After the war…

LO: What happened to the Germany and

the leading Nazis after the war?

Goering

Hess

The Nuremburg Trials

• The first trials at Nuremberg were for 24 senior Nazis. • The International Military Tribunal formulated four indictments,

all or some of which were made against all 24 men. The four indictments were:

• Count 1 - CONSPIRACY to commit crimes alleged in the next three counts.Count 2 - CRIMES AGAINST PEACE including planning, preparing, starting, or waging aggressive war.Count 3 - WAR CRIMES including violations of laws or customs of war. Count 4 - CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY including murder, extermination, enslavement, persecution on political or racial grounds, involuntary deportment, and inhumane acts against civilian populations.

Herman Goering – Prisoner No 1

  

Captured shortly after end of the war with large quantities of his looted artworks.

He insisted that everything they had done was out of loyalty to Germany and Hitler.

He had a larger than life personality and emerged as the leader of the other prisoners

He maintained his loyalty to Hitler until the end.

He was found guilty of all the charges and sentences to death.

Albert Speer – the ‘Decent Nazi’

  

Despite the reservations of his defence lawyer, Speer decided that his best defence was to admit his share of responsibility for the crimes of the regime and to distance himself from Hitler, a man who Speer freely admitted had once held him in thrall like all the rest.

Just before the trial opened he sent a four-page letter reminding the authorities of how useful and cooperative he had been in giving them information about the Nazis

  

Speer dramatically revealed early in the trial that at the very end of the war he had tried to find a way to assassinate Hitler by pouring poison gas into his underground bunker. The plot was abortive, but it again presented Speer to the prosecution as someone different from the rest of the defendants

When Speer was cross-examined he got off more lightly than others. At the end of the trial, even though he had been responsible for the mass exploitation of forced foreign labour, he was given a 20-year sentence. The man who supplied the labour, Fritz Sauckel, was executed.

Do you think Speer’s

sentence was fair?

The forgetful Rudolf Hess

  The most bizarre choice to stand trial was Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess.

There was no doubt that he had been a key figure in organising and running the party in the 1920s and early 1930s. He it was who took down the dictated draft of Hitler's 'Mein Kampf'. But from the mid-1930s he became a more marginal political figure - 'one of the great cranks of the Third Reich', in the words of Speer. .

  

On the night of May 10th 1941, Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess, had bailed out of his aircraftafter a five hour, 900 mile flight and parachuted into a field at Floors farm, near the village of Eaglesham. He surrendered to a ploughman named David McClean, armed with a pitchfork and told him in English, "I have an important message for the Duke of Hamilton". Hess was then offered tea at McClean's cottage before being taken into custody by the local Home Guard.

  

The official explanation for this was that he had gone mad.

Authors believe that he was on a mission to meet the Duke of Hamilton, whom he met at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, to negotiate a treaty that would allow Germany to concentrate on the invasion of Russia. 

Conspiracy Theories

• Did Hitler know about it in advance?

• Did the British also  know of it, and was it part of a planned operation with elements of Britain's secret service to actively undermine Churchill and promote a negotiated peace?

• Was the man who flew to Britain and later imprisoned in Spandau the real Rudolf Hess at all, or  a double?

  

During his years of British imprisonment 1941-45, Hess displayed increasingly unstable behaviour and developed a paranoid obsession that his food was being poisoned.

In 1945, he was returned to Germany to stand trial at Nuremberg.

• In the courtroom, he suffered from spells of disorientation, staring off vacantly into space and for a time claimed to have amnesia. In periods of lucidity he continued to display loyalty to Hitler, ending with his final speech –

• "It was granted me for many years to live and work under the greatest son whom my nation has brought forth in the thousand years of its history… I regret nothing. If I were standing once more at the beginning I should act once again as I did then, even if I knew that at the end I should be burnt at the stake…"

Life Imprisonment

• In spite of his mental condition he was sentenced to life in prison. The Soviets blocked all attempts at early release. He served his sentence in Spandau prison in Berlin, where from 1966 he was the sole inmate. Officially Hess died by suicide on 17th July 1987 aged 93, the last of  the prisoners to be tried at Nuremberg.

More conspiracy theories!It appears that Hess

committed suicide by hanging himself. However, there are those who believe that he was far too old and frail to do this by himself and that Hess may have received some assistance from others. Nothing has ever been proven.

The leading Nazis had been dealt with but what about the rest of the Germans who had gone along with

Hitler’s plans? • Denazification:

• an Allied initiative to rid German and Austrian society, culture, press, and politics of any remnants of the Nazi regime.

• Denazification also refers to the removal of the physical symbols of the Nazi regime. For example, in 1957 the German government re-issued World War II Iron Cross medals without the swastika in the centre. Swastika removed

Iron CurtainIron Curtain – – A term used by A term used by Winston Winston

Churchill Churchill to describe the to describe the separating of separating of Those Those

communistcommunistlands of East lands of East Europe from Europe from

the the West. West.

Improve your knowledge

• The Russians took very high casualties to capture Berlin in May 1945. They spent the early occupation trying to take over all zones of the city but were stopped by German democrats such as Willy Brandt and Konrad Adenauer. Reluctantly the Russians had to admit the Americans, French and British to their respective zones.

• Us zone:• Every adult had to fill out

a form, called a Fragebogen, detailing his or her past

• The courts relied on statements from other people regarding the accused's involvement in National Socialism.

• By early 1947, the Allies held 90,000 Nazis in detention; another 1,900,000 were forbidden to work as anything but manual labourers

• The Information Control Division of the US Army had by July 1946 taken control of 37 German newspapers, six radio stations, 314 theatres, 642 cinemas, 101 magazines, 237 book publishers, and 7,384 book dealers and printers.

• On May 13, 1946 the Allied Control Council issued a directive for the confiscation on all media that could contribute to Nazism. As a consequence a list was drawn up of over 30,000 book titles, ranging from school textbooks to poetry, which were then banned. All copies of books on the list were confiscated and destroyed; the possession of a book on the list was made a punishable offence. All the millions of copies of these books were to be confiscated and destroyed. The representative of the Military Directorate admitted that the order was in principle no different from the Nazi book burnings.

• In the end the denazification program was recognized as "counterproductive witch hunt" and a failure by US authorities, and they abandoned and even reversed the program in 1951