[90][91] The bringing of conspiracy charges also slowed the trial, as the same evidence ended up being read out multiple times, when it was relevant to both substantive and conspiracy charges. Friedrich Jeckeln was found guilty and was executed in Riga, Latvia. Efficiency Report for Henry F. Gerecke, 7/1/1945, NAID 6016856. Koch was later tried at Buchenwald and sentenced to life imprisonment. He was found innocent and released but sentenced in 1949 by a German court to nine years in prison. I would have kept my distance from them.. It was only sometime later that I realized in retrospect that I had become part of history, Prestianni said. Upon arriving in the European Theater, Prestianni, a replacement, found himself in the U.S. 1st Infantry Division. [22][23] War crimes already existed in international law as criminal violations of the laws and customs of war. It would be so greatly appreciated. His face had an animal look to it, Prestianni stated. [231], The International Military Tribunal for the Far East (Tokyo Trial) borrowed many of its ideas from the IMT, including all four charges. In the Hostages case, several generals were tried for executing thousands of hostages and prisoners of war, looting, using forced labor, and deporting civilians in the Balkans. Mark Felton Productions. Without fanfare or advance warning, on July 18, 1947, the remaining prisoners at Nuremberg were told to assemble their meager belongings. He died 21 months later on August 15, 1956. Epidemic jaundice experiments High . It was difficult and tiring duty. The toilet was the single source of water. [1] Most of the defendants were also charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity. After the first trial ended in October 1946, the United States held 12 other trials at Nuremberg under the authority of the International Military Tribunal. Procurement is quick and merely requires an . [129] The Soviet prosecution also attempted to fabricate German responsibility for the Katyn massacre, which had in fact been committed by the Soviet Union. The speech was favorably received by the prosecution, the tribunal, the audience, historians, and even the defendants. [206], Many Germans at the time of the trials focused on finding food and shelter; few followed the trial closely. [130] The defense presented evidence of Soviet responsibility,[131] and Katyn was not mentioned in the verdict. When he failed to respond to the periodic shouted challenges from the sergeant-of-the-guard, Prestianni was taken to a hospital in Nuremberg where he remained for two weeks before returning to duty. My mothers cousin was a WAC serving in England during WW2. The two men were deep in the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, Germany, venue for the Nuremberg War Crimes trials of Germany's Nazi leaders. The prisoners were restricted to groups of six to eight, which were strictly segregated from one another. [134] The second film included footage of the liberation of Majdanek and the liberation of Auschwitz and was considered even more disturbing than the American concentration camp film. [121], On 8 February, the Soviet prosecution opened its case with a speech by Rudenko that covered all four prosecution charges, highlighting both aggressive war and the devastation of Eastern Europe[122] and listing many crimes committed by the German occupiers against the Soviet people. During watch on one bitter cold night, Prestianni contracted pneumonia and collapsed, unconscious. The purpose of the armored reinforcement was to prevent any possibility of attack by groups of still-fanatic Nazis. It was a very old, ancient, almost primitive prison, Prestianni recalls. All eight judges participated in the deliberations, but the alternates could not cast a vote. [119] Unlike the British and American prosecution strategy, which focused on using German documents to make their case, the French prosecutors took the perspective of the victims, submitting postwar police reports and calling eleven witnesses. Number 6 was Walther Funk, former minister of economics, and Number 7 was Rudolf Hess, once Hitlers private secretary and deputy fhrer. The seventh series of Ravensbrck trials was held between July 2nd and July 21st, 1948 to hear the cases of Aufseherin accused of maltreatment of prisoners and making selections for the gas chambers. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). 1,148 Nuremberg Trials Photos and Premium High Res Pictures - Getty Images Images Creative Editorial Video Creative Editorial FILTERS CREATIVE EDITORIAL VIDEO 1,148 Nuremberg Trials Premium High Res Photos Browse 1,148 nuremberg trials stock photos and images available, or start a new search to explore more stock photos and images. [67] Former Nazis were allowed to serve as counsel[45] and by mid-November all defendants had lawyers. Back in 1945, his grandfather was stationed in Germany for the infamous Nuremberg trials, during which he got his hands on a pair of sunglasses allegedly worn by a high ranking Nazi. Below are facts about what has been called the greatest trial in history. However, fraternization did occur on a regular basis and, for the most part, went unpunished by the prison administration. Two and a quarter hours before he was to be executed he took poison under the. My dad was a guard at the trials he had a Picture of himself standing behind the prisoners he died at 86 in 2015 the picture is gone and he never wanted to talk about he was a sgt and received a purple heart. [85] The prosecution examined 110,000 captured German documents[40] and entered 4,600 into evidence,[87] along with 30 kilometres (19mi) of film and 25,000 photographs. [158][136] In contrast to the opening prosecution statements, all eight closing statements highlighted the Holocaust; and the French and British prosecutors made this the main charge, as opposed to that of aggression. BAY CITY . First, it rejected the contention that only a state, and not individuals, could be found guilty of war crimes; the tribunal held that crimes of international law are committed by men and that only by punishing individuals who commit such crimes can the provisions of international law be enforced. He was the first of 10 hanged on October 16, 1946. my father david c bergeron was a 1st LT with the guards at the war trials. [169][170] The judges did not agree that the conspiracy extended to anyone who participated in the affairs of the Nazi government, only taking being present at the high-level meetings discussing war plans in 1937 and 1939 as evidence of belonging to the conspiracy. The Estonian Guard Co. 4221 was formed to answer the need to guard the Nuremberg courthouse and the prison where accused Nazi War Criminals were held. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. Neurath, after serving eight years of his 15-year sentence, was spirited away in clandestine fashion, without fanfare, and mysteriously set free in the dead of night on November 6, 1954, because of an alleged eye ailment. Prestianni, the guard contingent, and supervisors under the command of Colonel B.C. Expressed repentance. My father became an MP after the war. The second-level tier housed high-ranking SS (Schutzstaffel) officers and many of the infamous doctors who had conducted ghastly medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners. [132][169] Through a compromise among the judges, the charge of conspiracy was narrowed to a conspiracy to wage aggressive war. Prisoners and guards were forced to wear heavy scarves to ward off the penetrating cold. If one inadvertently looked up at her, she arbitrarily ordered the prisoner shot. Keitel was one of ten defendants hanged in the Palace of Justice in the early morning hours of October 16, 1946. Outside the cellblock complex, a small courtyard with a few scraggly pear trees allowed each prisoner the opportunity to walk for 20 minutes each day. They merely brushed the guilt away with self-serving claims that they were following orders from superiors or perhaps even from Hitler himself in an atmosphere where failure to do so often meant banishment to a concentration camp, Gestapo torture, or even a summary execution. God have mercy on my soul. In an attempt to further depersonalize them, prisoners were designated by numbers rather than by their familial surnames. The Nazi war criminal, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, after execution at Nuremberg. He guarded top Nazis at Nuremberg trials; now he'll share his story By CAROL SMITH, P-I REPORTER Updated Nov 7, 2007 Jack Carver holds a portrait of top-ranking Nazi Hermann Goering, whom he met. Those men who liberated the camps of the Holocau. [108][109], On 12 December, Shawcross gave the opening speech for the British. False accusations of rape, abuse, or other misconduct by guards were commonplace. I need your: Michael R. Prestianni of Framingham, Massachusetts, who later survived months of combat in Korea. I never really got to know him very well during the few months before he was released, commented Prestianni, but at one time he tried to teach me an intricate German card game, but I never could catch on to it. [208][209] Many Germans lumped criminal trials with denazification, internment, and confrontation with the concentration camps, as illegitimate victor's justice and the imposition of collective guilt. . The Ugly Truth About the Nuremberg Tribunals. [60] Conspiracy charges were especially central to the cases against propagandists and industrialists; the former were charged with providing the ideological justification for war and other crimes, while the latter were accused of economic mobilization without which no war would have been possible. 18008 Bothell Everett Hwy SE # F, Bothell, WA 98012. Other Units at Nuremberg were The US Constabulary, the 793rd MP . An anti-Semite to the end, and proclaiming that his death was a victory for world Jewry, Streichers final shouted words as he dropped through the trap door to his death were, This is the Purim Festival for 1946. --. The Nuremberg Trials ended on October 1, 1946. [105] The American prosecutors were not any more effective when presenting documentary evidence on the conspiracy to commit crimes against humanity, and ended up reaching a "saturation point of horror" by their indiscriminate selection and disorganized presentation of evidence without tying it to specific defendants. These visits usually were brief, and participants were separated by a screen. [3] War losses in the Soviet Union alone included 27 million dead, mostly civilians, which was .mw-parser-output .frac{white-space:nowrap}.mw-parser-output .frac .num,.mw-parser-output .frac .den{font-size:80%;line-height:0;vertical-align:super}.mw-parser-output .frac .den{vertical-align:sub}.mw-parser-output .sr-only{border:0;clip:rect(0,0,0,0);height:1px;margin:-1px;overflow:hidden;padding:0;position:absolute;width:1px}17th of the prewar population. Updated on January 22, 2020. There was no physical contact, and all conversation via microphone was closely monitored by a guard standing behind each prisoner. The prisons concrete walls, most of which were more than three feet thick, encased the solitary cell window that offered the prisoners no view of the outside world. Some were gassed. [37] Nineteen states ratified the charter and were admitted as observers. He was another of Prestiannis favorite checker-playing opponents. [201], At the same time as the Nuremberg Charter was finalized, the Allies also signed the Potsdam Agreement, which provided for the mass expulsion of millions of Germans from central and eastern Europe, so that certain acts for which Nazis were convicted at Nuremberg were therefore made an official policy of the Allies. Perhaps the most feared group of accused criminals in the annals of history was a potpourri of personalities who had been associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. In addition to this brass pot I have three skeleton keys to the cells that held the Nazi war criminals, as well as a pair of wooden spoons used by them. We jokingly told him the girls coveted the gifts American soldiers could offer and they had all forgotten his (Schirachs) Nazi National Socialism propaganda indoctrination. Kaltenbrunner had perpetrated extreme barbarism in the extermination of Jews through the planning and execution of the Final Solution. He was proud of his physique, saying he was strong like Germany.. The International Military Tribunal set up by the . The Nuernberg trial records include transcripts of proceedings . Cell doors were never opened when food was distributed. His name was David C. Porter from Pennsylvania. Recently one of our readers in the US contacted us with a photo of a pair of sunglasses that were in a box in his grandfather's garage. Former field marshal Keitel, another prisoner who was eventually executed, gradually alienated himself from the other prisoners. Her last name was Marsico (cant recall her first name} and she was from Montgomery, WV. [102] Jackson's focus was on the aggressive war charge, which he described as the root of the crimes against humanity and of war crimes. [190][191] Also on trial were industrialistsin the Flick trial, the IG Farben trial, and the Krupp trialfor using forced labor, looting property from Nazi victims, and funding SS atrocities. [50][51] Because the Soviet Union expected a show trial, its appointees were familiar with this form. To some, he was demeaned as the foreigner., I didnt like his looks at all. Goring had been given a list of approved lawyers by the US authorities, but rejected every name on it. [43] The United States prosecution believed that Nazism was the product of a German deviation from Western history (the Sonderweg thesis) and sought to correct this deviation with a trial that would serve both retributive and educational purposes. Updates? [138], From March to July 1946, the defense presented its counterarguments. In July 1945 the 98 th set up operations in a hospital in Munich, and several months later Col. Burton C. Andrus, prison commandant at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, requested Gerecke's service. He guarded the prisoners in their cells and also stood guard in the court room. Several were militaristically aloof and looked down upon those they considered to be the mere political element. Emilio "Leo" DiPalma, a World War II veteran and a guard for some of the most notorious Nazi prisoners during the Nuremberg trials, died Wednesday along with several other veterans who. Again, without a word being spoken, the door was slammed shut. In the prison cellblock, each single-occupant cell had two parallel heating pipes beneath a single, heavily scratched, plastic-covered window, the top half of which could be tilted open for limited ventilation. Had I known just who these prisoners were at the time and what they had been accused and convicted of having done, I probably would not have had such a close relationship with them. Of course he was amongst other guards to his left and right. [38], In early 1946, there were a thousand employees from the four countries' delegations in Nuremberg, of which about two-thirds were from the United States. [181] All three acquittals (Papen, Schacht, and Fritzsche) were based on a deadlock between the judges; these acquittals surprised observers. Proposals for how to punish the defeated Nazi leaders ranged from a . [135] The Soviet Union also called two Holocaust survivors as witnesses, Samuel Rajzmana Treblinka survivorand poet Abraham Sutzkever, who eloquently described the murder of tens of thousands of Jews from Vilna, although their testimony did not directly incriminate any of the defendants. These citations refer to documents at "The International Military Tribunal for Germany". [84][85] The American prosecution drew on reports of the Office of Strategic Services and information provided by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the American Jewish Committee. Hitler's friend, favorite architect, and Minister of Armaments from 1942 until the end of the war. (November 1945) Sources: All photos copyright and courtesy of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Four were sentenced to terms of imprisonment ranging from 10 to 20 years: Karl Dnitz, Baldur von Schirach, Albert Speer, and Konstantin von Neurath. Jobs People Learning . [144] Most defendants argued their own insignificance within the Nazi system, but Gring took the opposite approach, presenting himself as Hitler's loyalist and expecting that while he would be executed, the German people would eventually appreciate his loyalty. We needled him by saying his girls wanted to abandon the Fatherland, marry Americans, and emigrate to the United States.. Yale Law School Lillian Goldman Law Library. Raeder was sentenced to life imprisonment but was released for poor health on September 26, 1955. . Uncover the topics related to the Nuremberg trials. Whether the prisoners availed themselves of this privilege was by individual choice. That was until he took his own life by biting down on a cyanide capsule a few hours before he was scheduled to be hanged., Prestianni remembered vividly the night of the executions and Grings suicide. In some cases, this arrogance lingered into their years of incarceration. The night Gring pulled that off on October 16, 1946, now that was quite a night, he recalled. [163] Contrary to the prosecution, the verdict dated the planning of aggression to the 1937 Hossbach Memorandum and not to the founding of the Nazi Party. Schacht had been imprisoned in July 1944, under suspicion of being part of an assassination conspiracy against Hitler. Ribbentrop, Prestianni related, was a man without humor. Courtroom 600 in the Nuremberg Palace of Justice was the site of the famous Nuremberg trials, a series of military tribunals that took place between November 20, 1945 and October 1, 1946. The Nuremberg prison was a Bastille-like affair. Let me have that again, please. [76] Of the 24 men indicted, Martin Bormann was tried in absentia, as the Allies were unaware of his death; Krupp was too ill to stand trial; and Robert Ley committed suicide. Noticeable dislike existed between the prisoners and most of their Soviet guards. Gring was the acknowledged leader among the prisoners. They had a profound affect on my dad, who always said, I would never want to be killed by hanging. Yet, the constables who allegedly murdered my Dad did just that. I do have a photo of my Dad standing behind the German prisoners. Hans Frank, known as the Slayer of Poles, was small, outwardly arrogant, and had a cruel face, Prestianni revealed. As a good military officer I was only following orders, he steadfastly maintained with quiet military bearing. During his three-month tour of duty at Nuremberg prison, Prestianni was assigned to 16 different prisoners. Soviet prosecutors in Nrnberg, Germany brought out Friedrich Paulus and Erich Buschenhagen by surprise as witnesses in the war crimes trials. Call us at (425) 485-6059. [203], In all, 249 journalists were accredited to cover the IMT[40] and 61,854 visitor tickets were issued. Prestianni does not recall Raeder maintaining even a limited friendship with the other prisoners. He considered himself the senior member of the prison military fraternity., Former president of the Reichsbank Hjalmar Schacht was one of three war crimes defendants who were found innocent of all charges against them. All were destined for incarceration, at least during their trials, in two of Germanys most feared prisons: the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg and Spandau Prison on the western outskirts of Berlin. Prompt medical attention was readily available to all prisoners. Tags International Military TribunalNurembergGermanywar crimes trialstrials National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD He has little or no memory of the six remaining defendants, Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach, Labor Front head Robert Ley, Minister of Economics Walther Funk, Plenipotentiary for Labor Deployment Fritz Sauckel, propagandist Hans Fritzsche, or Artur Seys-Inquart, the administrator of the occupied Netherlands. At least 30,000 women died here. [111][112] The British case covered invasions, from that of Poland to that of the Soviet Union, which Shawcross covered in the second part of his speech;[113] these charges took three days to present, with Maxwell Fyfe detailing 15 treaties broken by Germany. [104] On 29 November, the prosecution was unprepared to continue presenting on the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and instead screened Nazi Concentration and Prison Camps. 3 Feb 1946. Frick, one of Hitlers closest advisers during the early years of the Nazi regime, was one of those hanged. Ten condemned Nazi ringleaders died on the gallows in the Nuernberg jail early today but Herman Goering, Adolf . On occasion, guards assigned to courtroom duty asked for reassignment as they became emotionally and physically sickened by the film evidence of war crimes that was presented. One passing recollection I have of Schirach, said Prestianni, was teasing him about how much the prison guards were enjoying his former girls and how pretty we considered them. I had no idea of the magnitude of what they had done. The Nuremberg Trials were a series of trials that occurred in post-World War II Germany to provide a platform for justice against accused Nazi war criminals. Whenever these female prisoners, most of whom were former concentration camp guards, created a problem, we merely, as instructed, called the sergeant-of-the-guard to resolve the situation. He was a rather low key person at Nuremberg who caused the guards no problems at all, said Prestianni. The United States and United Kingdom refused to endorse this proposal, citing the failure of war crimes prosecutions after World War I. Dnitz remained an unrepentant Nazi until his death in 1980. [33], The negotiators decided that the tribunal's permanent seat would be in Berlin, while the trial would be held at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg. [123] The next week, the Soviet prosecution suddenly produced former field marshal Friedrich von Paulus, captured after the Battle of Stalingrad, as a witness and questioned him about the preparations for the invasion of the Soviet Union. The small letters, tav, shin, and zayin in the list of Haman's ten sons (Esther 9), with the combined numerical value of 707, are seen as a "prophetic" code hinting to the future hanging of the ten Nazis convicted at the Nuremberg trials in the year 5707, which Julius Streicher declared as "Purimfest 1946" before he was hanged. [27] Especially the United States wanted to avoid countenancing any rule that would give an international court jurisdiction over a government's treatment of its own citizens. Courtesy Emily Aho Around Memorial Day of 2000, Emily Aho took her then 75-year-old father, Emilio "Leo". [103], Much of the American case focused on the development of the Nazi conspiracy before the outbreak of war. At least Im out here and you are in there, said the former guard. He served in that capacity for three months, bringing him in daily contact with 16 of the 22 accused war criminals. Front row, from left to right: Hermann Gring, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Julius Streicher, Walther Funk, Hjalmar Schacht. Surviving members of the company marked the 56th anniversary of its founding , which took place, according to Toronto's Tommy Tomson, on December 26, 1946. He was usually confrontational and argumentative with the other prisoners. I inherited all of it. [5] Soviet jurist Aron Trainin developed the concept of crimes against peace (waging aggressive war) which would later be central to the proceedings at Nuremberg. Convicted and hanged, Rosenbergs ideology led to an appointment as minister of the occupied eastern territories in 1941. Number 2 was given to Karl Dnitz, former grand admiral of the German Navy. Long live Germany.. The 24 accused were, with respect to each charge, either indicted but not convicted (I), indicted and found guilty (G), or not charged (), as listed below by defendant, charge, and eventual outcome: Gustav was selected for indictment in error, instead of his son Alfried, who ran Krupp during most of the war. [117] The French prosecutors, more than their British or American counterparts, emphasized the guilt of the German people;[118] they barely mentioned the charge of aggressive war and instead focused on forced labor, economic plunder, massacres, and Germanization. My dad, Frederick M. Bencriscutto, was in the field artillery in the 1st Infantry Division during WWII. [240] The IMT is one of the most well-studied trials in history, and it has also been the subject of an abundance of books and scholarly publications, along with motion pictures such as Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) and The Memory of Justice (1976).