Nuremberg Sentences - Alec Baldwin (2000)

The London Agreement, which was signed by Great Britain, the United States, France, and the Soviet Union on August 8, 1945, established the procedures for the IMT and was intended to ensure that nearly all German citizens learned about the trial. This document required each occupying power to publicize information about the trial within their respective zone of occupation in Germany. The London Agreement mandated that news of the tribunal be published and broadcast throughout Germany, going so far as to make provisions for German prisoners to receive news of the trial proceedings. To fulfill these requirements, American authorities reestablished a German press to report on the proceedings at Nuremberg, erected billboards depicting photographs of Nazi atrocities, and commissioned films to document the horrors of concentration camps.

This extensive effort to spread information about the Holocaust and German war crimes was necessary because most Germans either denied ever supporting the Nazi Party or echoed the common refrain that “wir konnten nichts tun” (we could do nothing) when presented with a list of German atrocities. This claim blatantly ignored the fact that a majority of Germans had either actively or passively supported Hitler, voted in favor of him or his conservative allies, and generally stood by as more than 500,000 of their Jewish neighbors were persecuted and more than 150,000 of them were shipped to hundreds of concentration camps across Germany. If Germans needed more evidence of their government’s crimes, they needed only to observe the millions of malnourished foreign slave laborers forced to work in German factories and on German farms. When German civilians saw that their denials had little effect on Allied sentiments, they attempted to downplay the severity of German atrocities instead. American war correspondent Margaret Bourke-White reported how after some Germans viewed images of concentration camps, they responded by saying “Why get so excited about it, after [the Allies] bombing innocent women and children?” With the food and housing situation dire in most German cities and millions of soldiers and civilians dead from the fighting, the majority of former citizens of the Third Reich preferred to focus on their own suffering.

While interned in a Soviet prisoner of war camp, Major Siegfried Knappe and the other German prisoners of war received daily reports about the progress of the IMT. “We learned the details of the Nazi extermination camps and finally began to accept them as true rather than just Russian propaganda,” wrote Knappe. The former officer explained in his memoir that he only began to believe accounts of the evidence presented at the trial “when it became clear that the Western Allies as well as Russia were prosecuting the Germans responsible.” Knappe realized that “as a professional soldier, I could not escape my share of the guilt, because without us Hitler could not have done the horrible things he had done; but as a human being, I felt no guilt, because I had no part in or knowledge of the things he had done.” Many German soldiers’ postwar writings echoed similar denials about German atrocities.
The Allies attempted to persuade Germans of their guilt by forcing them to tour concentration camps, watch newsreel footage of Nazi crimes, and purge their libraries of Nazi materials. The real problem, however, was that every German adult who had not actively resisted Nazi rule bore some responsibility for the regime’s crimes. By accepting the legitimacy and verdicts of the IMT, German civilians, soldiers, and former government officials thought they could acknowledge that their country had committed horrific crimes but place all of the blame on a handful of Nazi leaders.

Though the trial failed to convince all Germans of their responsibility for initiating World War II and the Holocaust in Europe, it forged a tentative consensus about the criminality of Hitler’s rule.