The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. David Talbot
as Hitler rode by, standing erect in his open car and returning the lusty cheers with his own rather limp salute.
But by 1945, Nuremberg had been reduced to rubble. On January 2, Royal Air Force and U.S. Army Air Force bombers swarmed over the city and destroyed the glories of its medieval center in just one hour. More raids followed in February. And then, in April, U.S. infantry divisions attacked the heavily defended city, finally taking it after fiery building-to-building fighting.
When Rebecca West arrived in Nuremberg that fall to cover the war crimes trial for The New Yorker, she found only a ruined landscape and hordes of scavengers. Making her way over the rubble one day, she was forced to hold her breath against “the double stench of disinfectant and of that which was irredeemably infected, for it concealed 30,000 dead.” There was little food or fuel to buy in the shops—and no money for transactions, only cigarettes. At night, a Stygian blackness fell over the ghost city, relieved only by an eerie constellation of flickering candles in shattered windows.
That November, twenty-one prominent representatives of the Nazi regime that had brought Europe to this ruin faced their own moment of retribution as they sat in the defendants’ galley in Nuremberg’s Palace of Justice, one of the few official buildings left standing in Germany. Hitler and Himmler were already gone, as was the Reich’s master propagandist Joseph Goebbels, escaping the executioner by their own hands. But the Nuremberg prosecutors had managed to assemble a representative spectrum from Hitler’s glory days, including Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, at one time the second-highest-ranking member of the Nazi Party and Hitler’s designated successor. Goering was joined in the dock by dignitaries such as Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s half-mad deputy who had flown to Scotland in 1941 in a wild bid to cut a peace deal with Britain; Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Himmler’s grim, scar-faced executioner, the highest-ranking SS leader to be tried at Nuremberg; Hjalmar Schacht, the brilliant and arrogant international banker who had financed Hitler’s military rise; Albert Speer, the architect of Hitler’s imperial dreams and master of his weapons assembly line; and Julius Streicher, the unhinged politician and publisher who had parlayed his virulent brand of anti-Semitism into a thriving media empire based in Nuremberg.
Nuremberg, which enshrined the legal principle of personal responsibility for one’s actions, even in war, was a showcase of Nazi denial. When Hitler’s wily foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, was asked by an interrogator whether he was aware that millions had been murdered in the Nazi death camps, he had the gall to exclaim, “That … is an astounding thing to me … I can’t imagine that!” It was as if he were suddenly waking from the bad dream of his own life. The defendants had long before abdicated all of their will to the Führer. As defendant Wilhelm Frick, the Reich’s minister of the interior, declared in 1935, “I have no conscience; Adolf Hitler is my conscience.”
The most egotistical defendants, like Goering and Schacht, struck defiant poses. At times, Reichsmarschall Goering mugged for the courtroom, laughing at the prosecutors’ mispronunciation of German names and puffing his cheeks indignantly when they made errors about the Nazi chain of command.
The Reichsmarschall had not even bothered to run from the advancing American troops in the war’s final days, convinced that he would be treated as the eminent representative of a defeated but noble people. His first hours in captivity surely encouraged his optimism, as the U.S. 36th Infantry Division soldiers who came for him at his quarters in southern Bavaria chatted amiably with him and treated the well-fed Nazi to one of their chicken and rice dinners from a tin can. Goering had no idea that he would be tried as a war criminal. At one point he blithely asked an American commander, “Should [I] wear a pistol or my ceremonial dagger when I appear before General Eisenhower?”
But the Reich’s crimes would not be easily dismissed at Nuremberg. The very name of the city conjured not only Nazi triumphalism, but the race laws that Hitler ordered to be written in 1935—laws that, by criminalizing Jewishness, led inexorably to the butchery that followed. The city and its Palace of Justice had long been drenched with blood.
Nine days into the trial, the dead would make a dramatic appearance in the courtroom, conjured in a twenty-two-minute documentary called Death Mills. The documentary was made by Hollywood director Billy Wilder, an Austrian-born Jew who had fled Hitler, who compiled it from scraps of film taken by U.S. Army Signal Corps cameramen during the liberation of several Nazi concentration camps. In his opening statement, Robert Jackson, the chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg, warned the courtroom that the film “will be disgusting and you will say I have robbed you of your sleep.”
But nothing could prepare those who viewed the film for what they would see that day: the piles of shriveled corpses and the walking skeletons that greeted the stunned and sickened American liberators, the mangled remains of someone who had been experimented on by Nazi doctors (“This was a woman,” intoned the narrator), the mounds of human ash to be sold as farm fertilizer, the pyramids of human hair and boxes of gold dental fillings to be sold for wigs and jewelry—the final value extracted from the victims of the Reich. One of the most punishing images was not grisly, but it would stay fixed in the mind’s eye—a close-up shot that lingered on a bin of children’s shoes, well worn from play.
As the film unreeled in the darkened courtroom, low lights were aimed at the defendants so the courtroom could see their reaction. From this point on, there was no place to hide. “The hilarity in the dock suddenly stopped,” noted one courtroom witness. While the terrible images flickered on the screen, one criminal mopped his brow; another swallowed hard, trying to choke back tears. Now one buried his face in his hands, while another began openly weeping. (“These were crocodile tears. They wept for themselves, not for the dead,” observed a British prosecutor.) Only the most arrogant remained impervious, with Schacht, Hitler’s banker, turning his back to the screen, and Goering “trying to brazen it out,” in the words of assistant U.S. prosecutor Telford Taylor.
Afterward, Goering complained that the film had ruined the show he was putting on for the courtroom: “It was such a good afternoon too, until they showed that film. They were reading my telephone conversations on the Austrian [annexation] and everybody was laughing with me. And then they showed that awful film, and it just spoiled everything.”
The Nuremberg trial was a moral milestone, the first time that top government officials were held accountable for crimes against humanity that in earlier days would have likely been dismissed as the natural acts of war. During the war, Allied leaders had issued a “full warning” that Nazi war criminals would be pursued “to the uttermost ends of the earth … in order that justice be done.” But it took a heated debate within Allied diplomatic circles before the international tribunal was finally established in Nuremberg. And even after it was up and running, the process was fraught with political maneuvering.
President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill were so intent on meting out a fitting punishment that they originally favored taking the law into their own hands and summarily shooting Hitler’s top military, ministerial, and party ranks—Churchill estimated the number would be somewhere between fifty and a hundred men. The prime minister thought that once the proper identifications were made, the killing could be completed within six hours. In one of history’s deeper ironies, it was Joseph Stalin who insisted that the Nazi leaders be put on trial, lecturing his Western allies on the merits of due process. “U[ncle]. J[oe]. took an unexpectedly ultra-respectable line,” Churchill wrote Roosevelt after meeting with Stalin in Moscow in October 1944. The Soviet premier told Churchill that “there must be no executions without trial; otherwise the world would say we were afraid to try them.”
Roosevelt finally came around to the idea of an international