Victor’s justice was never better served than this date in 1946, when the brass of Third Reich hung for crimes against humanity during the late World War II.
[audio:http://www.stelzriede.com/ms/mus/nuremexe.mp3](From this page of original period audio files.)
The landmark legal proceeding* is covered well enough in many other sources for this humble venue to break new ground.
Apart from trailblazing international law, the trial was notable for the gut-punching film of German atrocities; this relatively novel piece of evidence is available for perusal thanks to the magic of the Internet. Caution: Strong stuff. An hour’s worth of Nazi atrocities.The climactic hangings in the predawn hours this day in Nuremberg were conducted by an American hangman who used the American standard drop rather than the British table calibrated for efficacious neck-snapping. As a result, at least some hangings were botched strangulation jobs, a circumstance which has occasionally attracted charges of intentional barbarism.
Media eyewitness Kingsbury Smith’s taut report of the night’s executions (well worth the full read) described just such an ugly end for propagandist Julius Streicher.
At that instant the trap opened with a loud bang. He went down kicking. When the rope snapped taut with the body swinging wildly, groans could be heard from within the concealed interior of the scaffold. Finally, the hangman, who had descended from the gallows platform, lifted the black canvas curtain and went inside. Something happened that put a stop to the groans and brought the rope to a standstill. After it was over I was not in the mood to ask what he did, but I assume that he grabbed the swinging body of and pulled down on it. We were all of the opinion that Streicher had strangled.
There were in all 12 condemned to death at Nuremberg; all hanged this day except Martin Bormann (condemned in absentia; it was only years later that his death during the Nazi regime’s 1945 Gotterdammerung was established) and Hermann Goering (who cheated the executioner with a cyanide capsule two hours before hanging). The ten to die this day were:
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Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, whose name adorns Nazi Germany’s shortlived truce with Stalin.
Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Reichskommissar of the occupied Netherlands.
Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, a career military man whose “only following orders” defense was rejected by the tribunal.
Waffen-SS General Ernst Kaltenbrunner.
Nazi intellectual Alfred Rosenberg.
Gauleiter of Poland Hans Frank, notable for his postwar conversion to Catholicism and profession that “a thousand years will pass and still Germany’s guilt will not have been erased.”
Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick.
Slave labor organizer Fritz Sauckel.
General Alfred Jodl, who signed the German capitulation in May 1945 and was posthumously acquitted of his war crimes charges by a German court.
Streicher, whose anti-Semitic frothing on the scaffold was the only overtly Nazi display of the night.
* Its resultant Nuremberg Principles comprise a lofty articulation of principles whose actual application, as Noam Chomsky has observed, would have meant that “every post-war American president would have been hanged.”
On this day..
- 1817: Manuel Piar, Bolivarian general
- 1814: Juan Antonio Caro de Boesi
- 1752: William Jillet, Daniel Johnson, and David Smith
- 1771: Mary Jones, hanged for shoplifting
- 1555: Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, Oxford martyrs
- 1730: Nevsehirli Damat Ibrahim Pasha, Tulip Era Grand Vizier
- 1935: George Criner, "anything can happen to anybody"
- 1946: Neville Heath, torture-killer
- 1891: William Rose
- 1675: Samuel Guile, Puritan rapist
- 1975: The Balibo Five, before the invasion of East Timor
- 1793: Marie Antoinette
We are two 17 year old students from the Netherlands who are currently working on a project regarding the final moments of NSB leader Anton Mussert. The final moments of Nazis are very useful for our project, considering they might reflect what a trial used to be like back in the 40s. Does anyone know wether the Nazis shown in this video were given the opportunity to say any ‘last words’ right before their execution? Or did they get the chance to do that during the trial? Or not at all? Feel free to reply! Thanks in advance.
They did. http://www.vaguelyinteresting.co.uk/last-words-from-nuremburg/
The Allies had committed the same war crimes as the Axis.
“* Its resultant Nuremberg Principles comprise a lofty articulation of principles whose actual application, as Noam Chomsky has observed, would have meant that “every post-war American president would have been hanged.””
Chomsky the communist jackass.
I just reviewed the NP and fail to find ANYTHING that an American President could be indicted for. While we have made many mistakes, WE HAVE NOT INTENTIONALLY WIPED OUT TOWNS OR COUNTRIES nor waged war against civilians etc – it is COMMUNISTS and their JIHADIST ALLIES who hide and fight from within civilian areas.
DEATH TO NAZIS, COMMUNISTS AND JIIHADIS
Actually Jay and Kevin since the crimes were among other things: Waging Wars of Aggression and Crime against the peace I’d suggest that all American presidents since at least Truman have been guilty of just that.
On the other hand don’t take my word for it ask Telford Taylor, who was chief prosecutor in all the trails after the one commemorated here.
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Operation Paperclip: US Army program to hire Nazi war criminals to help post war empire building.
US war on Viet Nam: two to three million people killed
Coups in Chile, Congo, Guatemala, Iran and numerous other countries that led to genocidal slaughters.
Threats to use nuclear weapons, which is itself a violation of the UN Genocide Convention.
Support for dozens of dictators who were inspired, in part, by Nazi atrocities. Death squads in El Salvador, Argentina, the Shah of Iran’s SAVAK, torture in Egypt, Uruguay, Brazil and many other countries whose regimes were given crucial support by the United States.
Sure, there’s lots of war criminals who had nothing to do with the US, but the body count of those killed by the US and its proxies rivals the body counts of the Nazi Holocaust. And the threat to use nuclear weapons, if implemented, would make Auschwitz and Treblinka seem like trivialities in comparison (not a statement I make lightly, since I’ve read the accounts of the rebellions at both death camps).
We need a “Truth and Reconciliation” Commission for the crimes of the US empire to move beyond this sort of violence.
People like Chomsky, as the ancient saying goes, are legion. Indeed, the world is filled with stupid humans; humans who declare there is value in each human life (Hitler, Bundy, Bin Laden, and the assholes who knocked down the towers, etc) and that we are no better than they are. And sadly, even the American academic world is often filled with some of the most stupid people imaginable (Ward Churchill, for example) and I constantly marvel at the mush which passes for their brains. In Churchill’s world, WE, THE UNITED STATES, ARE THE ENEMY!!! In the world of these mental abortions, everything is inverted: Right becomes wrong, we the enemy, and the real enemy is declared the friend. It is nothing more than a parade of fools!
“Noam Chomsky has observed, would have meant that ‘every post-war American president would have been hanged’.’”
REALLY?
For anyone to be so morally blind to the differences between the United States with its objectives and its national character compared to Nazi Germany with its objectives and national character must go far beyond stupidity. Indeed, it must only be described as wicked stupidity.
It is such a degree of utter obtuseness upon which the worst tyrants depend as they attempt to draw parallels between America and Nazi Germany. Such false grayscale then enables THEM to escape the assignments of guilt which liken them to Nazi Germany. Instead, they seize upon such moral confusion, using it to prevent the world from acting against them by claiming a moral equivalence to America. Thusly they provide the weak international community (and the America-haters) with an excuse to do nothing.
And in the meantime, millions of human beings continue to die at the hands of these monsters.
For anyone who thinks Noam Chomsky’s moral idiocy worth considering, all I can say is that you are supported by the Pol Pots, Mao Zedongs, Omar Bashirs, and myriad other uber-mass murderers. And the blood of THEIR victims will cry out agains you, too.
I know about the difference between UK and US hanging, and prefer the way the UK used, but for these butchers, torturers and inventors of evil, does it really matter how any of them died?