Seventy years since the Nuremberg Trials
November 20 marked the seventieth anniversary of the commencement of the Nuremberg Trials. Twenty-one high-ranking Nazi officials were arraigned in courtroom 600 at the Judicial Palace in Nuremberg as defendants, accountable for unspeakable crimes and millions of deaths.
Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels were already dead, having avoided prosecution by suicide. Martin Bormann was not captured but was convicted in absentia. Two other Nazi officials who were initially charged, the leader of the German Labour Front Robert Ley and the arms baron Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, were also not present. Ley committed suicide on the eve of the trial, while Krupp was senile, bedridden and incapable of standing trial.
However, the names of the major Nazi figures in the room were enough to send a shiver down the spine and underscore the significance of the trial. Alongside the second in command in the Nazi state, “Reichsmarshal” Hermann Göring sat the “deputy to the Führer,” Rudolf Hess, foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, the supreme commander of the Wehrmacht, Wilhelm Keitel, the chief of the security police, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the sadistic commander in occupied Poland, Hans Frank, the man responsible for the deportation of forced labourers, Fritz Sauckel, party ideologist and minister for the eastern region, Alfred Rosenberg, the editor of the Nazi newspaper Stürmer, Julius Streicher, and others.
Several events and exhibitions are recalling the first Nuremberg Trials, which lasted from November 20, 1945 until October 1, 1946 and concluded with a number of death sentences. The exhibition “Memorial to the Nuremberg Trials” invited three eyewitnesses to a podium discussion on 20 November. They had worked as an interpreter (George Sakheim), a guard to the chief defendant (Moritz Fuchs) and an assistant to the French judge (Eves Beigbeder). They described their experiences in detail.
Read more: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/12/03/nure-d03.html
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