, it would have been him.
His defence strategy involves
throwing the other defendants under the bus.
MAN: Name, please? Albert Speer.
You may sit down.
There's no translation coming through.
Speer is a charismatic figure,
the architect of many of Hitler's fantasies
about the rebuilding of Germany.
But he is also Hitler's armaments minister,
able to exploit forced labour
to bring German armaments production to a peak
at the cost of many hundreds of thousands of lives.
MAN: You knew about the deportation of 100,000 Jews from Hungary
for Subterranean airplane factories.
That is true, is it not?
That is true, yes.
The total production was marshalled under me with 14 million workers.
Work them to death - that was the policy.
No use killing them offhand, so you'll work them to death.
And they had to clear it with Speer.
Speer, rather than denying the atrocities that have taken place,
he deflects the blame.
His defence strategy involves
throwing the other defendants under the bus,
in particular, his deputy, Fritz Sauckel.
Relations between defendants fray as the trial goes on.
The court psychologist observes how angry Sauckel is with Speer.
He claims that it was Hitler and Speer giving the orders
to push all the labour towards the war industries.
And it's really unthinkable that,
being such a closely enmeshed part of Hitler's innermost circle,
he was unaware of the genocide
that furnished his legions of forced labourers.
SANDS: In a trial, there are always particular moments
that become emblematic - they crystallise the horror,
they crystallise the act of guilt, if you like.
And I think that in Nuremberg, when Hartley Shawcross
takes a witness statement written by a German
who has witnessed an act of killing.
"Without screaming or weeping, these people undressed,
"stood around in family groups,
"kissed each other, said farewells.
"During the 15 minutes that I stood near
"I heard no complaint or plea for mercy..."
And the reason that it stays in one's mind
is that he homes in on individuals.
You know, when you're confronted with vast numbers of bodies,
when you're told about millions who have perished,
it becomes very difficult to grapple
with the human reality of what has gone on.
And what Hartley Shawcross did was he focused on a single family.
"The father was holding the hand of a boy about 10 years old
"and speaking to him softly.
"The boy was fighting his tears.
"The father pointed to the sky, stroked his head,
"and seemed to explain something to the boy.
"At that moment, the SS man at the pit counted off about 20 persons
"and instructed them to go behind the earth mound.
"Among them was the family which I have mentioned.
"I walked around the mound and found myself confronted
"by a tremendous grave."
And that moment sticks with me
and I'm sure it will have stuck with the judges.
It's a moment that is deeply human and deeply personal.
12 million men, women and children have died thus,
murdered in cold blood.
Millions upon millions more today
mourn their fathers and their mothers, their husbands,
their wives and their children.
What rights has any man to mercy
who has played a part, however indirectly, in such a crime?
It's the kind of speech
which would have pushed across the line of a life sentence
into a sentence of death.
It was enormously powerful
and it was extraordinarily beautifully delivered.
You will remember, when you come to give your decision,
the story of Dubno,
but not in vengeance -
in a determination that these things shall not occur again.
The father, you will remember,
pointed to the sky
and seemed to say something to his boy.
The room will adjourn.
ANNOUNCER: The case of humanity
versus 21 leaders of German National Socialism.
Now it has ended.
Ended after 284 days.
After the speaking of 5 million words.
Ended after a chronicle of horror
such as the world has never heard nor ever will again.
12 years of Nazi terror.
12 years of the madness of an entire nation.
12 years of murder and death.
Behind them, perished by the frenzy of Hitler's Germany,
the silent dead wait for justice.
The judgement that's now about to be delivered
has to prove that the victors can so rise above human nature
as to be able to try fairly the foes they vanquished,
by submitting themselves to the restraints of law.
Hence, the judgement of the Nuremberg Tribunal
may be one of the most important events
in the history of civilisation.
REPORTER: Military authorities were redoubling their security precautions.
Armed guards were greatly increased in number
both in the courthouse itself and in the surrounding areas of the city.
Once again comes the familiar scene -
the crowded, floodlit courtroom
with the 21 Nazi leaders taking their places in the dock.
MAN: Now recording. Now recording.
First to be dealt with was Hermann Goering.
The tribunal finds the defendant Goering
guilty on all four counts of the indictment.
Hans Frank, former Governor General of Occupied Poland.
The tribunal finds that Frank is guilty.
Striecher's incitement to murder and extermination
clearly constitutes a crime against humanity.
The tribunal finds that Streicher is guilty on count 4.
The tribunal finds that Sauckel is guilty...
The tribunal finds that Speer is guilty under counts 3 and 4.
SANDS: These people, the defendants at Nuremberg,
were absolutely knowing and willing participants.
They were true believers, true supporters
and utterly committed to the extermination of millions of human beings.
Hermann Wilhelm Goering,
on the counts of the indictment on which you have been convicted,
the tribunal sentences you to death by hanging.
Joachim von Ribbentrop, death by hanging.
Julius Streicher, death by hanging.
Hans Frank, death by hanging.
Defendant Fritz Sauckel
the tribunal sentences you to death by hanging.
Defendant Albert Speer,
the tribunal sentences you to 20 years' imprisonment.
REPORTER: Very soon after the last sentence had been read,
the people of Nuremberg were rushing to learn their former leaders' fate.
Perhaps as they read,
they remembered the appalling cost of the Second World War.
Soon the guilty men will receive their just reward
but behind them they leave a legacy of sorrow and suffering
that a thousand years will never wipe out.
Gustave Gilbert, the court psychologist,
watches as the defendants return to their cells.
He describes Goering as looking pale.
Despite attempts to appear nonchalant,
his eyes are popping, his hands trembling.
Frank, shaken, says, "Death by hanging.
"I deserved it and I expected it."
Kaltenbrunner's face appears unmoved
but his tightly clasped hands reveal his fear.
Sauckel is sweating and trembling
when he tells the American psychologist about his sentence,
which he regards as deeply unfair.
He starts to cry.
When Goering is able to talk,
his voice is no longer filled with confident bravado.
Gilbert thinks that, finally,
he has realised there is nothing funny about death,
not when it's you that's going to die.
This is Arthur Gaeth reporting from Nuremberg.
Wilhelm Hermann Goering, guilty on all four counts,
the active agent of Hitler
who combined a court of steel and cruelty
with a lust of self-adornment and power and a certain affability,
escaped his fate of hanging
by committing suicide at 10:45 last night -
less than three hours before he would have been executed.
Goering succeeded in taking cyanide of potassium.
How he obtained it has not yet been determined.
Just before 1:00 in the morning,
our correspondent group was led into the execution chamber.
It was a harrowing, difficult assignment to watch these men die.
It was all a precise, businesslike, impersonal operation,
one that had needed doing so badly after such terror and aggression.
That they died after a trial
in which they were given every opportunity to defend themselves,
out of their own mouths and their own records
these men had been judged and found guilty.
The court has said that aggressive war is an international crime
and only by punishing individuals who commit such crimes
can the provisions of international law be enforced.
Justice has been done.
This happened in Nuremberg.
The day after the last of the top Nazi leaders are executed,
the court psychologist asks one of the German lawyers
what the German people are thinking.
He replies, "They think whatever you want them to think."
In his opinion,
12 years under Hitler had destroyed the moral fibre of the people.
I think a combination of this, and post-war destitution,
had left behind a country
desperately in need of physical, but also moral, reconstruction.
SANDS: All roads lead to that moment in Nuremberg.
It's where international criminal justice, in its modern sense, began.
Looking back to the Nuremberg trials,
it shows us we should never forget that what we have today
isn't something we should take for granted.
GRUNWALD: It's very hard to discern nice people under a Swastika flag.
When Neo-Nazis demonstrate against black voter registration
in Charlottesville
or in favour of retaining symbols of an anti-democratic past,
it's very important that our governments
heed the lessons of Nuremberg
and we that we remind them that we haven't forgotten
that the whole idea was 'never again'.
CROWD: (CHANTS) Black lives matter! Black lives matter!
We definitely do have a problem with right-wing extremism
and Neo-Nazis again.
We can't afford to be complacent.
As powerful as the Nuremberg moment has been
in Germany and in international law,
it's not a cure.
REPORTER: Are you prepared to use the military
against US citizens?
We still see leaders today continue to use incitement of racial hatred
or just hatred of the other and the dehumanising of the other
either to get to power or to remain in power.
SANDS: One of the great ironies, of course,
is that two countries that did more than any other
to create that sense of international criminal justice,
the United States and the United Kingdom,
have reached the edge of the abyss
in terms of their commitment to the model which they themselves created.
Which country is prosecuting members of ISIS
for crimes of genocide and crimes against humanity?
It's not Britain. It's not the United States.
It's Germany.
That says a lot.
AKANDE: Nuremberg's really important
for Germany coming to grips with its own history,
and other countries haven't come to grips with their history
in similar ways.
You had slavery, you had segregation of the races.
And at no point has the country gone through a moment
like what Germany went through with Nuremberg,
where they've actually had to look at themselves and say,
"What exactly has gone on in our country?"
They've not had to look at themselves
to actually think about how they're going to try and make that right.
Captions by Red Bee Media (c) SBS Australia 2021