The Nuremberg Trials: Hunting Nazis, Part One

Welcome to the trial of the century! All the remaining top Nazis after the war are about to meet their destiny, but first they must be rounded up, hunted down and jailed. And how will they react? Will they show regret? Will they deny it all despite tons of evidence? Will they play mad? Find out in this first episode that gives us a unique look into the human psyche. 

By and with Francis Lundh

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:00

Imagine that you are guilty of some of the most heinous crimes in all the world history. Can you at any time bring yourself to admit guilt and really take in the horrible suffering you have caused others without falling apart as a human being? What are the illusions and lies you must have believed in in order to do these things, and what happens when they are torn apart in front of your eyes in one document after another, also in films demonstrating the deaths your regime so clearly have caused? Are you still going to cling on to for now to your illusions to the point of absurdity? Are you distancing yourself from it, blaming it on others perhaps? Or maybe you pretend to have changed, omitting perhaps a few things here and there, but can real repentance occur once you have walked down that Nazi road for so long? Can it really occur when you're standing in it so deep? To what level is complete denial possible? How much self-delusion can otherwise sane human beings muster when everything is at stake? These kind of questions is what makes today's topic so interesting. It is an unprecedented happening in world history and it puts a whole lot of people in an extreme situation, deservedly by all means, but from a human condition standpoint it's hugely fascinating. What we are talking about is the Nuremberg trials, rather the first and most famous of them. There will be many more trials held in Nuremberg and other places after the Second World War, but this is where the most prominent Nazis remaining will be tried for the horrible acts of the Third Reich. It is a trial about the mass extermination of whole populations, especially Jews, but also other people that the Nazis considered less worthy. It is about extreme war crimes, about the mass shootings of prisoners of war, about horrible torture, about abductions, about millions being taken as slave laborers working themselves to death. It is about mobile gas vans and gas chambers, concentration camps, genocide, theft and unimaginable resources from the occupied countries, everything on a scale that absolutely no one ever had witnessed before and still have unto this day. But after losing up all these atrocities, why even have a trial, you might ask, right? You know, many, many certainly did ask this at the time. You know, surely there could be no mercy for the top Nazis. Shouldn't we just shoot them all and get over and done with? Well known monsters such as Gering, Kaiser, Ribbentrop, Hess, Speer, Rosenberg, and all these others, clearly guilty as guilty can be, right? What's the point of a show trial to emphasize that? But as it turns out, it won't be a show trial. The military tribunal set up will demand hard evidence to find the defendants guilty. And some of the results from the trial will be absolutely shocking to many. With these twenty odd defendants that will stand trial comes amazing stories. They are tales of stubbornness, about mental breakdowns, about incomprehensible denial, about self-deceit, about lying, about borderline mental illness, it's about intellectual fights with the prosecution, it's about blunders, controversy, political extremism at extraordinary levels, it's about death or life and huge emotions. This will be the story of the most important trial in all the world history. This is a topic I have been itching to do for a long time. It will be a series, as there are plenty of fascinating details here. It will throughout it all be a balancing act of not becoming too stuck in all those details and all of the people, and at the same time not just brushing over it all. So this is a very complex event that contains a lot of different people, and it covers a lot of ground concerning the biggest war in human history. And I will try not to mention too many of these names to keep the narrative fluent, but in this first episode, we can't really avoid it because I want to touch base with all the Germans that will actually end up being tried in Nuremberg in this first trial, in order to understand the full scope of it. And there are, as we said, over 20 of those. There are also plenty of other central characters in this. There are judges, prosecutors, defence attorneys, witnesses, jailers, and so forth. But in this first episode, I think we're going to focus mostly on the defendants, who they were, how and why they were captured, and then just really set the stage for this really intense drama. Before we start for real, I just say that this is a podcast that is doing hardly any marketing, as I took down most of the social media and home pages, etc., because basically it just took too long, and I'd rather spend time making content and not promoting it. That means that if anybody is promoting it, it's you, dear listener. So if you like it, recommend it to others and make them subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or Spotify, wherever you listen. As they say, sharing is caring. Also, a big thanks to all of you that are rating the show, sending messages one way or another, it's greatly appreciated. Okay, but when we now start this tale about the top Nazis, I just want to give you all a real reminder about what kind of crimes we are really talking about here. Because I know I'll get carried away and I'll really go in depth in all these personality here. This will be difficult throughout this series, kind of showing these defendants as the humans they are, but also as the mass murderers and empathyless creatures they sometimes are. So instead of me just saying, you know, it's like this and that, but we have to remember that, that's and that, and so forth, I want to just play a short audio recording from one of the Allied soldiers that liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Because this is some of the shock that the world back then has just received after gradually getting into occupied territory. This is some of the emotional background for this trial and for, of course, many survivors, even to this day. So there are much more chilling accounts than this as well. I won't start you off with some of the most descriptive quotes. But in these concentration camps, what happened is that they found tens of thousands of prisoners, thousands of dead, and those alive often in so horrible condition that they can hardly be called living. This is Sergeant Mike Lewis, one of those that came into the camp early on, just bewildered by how and why the Germans would end up doing something like this.

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Something had changed for me after I'd seen that camp. I thought I'd see in the terrible things of war to have treated all many people like this. And there were so many theories and reasons as to who was responsible, and everybody seemed to point a finger until the finger came in the center. But this was on the scale. It had to be organized. It had to be done it could only be done with a London administrative service. It could only be done by moving masses of people by rail. It had to be planned and worked for. It was a sort of death by administration.

SPEAKER_01: 8:34

So Lewis was part of liberating that camp. There were sixty thousand people there, but fourteen thousand of those died when they tried to save them by giving them food because they were so half dead that their system just couldn't take it. So this was also a huge tragedy. These soldiers desperately tried to give them food from their rations, but even when watered down completely, it was too much for so many to take, uh, and also at the same time they didn't have enough medical staff there and they didn't really have any other opportunity to properly nurture them back. So that makes these liberations of camps also a very much bittersweet experience. Okay, but that is our background context. Many on trial in Nuremberg will be confronted by the Holocaust specifically, but also the general crimes the Nazi regime did to all kinds of people, it was not only Jews. Um, so we're going to give you that context, but I also want to give you some more context going back in time because in order for the Nuremberg trials to really make sense, we need to kind of start from the beginning, and the reasons are twofold. For one, it's always good to understand the context and mindset of the people that we are talking about, but also these trials themselves they are not only concerning criminal acts during the Second World War, but also before that, as the Nazi Party gradually came to power through a combination of violence, propaganda, cheating, and hate speech over a huge number of years. So the real point in time in which we are going back to now is the end of the First World War to 1918-1919. So famously, Germany loses and are forced to accept bad surrender terms in the Versailles Treaty, much to the dismay of many of the armed forces in Germany that do not feel that they have lost at all. Some of them are still standing on French ground. In other words, it's a completely different situation as to the surrender at the end of the Second World War. So in the First World War, Germany loses without really being invaded, and the soldiers and others are buying into conspiracy theories that the political left and the Jews are the real reason for the defeat, undermining the troops and brokering a false peace. Now there was no truth in this myth, but this is the fuel Hitler will use. He's constantly blaming Jews and the so-called November criminals, meaning the people signing the armistice in November 1918, for basically everything that's wrong in the world. Now, the Versailles Treaty is in some ways an attempt at avoiding a new world war that fails rather miserably. At this point in time, all this was new, right? It is the first time the international community is in this position. You know, they're living in the aftermath of an industrial world war. No one expected it to last this long. No one ever does really when starting wars. They tend to believe that they will be done fast, but they rarely are. It becomes clear that some sort of international rules and unity is needed now more than before, and it's the birth of the League of Nations that is not a great success. But as in the Second World War, the question after the First World War is basically how do we deal with all those warmongers in Germany that started this worst war? How do we deal with them? How do we bring them to justice? It's not as straightforward as you might think because many Germans they don't even feel that they started the war. There's disagreement on even that. They feel that they have been ensnared in European politics and were acting with legitimacy, so while the armistice is there and is forced upon them, the perceptions of realities are still very different depending on who you're talking to. And at this point, it was also set up a trial afterwards in order to punish the warmongers, but how really can other nations try what they see as war criminals from different states? Should you transport a lot of German generals and politicians and whatnot over the Atlantic to look to let them stand trial in the US or in France or in Britain? And would the German civilian population accept anything like that, or would it just sow the seeds for yet another war down the road? The answer after World War One was to let the Germans prosecute themselves, which was a disaster because so many Germans didn't accept the moral defeat of the war. So almost everyone tried in the city of Leipzig after the war were acquitted. There was eight, nine hundred of them, and I think that the two of those that actually were sentenced will go out of house arrests shortly after. So basically it was a farce, and there really is very little sense of closure here. And if we zoom really far out, one can almost see the years between the first and the second world wars is just an intermission, right? And that that it would always be heaps of burning ambers lying there waiting for someone to pour gasoline on them. A cliche perhaps, but still kind of accurate. Now not everyone in Germany are determined to have more conflict at this point, not at all. Especially in the big cities and particularly Berlin, we see a short golden age with a Bauhaus movement and such, but the historical nationalistic and emotional glowing ambers are still there within certain layers of German society. It should be mentioned that German national pride in this then still young nation was very strong from before, and they envied other European nations, their colonies. As we said, they also uh wanted their time and the sun, that was the quote that went around. So German culture, even before the First World War, had some sense that we deserve more than we've got, those snooty British travelling around with a huge navy just snapping up colonies here and there, establishing huge trade networks. But here we are a great European power, we want our share of the spoils as well, but the others are blocking us. We are encircled here in Central Europe. It's so this kind of thing. So that's the sentiment that's there certain places. We have discussed this in the episode uh called The Year That Changed Hitler. Um because the radicalization of many ex-soldiers from the First World War starts more or less here, more or less immediately after the first war ends. And Adolf Hitler is the prime example. But let's talk about Hitler here, and the reason why I want to stop and talk Hitler is because Nazism is impossible to understand without understanding him, and in a way, Nazism and the system uh that it brought is kind of what is on trial in Nuremberg as well. Furthermore, exploring Hitler makes sense now because of a few of these defendants that we will meet, they have been part of this cult of personality from very early on, and in order to understand the defendants, we must also understand what went on around Hitler and this ideology that would be highly colored by his personal whims. So, the way we choose to see Hitler, that can also change how we see both Nazism and the Second World War as a whole. Now, my personal take on Adolf Hitler is that he is in no way an especially talented individual. He's not completely useless, but he's not especially talented either. He's very average. Now, some will dispute this. Some people have said that he was a you know very bad man, but he managed this and that or could speak well or something. Also, Churchill called him a furious genius. But I maintain that Hitler as a human is a man of very average talent, and why it matters is that it adds a dimension to this trial and to the admittance of guilt, as some will claim that Hitler had all the power and we were his charmed puppets kind of thing. Anyway, when Churchill talks about Hitler, he's coming from somewhere, and everything Churchill says is said for a reason, and he's also indirectly commenting on himself. So by painting Hitler as this devil mastermind, he's portraying him as a Satan that must be destroyed for all that it's worth. But at the same time, he's also making sure to call Hitler for Corporal Hitler, just to remind him and everybody that he is below Churchill in military rank. On the contrary, right, if Churchill had said that Hitler, he's a complete idiot, he would be faced with, then why did you let an idiot bomb London for over fifty days straight, right? So don't take him literally on that as my suggestion. The two men never met nor had any direct communication. They were at best speaking to one another through speeches, and perhaps had Churchill also known what passed for political thinking in the Indonazi circles, he might have chosen a different wording. In fact, Hitler was about to meet Churchill in 1932 in Munich, but thought him unimportant and stood him up. Again, why does all this matter? Well, I'm no professional historian, just a history podcaster, but I think a lot of the Second World War is seen in a different light once you realise how banal and sometimes even moronic Hitler and the early Nazis are. They are almost to the point of comical saying and doing completely nonsensical stuff. So the way I see Hitler is that he's no statesman, not a politician or leader, he's much more like an angry incel kind of person. And more than anything, he's an example that pretty useless people can find their ways to huge amounts of power if the circumstances are right and these people are scrupulous enough. Many historians will have many different views on this, of course, but after reading biographies on Hitler and what he has written as well, I kind of see him more as a typical school shooter or something, had he been born a hundred years later, more than this quote unquote furious genius. He is disgruntled and unsuccessful and violent and constantly blaming others for his failures. So I can definitely see him at 19, coming to his school or college, shooting everyone because the girls turned him down and the jocks made fun of him. So Hitler, let's just start with who he was. He is a lost youth in Austria. He's poor as heck, more or less living on the streets at his worst, then in shabby men's shelters trying to make his living as an artist, painting postcards and whatnot, selling them for a few pennies here and there. He's a fanatic Wagner fan that goes to the opera as much as he can afford. This is of Of huge embarrassment to his ego and has in his mind nothing to do with his talent. His paintings are not terrible, but they are far from great. They are decent for handmade postcards, kind of thing, not enough for the for an art academy. By the way, I just had this funny thought. Imagine people sending postcards back home from Austria painted by Adolf Hitler. Must have happened. Anyway, so he is, in lack of a better word, a loser. He's poor, angry, mediocre talent, no future prospects, and on top of that, he has very little family, so he is in dire straits before the First World War. Both his father, and more importantly for Hitler, his mother, dies when he's still a very young man. He has seemingly problems with the opposite sex and his no active sexual life as far as we know, but we have some indications that he was frightened by intimacy as a young adult. Also, later his views on sexuality and intimacy. Intimacy is discussed by the defendants of Nuremberg. Hans Frank, for example, thought his Hitler's lack of desire for intimacy helped him become a sadist. Who knows? Then the First World War breaks out, and Germany is starting mass recruitment of soldiers, and Hitler is one of many, many men finally finding a calling, finally finding a sense of purpose. And that purpose is, of course, to fight for the Germanic world. Hitler has an extremely fanatic personality. He's more than ready to sacrifice anything for some sense of meaning. He slips into the German army despite being Austrian, and as he was with painting, he's also quite a mediocre soldier. He's mostly a messenger boy, running back and forth between the trenches. He does get the Iron Cross for at one point delivering some extra important message, but he kind of nags his way into it, constantly you know bugging his superiors, saying that hey, that was a really important message, give me the cross, kind of thing. And his Jewish officer finally gives in and recommends him for the cross, which he eventually gets. Now, I'm sure he probably did risk his life by carrying out this order, but many people in wars risk their lives constantly. Most of the time he was not even at the front lines, and probably many people did more without even getting an Iron Cross, who knows? So while Hitler himself, he would of course put enormous emphasis on this medal, um, and uh that does not mean he was brilliant in the army, just just so you know. Ian Kerschel, I think, tells this great in his biography on Hitler. Again, I would claim he's still mediocre. Hitler would tell in Nazi propaganda, though, that he's uh he got the cross for for just ridiculous stuff, really, that he single-handedly captured heaps of French soldiers or something like that. So when the First War ends, Hitler is among those completely disillusioned. He's not a very young man, by the way, either now. He's he's closing in on 30. And Germany has heaps of soldiers that needs to return to civilian life. But of course, Hitler has no civilian life to return to. He is tasked with work on the decommissioning of the army and is somehow giving the role of snitching on others that his uh that his commanders fear were up to political shenanigans. So basically, they were scared of communists. This was a time with with just a lot of um extreme politics being very popular in all sorts of facets. After a time, Hitler is talking to soldiers to ensure their heads are in the right place, but then he notices that he can really rile them up by hate speeches about the Jews being at fault for the loss in the war, that they were sitting comfortably at home and surrendered while they, the brave soldiers, were out there in the trenches. There were many Jews in the German army, of course, but this was still a very welcome message to many of these downtrodden men, and here he's kind of kind of finding his niche, hate speech. And I choose to call it that for a reason because it kind of annoys me how certain historians are saying that Hitler is an oratory genius. In my humble opinion, he is average in that as well. But whatever you call it, his speeches are straightforward, there is there's normally hate and threats in there, it's mixed up with you know, we are super duper and we deserve so much better kind of stuff. And that is more or less the same themes. He's chugging on over and over and over. Just one example from 1938. This is before the Arnschluss, and it's uh is one of those actually really famous speeches. It goes like this quote Germany is a great nation, and great nations have a right to exist in their full strength. We will not tolerate that millions of Germans in Austria and Sudetenland are left to suffer under foreign rule. The right is their home and they will return to it. We do not seek war, but we will not be denied what is justly ours. Our patience is not endless, and those who seek to deny Germany's right to unite its people should remember Germany is no longer weak. The German people stand behind me and they demand justice. Are these the words of a genius? For me, this is just the same angry, threatening sulking that he always had, saying sort of Germany and or I am badly treated, and if you don't take me seriously, you'll goddamn regret it. And next thing the disgruntled young man that was an average student, never got to bed any of the hot girls, and was mocked by the jocks, turns up to the school with an assault rifle kind of thing. Who knows? This is my take on it. One of the defendants in Nuremberg again, this Hans Frank, he said something similar about Hitler's young years when he was awaiting his sentence, quote. He appeared sickly, weak, and tired. He gave the impression that he would not live long. Personally, I was not very much impressed with Hitler's statements at the time, end quote. And he was talking about 1919, by the way, and and this is the time where many people are saying that, oh, people are swaying everybody with this fantastic oratory. We need to take these quotes from Hans Frank with a huge pinch of salt, of course, because of the situations that they are giving in, but still, I think Hitler is being built up as this messiah by a crowd that are looking desperately for a saviour just around every corner, kind of like in the Monty Python movie Life of Brian, where Brian is kind of mistakenly elevated to the Messiah without actually having done anything. Other quotes as well from other defendants in the Nuremberg trial also kind of plays down how great a speaker Hitler was in the 20s, but there was no lack of people hyping him up. In my opinion, Hitler's superpower, if one can call it that, is that he's a genuine fanatic. So why that is good for him is that he is delivering his words with a heartfelt passion. He himself really does believe that Germany has been betrayed and that the Jews are at fault. He mixes Germany's destiny in with his own. He's projecting his feelings of betrayal and loss to be about a whole nation. And furthermore, he gets constant confirmation on his views by all the people around him. Um so he just becomes this super devoted anti-Semite that get all his worldviews confirmed kind of thing. An extreme conviction can, of course, be persuasive on its own, especially when delivered passionately to crowds that are in desperate need for some sort of explanation for how on earth they ended up like this, because none of them saw this coming, kind of thing. There has to be an explanation. And this guy, he's speaking from the heart, you have to give him that, right? One thing people will say about Hitler, and that's kind of recurring, is that he has a hypnotic personality. And I think that's a more precise description of him than a furious genius. He is an intense, utterly convinced person, but he's still the same angry nationalistic dreamer that would go to Wagner operas all the time. So Hitler basically has not only drank the Kool-Aid, he has made seconds himself and then shugged that down too. He goes on and on about November criminals, that they are all betrayed, and that the Jews are destroying Europe. And you can just easily see how that finds an audience in this time period in Germany. And Hitler gets more and more confidence and more and more used to delivering these kind of hate speeches over and over again. So, I mean, he definitely gets pretty decent at threatening others and expressing his sulkiness. He gets into this tiny party, the DAP, by chance, um, and he finds his place among other political extremists and other disgruntled men. And from there on it goes just step by step. Certain people are looking up to this fanatical hate speaker, not all, but some. What is really twisted is that there are actually a fair few women at this time that kind of finds this really sexy almost sitting on the front row as Hitler is fuming, almost like groupies. Hans Frank is again one of those commenting on there being a surprisingly large amount of women at these early party meetings. So maybe they at least thought that he had some sort of charisma. Then this political club gets a real boost when it's joined by people like Hermann Goering, a fighter race from the First World War, and a great pilot, uh, and it's just a fantastic poster boy for this new movement. Goering had 22 confirmed kills during the first world war, whereas you would describe as a fighter race if you had more than five. So he was really up there as one of the best pilots, a true German war hero that really gave legitimacy to this movement. He would actually later claim during the Nuremberg trials that he wasn't really an anti-Semite, but that this was just a lingo you had to speak to be around Hitler, that he just his point of view just really wanted to make Germany great again. But you know, take everything said by these defendants with a pinch of salt. After a while, you get other high-ranking German military men that are also disgruntled and are also all too happy to quote unquote stand up for Germany against what they see as a weak democracy. Most notably, we have this guy, Erich Ludendorff, that some of you might know. He also, like Goering, gives legitimacy to the movement early on. It's still very small though, but now they have a few famous poster boys. It's like let's say you have this weird little group of yours, and then some of the most famous pop stars all of a sudden decides to join you and makes people take notice, right? So it's like Billy Eilish or Brianna Drake all join the cult all of a sudden. You take notice, and hmm, so what's that all about? In the beginning, Hitler sees his task as drumming up support for the German case. Uh, he even calls himself the drummer, but then he gradually starts to convince himself that he is in fact the German Messiah, and more importantly, this cult that is growing up surrounding him are also accepting that Hitler is our man, this angry, hate-speaking guy that speaks with such conviction. Several other other defendants in the Nuremberg trials are also joining at this stage people such as Rudolf Hess and Julius Streicher, that we will hear more about very soon. So, this extremist movement they are starting to call themselves National Socialists. It's a mix between nationalism and socialism, so kind of a nationalistic party for the workers. It's thoroughly anti-Semitic, it's always blaming uh the quote-unquote the others, in this instance the Jews, for everything going wrong. And after a while, they are deciding that they need to take radical action. These guys are based in Munich, and in late 1923, they decide to make a hopeless attempt at overthrowing the local authorities in what would be known as the Beer Hall Putsch. It ends up with shots being fired, 16 of Hitler's crew dead, and the ringleaders arrested. One of those quite badly injured in this fiasco is in fact our Hammer Göring that is hit in his thigh and will carry a morphine addiction from here on, up until finally sobering up in captivity before the Nuremberg trials. But in the trial against Hitler, that's the one in 1924 after the Feld Kur, he famously gets way too much room for continuing spreading his hate speech, and in some crazy way, the court sympathizes with him. They kind of see him as a person that's you know in these difficult times. After all, he really loves Germany, he wants to do something good for the country, even though the means were wrong. So he both gets the publicity uh for being a la in for being in court, but he also gets this ridiculously short prison sentence and he's out again after only nine months. One of these others Nazis in prison together with Hitler is Rudolf Hess. He is the man typing down Mein Kampf while Hitler is walking around dictating it to him. This is, by the way, also very symptomatic for Hitler. He's rather lazy and very narcissistic. So he really doesn't have the follow-through to write a whole book himself, not even a horrible one such as Meinkampf. His role in writing that is walking around and talking to Rudolf Hess, talking about himself and how horrible Jews are, and how the German people deserve so much more. It would be like this for the rest of his career, also. He would very often give vague orders, he would often sleep in until the middle of the day after sitting up, arousing himself on nationalistic talks with others, could quite often be gubbles, and he would um it would also be like this during the war. He's quite lazy, he's blaming others when stuff is not going his way, he's expecting maximum spit licking from those around him and can be suspicious and even murderous towards those that he suspects are not completely loyal. The knight of the long knives will be an early example of this. So basically, everyone around Hitler will and should know that he is a man willing to kill in order to consolidate power. This should not be a secret to anyone following him. So if you look at this time in in Hitler's career, he has a ragtag band of former military men and lost souls that are clinging to this party and this growing cult of personality, but it's also forged by a more philosophical and idealistic branch of peoples that are coming in with ideas of especially race and social Darwinism. Hitler and these others they are seeing Jews as not only a cultural and religious community that have been quite isolationists in many countries for a long period in Europe, states within states, as some might see them, they are now also seeing them as an own kind of human race somehow. And they are mixing in theories with social Darwinism, saying that some quote-unquote imaged imagined races are stronger and better than others, um, and that it's all about survival of the fittest, and that the world is driven forward by conflict and that it's always a case of kill or be killed. So, unless you do something about the quote-unquote Jewish problem, the quote unquote Jewish problem will do something about you. It is about fight and struggle, blood and honor. If you want to learn more about race thinking in humans, we have discussed that quite a bit in a few previous episodes now, but but somehow Jews are made to be a different race from the Germans in this world, and the Germans have the purest blood, that's basically the belief. And to be fair, I've always struggled my myself when learning history as a kid. How how come that that doesn't make sense? How come they how can they be a different race? It's a religion, isn't it, right? And to be fair, that you know, even some of these top Nazis, they struggle to understand how a religious minority could be a distinct human race with somehow different blood, but it's in so much extremism, you need a strong quote-unquote the others as antagonists, and the Jews fitted very well for this time. So, this kind of ideology is also baked into this, like, and especially you have uh guys like Alfred Rosenberg bringing this in, and he's one of the first members of the party from 1919, and also a guy that we will meet again at the Nuremberg trial. We will do the rest here super brief so that we actually get more and more into the trial itself. But as the Nazis rise to power, it is through violence in the streets, suppression of political opponents, rabid nationalism, and hatred for quote-unquote the others, and the others are most of the time either the Jews or communists andor the November criminals. Hitler finally gets to power in 1933 through a democratic election, um, but also by wheeling and dealing deceit, and people around him thinking that they could use him as a puppet and become sort of the power behind the scenes. We, for example, have politicians here of the old German school like Franz von Papen playing a role, and he's yet another man that we'll meet again in Nuremberg. It is often said that these other German politicians uh around Hitler at this time were underestimating him, that uh that they didn't understand, that he had no intention of playing second fiddle and so forth. But in my own take on Hitler, I would also propose that it was to a certain extent also the other way around, that they also overestimated him. And the reason I say that is um that they actually thought him a statesman and a politician. They didn't realize that someone actually winning an election could be, in fact, a complete, in their world, Ninkum poop, a guy completely without political fingerspitz gefool. They didn't realize that Hitler was not like any other politicians for real. He wasn't just putting on a show for the seduced masses kind of thing. He was really a fanatic that would constantly do different stuff than they expected, not because he was some sort of genius, just because he had no idea, in a way so dumb, not understanding nor having any interest in the games they were playing. He was following completely different rule book in a game he had dreamt up himself. Furthermore, he has absolutely no morals, he has no problems lying, no problems cheating. After all, he is a fascinating. Fanatic. Every sort of mean justifies the ends of a greater Germany. So, as we said, he's hell bent on his mission. He has drunk double portions of the Kool-Aid. And furthermore, he has absolutely nothing to lose and absolutely no care for his followers if they will be injured or harmed in some way or another by his action. He doesn't care about that. One extremely important aspect about Hitler's psyche that is too often overlooked in all of these is that Hitler, in addition to being the obvious fanatical narcissist, is that he's also a constant hypochondriac. And this matters a whole lot in this ideology and cult of personality, because he's all the time thinking that he's not long for this world, and that he has limited time in reaching his mission as Messiah for Germany. So he's constantly pushing forward, taking unimaginable risks for basically all of his political career. Again, not because he's smart, but because he believes that he's about to die any moment and that he has a very ri little time to fulfil his destiny, right? Furthermore, he also truly believes that German blood is better than all the other blood, so he can take crazy risks because he will only prove that he what he knows that we will win no matter what if our racial hypotheses are right. And uh if I'm not, well, anyways, I'm I'm a goner. At the start of the war, this works really well for him because everyone is caught off guard constantly. Also, he gets lucky quite a lot of the time. But as the war goes on and this kind of tactics is uh are showing themselves to be the opposite of genius, uh we see that he constantly is throwing away pretty good hands. Just some example. The Battle of Britain is a mess from a German point of view, poorly planned. There is really no attempt at invasion or any means of crossing that channel, they don't have the boats. And we if we kind of s only see the headlines, you don't really take in how stupid some of these is from a tactical point of view. Göring is of course also at fault here. Then the entire invasion of the Soviet Union is more or less crazy, and even if it was probably going to happen, anyways, he actively goes out and declares war on the US before they can declare war on him. I mean it's just one catastrophe after another. You can find tons of other examples. Um, and then there would be plenty, you know, others, also very desperate attempts towards the end, just leading to enormous losses of lives. The fact that Hitler was a vegetarian, non-smoker, and non-drinker is related to him being a hypochondriac, not that he is a purist hard-working CEO that does everything to keep a sharp eye on the operation kind of thing. This paradoxically is also why he's getting doctors to give him all kinds of strange drugs, and he's also trying out some quack remedies through his life, and he will gradually become addicted to substances, and towards the end, he seems almost crazy to a lot of his closest people, and his left arm is constantly shaking. And this is the man that these men on trial in Nuremberg has actively worshipped for years and years on end. So as the Nazis take power, they are removing all political opposition, they are creating concentration camps as early as in 1933, but it will take a long time before there are proper extermination camps. By this point, some of the other notorious Nazis have also been on the stage for quite some time, such as Heinrich Himmler, head of the Fiat SS, and Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda. Other people also, as by inside this early on, is Joachim von Ribbentrop, as we met and got to know during our series on the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact, and also Julius Streicher, one of the old boys from the Beer Hall putsch. As in many totalitarian systems, qualifications are not especially important. What matters is loyalty to the leader. So basically, if you can suck up really, really hard and prove that you are as loyal as a dog, the leader will reward you. This might have an eerie parallel to some stuff in today's politics as well, by the way. But what that means is that many of these top Nazis are first and foremost a bunch of sycophant fanatics, and a fair few of them are just like Hitler, not especially talented individuals at all. Few of them have any real credentials other than being part of the Nazi party. Uh, there was a great importance what membership number you had in the party, and the earlier you got it got in the better. Uh so you see that some of these people will be completely out of their depth, but that doesn't mean uh it doesn't matter that much when loyalty is always the most important trait. Some people though came into a slightly different category, those were the people with a strong military background. Um so some of these people, the generals and admirals and and whatnot, they might not necessarily be that into the hardcore Nazi doctrine. Some of these were mostly nationalistic and felt a great obligation to the German cause, and you know, they were probably more concerned with Germany than Hitler. Um, and some of these people fall into a different bracket of competency. They actually did IQ tests on the Nuremberg defendants, and most scored above average, with a couple actually very high. And these are typically the guys that are not those rabid spitlickers, but the ones that had climbed the military ladder and were all in all capable bureaucrats or military men. Of course, IQ tests don't really tell you all that much, but still. So as the 30s pass on, Hitler manages to grow the nationalism of Germany. He makes uh uh Germany's and his own cause one and the same. So Hitler is now Germany and vice versa. If you insult Hitler, you you insult Germany. It has been said that he did uh great stuff for infrastructure and stuff and unemployment. Well, kind of, but also uh another kind of forgotten narrative here is that the Nazis really ran the economy into the ground. So by 38-39, they were starting to pay the price for building up a massive army and those huge huge building projects. Goebbels said so in his diary, they were basically screwed economically. Um, one of the guys we will meet in Nuremberg is a guy called Jalmar Schacht. He is the man that basically keeps the Nazi economy going up until 1938, before he can't collaborate with Hitler anymore, uh, and he's out. So he was a competent guy that kept things going. Um, but Hitler wants his way and doesn't really care about competency, so he was put on the sidelines and also the German economy suffered. Hitler wanted war for many reasons, but Leban's around the living space, it's also about getting resources that you can obviously not produce yourself, such as food, uh raw materials, and so forth. So you kind of create this dynamic where you need to keep momentum going internally with your nationalist fanatics, um, but because it's not sustainable unless you cheat the economy by adding resources that are not really yours. Nazism is, of course, not a great economical model, never was. And nationalistic enthusiasm can only get you so far because sooner or later you will need for stuff to add up. So Hitler he's starting to look at other territories, and to be honest, he had done so all the way from Mein Kampf, and they are literally literally saying that these other places they shall feed Germany, these lower peoples will have to move or be slaves for Germany, and specifically they are looking to the east. In 1938, when Chamberlain catastrophically proclaimed peace in our time, it was really not that great for Hitler either, because I mean he never had any plans of honouring his agreement, but in a way he also wanted and kind of needed a war fast, even though other people in the German leadership did not, and this was kind of a bump in the road for him. Ideally, he was looking for a fight at this point, but he would regardless get it a year later. The Anschluss of Austria happens in 1938, also done by trickery and threats, but of course, there are also by this point many dedicated Nazis that have bought into this cult, so things are not all that clear-cut, but the Anschluss will be a quite significant part of the Nuremberg trials. In the 30s, there are more and more laws passed that discriminate minorities in Germany, especially Jews and political prisoners and others not in line with Nazi party policy, are put in camps or killed. For example, people with disabilities that don't fit in, they are often uh killed, useless eaters, as uh as they're called by some of the Nuremberg defendants, also suspected homosexuals and others are starting to rather systematically be excluded from society by violence or threats or imprisonment or all of the above. But much of this, of course, will be known to you. So let's fast forward all the way to the last few days of the war. So Hitler is in his bunker in Berlin with a bunch of his remaining in the circle as Soviet shells are raining over the German capital. Everything has collapsed, and Hitler is angrily blaming the German people now that he he pretended to love and protect for what is entirely his own failures. This war has cost, you know, roughly fifteen fifty million lives and many, many more lives destroyed, or at least strongly affected. Now, my favorite World War II movie of all Times is the German movie Der Untergang or Downfall, I think it's called in English. It is where you have the scene that has been subject for so many memes and parodies with alternative subtitles, you know, that I often find find very funny, but it describes Hitler's last days in the bunker, and it's mostly historical accurate. There are some things we just don't know about what happened in those days in late April 1945, but this is a very relevant movie for this because many of these top Nazis that are there, and everyone, they kind of know that it's game over, the ground is literally shaking, and death and desperation is everywhere. Uh, and in the bunker, it's just extremely depressing, as you can imagine. Some people are just constantly getting drunk, people are desperate and panicking, and so forth. So, for these people that are trapped in Berlin, and for that matter, also the other Nazis on various other places in Germany and Austria, they are seeing that there are three opportunities there for them. Uh, either trying to disguise themselves and flee, or to give themselves up or to commit suicide. Most of these people know perfectly well what they have done and been a part of, and they understand that giving themselves up might be more or less death, even though that is not always true, at least not for those outside Berlin. None of these guys probably expected the leniency and the ability to get a fair trial as they did in Nuremberg afterwards, because as we will see, the tribunal in Nuremberg will demand hard evidence for everything. Prosecutors will not get away by rumors and hearsay. And as it turns out, if the evidence is not provided, white people might not even get convicted. Now the idea of a trial after the war was was not new. In fact, the Isle allies started discussing this already in 1942, and ironically, it was Molotov, a Soviet foreign minister that was one of the first to launch the idea because Rudolf Hess was in British captivity and they kind of wanted him dealt with. As the war raged on, everybody knew it was just a matter of time before Berlin and Hitler would fall, and they were keen to avoid the shambles that Leipzig had been after the First World War because that ended with no one basically being held responsible. They knew they needed a different kind of closure this time around. Some people were skeptical that one would use resources trying these people, that they felt you know all would for sure be shot. But thankfully the trial would come to be, and we will see just how damn important it was that it actually was a real trial. I think history can really thank these people that made it happen, even though uh an enterprise like this will always contain a fair bit of controversy, and we're going to learn all about that. But we're in 1945 now, so let's go through these top Nazis, see who um would be captured to go on trial in Nuremberg, who killed themselves, who got away, and whose fates are still somewhat shrouded in some form of mystery, still to this day. So the first top Nazi to fall into captivity, he does so in a complete bizarre way, and this is the before-mentioned Rudolf Hess. He was Hitler's second in command, but had gotten a more and more peripheral role in the Nazi party as the 30s went on. Most of these people are not quote unquote mad in any way. Some of them likely have personality disorders, like they are lacking their potential for empathy or megalomaniacs in some form. But when it comes to Hess, you kind of start wondering if there is a little bit more going on. He is, for lack of a better word, strange. And it should be said that for the most part, the defendants in the Nuremberg trials were ever suspected of being they've rarely suspected of being mad at any point. They they all would be able to you know resonate and explain themselves in that in an orderly sane manner, but there are two exceptions, and one of them is Hess. So he had early on entangled himself in various occult theories, and he kind of uh seems to be slightly psychotic at times. I mean it's impossible to put a diagnosis, you know, on historical people long dead, but Hess does not really seem all that well for a lot of the time. So even though he remains a part of the inner circle due to him being completely loyal to Hitler and being one of the old boys helping writing Mein Kampf, he's kind of a comical figure for many in the party. But truth be told, they very often re-resented one another as they were in constant competition to gain Hitler's favor. That Hess, this character that he is, was Hitler's stand-in for a long time, tells you something. So he was third in the hierarchy, and the substitute if Hitler couldn't go somewhere that was basically Hess going, he was third in the hierarchy after only their Fuhrer and Hermann Göring. But he still commanded very little respect from the other top Nazis. So Hess he gets captured as early as in May 1941. And you really can't make this up, but the confused Hess had gotten aboard a plane that he piloted himself and set the course towards Britain. At the same time, he had left a letter to Hitler saying that he would now take matters into his own hands and broker peace with the Allies so that Hitler didn't need to get his hands dirty with this, thus doing his master a huge favour. Now Hitler, of course, was furious and he had absolutely no desire to broker peace, and he hastily sent out a message condemning Hess's peace attempt, and then Hess was promptly arrested, and he sat in the Tower of London and also a few other places in prison for some long years before being sent to Nuremberg. There were many more that would be at the trial had they been alive at the end of the war. But inevitably some of them died for some reason or another. Perhaps the most prominent figure that definitely would have been on trial if he hadn't died during the war would be Reinhard Heydrich. He would at least be a very obvious candidate for this first and biggest Nuremberg trial. Heydrich was perhaps one of the most horrible Nazis, and that really says a lot. So he's a slick-looking man that is responsible for a lot of the worst atrocities connected to Holocaust, to the Holocaust. Still, the man that took over for him, you know, he wasn't much better, and he did at least stand trial. This is a manned bull meet called Ernst Kaltenbrunner. But Heydrich, who was he? Well, he arranged the false flag operation in Poland that served as justification of the German invasion that really kick-started the entire war. He was responsible for the killing and imprisonment of scores of Jewish people in Poland. He organized the Einsatzgruppen that would be killing squads, murdering at least a million innocent people, and he played a huge role in the Holocaust, as we said. So he was also chairing the infamous Van Sea Conference, where the logistical details of these biggest uh crimes of them all were put in place. He was killed, though, by partisans in 1942, and would thus, of course, never stand trial. During the spring of 1945, the Western Allies and the Soviets, uh, they were of course closing in on central Germany from each side, and it was completely clear, of course, just just everybody that Germany would now lose the war. It's been quite apparent for some time. Uh, and then, of course, some of the most entrusted Nazis they are starting jumping ship, right? And most notably Heinrich Himmler tries to do something towards the end. Now, Himmler here had been the boss of Heydrich and had perhaps even more blood on his hands than even his protege. He took over the responsibility for all the concentration camps from as early as 1934 after Goering had set him up, and would perhaps be more than anyone else the symbol of twisted Nazi ideological horror. Himmler he had understood the game was lost for some time, and in April 1945, he tried some desperate attempts at brokering peace and contacted. Count Folkebanner Dot to be an intermediary that he was the vice president of the Swedish Red Cross, but of course to no avail. His plans became known to Hitler in his bunker that was furious with this betrayal. But he was furious a lot these days, to put it like that. But he stripped Himmler of all his officers and ordered his arrest. Not that Hitler really could order very much, isolated, in his bunker with everything crumbling down round him. Himmler then chose to disguise himself. He shaved off his moustache, the typical Nazi Hitler-esque moustache. He put on an eye patch then called himself Heinrich Hitzinger. Now there was utter chaos in Germany as the war came to an end. Cities were bombed to ruins, refugees and soldiers and whatnot were everywhere, so the odds for managing to slip away were pretty good actually. Himmler was captured by the Soviets that did not recognize him, then he was handed over to the British, where he would sit in captivity without anyone knowing who he was, but he would not be long for this world as we will see. Hammer Goering. Now Goering, he is a character that we will get to know well in this series. As we said, he is the fighter pilot ace from the first world war and a very characteristic and kind of charismatic Nazi figure. So he actually has a bit more going for him in contrast to many other top Nazis in the inner circle, even though his talents was sometimes hard to spot. Some of the reason for this was his bizarre vanity that made him a very welcome target for caricatures in Allied newspapers. So he would get his own specially made uniforms with all kinds of weird medals and whatnot. Almost, you know, he was almost like an overgrown Christmas tree, uh, or it kind of looked like he was going to some kind of dresser play rather than command the air force kind of thing. It's almost like if Ben Stiller was dressing up as a general doing male modelling in the movie Siouxlander, kind of it's almost parodically stashed up, a parrot among magpies kind of thing. So it's kind of hard for outsiders to take him seriously at times. He had a very characteristic, smirky smile, and as the war went on, he became really heavy. So basically, he looked like this stuffed vein fat, so not untrue at all, really, but he will show a different side of himself during the trial. Some of the reasons is simply because he got rid of his morphine addiction in jail before the trial, so he would actually show up both fit rent sharper at the trial uh than he had been for the entire war. During was uh second in command uh to Hitler and obliged to take over if Hitler was incapacitated. So as the war is getting completely out of hands towards the end, he is sending a telegram to Hitler's bunker saying that if I don't get a reply to this, I'm taking over as Fuhrer of the Third Reich just because I'm assuming that year is sort of unable to rule. Where Hitler again gets a hissy fit. Hitler manages to telegram him back and uh and ask him to stand down. Um he wants him killed at the moment and whatnot. In the bunker in Berlin, the mayhem just continues. One of Himmler's top men, he he was there, he's a guy named Hermann Fergelin. He's an SS general and he was the brother-in-law of Eva Brown, Hitler's girlfriend. Fergelin was also a top sucker fan and also immensely disliked by many of the other top Nazis. And I think it's fair to say that he did not exactly cope well under the pressure in the Fuhrer Bunker. So during the last days, he he jumps ship, he says that you know I don't want to be part of a suicide pact, and he basically runs away. And then he's reigned in, most likely in his apartment in Berlin, trying to pack some stuff together. Uh apparently he was shit-faced drunk and in a very, very sad state. Apparently, he's crying, he's urinating on the floor. And you know, what exactly exactly happens to him we is a little bit uncertain, but he was shot for desertion one way or another, shortly after. So he's not going to stand trial, obviously. And then everything completely falls apart. So Hitler shoots himself in his bunker with Eva Brown that he married just before they both killed themselves, and a couple of other type Nazis are taking their own lives in there as well. And I won't go into them. And I'm sorry that I'm progressing quite quickly here, but otherwise, there are too many names and details to keep track of the main narrative. Goebbels, he's also in the bunker, and he also chooses suicide. And this is perhaps the most tragic of all these deaths around the bunker because he is there with his wife and their six children. So Goebbels and his wife, they are hundred percent committed Nazi fanatics and not willing to live in a world without their Fuhrer and Nazi ideology. So there is no other option for them than death. The real tragic part is that his wife, he dru she drugs all her children and kills them with cyanide in their sleep. By the way, this is one of the most chilling and best played out scenes in their untergang, in my opinion. So look that up if you haven't watched it. Then she and her husband goes on to kill themselves together. So basically that leaves Hitler, Goebbels, and a few top generals that we don't uh won't get into. They are dead by suicide, in addition to the executed Fegeline. So the list of obvious people to put on trial is already thin and thinning. Because ideally, you want all the big guns prosecuted, right? And you want them brought to justice. Uh, and one of the other top Nazis being in or around the bunker at this time uh is Martin Bormann. Now, Bormann he was also hated by all the others in the inner circle basically, uh, because he gradually got closer and closer to Hitler, uh, and after a while everything had to go through him. So it was kind of the shadow Fuhrer towards the end. Hitler would walk around talking with him for hours on end, whereas the others were only getting small scraps of time with their Fuhrer. So Bormann, he's also an obvious target for the first and most important trial after the war, but no one knew where Bormann went in all this chaos. So when the Nuremberg trial will start, Bormann will be tried in absentia. But spoiler alert, he dies somehow these days, but we don't know how. Tests taken much later in the 70s determined his remains in Berlin, so most likely he died either by suicide or by a Sovietshire or someone else shot him, we don't know. But he will be one of the defendants in Nuremberg, or but he will be dead, but they don't know that at this point. What was an even greater mystery than Bormann though, was the high-ranking Gestapo officer Heinrich Müller that also was in or around the bunker these last days. He would be another obvious target for this first trial. And he basically just vanished from the face of the earth, and even to this day there is some confusion to what the heck happened to the guy. Some of the problems tracking him down in the chaos that ensued German surrender was that Heinrich Müller is a German name akin to John Smith. It is simply one of the most common names you can have. So there were basically a ton of Heinrich Müllers in documents everywhere, uh, and there has been this mystery uh surrounding this guy ever since these last days in the bunker. But most people now feel quite sure that he died, as did Bormann in close vicinity to the bunker somewhere in Berlin. But it has been hard to definitely confirm this. But most people looking into this seem to land on this conclusion. Now, there were quite a few Nazis that actually did get away too, many of those fleeing to South America, uh, resulting in people hunting them down for decades later. And the most famous case of those would be Adolf Eichmann, that was found by Israeli sacred police and brought to Israel for a trial with a death sentence to follow. Some they famously never got a hold of. Dr. Mengele was one of them, the torturer from Auschwitz, while others they struggled with or had no idea of where were where they were when the war was over in Europe. So some of the big names to get away later were were hiding in Austria for a while before they managed to fly to other countries. Syria, a couple of them flew to before getting on boats uh from uh from around that region to to South America. Also, there were some lynchings in lynchings in liberated territories to the east, um, and some mock trials and public executions also taking place a few uh few you know a few places in the east. So it's not impossible that some of these people executed would also be put on this big trial if they had uh survived. And while the hunt for all these remaining Nazis was going on in parallel, the Allies were taking stock of Nazi leaders they already did have in captivity, and the list of people that would stand trial in Nuremberg started to amass. Nuremberg was not randomly chosen, by the way. One reason was practical that the court building there was one of a few buildings not in ruins and could be adopted for a large trial, but more importantly, was a symbolism of it. The Nuremberg laws were the infamous racial laws, and also some of the biggest Nazi rallies had been held in Nuremberg, so it seemed a fitting place. Now it is important to say that there is a lot of back and forth, and you know, a lot of good work being done in actually setting up the trial. There will be disputes between the Soviets, the French, the British, and Americans that will be the main nations here. So to begin with, there is not certain there will be a trial at all, but there are definitely those that are strongly advocating this from the very beginning, and they will after a while win through, even though there will be tons of stuff to be ironed out. There are differences in laws, for example, in juridical traditions, there are problems with language, and the fact that international law was pretty blurry, and and and the Nuremberg trials they were actually essential to actually putting down a fair few markers for this. But for the here and now, we will concentrate on those that will be the defendants in this trial so we have a very clear understanding of who they were and why they were on trial, uh, and we will get slightly back to some of this stuff later at least. So, of the prisoners, some were taken by the Soviets, some were taken by the Americans, some were taken by the British. Um, and the top catch, of course, is Hammond Göring. He was um captured fairly early after the war, he surrendered himself to the Americans, and he had a ton of morphine pills on him. For the would-be prosecution, it was important that they covered all aspects of the horrors of the war. The ones pushing for trials knew this would likely be the first of many, but this first trial with the biggest names, it was always going to be the most important one of all, both in terms of publicity but also in terms of what precedence it would set for all the other trials that they knew would follow. That meant that they wanted representatives from all the most important organizations of the Third Reich to stand trial from the beginning. So that meant leaders from the SS and Gestapo, the army, and so forth, you know, key perpetrators of the Holocaust that the Allies now had seen firsthand after deliberation, the key people of Nazi ideology promoting mass killings and racism, and also civilians and bureaucrats that played a huge role in enabling Germany's war machinery. So some industrialists and and other economic figures were uh were put on trial um as sort of co-defendants and and as uh participants in the horrors within the Nazi regime. So if we look at this from let's say a few weeks around Germany's surrender, so Hitler is dead, Goebbels is dead, Himmler is as far as they know, a warless Bormann, but of the very top Nazis um from the beginning, they have Göring and their focused, uh of course, have a confused Hess that has been sitting in captivity since 1941, and you know that's a start. A key aspect was to really take on the Nazi ideology, just not punish some horrible war criminals, they want to really hold the men that created this basis for mass murders responsible. Those that promoted ideology and ideas, let them talk to explain their theories confronted with evidence and let the world see everything and make them testify to what they had done. Would they sense any regret? How would they explain all this when the war was lost and Hitler their Fuhrer dead? Or would they admit guilt at all? So with this thinking in mind, one person that was clearly going to stand trial in this very first instance was Alfred Rosenberg. He's often known as the Nazi ideologist above all, and his book The Myth of the Twentieth Century was only second to mein Kampf in sales in Nazi Germany. But then again the regime kind of pushed people to get these books. So you should have both Hitler and Rosenberg kind of in your in your in your bookshelf. But Rosenberg's writings are allegedly perhaps even worse than those of Hitler. I haven't read them, but they are known to be hard to read and rather difficult to understand, and you suspect that he didn't really understand it himself either. Hermann Göring said he only read the first chapter of that book and that it was like sleeping medicine to him. Again, let's not make these people better than what they were, but at the same time, I don't want to make them more stupid than they were either. But some of these people they just aren't very impressive. And again, that goes especially for some of these early boys, the sycophans from the early days. As we will see, some you kind of can end understand why made it into high office, whereas others are really hard to fathom. And I put Rosenberg in this category. While not mad or directly stupid, he is like Hitler mostly first and foremost, he's a fanatical and hateful man portraying himself as some sort of deep thinker. After taking a few of these top people prisoners, some American GI said something akin that I can't believe that all this time we were fighting the war against jerks. And that really is the problem when you only appreciate loyalty before skill. You get this bizarre mix of people, uh all with pretty low moral standards, of course, but also some completely just lacking in the competency within the fields that they are, you know, supposed to have competency within. So it was a kind of shock for for some of the truth troops to just realize when you took off the uniforms and started talking to these men, well, they were kind of idiots, a few of them. I kind of think it builds up under the notion that Hitler is no genius because he surrounds himself with many people that most likely would not have had successful lives in a normal situation. For a lack of a better word, some of these other top Nazis are also losers, just like Hitler. But there are some exceptions, as we'll see. As for Rosenberg though, he is a person that takes himself very seriously, he's deeply convinced of everything racial, but as we said, not a great writer. Uh, he had very big problems keeping it to the point, and even Hitler said that Rosenberg's best seller was, quote, written in a style too difficult to understand, end quote. So yeah, there you have it. Rosenberg was a strange combination of Nazi dreamer, newspaper editor, and mass murderer, having been responsible for the occupied territories in the East after the invasion of the Soviet Union. Furthermore, he was also organizing huge-scale theft of Jewish art and other treasures, looting all kinds of things, basically totalling a staggering 1.4 million railway trucks with just a lot of stolen stuff. One reason the Nuremberg trial is so unique is that the Nazis were very strict on order. So basically, they documented everything they did. So they gave the court a fantastic opportunity to prove many of these wrongdoings because there were literally tons and tons of just paper remaining where they are, you know, they were carefully writing everything down. So, in many ways, the documentation you have for this trial is just enormous. A new evidence, the documentation would continue to flow in non-stop to the court as the trial would start and progress, as you know, various archives and such would be discovered. And a huge problem is actually trying to not get in more information than what was already proven. So, for some of these Nazi crimes, there is no doubt that they actually took place, it's more a question of who knew and who were responsible for what. And this also makes, I think, Holocaust denial almost comical. And none of these defendants really deny that it ever took place, but a lot of them would say something like, Oh, I didn't know, or there was only Himmler responsible, and so forth. And uh, but they had no problems or saw no little need for sort of dispute the evidence. Um they said this both privately to the psychiatrist and in court. Some expressed shame, but as we'll see, a lot of them didn't, they were more concerned with blaming others. But it it felt for them uh just silly to refute the facts because they were so overwhelming. In the meantime, Himmler, he is still sitting in British captivity under his false name, but after a couple of weeks he gets tired of it and he angrily states that you know, don't don't you know who I am? And he tears off his fake eye patch and declares that he is in fact Heinrich Himmler, is seeming kind of hurt that a man of his stature had not been recognized. Shortly after doing this though, Himmler kills himself with a cyanide capsule, a popular thing among these top Nazis that had been circulating towards the end of the war, so he would never stand trying. And he dies on the 23rd of May 1945. But there were heaps of other top Nazis, of course. One of them, an old acquaintance of regular listeners, as we said, is Joachim von Ribbentrop, obviously the man who lends his name to the infamous Molotov Ribbentrop Act. So we have, of course, described him before, but we will do it again if you haven't heard that series. In many ways, he is a great example of this loyalist, spit-licking, unqualified person that he can get in these kinds of regimes. So his main trick was to take everything Hitler said and then turn it up a notch. So if Hitler said kind of let's invade Poland, Ribbentrop would scream, let's invade all of Europe, kind of thing. So he had very little idea what he was doing. He just tried to impress Hitler and being the ultimate yes man, whereas generals and others might urge some caution based on expertise. Ribbentrop was doubling down on Hitler's every suggestion, however foolish, and that would ultimately earn him the role as foreign minister. After completing the pact with Stalin in Moscow, where he actually had to give away a lot in the negotiations, Hitler greeted him as the new Bismarck upon returning. To be fair, neither of the two men were any besmarks. His background was that of a wine salesman, or he was selling so-called German champagne, and since he had travelled a bit, he mastered some languages, so that was basically all that he had going for him being a foreign minister. I mean, looking back at this, you make this wine salesman your foreign minister because he speaks English and is loyal. The bar is not really set very high. Make what you will about Hitler, but you at least you can't escape the fact that he he did put several incompetent people into very high position. That's hard to argue with. Some will constantly absolutely hear the others, some will distance themselves from the other captives, some will legions will change and so forth. This is a gang with uh a lot of games being played. Also, it is important to know that there were always also various quite split up factions within Nazi Germany during the war. Some are almost um not viewing themselves as National Socialists at all, just as Germans doing their job, whereas others are just completely rabid fanatics, completely devoted to the National Socialist cause. And one person that absolutely fits into this last category is another person that absolutely everyone on trial seems to have hated, and his name is Julius Streicher, that we have mentioned before. Okay, so this is really some character. This is really a guy that you can understand those USGI saying that they couldn't believe just how big jerk some of these guys were. So Streicher. What he was was the editor of the newspaper Der Stuma, and he's just a completely erratic man. Göring called him half mad and an idiot. You know, those doing the IQ tests before the trial, he is actually by far the worst. Not again that IQ tests need to matter all that much, but in the totality of things, it's worth mentioning here. Um, he never held official office, it should be said, but he is an important person in terms of spreading Nazism. So let's take a look at his publication, Der Stummer. So it's obviously a Nazi publication, but it's a bit different from the others. They had a couple of newspapers, but Der Stummer is kind of the tabloid version of this, so it's like the son of Nazi Germany kind of thing, and it's just as dark as dark can be. And as in many ways, it is kind of reflecting the mind of Streicher that had complete control over this publication. So Der Stummer started as early as in 1923, and it means the attacker or stormer, and it's a mix of frantic anti-Semitism that is spiced up with the horrible cartoons and then bizarrely also sort of sexualized content. Now, Streicher he considered himself a connoisseur of pornography, and he's not only completely full of hate for the Jews, but he's also a pervert in lack of a better word, and he was accused for several sexual transgressions and um and even something borderline to rape himself. Well, it's hard to say anything other than that. He's you know, truly an obnoxious character. It's really hard to find anything positive about the guy, and he had this huge, huge collection of pornography. This mysteriously disappeared after the war, most likely was pinched and traded among American soldiers. I personally would never have touched Streicher's pawn with a five-foot stick, but anyways. So, as we said, the other defenders just absolutely despised him, probably more than the others, and that's really saying something. The guy seated next to him in the docks in the courtroom, he felt it was a cruel punishment directed at him. Streicher is, for lack of a better word, really creepy. He's one of the last persons in history you want to be stuck in and elevated with. Also, to call his publication Der Sturmer anti-Semitic is really an understatement. Nearly every issue had a large text at the bottom saying that Derjud sind unser Ungluck, meaning that the Jews are our misfortune. Some also had added the text and without a solution to the Jewish question, there is no salvation for mankind. So this part here about the Strumer is a bit of a caveat, but I think it's still kind of descriptive of what some of these people read and believed, and how banal some of you know the operations within Nazi Germany really was. So just as Streicher was, the Strumer was also obsessed with sex, and especially it fed German women having sex with Jewish men. Streicher himself was, by the way, hurt for not being consulted in making the so-called Nuremberg laws about race. But just to take one typical example on how this newspaper worked. So the Sturma shows an image of a man that is supposed to be a Jew but looks more like a troll with almost claws for a hand carrying a sack of gold. In front of him sits a pure German girl topless, hanging her head in shame, with scores of other blond German women walking past looking embarrassed, some with their faces in their hands, and the text reads quote ignorant, lured by gold, they stand disgraced in Judo's fold, souls poisoned, blood infected, disaster broods in their womb. There is just much, much, much more like this. It had a circulation of up to 500,000, I've seen some places. Uh Streicher himself said 1.5 million. But anyways, it was read by plenty more because they were set up by the Nazi regime in reading boxes for public display in a lot of streets, canteens, factories, and so forth. So everybody could read this at their lunch break, which in turn make you think it kind of weird how anyone after the war could say that they didn't understand or know that the Nazis really, really, really hate the Jews for for real and were shocked by concentration camps, etc. This we paper, week in and week out, very clearly stated that the Jews were subhuman, that they were dangerous, that it was either us or them. And seeing how they disappeared and were mistreated in the streets, I find it a little bit hard to believe that any German in the 1930s didn't know at least something about crimes against Jewish people or should have known. We mustn't forget that many people in Germany also, in fact, heroically did stand up against Nazism. So many people knew perfectly well from early on what this ideology was all about, even though the details might not have been to the right in their faces to begin with. Hitler, he was a great fan of the Sturmer, of course, said he read every page of every edition, fantastic entertainment in his mind. Göring, on the other hand, uh, that tried to brand himself as a military man and not as a Nazi fanatic during the trial, said that he had read one page of the Sturmer once and that was enough, never again, and he would never allow it in his house because he found it disgusting, against you know, huge pinches of salt. But to his prison psychiatrist during the trial, Goering claim claimed that he was never into this with the Jews, that that this was just a lingo you had to speak. He even said that he tried to limit everything that Hitler and Hitler were on to, and that he could even prove this with documents, but that he chose not to. As I said, he realized how stupid it looked in court, as he knew he had said so many strongly anti-Semitic things on record that the prosecution, of course, had and had read out. The most popular copy, by the way, of their Stuma, it showed a medieval depiction of alleged Jewish ritual murder. Just a reminder that anti-Semitism, of course, is nothing new. The Holocaust Memorial Museum that has a lot of these copies of Der Stuma online if you want to see them, and you can also very easily see the text Der Juden sind Unser Ungluck at the bottom of most copies. When all the defendants eventually end up in jail altogether before and during the trial, the infamous Strumer editor Streicher, he would every morning do his exercise routines in front of everybody naked. You heard me. So he would dress down, bend and stretch, and according to the book on the Nuremberg trials by John and Antusa, he would literally make the others feel sick, both guides and inmates. They even tried giving him underwear to exercise in, but he wouldn't wear it. He insisted on exercising naked for the others every morning. So Julie Streicher, the defendant that, as we said, was the editor of their streamer, he was a complete pain for anyone having anything to do with him, guards and inmates alike. He's also always complaining. So he's full of conspiracy theories, he's constantly saying that the Allies only wanted to attack Germany because Eisenhower was a Jew. So yeah, this is not a guy to be impressed with. I'm sorry for almost laughing, but but he is a horrible man, but but it's kind of comical. And some of these people, they are really completely nuts. And for Striker's part, there is also some serious suspicions that he might not be properly on the up and up, it's that he is perhaps mentally ill. So in addition to his, he is the second one of these that falls into the category of potentially mentally sick. Um, and there would be questions about his mental health uh during the trial. However, all the others are very clearly sane human beings, but with very questionable morals, of course. But again, can't get over Streicher. He's an amazing example of how bad shit crazy people you can have in high positions in autocratic regimes. So let's let's not make the mistake of thinking that just because some people held high positions that were smart or talented, there might be completely other reasons for why they end up there. That goes for history in general, by the way. Streicher, he also tried to hide after the war. He pretended to be a painter living on a farm. Uh, but when visited by America, there will inevitably be many names in this series. So far, we have discussed Goering, Ribbentrop, Hess, Rosenberg, and now Streicher among the captives that will stand trial. Uh, the exact order of their arrest is not reflected here, by the way. Um, but I'm going through each story here. I will not do all in the same amount of detail, but these guys are jailed jailed relatively short, uh, shortly after the war, uh, some after a few weeks, some immediately. But as you have noticed, the meaning of this first episode is really just to set the stage and help you know who these defendants were, at least for a for a little bit. Another rather unsavory character, I think we have to say, uh, is Ernst Carlton Brunner. So he was taking over Heydrich, partly at least, that was assassinated by partisans, and he uh Carlton Brunner is quite heavily involved in the Holocaust. He was involved both in Gestapo and SS and had first hand knowledge about anything that happened in the concentration camps, uh, also actively ensuring that hundreds of thousands were sent to their deaths. It's kind of also, I don't know who can say that this is comical, but later in the trial we'll hear that one of his witnesses are actually, you know, just completely incriminating him. You know, the guy that he thought would defend him just um well he kind of attempts to defend him, but it's just a disaster and basically basically um makes him look very guilty, which he was. He was also big man with the scars on his face, and he kind of looked like a thug. He's captured um four days after the surrender in the small cabin close to the Austrian border together with three other guys. The Allies had been tipped off, and um Captain Brunner here uh he tried to pretend he was a doctor with some false papers on him, but after a very short standoff he surrendered and he was finally completely identified when he came down to town and his lover embraced him and blew whatever little cover he had left. Uh so that's him and the cell. So, in describing these human beings, we are at, you know, again this kind of dilemma because I don't want to make them into sort of caricatures completely. I don't want to make them either better or worse than what they actually were. But at the same time, that is a kind of impossible task, as undoubtedly there are these people are implicated in the worst crimes of history. And can you or should you even say anything positive about them? Uh we have just described Strachen, Kalton Brunner as more or less monsters, which they thoroughly deserve, but then again, in all humans you can find something relatable and things that can make you even sympathetic towards them, and this is just this ethical dilemma everyone tackling these questions and this narrative will face. So while we have described some of the quote unquote worst people standing trial not holding much back, I think we should be as honest as possible in our assessment. And when you have over 20 individuals, you do really have many different personalities, and as we will see during the trial, also many different levels of guilt for the atrocities, and that brings us almost almost into a kind of philosophical space. Because where do you draw the line between obligation, duty, and personal moral choices? Do you always have a choice? These are some of the key questions that will come up. But as the trial will establish, yes, you always do have a responsibility to act morally, even though it might cause you dire consequences. You are responsible for your own actions, even though you get orders. And contrary to popular opinion, you would often not be executed even in Nazi Germany if you refused stuff. You would easily be demoted or whatnot, perhaps even thrown into prison. But very often you could refuse and continue to live some sort of free life. Same with some of these mass murders, by the way. Soldiers often had the right to refuse, but very often chose not to, might be sort of group mentality or something that it was hard to resist when everybody else. Um but, anyways, and here I think we need to differentiate somehow between some of the defendants, even though their final sentences, you know, might vary very much uh across the differentiation differentiations we're about to make. But I would like to create three categories here. I kind of mentioned them already. It don't fit all the defendants perfectly, but it helps us to keep some order of all these names and personalities. So let's call the first group of defendants, they're the Nazi idealists. Those are the ones convinced about the ideology, often they are very cynical anti-Semites. I truly believe in the superiority of the German race. Hitler here would clearly be in this bracket. Then we have the military professionals that are first and foremost coming into this through a military career path that sometimes kind of ignore the politics and saw themselves as you know not Germans, first and foremost, rather than Nazis. And then we have the civilians and administrators that might not be all that involved within the shaping of the Nazi Party or uh that might not even be very close to Hitler, but that still played a huge role in, for example, rounding up Jews for the concentration camps, making the Reich tick. Now, representatives for all these groups, the idealists, the military men, and the civil servants will all both be sentenced to both the stricter sentences and more lenient sentences. And so you get a bit of everything. So, who do we put in this first box? The idealists. Well, obviously, it's kind of like Rosenberg, it's a Also Hess Streicher, they are committed to the Nazi course. And you can probably also add Carlton Brunner to this group. Had Himmler and Goebbels been alive, they would have been in this category too. And then you have Göring, that is kind of a little bit in this box, but also overlapping with a group of military men. So if we're looking into the group of military men, we have people that we haven't gone through, like Admiral Carl Dernitz. And now his case is quite interesting though. Because after Hitler kills himself, he is the guy that will take uh over the Reich for a few days before surrendering, which makes you think that he was one of the central characters in the movement. But in these final days, there were not that many for Hitler to choose from. As Hitler had been, you know, he was mad at Göring for trying to take power too soon. Himmler, he was stripped of all honors and had gone incognito, and a whole lot of that other bunch that they were already in the bunker with him and surrounded by the Soviets. So he kind of had to point at someone that was reliable enough, but not in Berlin, and that someone would be Donitz. Now, he actually wasn't all that high up until 1943. So he had only met Hitler a few times before he got promoted. So he's nothing like the old guys, you know, the brawlers from the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. He's a military man that, at least for his own part, claims that he had only ever been dedicated to the Navy, and he would take the position that he thought this trial was a whole lot of nonsense and that he had nothing to do with anything, more or less painting an image of himself being off at sea all the time, uh conducting war far away from the politics in Berlin. The way he would explain this to the prison psychiatrist that would interview the prisoners during the trial was that he was proud to take over as uh as admiral when he was asked in 43. Uh he barely had met Hitler before that, and he certainly had no information about mass extermination of Jews. Heck, he even had Jewish officers himself, he said. Uh, and he also said that any calls on him to to get Jews out of the navy was you know bluntly refused by him, uh, and that he would just do as he had always done. And basically, he just saw this as a propaganda tool to to unite the German people, this anti-Semitism. He didn't really believe it was was a real thing. You know, you can ask yourself, is that that might be a blatant lie? Probably is, but Donitz is one of or two or three that would do remarkably well on these IQ tests, and and he will actually pose a dilemma for the prosecution because um the last Fuhrer of the Reich, or the only second to be honest, he could hardly be innocent, right? And if you um but if you just want to try military men for fighting in the war, uh killing enemy soldiers and sailors, then also all the Allied commanders would be guilty of something too, right? It's war after all. According to Dernitz, he did almost a hero's deed because he claimed that he was very happy to step in for Hitler just in order to surrender the navy and all that he had of military equipment to the Americans and the British to get it out of Soviet hands. And he said stuff that you got, you will thank me for this later. You will have problems with the Soviets, just wait and see. So his case actually will be one of the most intriguing and perhaps also controversial of the trials, but not all the military prisoners would give off the same stout impression as Sternitz would. One of those that wouldn't do that was Wilhelm Keitel. So Keitel, he was head of the army and was another Zuckerphante known as Hitler's Yes Man, same as Ribbentrop, and he would never ever contest the Fuhrer, he was loyal as a lapdog, and the others would also mock him for being such a groveller. He was really someone not afraid of rolling around properly in the in the dirt. Then after Hitler shot himself on April 30th and Dernitz took over for about eight days, Keitel was apparently grovelling just as much for Dernitz as he had for Hitler, according to Albert Speer. Not either an impressive man, um it should be said. So Keitel had to take some part in signing some of the surrender papers himself and was arrested shortly thereafter. Um during the trial, he said basically that you know I was I was general in name only, I was more or less a secretary. Well, let's see about that. Kind of same story with Alfred Yodel, another general doing off the paperwork of the surrender, and arrested shortly thereafter, um, and would also be added to our list of defendants. We will have uh we will leave Yodel for later examination in this series, and the same goes for Admiral Rader. He was Admiral before Dernitz, so up until 1943. So now we've added quite a few more names to our lists. We have Goering, the fat guy in the weird costumes, head of the Air Force, and former fighters from World War I. We have Rosenberg, the confused Nazi ideologue that would write incomprehensible books. We have Bormann, the Shadow Fuhrer that no one quite knew where was, but was actually dead. We have Streicher, the perverted editor of Der Stummer, and we have of course Hess, the confused Nazi leader that flew on his own to Allied captivity in 1941. Furthermore, we've added the Scarfaced Gestapo and SS leader Ernst Kaltenbrunner, suspected of genocide and mass extermination of Jews. We have Admiral Dernitz, and then we have Bealey now just mentioned, Admiral Reda, and Generals Keitel and Jordel. Many names here. And again, don't worry if you feel you don't sort of have every name and personality nailed down by this point, you know. We will get into these in more detail as we go along. But having said that, not all are really equally interesting. So we will pick and choose a bit who we delve into. Um, what is kind of curious is that since the prosecution was eager to get people from both uh Hitler's inner circle, the military branches, and also the Nazi bureaucracy, not all these defendants actually knew each other all that well. Some had not even met many of the others. Uh, some actually said that they haven't hadn't even heard about some of the others. Who knows what's true, right? Um, and concerning Hess, nobody had, of course, seen him for the past four or five years before being locked up in the same prison. Uh, and some would of course never have met him, whereas others would have known him since the very beginning. And but I kind of just imagine how that odd first meeting would have been between Göring and him. Kind of uh hi mate, how did that flying alone over to Britain work out for you? Bloody great idea that was kind of thing. Furthermore, as the prosecution wanted this first trial to to really cover the entire Nazi era and making really making this the end of Nazism for good, they prosecuted people like Franz von Parpen. That was really mostly important around 32 through 33 before having a more peripheral role, and then he was ambassador in Turkey for most of the war. So uh a guy such as Dernitz would, of course, know who he was, but typically these two two guys would not have spent much time together or might even not have met each other before being locked up together, um, just to take one example. So, this group of defendants were very often not that sort of unified, uh, and often they would totally resent one another and they would partly refuse to talk to others. Very much part of Hitler's inner circle, and that is one of these famous names, and one that will stand out in this trial, and that is Albert Speer. Now, Speer was an architect, and Hitler loved Speer because he would help Hitler live out his dreams about a new epic Germany, he would make models of how the Third Reich could look like, he would also help design and build a lot of Nazi buildings, and basically he's the designer of visual Nazism. He was a man Hitler really enjoyed speaking a lot with, he was younger than many of the others, uh, and just again to prove that loyalty went far beyond whatever qualifications one might have, Hitler made Speer the architect, minister for rearmament and war, something he was clearly not qualified for, even though Speer, as we will see, is one of these people that actually has something going for him. He's he's not an idiot or fanatic, but his case is also, in addition to that of Dernitz, it is gonna be one of those that there is a lot of controversy about after the sentencing is is ready. And as a spoiler alert, perhaps, because Speer will survive these trials, unlike some of these others. And you might already know that because his memoirs became very popular and are important sources for us today, and also in this series, even though they, of course, must be read in the context that Speer is someone that is trying to save his own skin and reputation, as far as that was at all possible. So, Albert Speer, he's a quite charming man, he's intelligent, and um he seems to have some sort of ability to read the room in the much greater uh ways than some of the others. So uh let's say you're at a dinner party, you definitely would prefer sitting next to Speer rather than the erratic Streicher, for example. Speer you probably could have a decent enough conversation with, he would probably listen to you, be a German gentleman, being able to speak on a wide range of subjects, he would laugh at the right places and so forth, perhaps showing a bit of humour, whereas Streicher would, if you are female, constantly be looking down your blouse and talking about Jewish conspiracies. Speer understood that it was smart to collaborate with the Allies from the start, and he was also part of the so-called Flensburg government that was a temporary government for a couple of weeks uh after the war, where some of these men like Dernitz were allowed to dismantle everything before they were all being arrested. We will get to the spear case properly in due time because he is super interesting. Uh, also, he has some really eerie words of caution uh in both court and his memoirs that perhaps hits pretty close to home in our days regarding the use of mass communication technology and how that has the potential to amplify the ideas of some political extremists uh to sway the masses. So, a lot of names for you already, and some of these might not be all that well known for most of you, even if you are well into history and the World War II, um, but they all played rather important roles. Some names we will mention only now in passing, but before we round off this, there are a couple of the more or the civilian defendants that need some mention, and I think one in particular is interesting, and that is Hans Frank. So Hans Frank, he was accused for many atrocities in in Poland. It was him I I've heard him call the the butcher of Poland in his quoted in 41 saying this to his officers Gentlemen, I must ask you to rid yourselves of all feelings of pity. We must annihilate the Jews wherever we find them and whenever it is possible. Hans Frank was we have mentioned him actually a few times before. He was the one we quoted in the beginning that was unimpressed by Hitler in 1919. He had been flirting with the Nazi Party in the very early days, but not really stuck with it. He had gotten out of it before becoming a lawyer, and then he was fetched back uh by Hitler himself that needed his services. So basically he's Hitler's lawyer. Hans Frank, he looks a little bit like a gangster, he kind of looks like Al Capone, his dark hair is coned back, he's clean shaven, he has a bit of cheeks on him, and it kind of looks a little dumb, but he's really not. In fact, his conversations with the prison psychiatrist during the trial, I think, are some of the most interesting ones, and the reason for this is that he's kind of he's letting down his guard quite a lot. And with Frank, we must perhaps be a bit extra cautious because it's it's quite easy to kind of like the guy when you read his conversations with a psychiatrist, and um uh that's why I wanted to start with this horrible quote of his early on. But out of many of these defendants, he's one that's ready to admit guilt, and in some ways you can say that perhaps he was less guilty than a few others. In lack of a better word, he's a guy responsible for genocide that manages to sound nice, and that is always fascinating on its own. How how can that be? We will get even more into him later, but the way he describes himself that we again must take with heaps of pinches of salt, um was that he he and this is not really denied either by the prosecution, but he is a Nazi that seems to turn during the war, and he starts really, it seems, regretting stuff even as the war went on. So, this quote about annihilating the Jews from 1941, when he was responsible for for running things in Poland, according to himself, he in 1942 starts holding a new speech kind of thing with new message, and he holds this several places around Nazi Germany where he is seemingly quite bravely denouncing Hitler's persecution of Jews. Is it all rubbish? Well, kind of and kind of not. It's hard to find evidence. He posts he supposedly pushed this, but he was stripped of everything in the party, and according to himself, he was re forced to remain as an administrative leader in Poland, and he would claim he sent in his resignation twelve times, but they were all refused by Hitler. Now you could just stop, right? Flee. Even you know, in worst case, get killed. But and that probably would be the morally right thing to do, wouldn't it? He actually, when he surrendered, he handed over all his diaries to the allies just to basically prove his own guilt and his own sort of maybe journey to where he was. So he was kind of he was kind of ready to to capitulate from the beginning. When he speaks to the psychiatrist, I think he shows much more self-reflection than most of these other. He speaks about the the Hitler cult, how Hitler had even denied that he divorced his wife, Hitler would interfere with his private stuff, you know, just like uh this cult leader. He says stuff uh that of course he and all the others are guilty, thank god. If they had not been guilty, that would have meant that the entire German population would be guilty. And he's perfectly happy to die at this point. He's one of those people that has absolutely no illusions that he can survive the trial, even though he said he thought he could prove that he didn't directly send any Jews to a concentration camp. Um he he's ready to sort of take responsibility. Personally, I think that about the concentration camp is a is a lie, or at best a technical play with the words, but still Hans Frank, he's a bit of a character, and he at least kind of convincingly makes a case that he is a regretting sinner. He's uh in these interviews, he's talking a lot about his father, uh, that from the very beginning had warmed him about what kind of figure Hitler was and uh and what kind of uh people the Nazis were, and he's lamenting that he, you know, he he should never have been entangled in politics at all. Um, he kind of seems to have understood since 42-43 that this is not going to end well with me for me. This is horrible, just waiting for something to happen and then surrender and things are going to go the way they are going to go. He talks about his marital problems, um, and that he, unlike Göring and these guys, never had had a life of luxury. He saw himself more as more as more or less enslaved to his duty for the last couple of years of the war. And that is what makes this so hard, because in one way you see the human being in this when they speak about these things, um, they were not really part of Hitler's inner circle, but they carried out orders, and um and is this regret heartfelt? Why didn't he sacrifice even more to to to stop it? I mean, fair enough, you handed in your resignation and you were sort of um put back in your place, but he can can always do more, right? In at the end of his speech from 1941, um that is kind of before he claims to have turned, uh you know, this entire speech is a huge problem for his defence. Some I'll I'll give you some more quotes just to make sure that I'm not portraying this guy as a super nice guy. He he he said this further down in his speech from 41 quote I will tell you that quite openly we must finish off the Jews. Their Fuhrer put it into words once. Should United Jewry again succeed in setting off a world war, then the blood sacrifice shall not be made only by the peoples driven into war, but then the Jew of Europe will have met his end. I know that there is criticism of many of the measures now applied to the Jews in the Reich. There are always deliberate attempts to speak again and again of cruelty, harshness, and Etc. This emerges from the reports on the popular mood. I appeal to you before I now continue speaking. First agree with me on a formula. We will have pity on principle only for the German people and for nobody else in the world. Are these the words of an administrator that is only forced to obey orders and that can turn 180 degrees the next year? And if so, does it matter what he really thinks as long as he's still part of the system? The interesting thing is that Frank comes to the conclusion more or less himself that no, no, it doesn't matter. You know, for the record, I did try to oppose Hitler, um I did my best, but I realized that this was of no matter, it was way too little, way too late, I am at false here. And in many ways, that kind of makes him a bigger man, at least than many of these others, even though no doubt he was part of horrendous crimes. But in a way, this is some of the essence with the Nuremberg trial, that even the monsters are humans when you zoom in on them, you know, hard enough. Okay, so this episode has already become become pretty long. Um I will take in two or three more defendants in some detail before we will just list the last ones and see how far we get with them later down the road. As we said, this is a bit of a ragtang band of people being rounded up, and in a perhaps strange move, a radio host called Hans Fritscher is also put together with these other people. So this is kind of a way to try to put the propaganda apparatus on trial since Goebbels has shot himself. So the answer is this Fritscher. Fritscher was one of the famous voices of Nazis, and often showing a kind of lighter sign of things. You know, he's a Nazi DJ kind of person. To be fair to him, he had really never met many of those people on trial before he was put in jail with them, which must have been kind of weird because you have this uh you have this radio host there, and all of a sudden you're locked up with all these big shots from the regime, all the executives, so to speak, people that you've only seen on photographs and and talked about on the radio, and now you're walking around in an exercise yard with them. In one way you can say it's not so strange that Fritz is put on trial, because Streicher is on trial too, right? Uh and to be fair, to to Streicher, he had quote unquote only published super hateful stuff. Uh, why is it different to speak about that in a soft voice on the radio? As we will see, there are plenty of uridical notes here. Another man um that from the beginning was looking kind of hard to pin down to uridical uh stuff was a man I briefly mentioned called Jalmar Schacht. So Schacht actually had himself put in a mild form of Nazi, or not necessarily mild form, I'm not sure, but he was put in the concentration camp from 1944 after really falling afoul with Hitler. So for him, it was basically moving from Nazi captivity to another form of captivity, which he was not super pleased about. Now, Schacht would be taking the position that what the heck am I doing here with these freaks? I hated them before and I hate them now, and why on earth am I sitting here with them in the same sort of dock uh accused for those same things? So Schacht, he was an economist, he was a banker, he was this guy who made the financial wheels spin during the the the 30s before he he he ran a foul with Hitler in 38, but he basically kept the German economy going through the 30s, and the court case against him is also a doozy. And as you are about to discover, uh the trial uh is kind of while it's great they did it, it's problematic for different reasons. And while in many ways this is a huge triumph and an extremely important achievement, um uh taking the circumstances into consideration, there will be controversy and there will be problems, and some problems are more apparent than others, and some will come to the surface much later, but some will be very apparent from the beginning. And one huge blunder that came up early was that the prosecution wanted to have industrialists on trial, and one of the most embarrassing mistakes of the entire trial was to charge Gustav Krupp. Now he was a man in charge of Krupp uh Krop Industries or the Krop Industrial Empire that was the main weapons manufacturer in Nazi Germany, and that had used slave labor uh in the extreme in order to produce weapons, and you're not allowed to work prisoners of war to death in your arms factories. That much had actually already been long established by international law, so it kind of made sense from that point of view to put him on trial, but it was a scandal because Gustav Krupp was more or less paralyzed and had been so for several years. So his son Alfred was in fact the man leading the operation for for most of the war. Basically, they charged the wrong Krupp, and the prosecution realized this and tried to change it from Gustav to Alfred, but was actually denied again early on, demonstrating that in Nuremberg trials there were not going to be a show trial. If the prosecution didn't do stuff by the book, that had real consequences. So Gustav that could hardly speak or walk and was 100% bedridden, he was still technically on trial, even if he, of course, could not be in the courtroom. Whereas Alfred he kind of escaped the most serious charges, although there would be legal action taken taken against him later, and he would uh would serve some time, but we would be free again a few years later. Maybe it could have been different had the prosecution not messed it up. Sometimes it's just fascinating in history how you know individual blunders or random actions might just cling into things. Okay, so now we have representatives of all three of our chosen categories in there. We have the Nazi ideologists such as Rosenberg, Hess, Streicher, to and we have Ribbentrop and Göring and Kartenbrunner, we have the military man where we find Dernitz, Keitel, Jodel, Rader. Then we have overlapping to the more civilian group, we find Albert Speer, Hans Frank, the Bankers Schacht, the radio voice Fritscher, and the old politician Franzon Parpen. And then we have also the wrong industrialist group. So you might now know a little bit about who these main defendants are. And there are, you know, I know there are too many names in this, but for the sake of accuracy, I will just list the rest, and we will see where we get with them later in this series. And the rest are Wilhelm Frick, Minister of the Interior, accused for some of the laws that led both to Nazis taking total power and laws that kicked off the Holocaust. Fritz Saukel, a top Nazi accused for forced slave labor and accused for many such atrocities related to labor, both labor camps and other stuff. Arthur C.'s inquiry. He played an important part in the Anschluss and he was in charge of the occupied Netherlands and accused for various crimes like deportation of Jews and shooting of hostages. He's called the Quisling of the Netherlands, if you remember our very first series on this podcast about Witken Quisling. Then we have Walter Funk, that was the new minister for economics that stepped in when the befuddled Schacht was out of a job. We have Konstantin Borneurath. He was the foreign minister before Ribbentrop, and then he was the so-called Reich Protector in parts of what is now the Czech Republic. Then we have Robert Leigh, a man holding several positions in the Nazi regime, and he was, among other stuff, also so-called Gauleiter, which means a regional leader in the Reich, and a hardcore Hitler devotee. In addition, he was leader for the German Labour Front that replaced all legitimate labor unions. Then at the very last of our list, we have a man called Balder von Schirach. Now he's in one way a little bit interesting because he's a uh for a crucial time he's head of the Hitler Jugend. So basically he's responsible for the indoctrination of hundreds of thousands of German youths, teaching them what uh uh everything about Nazism and that Hitler is the protector of Germany, uh learning them anti-Semitic songs as well as songs with not so subtle title as We Will Invade France and similar. He was also Garliger in Vienna during the war. We'll probably get more into him as we progress. So I hope that you're not all worn out from all these names, from this horror cabinet of Nazis, torturers, murderers, uh, but presumably also some perhaps less guilty, perhaps even innocent, but presumably also a few talented individuals, some that just seems almost destroyed as moral human beings, and others that are actually capable of reflecting on what they've been part of. How will all that play out in court? As we mentioned, some of these might not be found as guilty as others. There will be a lot of courtroom drama to come, there will be some shocking results. And as we progress, you will find out how the trial was set up, more about the controversies surrounding it, the conflicts between the allies. The Soviet Union was, of course, not a democratic country, and um the courts could be instructed to do what Stalin said there. So this is a bit of a culture crash to put it mildly, and the Soviets very much want some of the skeletons from the war remaining in their closets, as well as they are trying to blame one huge massacre they themselves committed on the Germans. But the thing you can ponder until next time is who of which ones will express more regret, who will double down on Nazism, who will be religiously converted and turned over, who will distance themselves completely from the others, who will, sadly I'd say, be mistreated and urinated on and humiliated in captivity, and who will kill themselves. This is a study of how humans may react to some of the most extreme circumstances. And it should be said that that the goal very clearly from the start is to give these men a fair trial and fair treatment, even though there are a couple of unfortunate happenings where guards could not control their anger. Most of the time these men's men were treated with respect in captivity under decent, even though anything but luxurious conditions. I will give you the list of all the accused one last time for you to remember, and if you can resist Googling until next time, ponder who and how the accusations they faced and how they life how their lives in captivity will work out. So one last reminder of who they are. Informal, short description, with some visual details to paint a picture. So we have Hammond Going, pompous, vain, heavy, likes crazy fashioned uniforms with metal, one of the yearly Nazis shot in the tide during the fail coup of 23, head of the Air Force, morphine addict, Alfred Rosenberg, dreamy Nazi ideologist, also from the old days, writes long hard-to-read Nazi philosophy, is later a leader in eastern areas of occupied territories. Joachim von Ribbentrop, foreign minister making dodgy packs with Stalin, former wine salesman, Hitler hype master and cheerleader, not the next Bismarck. Albert Speer, Hitler's architect, is somehow made into leader for armament and war after designing much of Nazi Germany's visual profile. Ernst Kaltenbrunner, scarfed SS and Gestapo leader under Himmler, takes over from one of the worst Nazis ever in Heydrich and does his best to top him. Julius Streicher, the erratic pornography loving editor of Der Stuma, obsessive anti-Semite, fond of conspiracy theories and nude exercising. Generals Keitel and Jodel. Keitel, known as the ultimate yes man to Hitler, laughed at behind his back for being as obedient as a dog, Jodel more a general of the old school, strict, stiff, and dedicated to the army. Admirals Dernitz and Rader, the first, the man in charge of um of the Navy and the Reich. For the week or so between Hitler's death and the final surrender, Rader is head of the Navy before Dernitz, looks sharp in uniforms with golden buttons. Then we have economists Walter Funk that was head of the Reichsbanks financing the war, and his predecessor Jama Schach that had run afoul with Hitler and had himself been placed in prison by the regime, the one looking even more of a banker than the other. Then we have the industrialist Gustav Krupp, but it's the wrong Krupp. This group was half dead already, and his son had done most of what his father was accused for during the war. Then we have the then famous Nazi DJ, Hans Fritscher, that was the radio voice of Nazism. In contrast to the other screaming over the ways, he often had a soothing, soft Nazi voice and actually a rather soft-looking face as well. Then we have politicians such as Hans Frank running things in occupied Poland, looking pretty much like a straight of an American crime gang. Think about Al Capone. Then we have William Frick passing dodgy race law. We have Franz von Papen, the old school aristocrat, helping Hitler to power early on, with the looks of an old distinguished gentleman, the silver fox. We have Robert Leigh, head of the German labor front, another one of those very fond of this tiny, tiny Hitler moustache, just a tiny small dutch straight underneath the nose, not a great look. Then we have Fritz Sarkel, a man fond of slave labor, and we have the Quisling of the Netherlands, an Anschluss culprit, Arthur Seis Inquart. We also have Constantine von Neurat, the foreign minister before the famous wine salesman von Ribbentrop. We have Shadow Fuhrer Martin Bormann Tridena Bessentia, but in reality already dead. And we have the head of the Hitler Hugin and Gaulleiter of Vienna, Balder von Schirach. And then of course we finally have the confused Rudolf Hess that flew on his own to Breton in 1941, only to end up in captivity, a man with a characteristic monobrow and secretary slash typist slash editor from Wine Kampf. So if you want to know how all these fared in captivity among internal intrigue, claims of amnesia, nude exercising, religious conversion, and death, we will get to all that when the second episode in this series is out. Cheers.