Hitler's Forgotten Children by Ingrid Von Oelhafen

Author:Ingrid Von Oelhafen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783961214
Publisher: Elliott & Thompson

TWELVE | NUREMBERG

‘Lebensborn was responsible, amongst other things, for the kidnapping of foreign children for the purpose of Germanisation … numerous Czech, Polish, Yugoslav and Norwegian children were taken from their parents.’

INDICTMENT: THE NUREMBERG MILITARY TRIBUNALS, CASE 8

It was spring 2003 by the time I set off for Nuremberg, 500 kilometres south.

Nuremberg was the dark heart of National Socialism. Between 1927 and 1938 it was the city where Hitler held spectacular torchlit rallies – serried ranks of tens of thousands of supporters screaming ‘Sieg Heil’ beneath an ocean of swastika banners, all captured in melodramatic propaganda films – and where the 1935 Race Laws that signalled the start of the Holocaust were promulgated.

For the Nazi Party, Nuremberg’s position at the centre of the country symbolised, in some mystical way, the connection between the Third Reich and the supposed Aryan supermen of Himmler’s imagination. It was also heavily fortified, which made it one of the last cities to fall to the Allied forces in the final weeks of the war. Despite systematic bombing that destroyed 90 per cent of the medieval centre, the city was only captured after four days of fierce house-to-house fighting.

The three main Allied Powers, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States, had long planned to mount public trials of the Nazi leaders, even before the war ended. On 1 November 1943 they published a joint ‘Declaration on German Atrocities in Occupied Europe’, issuing ‘full warning’ that as and when the Nazis were defeated, the Allies would ‘pursue them to the uttermost ends of the earth … in order that justice may be done’.

For the next eighteen months, as their armies slowly inched to victory, lawyers and politicians from all three countries hammered out a set of innovative legal principles under which leading Nazis could be prosecuted for war crimes and crimes against humanity. When the war ended, the only remaining issue was where to hold the hearings.

Leipzig and Luxembourg were briefly considered and rejected. The Soviet Union favoured Berlin – the ‘capital of the fascist conspirators’ – as a suitably symbolic location, but the overwhelming destruction suffered by the city made it impractical. The decision to choose Nuremberg was based on two key factors. Its role in the Nazi propaganda machine made it an appropriate site to dispense exemplary justice but, more importantly, its spacious Palace of Justice had survived the war largely intact – and its buildings included a large prison facility.

The surviving leaders of the Third Reich were brought to the cells beneath the courtroom in November 1945. Hitler himself had cheated justice, committing suicide in the Führerbunker amid the flames and ruins of Berlin. Himmler, too, had taken the coward’s way out, swallowing a cyanide capsule while in captivity. But twenty-two others, including Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring and Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess, were brought before the International Military Tribunal and arraigned for the crimes of the Nazi regime. Eleven months later the judges, one each from France, Britain, America and the Soviet Union, pronounced the verdicts.

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