WAR CRIMES AND ATROCITIES (True Crime) (27 page)

Part Five: War Crimes Trials

Nuremburg War Crimes Trial

1945–49

The Nuremberg Trials were a series of trials designed to bring the perpetrators of the Nazi holocaust in World War II to justice. Over 100 defendants took the stand in 12 major trials, revealing an extraordinary picture of what Hannah Arendt later called, ‘the banality of evil’. What emerged was that the men and women who committed hideous acts of cruelty on a grand scale in the name of the Third Reich were, in their private lives, often ordinary people: who were responsible, respectable citizens, loving family members and kind neighbours.

The Nuremberg Trials showed that, despite these qualities, the defendants were completely unable to empathize with their victims, or, indeed, regard them as human beings; and that, further, they were able to put aside what moral qualms they may have had by thoroughly identifying with the ideology of Nazism and conforming to what the authorities demanded of them. What also emerged from the trials was just how horrifically cruel, to the point of insanity, the Nazi regime had been: the dreadful stories of what had gone on in the concentration camps traumatized Germany, Europe and the rest of the world, and remind us just how barbaric ‘modern’ civilization continues to be.

H
ORRIFIC EXPERIMENTS

As World War II came to a close, the United States President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, raised the question of how to bring the leaders of the Third Reich to justice as war criminals. The Allies had discovered that atrocities in the concentration camps went beyond the scale of what anyone had imagined, and that the Nazis had been involved in the full-scale genocide of the Jewish people, not only gassing them to death in great numbers but torturing and brutalizing them as well. In addition, people with mental and physical disabilities, homosexuals, communists, gypsies, twins and others, had been abused, as Nazi doctors conducted horrific experiments on them.

Roosevelt felt that the captured Nazi leaders should be tried in a court of law, but there was some disagreement about this. Churchill favoured immediate execution of the Nazi leaders, and Stalin wanted to execute thousands of officers. According to some sources, Roosevelt initially thought that Stalin was joking about this, but soon realized his mistake. The US Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau Jr, then came up with a plan to punish the Germans with a series of crushing economic and other sanctions. However, when Roosevelt died in April 1945, his successor Harry S. Truman rejected the Morgenthau Plan, realizing that it would create problems for the future (as had the previous agreement, The Treaty of Versailles, at the end of World War I), and he went on to devise a plan for a judicial war crimes review with the head of his War Department, Henry L. Stimson.

D
EFEAT AND SUICIDE

In the meantime, several leading Nazi figures had committed suicide once it became clear that their cause was lost. Hitler, as is well known, shot himself in his Berlin bunker when news of the Allied victory reached him, shortly after marrying his mistress Eva Braun, who also killed herself. Heinrich Himmler, the head of the notorious SS and Gestapo, which had been responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews and others, also took his own life, poisoning himself with cyanide when he was captured. Joseph Goebbels, who became chancellor for one day after Hitler’s death, also committed suicide, along with his wife, Magda, who had earlier drugged and poisoned their six children. Martin Bormann, Hitler’s private secretary, escaped; some believe that he died while doing so, others that he went on the run for many years after the war.

B
RUTALITY AND SADISM

Eventually, it was agreed that the war criminal trials should take place in the German city of Nuremberg, at the Palace of Justice. The first of the trials, in which 24 prominent members of the Nazi administration were charged, took place from 20 November, 1945 to 1 October, 1946, and became the most famous, attracting worldwide attention.

During the trial, evidence of the extreme brutality and sadism of the Nazi regime came to light as the prosecution presented their case. In one instance, prosecutors produced a tattooed piece of human skin, which had been tanned for use as a lampshade. Apparently, the wife of the Commandant of Buchenwald, Isle Koch, liked to have the skin of concentration-camp victims made into decorative household objects for her home. She even used the shrunken head of one victim as a paperweight. In another instance, the prosecution read out descriptions of experiments performed by Nazi doctors on camp inmates. For example, Dr Sigmund Rasher forced victims at Dachau to strip naked before being thrown into tanks of iced water, then threw them into hot water to see how rapidly they warmed up. All the while, the victims had thermometers thrust into their rectums. Dr Rasher’s notes also reported how, in most cases, the victims went into convulsions and died during the experiments.

B
URNING LIVE CHILDREN

Inmates who had survived the concentration camps also gave their testimony. In one case, a Frenchwoman, Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, described her ordeal at Auschwitz. According to her, Nazi soldiers had gone through the crowds of inmates, sizing up which were to be gassed and which could be forced to perform slave labour on the basis of their physical condition. In another instance, she described how the Nazi soldiers ran out of gas in the chambers, so begun to hurl live children into the furnaces instead. In total, 33 witnesses and hundreds of exhibits were produced, confirming that the Nazi regime had perpetrated some of the worst crimes in human history, and on a scale much larger than ever before.

One of the most interesting aspects of the trial was the evidence of psychiatrists, such as Leon Goldensohn, who was charged with caring for the mental health of the defendants during the trial and detailed the personality traits of those involved. (His notes describing his conversations with the former Nazi officers were later published as
The Nuremberg Interviews
.) In most cases, the defendants alleged that they knew nothing about the concentration camps and what had been going on in them, although this was hard to believe. For example, Joachim von Ribbentrop alleged that he knew nothing of the concentration camps, even though several of them were located near his homes. In other cases, they reported what they had done without seeming to understand that it was wrong. For instance, Colonel Rudolf Hess, speaking as a defence witness for SS head Ernst Kaltenbrunner, described how in an average day at the concentration camp, 10,000 inmates could be gassed to death. His matter-of-fact tone of voice and demeanour shocked many people in the courtroom to the core.

G
UILT AND REPENTANCE

In some cases, those accused admitted their guilt and expressed repentance for their heinous crimes. For example, Albert Speer, who had been Minister of Armaments, expressed his regret for participating in the genocide, calling the Nazi regime a disaster, and saying, ‘A thousand years will pass and still Germany’s guilt will not have been erased.’ However, there were others, such as Hermann Goering, who refused to accept that they had committed crimes and continued to maintain that what they had done was right. Shortly before his conviction, Goering made a statement saying that it had been his pleasure to work under Hitler, ‘the greatest son which my people produced in a thousand-year history’.

Among those convicted was Martin Bormann, who was tried in his absence and sentenced to death. Hermann Goring, the Head of the Luftwaffe and several sections of the SS, also received the death sentence, but he committed suicide the night before he was due to be executed. Others sentenced to death were: Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Nazi Minister of Foreign Affairs; Wilhelm Frick, the Minister of the Interior and architect of Nazi race laws; Hans Frank, Head of the Poland under its occupation; Wilhelm Keitel, head of the Wehrmacht; Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the highest-ranking SS officer to survive the war; and Julius Streicher, editor of the weekly newspaper,
Der Sturmer,
which had incited hatred and murder of the Jews.

A
FTERMATH

Among those who received a life sentence was Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s former deputy. Hess later died in Spandau Prison at the age of 93, apparently having committed suicide. (However, some believe he was murdered, questioning the motivation and ability of a 93-year-old to hang by an electrical extension cord from the ceiling.) Since his death, Hess has become a cult figure in Neo-Nazi circles and is regarded with reverence by many contemporary anti-Semites.

Trials of former Nazi officials continued in Nuremberg for the next two years, generating an enormous amount of discussion and controversy. The aim of the trials, besides bringing the culprits to justice, was to ensure that mass genocide of the kind that took place in the Third Reich would never happen again – but sadly, that did not turn out to be the case. However, the Nuremberg trials did bring the hideous crimes of the Nazi war leaders to light, ensuring that they could never become war heroes or martyrs in their country and helped to establish racial tolerance and democracy in modern-day Germany.

Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal 

1946–48

The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, formally known as the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) was modelled on the Nuremburg Trials and was convened on 3 May, 1946. The aim was to bring prominent figures in the Japanese government to justice after the defeat of Japan in the World War II. In many people’s view, Japan’s aggressive stance during the war, and its inhumane treatment of prisoners of war and civilians, were comparable with the behaviour of the Nazis during the war, and in some cases worse. For this reason, it was felt by the Allies that the Japanese leaders should pay for what they had done, rather than continue to hold office once the war was over.

The Japanese leaders were tried for a variety of crimes, including starting and waging the war (Class A), committing war crimes (Class B), and committing ‘crimes against humanity’ (Class C). The trials were more controversial than those at Nuremberg; as many commentators pointed out, the Allied powers themselves had, during their history, all been guilty of such crimes themselves, and it was only because they had won the war that they were in a position to accuse the losers. (For example, the Soviet Union was not the subject of an investigation, even though the abuses of Japanese prisoners of war there had been appalling.) The Japanese, moreover, argued that they had not been signatory to the Geneva Convention, which specified the proper treatment of prisoners of war and civilians, and that therefore they had broken no international law. Moreover, they pointed to the fact that the Allies themselves were not on trial for some of the worst episodes of the conflict, such as the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, which killed millions of civilians in the most horrifying way and caused lasting sickness and disease in the population as well as untold ecological damage.

A
 CULTURE OF CRUELTY

However, despite the criticisms, the Tokyo trials went ahead. The Japanese emperor, Hirohito, was not tried, but major figures in his government were charged, including the foreign minister, Baron Hirota Koki, the war minister, General Itagaki Seishiro, and the commander of the Burma Expeditionary Force, General Kimura Heitaro.

The Japanese military had the reputation of being extremely cruel to prisoners of war, and this was indeed borne out by the trial. Japanese military culture was such that soldiers were expected to be unquestioningly obedient to their superiors and to be completely without mercy to their enemies. Since the days of the samurai, Japanese citizens had been taught to be loyal to the emperor, and the Japanese government and people saw it as Japan’s right to expand its power and enlarge its empire. Moreover, the Japanese religion, Shinto, which had been adopted as the state religion in the late 19th century, had further reinforced this ideal of obedience to the emperor, who was held to be divine, a descendent of the sun goddess Amaterasu.

R
EIGN OF TERROR

However, this general cultural influence alone could not explain the sadistic acts of barbarism that took place during World War II in Japan and its occupied territories. What emerged was that during the 1930s, a military dictatorship had taken control in Japan whose reign of terror was similar, in many ways, to that of the Nazis. Japan’s secret police, the Kempeitai, ruled the country by fear, while military personnel were required to beat their subordinates for any perceived failure. The further down the ranks the beatings went, the more severe they got, so that during the war, the prisoners taken captive in the camps received the worst treatment of all.

S
ADISTIC EXPERIMENTS

In such a harsh, militaristic climate, it was hardly surprising that, when Japan joined the Axis powers, their forces would commit dreadful atrocities. However, no one was prepared for the scale of their barbarism, and just as at Nuremberg, the courts were shocked by survivors’ accounts of what had gone on the Japanese prisoner-of-war camps. Besides everyday ill-treatment, such as starvation, there were many instances of murder, torture and rape that went unpunished by senior officers. In addition, the Japanese conducted experiments on the prisoners of war, as had the Germans. In one instance, at Unit 731, victims were taken outside in freezing weather, stripped and soaked in water until they had frozen solid. Their arms were amputated, and then their legs. This, apparently, was so that doctors could discover how frostbite affects the human body. Afterwards, the torso was used for other experiments, including researching the effects of diseases such as plague.

The cruelty of such experiments was hardly credible, but there were also other horror stories: of vivisection without anaesthetic on prisoners, and of using them to test for biological and chemical weapons such as poison gas. There were also many tales of torture, which was used on a daily basis to gather military intelligence. After their ordeal, the torture victims were often executed.

‘
C
OMFORT WOMEN’

As well as this, the Japanese forced thousands of civilian women into prostitution. They set up military brothels in occupied countries and forced local women to become sex slaves, or ‘comfort women’ as they were more politely known. In this way, women from the Philippines, Taiwan, Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore and China became prostitutes in a system that was authorized by the Japanese military officials. However, some commentators allege that this system was not as abusive as it looked, and that many of the women agreed to become prostitutes voluntarily. Whatever the truth, it seems that around 200,000 women became ‘comfort women’ during the period of World War II.

F
ORCED LABOUR

Besides this, many civilians and prisoners of war became victims of forced labour camps, in which they were made to work so hard that they died from disease and exhaustion. According to reliable sources, more than

10 million Chinese civilians were forced to become labourers for the Japanese, under a scheme implemented by the Koa-in (the so-called ‘Japanese Asia Development Board’). Today, it is well known, for instance, that over 100,000 civilians and prisoners of war, including British, Australian, Dutch and American servicemen, died while building the Burma Railway from Thailand to Myanmar, known as the ‘Death Railway’.

T
HE VERDICT

In all, seven officials were hanged at Sugamo Prison, Ikebukuro, on 23 December, 1948, and 16 others were sentenced to life imprisonment. Of those serving life sentences, 13 were paroled in 1955, and one, Shigemitsu Mamoru, went on to become Foreign Minister in a later government.

After the trials, prosecutions of other Japanese officials for war crimes continued, and over 4,000 of them were convicted. The largest single trial was that of 93 Japanese officials, who were accused of perpetrating the Laha Massacre, in which 300 Allied prisoners of war were chosen at random and executed in revenge for defeat in battle. In 1946, an Australian tribunal passed the death sentence on Captain Kunito Hatakeyama, who had been in direct command of the massacres, and he was hanged for his crime.

C
OMPENSATION TO VICTIMS

While the Japanese government has never fully recognized its legal and moral responsibility for the crimes of World War II, individual prime ministers such as Tomiichi Murayama and Kakuei Tanaka have offered their apologies for the suffering caused by the Japanese military in the past, especially as regards their treatment of the Chinese. However, many political commentators feel that these apologies have not gone far enough, and that Japan should take the example of Chancellor Willy Brandt, the German premier, who in 1970 knelt down at a monument to the victims of the Warsaw Ghetto.

No Japanese leader has so far agreed to make this kind of apology. Instead, in its defence, the Japanese government points to the monetary compensation it has made to the victims of war crimes, in compliance with the Potsdam Declaration of 1945, which specified the terms of Japan’s surrender to the Allies. They also point to the setting up of the Asian Women’s Fund in 1995, an organization that aims to compensate women forced into prostitution during World War II.

T
HE ROLE OF 
H
IROHITO

Interestingly, although there is a general view in Europe and the USA that the Japanese refuse to speak about what happened during the war, in recent years there has been a great deal of debate about the issue of war crimes within the country. The view that the Japanese military were only acting in the way they had been trained to do, and were part of a highly authoritarian culture that demanded cruelty towards the enemy as a mark of obedience and loyalty to the emperor, has come under attack. Many critics, both on the left and right, now argue that the Japanese leaders of the time acted in a criminal manner, against the moral and legal constraints of the time, and that the Allies were right to pursue the matter in the courts after the war.

The actions of Emperor Hirohito during World War II have also come under scrutiny, with some commentators arguing that he should have abdicated. Others believe that it was not his moral duty to do so, and that as a figurehead, he was forced to abide by decisions of his ministers. According to the majority view, the real culpability for the war crimes lay with the leading figures in the Japanese Cabinet and military High Command, most of whom were tried and convicted at the Tokyo trials.