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After the war…
LO: What happened
to the Germany and
the leading Nazis
after the war?
Hess
Goering
The Nuremburg Trials
• The first trials at Nuremberg were for 24 senior Nazis.
• The International Military Tribunal formulated four indictments,
all or some of which were made against all 24 men. The four
indictments were:
• Count 1 - CONSPIRACY to commit crimes alleged in the next
three counts.
Count 2 - CRIMES AGAINST PEACE including planning,
preparing, starting, or waging aggressive war.
Count 3 - WAR CRIMES including violations of laws or customs
of war.
Count 4 - CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY including murder,
extermination, enslavement, persecution on political or racial
grounds, involuntary deportment, and inhumane acts against
civilian populations.
Herman Goering – Prisoner No 1
Captured shortly after end of the
war with large quantities of his
looted artworks.
He insisted that everything they
had done was out of loyalty to
Germany and Hitler.
He had a larger than life
personality and emerged as the
leader of the other prisoners
He maintained his loyalty to Hitler
until the end.
He was found guilty of all the
charges and sentences to death.
Albert Speer – the ‘Decent Nazi’
Despite the reservations of his
defence lawyer, Speer decided
that his best defence was to admit
his share of responsibility for the
crimes of the regime and to
distance himself from Hitler, a
man who Speer freely admitted
had once held him in thrall like all
the rest.
Just before the trial opened he
sent a four-page letter reminding
the authorities of how useful and
cooperative he had been in giving
them information about the Nazis
Speer dramatically revealed early in
the trial that at the very end of the war
he had tried to find a way to
assassinate Hitler by pouring poison
gas into his underground bunker. The
plot was abortive, but it again
presented Speer to the prosecution as
someone different fromDo
the you
rest ofthink
the
defendants
Speer’s
When Speer was cross-examined
sentence he
was
got off more lightly than others. At the
end of the trial, even though fair?
he had
been responsible for the mass
exploitation of forced foreign labour,
he was given a 20-year sentence. The
man who supplied the labour, Fritz
Sauckel, was executed.
The forgetful Rudolf Hess
The most bizarre choice to stand
trial was Hitler's deputy, Rudolf
Hess.
There was no doubt that he had
been a key figure in organising
and running the party in the
1920s and early 1930s. He it was
who took down the dictated draft
of Hitler's 'Mein Kampf'. But from
the mid-1930s he became a more
marginal political figure - 'one of
the great cranks of the Third
Reich', in the words of Speer.
On the night of May 10th 1941, Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess, had
bailed out of his aircraftafter a five hour, 900 mile flight and
parachuted into a field at Floors farm, near the village of
Eaglesham.
He surrendered to a ploughman named David McClean, armed
with a pitchfork and told him in English, "I have an important
message for the Duke of Hamilton". Hess was then offered tea at
McClean's cottage before being taken into custody by the local
Home Guard.
The official explanation
for this was that he had
gone mad.
Authors believe that he
was on a mission to
meet the Duke of
Hamilton, whom he met
at the 1936 Berlin
Olympics, to negotiate
a treaty that would
allow Germany to
concentrate on the
invasion of Russia.
Conspiracy Theories
• Did Hitler know about it in advance?
• Did the British also know of it, and was it
part of a planned operation with elements of
Britain's secret service to actively
undermine Churchill and promote a
negotiated peace?
• Was the man who flew to Britain and later
imprisoned in Spandau the real Rudolf Hess
at all, or a double?
During his years of
British imprisonment
1941-45, Hess
displayed increasingly
unstable behaviour
and developed a
paranoid obsession
that his food was
being poisoned.
In 1945, he was
returned to Germany
to stand trial at
Nuremberg.
• In the courtroom, he suffered from spells of
disorientation, staring off vacantly into
space and for a time claimed to have
amnesia. In periods of lucidity he continued
to display loyalty to Hitler, ending with his
final speech –
• "It was granted me for many years to live
and work under the greatest son whom my
nation has brought forth in the thousand
years of its history… I regret nothing. If I
were standing once more at the beginning I
should act once again as I did then, even if I
knew that at the end I should be burnt at the
stake…"
Life Imprisonment
• In spite of his mental condition he was
sentenced to life in prison. The Soviets
blocked all attempts at early release. He
served his sentence in Spandau prison
in Berlin, where from 1966 he was the
sole inmate. Officially Hess died by
suicide on 17th July 1987 aged 93, the
last of the prisoners to be tried at
Nuremberg.
More conspiracy theories!
It appears that Hess
committed suicide
by hanging himself.
However, there are
those who believe
that he was far too
old and frail to do
this by himself and
that Hess may have
received some
assistance from
others. Nothing has
ever been proven.
The leading Nazis had been dealt with but what about
the rest of the Germans who had gone along with
Hitler’s plans?
• Denazification:
• an Allied initiative to rid
German and Austrian
society, culture, press,
and politics of any
remnants of the Nazi
regime.
• Denazification also
refers to the
removal of the
physical symbols
of the Nazi regime.
For example, in
1957 the German
government reissued World War
II Iron Cross
medals without the
swastika in the
centre.
Swastika removed
Iron Curtain –
A term used by
Winston Churchill
to describe the
separating of
Those communist
lands of East
Europe from the
West.
Improve your knowledge
• The Russians took very high casualties to
capture Berlin in May 1945. They spent the
early occupation trying to take over all zones
of the city but were stopped by German
democrats such as Willy Brandt and Konrad
Adenauer. Reluctantly the Russians had to
admit the Americans, French and British to
their respective zones.
• Us zone:
• Every adult had to fill out
a form, called a
Fragebogen, detailing his
or her past
• The courts relied on
statements from other
people regarding the
accused's involvement in
National Socialism.
• By early 1947, the Allies
held 90,000 Nazis in
detention; another
1,900,000 were forbidden
to work as anything but
manual labourers
• The Information Control Division of the US Army
had by July 1946 taken control of 37 German
newspapers, six radio stations, 314 theatres, 642
cinemas, 101 magazines, 237 book publishers, and
7,384 book dealers and printers.
• On May 13, 1946 the Allied Control Council issued a
directive for the confiscation on all media that could
contribute to Nazism. As a consequence a list was
drawn up of over 30,000 book titles, ranging from
school textbooks to poetry, which were then banned.
All copies of books on the list were confiscated and
destroyed; the possession of a book on the list was
made a punishable offence. All the millions of copies
of these books were to be confiscated and destroyed.
The representative of the Military Directorate admitted
that the order was in principle no different from the
Nazi book burnings.
• In the end the
denazification
program was
recognized as
"counterproductive
witch hunt" and a
failure by US
authorities, and
they abandoned
and even reversed
the program in
1951