The men in Nrnberg's dock
smiled more than they had for years. They were generally more relaxed
and in better health. But most of them knew they would not live to see
another spring in Germany. Some faced it with bravado—like ex-Fighter Pilot Hermann Gring, who
gestured and postured and smiled his dimpled smile. Others tried to
ignore it—like Colonel General Alfred Jodl who, contrary to rules,
hid his head at night under the blankets in his cell. Still others
fought it alternately with cool logic and indignant tantrums—like
Banker Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht. All were puzzled by their fate. Beyond the unhappy realization of having
been on the losing side of a war, they could not quite grasp the
meaning of the court's quiet, determined fairness, or of the hard
working prosecution's meticulous attention to detail. The Nazis had
never done things that way. The rowdies, the Storm Troopers, the policemen among them could easily
see a connection between themselves and the charges against them. But
Alfred Rosenberg could protest that he was just a quiet philosopher,
and Julius Streicher a plain newspaper editor, and Joachim von
Ribbentrop a diplomat who served his country. Nevertheless, as the prosecution told its story to the court, they began
to realize that they were on trial not only for a hundred children
murdered here, a thousand women tortured there , but for their parts in
the Great Conspiracy. Like spokes to a wheel, the prosecution joined
propaganda to atrocity, atrocity to law and finance, and all of these
to the Nazi plan to rule all Europe and lands beyond. Burden of Proof. The U.S. had shouldered the task of formally proving
the existence of this conspiracy. It was a difficult, delicate and
important effort; in all the world's history such a thing had never
been tried before. Bale after bale of documentary evidence, records, diaries, transcripts,
memoranda, all kept and carefully stored by methodical Germans, entered
the record. Here in a single trial was historical evidence which, under
other circumstances, might require 50 years of research to compile. The documents were read slowly, so that the translators could keep pace.
The accused dropped their initial air of boredom, strained to hear
every word. As the relatively “innocent” and “detached” ones, such as
Schacht, were drawn into the story, the defendants began to understand
the scope of the case. There was Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, who sat stony-faced, trying to
maintain the comfortably superior attitude of an officer and a
gentleman. His was the first sobering shock: the prosecution's account
of his pre-Hitler efforts
to rebuild the German Navy in defiance of Versailles. The record read:
German submarines had been constructed in Spain and Finland; crews had
been trained in The Netherlands.
