Cackling Nazis, amnesia defence & 100ft cliff executions… how Brit pair turned tables on Hitler’s henchmen at Nuremberg

WITH Europe in ruins and nearly 30 million Allied dead, the first instinct of the victorious nations was to put the most senior Nazis up against a wall.

Russia’s president Joseph Stalin wanted 50,000 ‘liquidating’, while Britain’s prime minister Winston Churchill had called for senior officers to be taken out and shot within six hours of their identity being established.

Yet six months after Germany’s surrender in May 1945 a court was set up to try the highest ranking members of Adolf Hitler’s regime for war crimes.

Oscar winners Russell Crowe and Rami Malek star in a movie called Nuremberg about the Nuremberg Trials which began on November 20 1945.

It tells the story of how psychiatrist Douglas Kelley’s (Malek) assessment of Hitler’s second in command Hermann Goering (Crowe) helped the prosecution.

It was dubbed The Trial of the Century and the twists and turns proved to be front page news.

The almost year long military tribunal revealed both the reality of the Holocaust and introduced the idea of crimes against humanity.

The general public had not seen the horrific images from the Nazi’s death camps prior to the trial and the term genocide had not been used before in a court case.

Overseeing the proceedings in the Bavarian city of Nuremberg was a British judge called Sir Geoffrey Lawrence, whose job it was to make sure the most hated men in Europe answered for their crimes.

His barrister grandson Patrick Lawrence, KC, tells The Sun: “Churchill had originally suggested simply putting them up against a wall and shooting them.

“But it was pointed out to Churchill that it wouldn’t be a good way to set out on hopefully making a better world.

“So he was persuaded this wasn’t a good idea, hence the decision to have the trials, and my grandfather worked very hard to give them a fair trial.”

Europe’s most wanted

With the war lost Hitler and his successor Joseph Goebbels both killed themselves in a bunker in Germany’s capital Berlin.

Heinrich Himmler, the man most associated with the systematic extermination of six million Jews, took the same way out while in British custody.

Some of the other war criminals, including Auschwitz ‘Angel of Death’ doctor Josef Mengele, managed to escape while others were strung up when Soviet troops got their hands on them.

But Goering, who founded the murderous Gestapo secret police force, Hitler’s former deputy Rudolf Hess and Foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop all stood trial after being captured.

The British questioned whether naval leader Karl Donitz and supreme military commander Wilhelm Keitel should be tried because “they were only following orders.”

But as they were often giving out those orders, they were among the defendants.

Unimaginable crimes

One of the first questions was what to charge them with.

Patrick 65, says: “We didn’t even have the term genocide until shortly before the trial started.

“It was the first time it was introduced into a legal case.”

Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin defined genocide as “the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group”.

It was decided the four main charges should be committing crimes against humanity, conspiracy to commit a crime against peace, waging a war of aggression and participating in war crimes.

Normally, you can’t charge someone with an offence which wasn’t a crime when it was committed.

It was the first time anyone tried to do this

Patrick Lawrence

But this was a special case because until the Nazi regime no one could have imagined such horrendous crimes were possible.

Patrick says: “It was the first time anyone tried to do this. They did it as well as they could and it created a precedent for that type of legal operation.

“My grandfather knew that the whole enterprise was legally questionable because the crimes that the defendants were accused of didn’t exist in any statute book.

“They were invented retrospectively. That was a problem which he recognised, however something had to happen to them.”

Ruling the Nazis

With the death penalty a likely punishment, the British judge made sure this was not a kangaroo court.

Patrick continues: “The reason the trial took so long was that he was meticulous about letting the defendants see documents, making sure documents were disclosed giving them a chance to cross-examine.

“He generally tried to achieve procedural fairness which was important because you know the whole thing could have looked like an unfair kangaroo court.

“Certainly the Russian judges were under instructions from Moscow as to what result was to be expected and I think voted unanimously in all cases for the death penalty.”

The Russian judges were under instructions from Moscow

Patrick Lawrence

Judge Lawrence had fought on the front line in World War I and understood the realities of armed conflict.

That meant he was respected by Donitz.

While there were more famous judges than Geoffrey, few had as much authority.

Patrick says: “He was very robust, he never spoke loudly but he spoke with authority and he controlled the courtroom.

“When he said something it happened which was very important in Nuremberg.”

Goering’s last stand

But not all of the defendants showed respect for the court.

Hess, who parachuted into Britain in a doomed ‘peace’ mission in 1941, feigned amnesia before admitting he remembered everything.

Goering squeezed the bottom of a passing Wren officer and laughed when a film of Nazi atrocities was shown.

Crowe reckons the “charismatic” former fighter pilot thought he could talk his way out of a guilty verdict.

The Gladiator star says: “I think, at a certain point, he managed to convince himself that he might get away with it all if his performance in court was strong enough.

“It was the size of his ego that made him say, ‘I can still turn this around.’”

Shocked the world

That looked difficult after November 29 when the court was shown the film taken by Allied military photographers during the liberation of the extermination camps.

There, for the world to see, were skeletons piled high, gas chambers and emaciated survivors.

The court also heard from Allied soldiers who witnessed prisoners of war being killed by pushing them off 100ft cliffs or forcing them to stand naked in freezing temperatures for two days.

Patrick says: “I remember hearing from my grandmother about the effect of when they were shown the concentration camp film in the courtroom, even the defendants looked a bit queasy.”

Some of the Nazis turned away from the screen rather than face the reality of their evil actions and Justice Lawrence left the court after seeing the deeply disturbing images.

But the prosecution had to prove Goering knew about these atrocities.

It was the size of his ego that made him say, ‘I can still turn this around.’

Russell Crowe

The wily German politician seemed to get the better of the US prosecutor Robert H Jackson.

There was a real risk of not guilty verdicts.

Only when British chief prosecutor Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe took over, did the German crumble.

Patrick explains: “Maxwell-Fyfe cross-examined Goering in a very sort of plodding English way on the documents just to prove that Goering had known about the order to murder escaped prisoners of war which was against international law and slowly proved that Goering knew a lot more than he was prepared to let on.

“Goering got cross, he got bothered, he started lying and that was an important moment because it had looked as if Goering was going to get away with things, which would have been very bad.”

Hangman’s justice

All but three of the 24 defendants were found guilty.

Goering was sentenced to hang but defied the Allies one last time by ending his life with a cyanide pill.

For many of the Nazis who faced the gallows it was a worse fate because American Master Sergeant John Clarence Woods botched some of the executions.

Neither Anti-Semitic propogandist Julius Streicher nor Field Marshal Keitel died immediately, with the former swinging wildly after dropping through the trap door and the latter taking 20 minutes to die.

The first trial was followed by another 12 military tribunals in Nuremberg, including prosecuting doctors involved in murderous experiments and business leaders who used forced labour.

Patrick concludes: “I think people eventually understood that within the limitations of this extraordinary process it was done as fairly as it could be.

“To try and deal fairly with your enemies is maybe a virtue that is dying out, I fear, but it’s an important virtue and the trial went a long way towards establishing that principle.”

Nuremberg is in cinemas now.