WAR CRIMES: Day of Judgment

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The men in Nürnberg'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 Göring, 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 (the French and Russians would take up these charges later in the trial), 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 (compiled from German Navy archives) of his pre-Hitler (1932) 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.