Chapter 37 Chapter 8: When the Dust Settled and Be Tried (Nuremberg Trial and Tokyo Trial)

With the surrender of Japan, the smoke of World War II cleared. This unprecedented grand war is different from the past. It is not as simple as bullying the weak and using violence to control violence. This war has noble justice.At the same time, the defeated Germany, Italy, and Japan did not simply use violence, but had rich theoretical foundations: Italian dictator Mussolini pioneered fascism, Nazi Germany’s Hitler and Japanese militarists all enriched it and made it their own. To develop and penetrate the hearts of the people.The people of these three countries either firmly believe that they are superior to others, or believe that they can conquer the world on behalf of the country, and they will do whatever it takes to achieve their goals.Therefore, at the end of this war, how to deal with those criminals who provoked the war is a test of the collective wisdom of mankind.

At the end of the European War, there was a fierce debate within the Allies about how to deal with the heinous Nazis.The Soviets believed that all Germans who wore Nazi uniforms should be shot or at least sent to Siberia for hard labor; as for the SS, burial alive might be a good idea.Even Britain, with a long tradition of the rule of law, suggested that the main war criminals of Nazi Germany should be executed without trial.The British government believes that when these people planned to launch World War II, they issued a guilty verdict and served an execution order for themselves. However, US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson insisted that an open, fair and impartial trial must be held.He pointed out: "If you think that the victor can execute a person arbitrarily without trial, then there is no need for courts and trials, and people will lose faith and respect for the law, because the purpose of the establishment of the court was originally It is to make people guilty.” At the end of the argument, the eloquent judge won, and those who advocated an open, fair, and just trial won.People believe that there is no end to using violence to control violence. It may be more effective to use law to convict criminals, cultivate fairness and justice, and use rationality to consolidate peace.

According to the "Declaration on the Responsibility of Hitlerites for Their Crimes" adopted by the foreign ministers of the Soviet Union, the United States, and the United Kingdom in Moscow in October 1943, war criminals "will be sent back to the place where they committed crimes, and the people they persecuted will be punished." trial". In February 1945, the German Empire was about to collapse, and the communiqué of the Yalta Conference reiterated the purpose of punishing all war criminals fairly and promptly. From July to August 1945, after the end of the European War, the "Potsdam Conference Protocol" signed by the Soviet Union, the United States, and the United Kingdom included provisions for the establishment of military courts to try war criminals, and the first international court in history was born.

The Nuremberg International Military Tribunal, which tried Nazi war criminals, was in session just six months before the end of World War II.In Germany at that time, although the Nazis had been defeated, the people had not yet woken up from more than ten years of mental control and theoretical poisoning.Many Nazi Party diehards are hiding in the sea of ​​people, still just around the corner, trying to make a comeback.The spiritual legacy of the Nazis still shines in the unyielding eyes of German children, hidden in the ideology of some German people, or put on the cloak of nationalism.Ordinary German soldiers believed that although they participated in the war, they were only fulfilling their obligations to defend the motherland as a German citizen, and it was not a crime.

In this case, showing criminal evidence in court, debating right and wrong, and making a fair judgment can clarify the facts and identify the crime. At 10 a.m. on November 20, 1945, three groups of defense lawyers stepped out of the elevator one after another and filed into the well-prepared International Court of Justice - Hall 600 in Nuremberg.This was once the place where the Nazi Party held a party congress, and it has a profound meaning as a trial site. Nuremberg is a city where many German emperors were born and lived in the Middle Ages. It has a strong historical atmosphere and is also one of the central cities directly under the emperor of the "Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation".Because of this, the Nazi Party tried to use the historical tradition of Nuremberg to smear itself with a layer of hypocritical gold. In 1933, Hitler designated Nuremberg as the "Nazi Party Congress Site". Every year, 500,000 Nazi party members come to Nuremberg from all over Germany, which is a wonderful scene.The notorious anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws were enacted here, setting off a bloodbath of ethnic cleansing.

There was a joke in which a child introduced his family: "My father was a SA, my elder brother was in the SS, my second brother joined the Hitler Youth, my mother was a member of the National Socialist Women's Federation, and I joined the The League of German Girls." Someone asked: "That's right, so can you still meet after so much work?" The child replied: "Oh, of course, we can meet every year at the Nuremberg Party Congress." Now, indeed, those who regularly attended party congresses met again in Nuremberg.However, they appeared in the dock as war criminals.In the trial seat, four judges from different victorious countries sat there.Judges in the United States, Britain and France all wore black robes, while those in the Soviet Union wore brown military uniforms.In the courtroom, heavy gray velvet curtains hung down to cover the Nuremberg autumn skyline, and rows of wooden benches were painted a dark wood color.The atmosphere in which the courtroom unfolded before the world was, as Judge Jackson described it—a melancholy solemnity.

Twenty-one Nazi German defendants sat in the dock.The gallery was packed and 250 reporters scribbled notes as the world watched the trial. Before the Nuremberg trials began, Hitler and several other senior Nazi leaders committed suicide and disappeared. When it came time for the trial, 21 of the 23 war criminals identified by the Allies remained on trial.One of them was seriously ill and could not appear in court. In the end, 20 people sat in the dock. After the court session, the chief prosecutor and U.S. Justice Jackson first read the general indictment. Justice Jackson's court statement is one of the most important in history.By the next morning, his statement was in newspapers around the world.He said: "The crimes we are trying to bring to justice were once carefully planned, extremely vicious, and destructive. Human civilization cannot tolerate them being ignored without trial, let alone their resurgence."

The indictment read out by Jackson is convincing that 3,000 Jews were mass murdered because they were suspected of carrying "Bolshevik leaflets"; The Jews rushed to the shabby house and the sewer, and then carried out the explosion. Immediately afterwards, the prosecution representatives from Britain, France, the Soviet Union and other countries spoke one after another. The facts listed in the indictment were unheard of by the people sitting in the auditorium, which made people shudder. The court also heard testimony from survivors during the trial and screened documentaries documenting the horrors of the concentration camps.The organized and brutal killings by the Nazis were so shocking that some in the courtroom began to cry.

Judge Jackson's voice resounded in the courtroom. The facts listed in the indictment shocked the listeners, and the evidence presented in the courtroom made the audience cry.Among the 21 war criminals identified by the Allies, the Nazi Reichsmarshal is considered to be the most sinful. He is the founder of the notorious Nazi secret police organization - "Gestapo". "You have committed the crime of aggression." Justice Jackson's resounding voice resounded through the courtroom. "I am not guilty." Goering, the number two Nazi, shouted.Göring denies all charges against him, saying that he has no control over what the Nazis did, in particular that he is an anti-Semite, and that he has participated in these atrocities.

During the trial, however, Albert Speer, who was in charge of communications with war criminals, reported that, after the testimony of the Hungarian Jewish survivors, he heard Goering remark casually: "My God, how are there still Jews left? I Thought we'd cleared them out, it looks like some have slipped away again." When showing the evidence, on one occasion, the Soviet staff turned the slide down, with the tank tracks facing up and the barrel facing down.Göring laughed, not missing an opportunity to laugh at the Soviets. Although it is too childish for Goering to do this, is there nothing for the Soviets to be ridiculed?Of course there is!During the Nuremberg Trials, the Soviets tried to put the responsibility for the "Katyn Massacre" on Nazi Germany, and it was settled once and for all.It's a long story.

On March 14, 1943, Nazi Germany broadcast a shocking news through Berlin Radio, which shocked the whole world like a thunderbolt.The German army discovered eight huge graves in the Katyn Forest in the Smolensk region of the Soviet Union, which contained the bodies of thousands of Polish officers dressed in Polish officer uniforms, wearing epaulets and medals.The deceased were all shot into the back of the head by pistol bullets and pierced through the forehead to death.From the analysis of the condition of the corpses and the dates of the newspapers in their pockets, it can be concluded that these Polish officers were systematically killed by the Soviets in the spring of 1940. On April 14, 1943, at the invitation of the German authorities, the Polish Red Cross sent a five-member team to Katyn Forest to conduct an in-depth and detailed investigation, and wrote the "Secret Report of the Polish Red Cross".The findings of the report are exactly the same as those of Nazi Germany. However, on April 15, 1943, the Soviet government issued a statement through Moscow Radio, accusing Germany of being a "dirty fantasy, a shameless fabrication. The Katyn Forest Massacre was committed by Nazi Germany in the summer of 1941. Blame it on the Soviet Union". This case was brought up again in Nuremberg.The most heated debate at the Nuremberg Tribunal was whether the Soviets or Nazi Germany massacred some 22,000 Polish military officers and elites in Katyn.At that time, Stalin instructed Soviet general Roman Rudenko to file a case in court: "The massacre of Polish prisoners of war in the Katyn Forest near Smolensk by the German fascist invaders is one of the major war crimes for which the German fascists are primarily responsible. One." At that time, Germany, as a defeated country, could not argue with anything and almost became a scapegoat.The charge was eventually dismissed by US and British judges for lack of convincing evidence.The Nazi leaders Goering and Ribbentrop insisted that the Soviets massacred Polish prisoners of war in Katyn, but they were not found by the court.The Nuremberg Tribunal finally failed to reach a conclusion on who created the "Katyn Massacre", which made this international unsolved case even more bizarre and mysterious.Such a brutal and bloody thing, even if the devil did it, he would definitely not admit it! However, people have not forgotten to track and cherish this tragedy.The "Katyn Cemetery" is specially set up in the Warsaw Cemetery.Many countries in the world have established the "Katyn Massacre Monument" to express their sympathy for the Poles and commemorate the "Katyn Massacre".The Poles have been working hard to persist in the investigation and seek the truth of the "Katyn tragedy".It was not until 1985, after Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Party and the country, that the Soviet Union and Poland formed a joint investigation team composed of free historians to conduct an in-depth and detailed investigation on the "Katyn Massacre". Slowly reveal the "Katyn tragedy" happened. After Nazi Germany invaded Poland, the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland in accordance with the Soviet-German secret treaty. On September 18, the commander-in-chief of the Polish army, Marshal Rez Simigwe, and the Soviet army reached an agreement after more than 10 hours of negotiations. After reaching an agreement, he issued an order to the Polish army: The Soviet Union is not a belligerent country, so do not resist.The vast majority of the Polish army carried out this order, and then about 250,000 Polish officers and elites from all walks of life were exiled to the Soviet Union.As soon as these people arrived in the Soviet Union, they immediately became prisoners of war, lost their personal freedom stipulated in the Soviet-Polish agreement, and were handed over to the prisoner-of-war camp of the Ministry of Internal Affairs led by Beria.In the next step, the Soviet Union was determined to eliminate the "backbone" forces among these prisoners of war who opposed the division of Poland by the Soviet Union and Germany.By December 1939, about 22,000 Polish military officers, professors, lawyers, doctors, civil servants and other elites from all walks of life were screened out one by one by the Prisoner of War Bureau of the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs. On March 5, 1940, Beria, the People's Commissar of Internal Affairs (Minister) of the Soviet Union submitted a plan to Stalin and the Central Committee to shoot all the 22,000 Poles.Stalin and four other central leaders immediately signed their own signatures and approved the secret massacre plan.Thus, the "Katyn tragedy" happened. From April 4, 1940, people in the Polish prisoner-of-war camp were taken into cars every day and secretly escorted to the Katyn Forest, Kalinin and Zagrov, 19 kilometers west of Smolensk, where the execution took place.The shooting executions started at night and continued until the early hours of the next day.During the execution, a blower was used to make a loud noise to cover up the gunshots.The executions were carried out with German-made 7.65mm pistols or revolvers specially shipped from Moscow, which are special pistols for the Gestapo.The prisoner was handcuffed after his watch and ring were removed, and taken into a small room closed with felt, where he was shot dead from the back of the head.The body was immediately moved out from the opposite door, and the next prisoner was brought in.The bodies of the victims were buried in Katyn Forest, Kalinin and Chargrove respectively, and each grave was buried with corpses overlapping up to 12 layers. Until December 23, 1991, when Soviet President Gorbachev handed over power to Russian Federation President Yeltsin, they opened a special top-secret file of the Political Bureau of the CPSU Central Committee printed with "Never Open".After opening the seal and seeing the document, Gorbachev said: "Our hair stands on end", "We have no right to hide the truth from the Polish people, and we immediately thought that we should inform the Polish side regardless of the consequences." On October 4, 1992, Yeltsin sent a special envoy to Poland to hand over a copy of this top-secret archive of the Political Bureau of the CPSU Central Committee to Poland.Polish President Lech Wałęsa took over the secret document and said hoarsely: "I feel trembling all over." In the secret document was the "Decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) on March 5, 1940" signed by Stalin and others. . Who should confess the crime, if you do not want to confess, history will help you to confess.Justice is sometimes late, but never absent. The Nuremberg Trials lasted 218 days and closed on October 1, 1946 after 216 sessions.The court pronounced sentences on 22 of the 24 defendants in Nazi Germany: There were 12 people who were sentenced to hang: Goering, the number two Nazi figure, Ribbentrop, the foreign minister, Field Marshal Keitel, Karten Bruner, the head of the Central Security Bureau, Rosenberg, the ideological leader of the Nazi Party and the Minister of Eastern Occupied Areas, Frank, the judicial leader of the Nazi Party and the governor of the Polish occupied area; SS General Schaukel, Governor-General of Austria Inquart. Among them, the only one who was sentenced to hang in absentia was Martin Bormann, who served as Party Secretary of the Nazi Party after Hitler's death.As the Secretary-General of the Nazi Party and Hitler's private secretary, Bormann held the purse of the Nazi Party, known as the "Shadow of the Führer".In the later period of Hitler's regime, the power was growing day by day.Bowman has always been known for being scheming, good at infighting, framed many people, and has a bad relationship with Goering.It is said that Marshal Rommel was involved in the assassination of Hitler, and he was also related.Regarding the cause of Borman's death, there is a saying that Borman left the Chancellery after Hitler committed suicide, was blocked by Soviet artillery fire, and committed suicide by taking poison together with Hitler's personal doctor Stumpfinger in despair. Their remains were discovered in 1972 while laying underground pipelines at West Berlin Central Station. In addition to the war criminals sentenced to hang, Hitler's second heir Hess and three others were sentenced to life imprisonment, two were sentenced to 20 years in prison, one was sentenced to 15 years in prison, and Hitler's designated successor, Admiral Dönitz, was sentenced to 10 years in prison. In addition, Papen, the first deputy prime minister of Nazi Germany, Schacht, president of the National Bank and member of the Plenipotentiary Committee on War Economy, and Fritsch, director of the domestic news department of the Ministry of Propaganda, were acquitted and released. After the Nuremberg Tribunal closed, six defendants, including Ribbentrop, Frank, Inquart, and Dönitz, successively appealed for a commutation of their sentences.Goering also appealed, asking for the hanging to be shot.All appeals were dismissed and the original judgment was upheld.It is worth mentioning that the defendant Raeder's appeal to change his life sentence to shooting was also rejected. In the early hours of October 16, 1946, at Nuremberg Prison, the executions of Nazi war criminals sentenced to be hanged began. At this time, Goering played tricks again.Two hours before his execution, he deceived the guards and committed suicide by swallowing potassium cyanide.Where Goering obtained this deadly poison is still unknown.In any case, Göring did not end well. In the end, 10 Nazi Class A war criminals were hanged.When these war criminals went to the gallows, none of them shouted "Heil Hitler." Even the most fanatical Nazi war criminals could at most say: I don't deserve to die, I don't plead guilty. When the Nazi war criminal Frank went to the gallows, he said that a thousand years is easy to pass, but Germany's sins are hard to erase. For Germany, the Nuremberg trials were the end of a dark history and the beginning of a clean break with its Nazi past.From then on, the German nation began to reflect on history. The Nazi Party, the SS, and the Gestapo were all declared criminal organisations.If you were in the SS, you belonged to a criminal organization, and even if you quit now, you were a member of a criminal organization.Most Nazi war criminals have realized their mistakes.When the Japanese war criminals went to the gallows, they shouted "Long live the Great Japanese Empire" and "Long live His Majesty the Emperor", and one person led them. Everyone shouted three times in unison, and then went to the gallows.That is to say, even the German Nazi war criminals repented when they were dying, but the Japanese war criminals did not plead guilty. After the war, the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and France implemented divisional occupation of Germany. The Soviet-occupied area became the later Democratic Germany, and the British, French, and American-occupied areas became the later Federal Germany.The first chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, Mr. Adenauer, was released from the concentration camp by the Allied forces.The old man has been a German politician since the 1920s and 1930s and the Weimar Republic, and he opposed the Nazis.As soon as the Nazi Party came to power, he went to a concentration camp.This old man can really live, he has not been tortured to death for so many years.After he was released, he hated the Nazis more than the Soviets. How far was Germany de-Nazified?In Germany, it is illegal to buy or sell souvenirs from the Third Reich era.You bought a German Iron Cross from a German veteran. Either you admire the Nazis, or you think this medal is very beautiful.You are taken out of the customs, you are lucky, you will be found out, and you will be sentenced if you fail.Public officials who spread Nazi-related remarks and salute Nazis in public will be sentenced to prison. It can be seen that the Germans have a very obvious sense of repentance, which is why Brandt knelt down to the Holocaust Memorial. On December 7, 1970, Chancellor Brandt of the Federal Republic of Germany visited Poland and knelt down at the Holocaust Memorial.In the drizzle, no one held an umbrella for him, so he just knelt there.The victims on the monument were not killed by Brandt, he was a staunch anti-Nazi fighter.However, he said, I feel remorse for the crimes committed by the German nation. Although I did not kill these people, they were killed by my compatriots, so I want to repent.At that time, the world press commented that when Brandt knelt down, the Germans stood up. Therefore, Germany's reflection is very thorough and remarkable.