“But the most interesting — although horrible — sight that I encountered during the trip was a visit to a German internment camp near Gotha. The things I saw beggar description. While I was touring the camp I encountered three men who had been inmates and by one ruse or another had made their escape. I interviewed them through an interpreter. The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they [there] were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda’.”
General Eisenhower letter to General George Marshall 4/15/45
The Nuremberg Trials got under way seventy-nine years ago today. One may cavil at some of the procedures used during the trials and the presence of Soviet judges and prosecutors at the trial, but no decent human being can ever claim that the crimes committed by the leaders of the Third Reich, in Eisenhower’s phrase, beggar description. The video at the beginning of this post consists of film shot by the Army Signal Corps, at Eisenhower’s order, of the Nazi death camps and was admitted into evidence at the Nuremberg trial. It makes for grim viewing, but the reality it reflected must never be forgotten.
I was in my early 30’s when I watched Judgment at Nuremberg for the first time. It was an incredibly captivating film and gave me an added dimension to what I already knew, having read and seen much of the first person accounts.
One may cavil at some of the procedures used during the trials and the presence of Soviet judges and prosecutors at the trial, but no decent human being can ever claim that the crimes committed by the leaders of the Third Reich, in Eisenhower’s phrase, beggar description.
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One of the defendants was a pre-war cabinet minister who spent the last years of the war in a concentration camp. One was in the diplomatic corps for ten years (posted to Turkey during the war). Two others were naval officers. Three others were generators of party agitprop properly referred to German or Austrian courts. You only had two dozen defendants. They could have done a better job.