Caricature of Nuremberg International Military Tribunal defendant Alfred Rosenberg, by the German newspaper caricaturist, Peis.
Overview
- Caption
- Caricature of Nuremberg International Military Tribunal defendant Alfred Rosenberg, by the German newspaper caricaturist, Peis.
- Date
-
1946 October 01
- Locale
- Nuremberg, [Bavaria] Germany
- Variant Locale
- Nurnberg
- Photo Credit
- United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Gerald (Gerd) Schwab
- Event History
- The International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg opened in the fall of 1945, but by the winter of 1942, the governments of the Allied powers had already announced their determination to punish Nazi war criminals. On December 17, 1942, the leaders of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union issued the first joint declaration officially noting the mass murder of European Jewry and resolving to prosecute those responsible for violence against civilian populations. Though some political leaders advocated for summary executions instead of trials, eventually the Allies decided to hold an International Military Tribunal so that, in the words of Cordell Hull, "a condemnation after such a proceeding will meet the judgment of history, so that the Germans will not be able to claim that an admission of war guilt was extracted from them under duress." The October 1943 Moscow Declaration, signed by U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet leader Josef Stalin, stated that at the time of an armistice persons deemed responsible for war crimes would be sent back to those countries in which the crimes had been committed and adjudged according to the laws of the nation concerned. Major war criminals, whose crimes could be assigned no particular geographic location, would be punished by joint decisions of the Allied governments.
The trials of leading German officials before the International Military Tribunal (IMT), the best known of the postwar war crimes trials, formally opened in Nuremberg on November 20, 1945, only six and a half months after Germany surrendered. Each of the four Allied nations -- the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, and France -- supplied a judge and a prosecution team. Lord Justice Geoffrey Lawrence of Great Britain served as the court's presiding judge. The trial's rules were the result of delicate reconciliations of the Continental and Anglo-American judicial systems. A team of translators provided simultaneous translations of all proceedings in four languages: English, French, German, and Russian. After much debate, 24 defendants were selected to represent a cross-section of Nazi diplomatic, economic, political, and military leadership. Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Joseph Goebbels never stood trial,having committed suicide before the end of the war. The IMT decided not to try them posthumously so as not to create an impression that they might still be alive. In fact, only 21 defendants appeared in court. German industrialist Gustav Krupp was included in the original indictment, but he was elderly and in failing health, and it was decided in preliminary hearings to exclude him from the proceedings. Nazi Party secretary Martin Bormann was tried and convicted in absentia, and Robert Ley committed suicide on the eve of the trial.
The IMT indicted the defendants on charges of crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The IMT defined crimes against humanity as "murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation...or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds." A fourth charge of conspiracy was added both to cover crimes committed under domestic Nazi law before the start of World War II and so that subsequent tribunals would have jurisdiction to prosecute any individual belonging to a proven criminal organization. Therefore the IMT also indicted several Nazi organizations deemed to be criminal, namely the Reich Cabinet, the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party, the Elite Guard (SS), the Security Service (SD), the Secret State Police (Gestapo), the Stormtroopers (SA), and the General Staff and High Command of the German Armed Forces.
The defendants were entitled to a legal counsel of their choosing. Over 400 visitors attended the proceedings each day, as well as 325 correspondents representing 23 different countries. American chief prosecutor Robert Jackson decided to argue his case primarily on the basis of mounds of documents written by the Nazis themselves rather than eyewitness testimony so that the trial could not be accused of relying on biased or tainted testimony. Testimony presented at Nuremberg revealed much of what we know about the Holocaust including the details of the Auschwitz death machinery, the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto, and the estimate of six million Jewish victims.
The judges delivered their verdict on October 1, 1946. Agreement among three out of four judges was needed for conviction. Twelve defendants were sentenced to death, among them Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hans Frank, Alfred Rosenberg, and Julius Streicher. They were hanged, cremated in Dachau, and their ashes were dropped in the Isar River. Hermann Goering escaped the hangman's noose by committing suicide the night before. The IMT sentenced three defendants to life imprisonment and four to prison terms ranging from 10 to 20 years. It acquitted three of the defendants.
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/international-military-tribunal-at-nuremberg.
Rights & Restrictions
- Photo Source
-
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Copyright: United States Holocaust Memorial MuseumProvenance: Gerald (Gerd) Schwab
Keywords & Subjects
Administrative Notes
- Artifact Photographer
- Max Reid
- Biography
- Alfred Rosenberg (1893-1946) Nazi racial theorist who became head of the Nazi party's Foreign Affairs Department during the Third Reich. Born in Tallinn, Estonia, Rosenberg was the son of an Estonian mother and Lithuanian father, both of whom were of German extraction. He studied engineering in Riga and architecture in Moscow before fleeing to the West after the Bolshevik Revolution. In 1918 he settled in Munich, where he became active both in White Russian émigré circles and in an ultra-nationalist German society. Rosenberg joined the NSDAP in 1919 and met Hitler soon after. Hitler was impressed by Rosenberg's breadth of knowledge and attracted to his virulently anti-Semitic, anti-Bolshevik and anti-Masonic worldview. In 1923 Rosenberg became editor of the NSDAP newspaper, the "Voelkische Beobachter," and in November of that year played an active role in the failed Beer Hall Putsch. During the next few years he established himself as the leading theoretician of Nazi racism. His ideas received their fullest expression in his "Myth of the Twentieth Century" (1930), which posited that the whole of world history is the history of races, that the Germnas are the master-race of Aryans, and that Judaism and Christianity are the mortal enemies of the true German spirit. Rosenberg's arrogance and zealous, pedantic style alienated many of his fellow Nazi leaders, especially Joseph Goebbels. As a result, he was repeatedly passed over for major posts such as Foreign Minister. From 1933 to 1945 he served as head of the inconsequential NSDAP Foreign Affairs Department. In 1939 Rosenberg established in Frankfurt his Institute for the Investigation of the Jewish Question, whose mission was the looting of European Jewish cultural treasures. A special unit called the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (Rosenberg Task Force) was set up in the fall of 1940 to confiscate such material and transport it to Germany. In July 1941, following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Rosenberg was appointed Minister of the Occupied Eastern Territories. Though he came to question the wisdom of the Germanization policy pursued by the Nazi leadership in the Eastern Territories, he faithfully carried out his duties, including the extermination of Jews and the deportation of Soviet civilians to the Reich for forced labor. After the war Rosenberg was tried before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Following his conviction he was hanged in Nuremberg on October 16, 1946.
[Source: Wistrich, Robert. "Who's Who in Nazi Germany." MacMillan, 1982; Zentner, Christian. "Encyclopedia of the Third Reich." MacMillan, 1991.]
- Record last modified:
- 2005-07-13 00:00:00
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