REPOST: Nuremberg Trials (oops all war crimes)

This week, in preparation for next week's episode about Hitler's rise to power, we revisit our 2023 episode on the Nuremberg Trials.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey everyone. No, we're supposed to have a new episode
out today, but things have been a little busy lately
and Joe was on vacation for a week, so we
pushed back our schedule one week and we will have
a new episode for you next Friday, February twenty eighth.
That episode will be about Hitler's rise to power, and
so we thought a good way to prep for that

(00:20):
episode would be to repost our twenty twenty three episode
about the Neurmberg Trials. So give it a listen and
we will talk to you all next week.

Speaker 2 (00:30):
Welcome to an hour of our time, the podcast where
we pick a topic, research it, and come back and
tell you what we learned. This week, we are going
to cover the Nurmberg Trials. Events of World War Two
that accumulated to the Nuremberg Trials, Me and defendants, what
happened during the trial, and its lasting effect on history.
I'm Mark, I'm Dave.

Speaker 3 (00:48):
I'm Joe.

Speaker 2 (01:02):
I had a very busy day of work, dealing dealing
with a bunch of bullshit.

Speaker 4 (01:07):
Some bullshit.

Speaker 1 (01:08):
Oh man, speaking of dealing with bullshit, man.

Speaker 4 (01:13):
Hey, you're just really trying to move us along, hunh Yeah, Well,
I trend. This is gonna be hard to get from, like, hey,
how's your day? Hey, by the way, the Nuremberg.

Speaker 2 (01:22):
Trials, right.

Speaker 1 (01:24):
I watched that Next Generation episode today, the Offspring where
Data makes his own daughter it always always gets me
right here, and she's like she tells him at the
end that she loves him, and he says, I wish
I could feel that too, and she's I'll feel it

(01:44):
for both of us right here.

Speaker 4 (01:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:49):
Yeah, that's like, daddy, that is what data Daddy, Data,
Data Daddy.

Speaker 4 (01:56):
I'm going to make one of those memes. And for
the record, I think these are bad and like toxic,
but you see like the meme format where it would
be like like badly daring cartoons, like two this sust
to be two women and they're like what girls cray about?
And then it'll be like I don't know something that
the the person is implying as dumb, and then like

(02:19):
the bottom front would be like two guys, And then
I want to make one where they're crying about that
episode Star Trek.

Speaker 2 (02:27):
It really gets you, man, Yeah, gets you good.

Speaker 4 (02:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:30):
I also watched Yesterday's Enterprise, which is also pretty awesome.

Speaker 4 (02:34):
I think I told you guys this, but I ran
a session of my long running we're going on two
years now, long running Dungeons and Dragons campaign, which is
like a naval based campaign that I based, like very
much on yesterday's enterprise, complete with them having to like

(02:56):
send the other crew back through the portal to certain
death so that they could reset the timeline.

Speaker 2 (03:05):
Very specific, It was very specific.

Speaker 4 (03:08):
The thing is, none of my friends are my other
friends are Star Trek fans, except for one guy. The
whole time he was like, oh man, I know what's
going to happen. No foreshadowing needed.

Speaker 1 (03:20):
Yeah, So, speaking of having to go back to pay
the price, Okay, all right, Okay, I like it. I
did it. I like it. Today we're talking about the
Neuremberg Trials, and frankly, I'm surprised we never did an
episode about this.

Speaker 4 (03:37):
I looking back at your so so this is kind
of like the spiritual successor to David. Well, Dave, do
you want to say say the reason why we're doing
this is a topic other than just as an important topic?

Speaker 1 (03:52):
So this is episode right. Our next one will be
two hundred, and we decided that as we approached two hundred,
we wanted to go back to the most popular topic
and always and by a wide margin, our episode on
Nazi Hunters is the most popular episode we've ever done.

(04:15):
We did that episode like four years ago, five years ago,
maybe more, and yeah, always been the most popular. So
we wanted to revisit that topic in some ways. And
then it hit me, like, we haven't talked about the
Neurmberg Trials in our Nazi Hunters episode. I think we
touched on it briefly, but we didn't really focus on
the Neurmberg Trials. Now we focused more on what happened,

(04:39):
you know, decades later, as some of these guys were
tracked down. But the Neurmberg Trials themselves are not just
important in terms of like post World War two, but
set a very clear precedent that was poorly set after
World War One.

Speaker 4 (04:58):
Yeah, I had to do a little bit more homework
for this one, because I if you go back and
listen to the Nazi Hunters episode, you will not hear
my voice. You will hear our other friend Joe, who
was one of the original podcast hosts of this podcast
before we kind of transitioned to me sort of permanently

(05:22):
taking his spot. I think Nazi Hunter when you guys
did the Nazi Hunters episode. It was still like several
months before I made my first appearance, which I believe
was as a like guest right at the tail end
of your GMO's episode, and then I did, and then

(05:45):
we did a dinosaur episode. But anyway, Yeah, I had
listened to the episode, but it was obviously like a
really long time ago, and I wasn't there. I didn't
have notes from it, of course, So I went back
and I listened to the episode and you know, talk
about the Numberg Trials just a little bit, but only
in the sense that, like, these are the guys that
didn't get got by the Neurremberg trials, right, So yeah,

(06:08):
so this is a little bit of a prequel.

Speaker 2 (06:11):
Yeah, prequel the prequel. Well, so.

Speaker 1 (06:17):
I don't know where to start exactly, but I thought
it'd be good to start with times in relatively recent history,
not you know, since World War Two, but prior to
World War two, but mainly in the nineteenth century early
twentieth century when people were tried for war crimes and
how that went, and also what is different about the

(06:41):
Neurmberg trials and how those events of the past influenced
the way that the Neurmberg trials came to be and
were handled. I learned that there are a couple examples
of people being tried for war crimes in the in
the nineteenth century. A good example is that of and

(07:05):
this is kind of relevant to last week's topic, Confederate
Army officer Henry Wurz. He was tried for maltreatment of
Union prisoners of war during the American Civil War. I
didn't bother to look exactly what happened in that trial,
but he was ultimately executed for these crimes. There was

(07:28):
also a military court that held a hearing in Turkey
punishing those responsible for the Armenian genocide. I did not
know that. Frankly, I was kind of surprised to know
that anybody was ever held accountable for the Armenian genocide.
So there's that. Does anybody else have any other examples

(07:50):
they want to mention outside of the Leipzig trials because
I'm going to get to that.

Speaker 2 (07:56):
We'll get to it later. But there was a similar
situation in Tokyo dealing with the Japanese side of the war. Yeah,
I just have a few notes on it, but it's
worth mentioning.

Speaker 1 (08:10):
Well, let's just quickly talk about the Leipzig war crimes trials.
These happened after World War One. So basically what happened
is that during the Paris Peace Conference in nineteen nineteen
after World War One, the Allied government they established the
Commission of Responsibilities and they were charged with making recommendations

(08:33):
on how to try German war criminals. It actually came
to be that they were going to try to charge
Kaiser Wilhelm the Second. In fact, they did try to
charge him. The problem was extradition. So these governments, in
the articles that they drafted in the Treaty of Versailles,
stipulated the arrest and trial of German officers defined as

(08:57):
war criminals by Allied governments. They established a special tribunal
that would preside over these hearings. There would be judges
appointed by Britain, France, Italy, the United States and Japan,
and that they could extradite these people to try them.

(09:19):
They attempted to extradite Kaiser Wilhelm the Second, who was
in the Netherlands. Actually he was being hidden by the
Dutch government after he abdicated in nineteen eighteen. Essentially, kind
of long story short, the Dutch said no, because doing

(09:41):
so would validate their neutrality. They said, hey, we're neutral,
so this does not fall you know, we don't fall
under this. To make this story even shorter, essentially, this
group of Allies partners that were trying to try these

(10:02):
German war criminals ultimately let Germany handle it. You can
try them in Germany, in your courts, in your system.
At one point they put forth a list of nine
hundred names to the German government, we want to try
these guys. Those names got whittled down to like forty
five people that were accused, and then I think only

(10:24):
twelve of them actually stood trial, and I read that
the harshest punishment was two years imprisonment for a guy
that ordered the execution of a bunch of French prisoners.

Speaker 2 (10:34):
Jeez.

Speaker 1 (10:35):
So essentially they let the Germans handle it. The Germans
showed that they were fine with a slap on the
wrist and unwilling to punish people that they viewed as
nationalists who serve their country. So it's important to know
that because that is not something that Stalin and Churchhill

(10:57):
and Roosevelt and later Truman are not aware of. They
know that that's true, So they know they have to
take a different route.

Speaker 2 (11:07):
After World War One, Germany, as the country kind of
felt like they got screwed over anyway. Oh yeah, so
they probably weren't very eager to like take the suggestion
of their victors very seriously. Yeah.

Speaker 4 (11:21):
Well, there was also like, you know, they're being forced
to pay you know, reparations that kind of crippled the
economy and all these other things.

Speaker 1 (11:32):
They were forced to disarm the military entirely. I mean,
those events are what caused World War two, you know,
not really indirectly, pretty directly.

Speaker 4 (11:43):
I was just going to say, I think it's only
a little bit, but only a little bit of a
oversimplification to say that the the way that the that
World War One sort of directly led into World War
Two in a lot of ways.

Speaker 1 (11:57):
Well, this is sort of the funny thing, right, Like
the Allies forced Germany to disarm their their their forces,
forced their economy into a crippled situation, but did not
force them to allow a larger tribunal to try their
war criminals. So it is a weird line to draw

(12:18):
to me.

Speaker 2 (12:20):
Yeah, maybe it's important to talk about what the four
main indictments were during the Nuremberg Trial. Itself.

Speaker 1 (12:32):
Let's let's get to that. I'm in nineteen forty.

Speaker 2 (12:34):
Two here, okay, nineteen forty two, a legal invasion of Poland, Czechoslovakia, France,
number of other countries, deportation and racial segregation of the Jews,
the Einsteins Group and extermination squads, concentration camps, need I

(12:59):
keep going.

Speaker 1 (13:00):
No, And by this point in nineteen forty two, we're
talking December nineteen forty two cinders. So at the end
of it, it's becoming clear that an Allied victory is likely.
And when Great Britain and the United States and the
Soviet Union, specifically Churchill Stalin Roosevelt meet, they issue a

(13:23):
joint declaration officially noting the mass murder of European Jews
and resolving to prosecute those responsible for violence against civilian populations.
That is a quote from the Holocaust Museum Memorial Holocaust
Memorial Museum, That's how they describe it. During this meeting,
Stalin suggests that they execute fifty thousand to one hundred

(13:45):
thousand German staff officers. He says he wants to do
this to ensure that they don't have an army, but
clearly he also wants to make an example of them.
When he suggests this, Roosevelt scoffs and says to the
effect of, don't you think forty nine thousand would be enough?

(14:05):
Churchill gets pretty upset about it. He doesn't want to
be that ruthless. Although he suggests summary executions. Does anybody
know what a summary execution is? I didn't know this term.
It's an execution without a trial. Trial, You accuse him,
you kill him. That's what he wants to do. It's

(14:28):
I don't know that you can say it's ultimately going
to be Truman. That is more the voice of reason
in this. But Roosevelt also didn't really side with these ideas,
but he was probably in this is speculative, but probably
more likely to lean towards Stalin's idea than Churchill's more
side of mercy. Yes, he wanted summary executions, but only

(14:52):
of a couple top Nazi leaders.

Speaker 4 (14:55):
Yeah. Well, when you talk about fifty thousand to one
hundred thous that is a lot of people, but a
lot you have to remember the history of Stalinist Russia
and he killed it. Will never know for certain, but
I think it's somewhere between five to ten million. People. Correct.

Speaker 1 (15:15):
Well, you bring up an interesting point because, as we'll
get into the stipulations they laid out during the Nuremberg trials,
the Soviets were pretty reluctant to agree to them because
it dawned on them immediately that they could easily be
charged for these same crimes.

Speaker 4 (15:29):
Yeah, they obviously were. Their motivations for the different terms
of the trial were very motivated by their own recent history.

Speaker 1 (15:44):
Yeah. So ultimately, and Mark, maybe you can sum this
up a little better, but it was ultimately determined that
you have to have a trial that is a real
and legitimate trial, so that nobody could ever say that
the guilt of these people was presumed ahead of time,
that there was anything shady about it. You knew, you

(16:07):
had the evidence. The Germans were fastidious about their record keeping,
which helped the you know, against them, But it was
felt that you needed to have a real and true
trial to truly make an example of these people in
front of other Germans.

Speaker 2 (16:28):
Yeah. The Allies had the evidence and felt like it
needed to be presented so that this kind of thing
wouldn't happen again. Yeah, otherwise it would get brushed under the.

Speaker 1 (16:40):
Rug and again. World War One the Leipzig Trials. They
know that, you know, this can't be done by the
German government. Obviously, the German government is essentially in shambles
now that it needs to be something that's run by
the Allies, although they do hold it in Germany because
that is also a symbolic making a big point here. Eventually,

(17:05):
the Allies draft the London Charter, which goes on to
be called the Nuremberg Charter or something to that effect.
But in nineteen forty five they outline the three types.
I guess it's really four types of crimes that people
can be charged with, right, and that's crimes against peace,

(17:29):
which is planning, preparing, staging, or waging wars of aggression,
or wars in violation of international agreements. You got war crimes,
violations of customs or laws of war, including improper treatment
of civilians and prisoners of war. And crimes against humanity
including murder, enslavement, or deportation of civilians or persecuted on political, religious,

(17:50):
or racial grounds. The fourth one, I believe it's not
here what I wrote, but I've read something else that
suggested that the fourth one was conspiracy to do any
of these things. Okay, which makes sense, and the idea
of that one was to make it clear to the
leaders that anything done under their suggestion by other people,

(18:11):
they're responsible for it. So there's your kind of outline
of what a war crime is and what these other
things are. And also it made it clear that civilians
and military officers could be accused of war crimes. Yeah,
because there's one guy who's on trial here. He ran
an anti Semitic newspaper. So I'm not trivializing that. I'm

(18:33):
just saying that it's not just the military officers, it's
civilians as well well.

Speaker 4 (18:39):
And crucially one of the things that I'm going to discuss,
I mean, it was mainly not members of the Wehrmacht.
In fact, there's also we can go into some of
the defendants, the specific people, but there were also several
organizations which were put on trial. So that would be

(19:01):
the Gestapo, the Secret Police, the SS, the Reich Cabinet,
the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party, the Stormtroopers or
the SA, the Security Services or the SD, and the
General Staff and the High Command of the Armed Forces.
But you'll notice that last one it's fairly specific. The

(19:27):
Wehrmacht itself was not on trial because they were not
part of this. That led to some skewed perceptions about
the culpability of the military in the war crimes. After
the trial, which I will discuss later.

Speaker 2 (19:48):
A lot of the regular run of the mill military
officers would have the I guess defense of well, I
was following orders. That's a big thing that comes up
with Eichman people like that. You know, with a hierarchical

(20:11):
structure like this, you can kind of pass the buck
backwards to it. Well, and they kind of did this
during the trial too. A lot of people said like, well,
that was Hitler's idea, or that was Hitler's idea or
whatever I did. I didn't know about that.

Speaker 1 (20:26):
Did you see the thing? The way that they countered
that though they could show that Rommel was once given
an order during the ward take no prisoners, you kill everybody,
and he burned the order, so that it was a
way of showing that even a high ranking member of
the German Army didn't always just take orders blindly, and

(20:47):
that that definitely hurt that, you know, already pretty dumb argument.

Speaker 4 (20:51):
A lot of them, in their defense, they tried to
blame kind of the upper echelons of the Nazi leadership,
which would be Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich and Eichmann and Borman.

Speaker 2 (21:06):
What do all the Alain people who were not what
all those.

Speaker 4 (21:08):
People have in common? They committed suicide before the start
of the trial.

Speaker 1 (21:13):
Which is uh incriminating.

Speaker 2 (21:16):
It is hyd got assassinated. Well that's true, I forgot
and was sort of h m I A.

Speaker 4 (21:24):
But because they did that, because they were not there,
they provided somewhat of a convenient scapegoat for the people
that were left to say, oh, you know, it wasn't me,
I didn't make these decisions. It was you know, Himmler or.

Speaker 2 (21:40):
The defendants were also very careful not to incriminate each other, right,
they all were stand they were all.

Speaker 4 (21:46):
Playing a big game of the prisoner's dilemma. But yes,
they were all very careful not to incriminate each other
because that probably would have ruined their defense quite quickly.

Speaker 1 (21:58):
Oh you would think so.

Speaker 2 (22:00):
Well, I have an article here that is a History
Channel article ten things that you may not know about
the Nuremberg Trials. Some of these things may set up
our discussion. Well, this was the Nuremberg trial, and Nuremberg
as a city was chosen specifically because of its symbolic

(22:21):
value to the Nazi Party. It was host to a
number of massive Nazi rallies in the twenties and thirties,
Triumph of the Will, A number of famous photos and
speeches and stuff were held in Nuremberg. But conveniently it
was also the location of the German Palace of Justice

(22:44):
and a large prison that was used for the commencement
of this trial.

Speaker 4 (22:50):
They expanded the prison as well.

Speaker 1 (22:51):
For this, but they expanded the courtroom, they doubled it
in size.

Speaker 4 (22:56):
But doing this trial in Nuremberg was intended what you said, Mark,
was intended to signify the death of Nazi Germany.

Speaker 2 (23:06):
Yeah, where it happened. It was also the first trial
of its kind with judges from four countries. So after
the war, the victorious European allies, the United States, France,
Britain and the Soviet Union came together to carry out
this trial in front of a world stage. There were

(23:33):
a number of presiding judges. The American judges are Francis Biddle,
John J. Parker, Edward Francis Carter, the British judge and
the president of the Tribunal, Sir Jeffrey Lawrence, also Sir

(23:54):
Norman Burkett. The French judges are Henri Don dud Vrabels
and Robert Falco, and the two Soviet judges are Major
General Iona Nichchenko and Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Volskov. And the

(24:16):
chief prosecutors in this case our Associate Justice Robert H. Jackson,
who was a member of the Supreme Court. The United
Kingdom's Attorney General, Sir Hartley Shawcross has that's the hell
of a name. France. France's representative is Francois de Methlon,

(24:40):
later replaced by August Champierre de ReBs, and the Soviet
Union's representative is Lieutenant General Roman Andreavich Rutenko.

Speaker 1 (24:52):
These all sound like if you asked me to make
up a name for somebody from this country, it's what
I would come up with.

Speaker 4 (24:58):
I mean, they do very much.

Speaker 2 (24:59):
So.

Speaker 4 (25:00):
Yeah, robb Ray Jackson of the United States, you know,
he certainly didn't sound like that at all.

Speaker 1 (25:07):
Yeah, I mean I would have been like Jackson, Hamburger McGee.

Speaker 4 (25:09):
He's wearing a he's wearing a cowboy who's got a
salt off shotgun, going to do some justice on these.

Speaker 1 (25:17):
Nancies, Okay, the whole trial. He wore a who Farted
t shirt? Yep, the and the arrow was pointing at
a swastika?

Speaker 4 (25:25):
Did we So we talked about the the list of
organizations on trial as well as the judges. We didn't
talk about the defendants yet. Were we going to I
don't think we want to like a list all twenty
four of them? But there were twenty four defendants. Are
there any of them in particularly they wanted to talk
about if they were of note?

Speaker 2 (25:46):
Well, the the six organizations that you mentioned are very important.
So not only were there the you know, what we
think of as the main Nurnberg trial with these you know,
high ranking Nazi officials, people that we would know, there
were also twelve follow up trials, and including these organizations

(26:08):
in the first round sort of takes the pressure off of,
you know, the other people coming up later who are
going to be tried in the other trials. If you established,
like oh, you were a member of the Gestapo and
that is a criminal organization, it's a lot easier to
try that person.

Speaker 4 (26:29):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (26:30):
Yeah, they were sort of lower level officials, but also
people culpable in some of these heinous actions.

Speaker 4 (26:40):
There were twelve subsequent trials, Like you said, these were
all held in the same location, but they were all
conducted by the United States only, Okay, And for instance,
you know, like you were saying, mark various other types
of war crimes, like one was the doctor's trial talking
about some of the medical ermentation for instance. So each

(27:03):
each of those trial had a specific the Einsts group
and the trial which was as theme suggest trial of
the the the death squads from the SS. So each
of those subsequent trials had like a specific theme. But
iust were kind of jumping ahead.

Speaker 2 (27:21):
Some of these organized organizations like the Schutztafel SS. If
you don't know about it, it's like the politicized military
wing of the Nazi Party. The Sishar Heightstens is the
intelligence agency of the Nazi Party. Gestapo's the secret police,
Sturm of Tiling, stormtroopers whatever. They are directly linked to

(27:45):
the Nazi Party's agenda. And some of these things like
racial classism and the actions of the Holocaust, so those
things are important. The ober Commando der Vermack, the German
military high command were involved in planning the military aspects

(28:10):
of what the army carried out. So those people had
to know something about this bigger plan, so I don't know. Yeah,
that's an important thing to point out. Do you want
to talk about some of the defendants an hour later.

Speaker 4 (28:31):
We can, and I think we probably don't want to
talk about all twenty four of them.

Speaker 1 (28:35):
But maybe just more of some heavy hitters.

Speaker 4 (28:38):
Well, some of these names, if you are familiar with
World War two or this history, you'll recognize them. Martin Borman,
Carl Donnitz, who was the person handpicked by Hitler to
take over after he committed.

Speaker 2 (28:58):
He was president for like a week, Ye, for like
a week.

Speaker 4 (29:01):
Yeah, he was a very very short tenure.

Speaker 2 (29:05):
Herman Gordon Borman was tried in absentia. They didn't really
know what happened to him, but he probably died in
the bunker with Hitler or shortly after.

Speaker 1 (29:14):
Yeah, they determined that he was he was dead at
the time.

Speaker 2 (29:18):
They found his body in nineteen seventy two and finally
confirm that he was dead.

Speaker 1 (29:23):
Where did they find the body?

Speaker 2 (29:25):
I don't know. I didn't look out to that.

Speaker 4 (29:29):
Rudolph Hesse was another one of the big names.

Speaker 2 (29:33):
Rudolph hess was interesting because he flew to Scotland in
nineteen forty one to try to persuade the British to
make a make a peace treaty. So he was kind
of like in prison in England for most of the war,
but he had been like the deputy furor before that.

(29:58):
Martin Borman was the person who took his position for that. Yeah,
Hermann Goering one of the weirdest and most charismatic Nazis,
that big, old, fat, fancy guy. He was the commander
of the Dandy.

Speaker 1 (30:18):
Wasn't he the one who?

Speaker 2 (30:19):
Was it him?

Speaker 1 (30:20):
Or I think it was Goring who they were asked to,
you know, reply guilty or not guilty. And he started
to make a statement and the judge like shut that
ship down, starts to make a statement again. They just
cut the mic. I wanted to make it clear that
this was not an opportunity for these guys to to
you know, speak about their their Nazi ideology.

Speaker 4 (30:44):
M H. Hans Frank was another one of the main
the main people in this trial. He was the head
of the general government in Nazi occupied Poland. So because
Poland was the first country that Germany occupied, there was
a very long time for war crimes to be committed.

(31:07):
In fact, there were atrocities committed in Poland on the
very first day of the war. So that that's one
of the reasons why he was one of the major
defendants in this trial, because he presided over some of
the atrocities that took place over their greatest length of time.

Speaker 2 (31:29):
Ernst Colton Brenner is the highest surviving SS leader. He
was the head of the Nazi intelligence office. He also
commanded many of the Einstadts group in and concentration camps.

Speaker 4 (31:45):
Sorry, just to go back to Hans Frank real quick.
There are four million people died because of his jurisdiction,
so that that's why he is. When you look at
the list of names, he is the very top of
the list.

Speaker 1 (32:05):
I mentioned uh that there was somebody who published an
anti Semitic weekly newspaper. His name is Julius Striker and
uh dare Strumer. Oh strmer is was the name of
his publication. He is the one. I think he's the
only one who is not in the military. Maybe not no, no, doctor,

(32:30):
doctor shack.

Speaker 2 (32:35):
He was an economist, banker.

Speaker 1 (32:38):
Yeah, so there's a couple civilians.

Speaker 4 (32:41):
Yeah, there is the Albert Spear. He was the Minister
of Armaments and War Production. So when you start to
get further down the list, that is to like, these
are some of the people that we're convicted but didn't

(33:02):
we're not executed because they were not directly well, I
say they were't directly involved in war crimes. But Albert
Speer exploited slave labor for the benefit of the war effort,
so there are degrees.

Speaker 2 (33:22):
Wilhelm Kitel was the head of the ober Commander de Hmacht,
the army high command. He was head of the army
from thirty eight to forty five, so he was a
pretty influential military figure. Franz von Pappen is kind of
interesting in that he was the Chancellor of Germany in

(33:45):
nineteen thirty two and sort of allowed Hitler to become
chancellor himself and the rise of the Nazi Party and stuff.
He ended up being acquitted. He was classified as a
war criminal in nineteen forty seven by a German denacification

(34:08):
court later on, but he really didn't get punished that much.

Speaker 4 (34:16):
So there are many, many, many other defendants market story.
If you wanted to say one of them.

Speaker 1 (34:22):
Who did you say?

Speaker 2 (34:23):
That was Mark Franz von Pappen.

Speaker 1 (34:26):
Yeah, he did two years of hard labor before he
was acquitted. He was sentenced to eight Okay, so he
got something.

Speaker 2 (34:34):
He wasn't tried under the Nuremberg trial though he was
one of the defendants.

Speaker 1 (34:38):
He was he was not charged as a war criminal.

Speaker 2 (34:41):
Okay, sorry, Yeah.

Speaker 4 (34:42):
So, yes, we talked about all these different figures about
to give a sense of the the seriousness of the
crimes that these people committed, but also just to give
like are kind of a cross section and of the
different variety of people, like Dave pointed out, they weren't

(35:06):
all you know, military commanders.

Speaker 2 (35:09):
So the Nuremberg trials were the first instances of prosecutions
for crimes against humanity. The London Charter of the International
Military Tribunal set forth these laws under which the defendants
were tried crimes against humanity, which include murder, enslavement, or

(35:33):
deportation of civilians, or persecution on political, religious, or racial grounds.
Nazis did all of those things. An interesting technical situation
within the trial is this is the first trial with

(35:53):
simultaneous translation.

Speaker 1 (35:56):
Yeah, thanks to IBM.

Speaker 2 (35:58):
Yeah. There's a book called IBM in the Holocaust, and
it makes a claim that IBM was in cooperation with
the Nazis and that they used some sort of primitive
punch card computer system to categorize in catalog Jews.

Speaker 4 (36:22):
That seems pretty far fetched to accuse the IBM of
Nazi collaboration when Henry Ford was right there.

Speaker 2 (36:34):
Anyway about this translation thing. Because of the International Tribunal
almost all of the defendants speaking German, they IBM invented
a system that allowed simultaneous translation via headset and real time.

(36:54):
They had lights on the microphone base, a yellow light
worn speaker to slow down for the benefit of the translators,
while a red light signaled the need to stop and
repeat statements. This allowed the trial to be conducted four
times faster than it would have otherwise.

Speaker 4 (37:12):
Oh, because they would have had to translate it into
what English, French, Russian.

Speaker 1 (37:22):
Yeah. They also did a thing where some presentations were
audio is pre recorded.

Speaker 4 (37:29):
Okay. The reason I said that slowly a second ago
because I was like, what's the fourth language? And then
I was like, oh German? Duh idiot.

Speaker 2 (37:39):
As we mentioned already, the chief American prosecutor was Supreme
Court Associate Justice Robert Jackson. He was pretty much handpicked
by Truman. He has a quote here, if we want
to shoot a German as a matter of policy, let
it be done as such, but don't high the deed

(38:00):
behind a court. So he didn't want this to be
like a show trial situation. He wanted to present the
facts and do it in straightforward kind of way.

Speaker 1 (38:11):
Yeah, and he'd sure did. I don't know if he
was the one that did it. But they showed like
a documentary about the Holocaust. That was kind of the
first time a lot of people saw any of that footage,
and it greatly affected the people in the courtroom.

Speaker 2 (38:33):
As you could imagine, a prosecutorial advisor on this court
originated the term genocide.

Speaker 4 (38:45):
I didn't know that. I didn't know that originated with us.

Speaker 2 (38:48):
A Polish born lawyer, Rafael Lemkin, was an advisor to Jackson,
and he coined this term in nineteen forty four to
describe the Nazis' plan execution of the Jews.

Speaker 4 (39:03):
Dave, can I back up a step to what you
were just saying with the documentary evidence. So the American
and British prosecutors specifically focused on documentary evidence and Affi
David's rather than testimony from survivors, because they didn't think
that survivor's testimony was going to be credible or condensing

(39:28):
because the defendants or other people would convince the survivors
of bias. I mean, it sounds super fucked up to
say that, but that was their reasoning and why they
chose to use that documentary evidence rather than, for instance,
calling a bunch of survivors up to the witness stand.

Speaker 1 (39:51):
Well, you almost didn't need the survivor testimony because you know,
when the Americans started liberating camps, Eisenhower insisted that they filmed,
and so there was just it was all on film.
I mean, you you know, you can take testimony, and yeah,
it sounds shitty to say that people could look at
as being biased, but it is somebody's testimony. That's what

(40:13):
comes with that. But it's actually seeing it. You can't
argue with it.

Speaker 4 (40:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (40:18):
So now you'd say, oh, well it's it's fake, right,
fake news, But at the time you saw it, it was
just what it was.

Speaker 2 (40:25):
So just anything that's like overly emotional is kind of
a tactic that could be misrepresented.

Speaker 1 (40:34):
Yeah, right, so by just showing it, like you draw
your own conclusion, and there's really only one conclusion to draw.

Speaker 4 (40:41):
Yeah, the prosecution only called thirty seven witnesses toll, whereas
the defense had eighty three, which are not including nineteen
defendants who testified on their own behalf, So wide wide
gulf between the number of I wentness testimony from the
prosecution in the.

Speaker 1 (41:00):
Defense, it kind of makes sense to me.

Speaker 4 (41:05):
Yeah, I mean that was that was that was that
was a strategy on their purpose.

Speaker 2 (41:09):
Yeah, not all of the defendants were found guilty. We
sort of mentioned some of these already. There were twenty
four people who took part in the trial, including Martin
Borman who was in absentia. Twelve of them were sentenced
to death. Gering committed suicide the night before he was
supposed to be executed. Seven others were had prison sentences

(41:37):
from ten ten years to life, and three were ecquitted altogether.

Speaker 4 (41:42):
Yeah, So just just back up a step with like
what the different to each of the different prosecutions, like
focused on a different thing or different aspect. So the
American case was focused primarily on the Nazi conspiracy before

(42:03):
the outbreak of the war, So they presented on things
like the aggression against Austria, the invasion of Czechoslovakia. They
screened the film that you mentioned, Dave Nazi Concentration and
prison camps which were which was film compiled from footage
of the liberation of the camps, shocked both the defendants

(42:28):
and the judges, who adjourned the trial after they showed
that and had to reconvene later. The British the Americans
called the Iams a group in Commander Otto Ollendorf, who
testified about eighty thousand people killed under his command, and

(42:50):
they also brought up SS General Eric von dem Bachzaluski,
who claimed that the warfare against like artisans was actually
just a cover for the mass murder of Jews. The
British prosecution covered the charge of crimes against peace, which

(43:11):
was kind of like overlapped with the American case. The
French prosecution was a little bit different from them because
they they went like kind of philosophical, went all the
way back to the nineteenth century to talk about like
the development of Nazi ideology, like its relationship to German

(43:36):
nationalism and stuff like that. This is kind of interesting.
They so they were kind of arguing about the crimes
against humanity. So they had witnesses including Auschwitz survivors. And

(43:59):
then lastly these Soviet prosecution was again this was kind
of interesting, as you mentioned earlier, because they had some
skeletons in their closet as well. You could say they
covered all four prosecution charges and tried to like kind
of cover everything. I just nothing that was interesting about

(44:22):
the defense was they specifically outlined in the trial that
a defense that was not allowed was a logical fallacy
told called tucoke, which basically means uh u two, Which
is so they specifically outlawed the defense that it was

(44:43):
not It's not a defense for the Germans to say
that the other nations did similar things. So for instance,
Chester Nimitz, the admiral of the US Navy, actually testified
that the US also used unrestricted submarine warfare, but that

(45:05):
was struck down as evidence because that is not a
defense that is allowed. So this is kind of why,
like the things like the Japanese internment camps did not
really come into play in this defense.

Speaker 1 (45:24):
You reminded me of something I wanted to say, which
is the importance of this being a real trial and
the importance of them actually outlining what the crimes are
was an effort to prevent there There's a legal idea
that if you are not clear about a law, then

(45:47):
somebody could say well, I would have acted differently had
I known that, you know, had the rules been clear,
had I known this was illegal, then I would have
acted differently. And that was sort of a concern in
the trial, kind of setting the rules after the fact.

(46:07):
The counter argument is, hey, things like murder and assault
and rape are universally criminalized amongst humanity, so you shouldn't
be able to use your time in the military as
an excuse to do those things.

Speaker 2 (46:30):
That's not to say that this was sort of an
unprecedented situation, like the scope of these crimes had never
really happened.

Speaker 4 (46:38):
Because the scope of the atrocities were at a whole
another level for sure.

Speaker 1 (46:44):
Right, But like we said, there were examples in the past,
the Armenian genocide being one where things similar people have
been tried for crimes similar to this.

Speaker 4 (46:58):
Some of the German defendant also tried to repeatedly tried
to bring up the Treaty of Versailles as like an
excuse for the behavior of Germany and World War two
and then the lead of World War two, and those
those attempts to bring that up were repeatedly struck down.
Another thing that Alfred Seidel, one of the defendants repeatedly

(47:23):
tried to disclose the secret German Soviet packed and they
kept like trying to shut him down, and eventually he
like got it out. But this was ruled legally irrelevant
by the judges. But that's that was definitely a sticking

(47:46):
point or a sore point between the the Western Powers
and the Soviet Union.

Speaker 1 (47:52):
You mean the pact at the beginning of the war.

Speaker 4 (47:54):
Yes, he repeatedly tried to bring that up because that
was that was a secret. He spilled the beams on
that during the Nuremberg trials in order to use that
as a defense against the Soviet prosecution. Mm hmmm, which
is really interesting. Yeah, so so sorry, that was a
little bit of like the the prosecution and the evidence

(48:16):
that they presented. And then Mark, you talked about who
who was convicted and who was executed.

Speaker 2 (48:25):
Yeah, most of these big wig guys were executed. Hans
Frank Villain, Frick Gurring, although he committed suicide Offerd Yodel,
Carlton Brunner, title, Joachim von Ribbentrop.

Speaker 4 (48:45):
Yeah, what a name.

Speaker 2 (48:48):
Rosenberg. Uh Fritz Salkel, who was a involved in the
Nazi slave labor program. Seysse Eincourt, who constructed the on
Schluse between Germany and Austria and Julius Striker, who was

(49:10):
the guy that was the anti Jewish newspaper propagandistrum. Yeah,
so they were sentenced to death.

Speaker 4 (49:20):
So ye'ah, all go ahead, David Starr.

Speaker 1 (49:24):
Well, I was gonna say, I did look into Martin Borman,
the discovery of his body and everything. So apparently what happened,
uh was that Archer AxMan who was the leader of
the Hitler youth. He he gave an account of Borman's death.
He claimed that they left the bunker. They were trying

(49:45):
to get across the river. Ultimately they got I don't know,
they were behind a tank. The tank was hit by
anti tank rounds. They were all not to the ground
and they kind of scattered. When AxMan looked back, he
ultimately saw two bodies on the bridge, one of them
being he identified as Borman's, the one being an SS

(50:07):
doctor named Lutwig stump Figure, And that was his claim.
In nineteen seventy one, construction workers did find remains at
the spot where Axually claimed the bodies were, and they
did some testing and based on several factors, determined that

(50:27):
it was Borman's. They also determined from the remains that
there was glass found in the jaws, which suggested that
the men had taken cyanide capsules to kill themselves. And
then in nineteen ninety eight, German authorities ordered genetic testing
on the fragments of the skull and that did determine

(50:48):
conclusively that it was Borman's.

Speaker 2 (50:50):
Interesting fun fact about Martin Borman the gene Wilder Willie
Wonko on the Chocolate Factory movie. Yeah, the scene where
they say this man from Uruguay found the ticket. The
picture they show is of Martin Borman.

Speaker 1 (51:06):
Was Jesus Christ? Really?

Speaker 4 (51:09):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (51:09):
Holy?

Speaker 2 (51:10):
There was a conspiracy theory for a long time that
he escaped and went to South America.

Speaker 1 (51:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (51:14):
Well, consult the Nazi Hunters episode to learn about how
a fuck ton of them did.

Speaker 1 (51:22):
The rat lines.

Speaker 4 (51:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (51:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (51:26):
Anyways, Well, all told, including the twelve subsequent trials, which
again were held conducted just by the US, there were
a total of one and ninety nine defendants. So the
original trial that we were mostly discussing here was was
twenty four defendants, but all told, there were one hundred

(51:47):
and ninety nine defendants that were tried. One hundred and
sixty one of them were convicted and thirty seven were
sentenced to death. So most of the people who were
sentenced to death were in this first batch of the
you know, the worst of the worst, if you will.

Speaker 2 (52:02):
The ten remaining men who were executed were hanged on
October sixteenth, nineteen forty six by the US Army's official hangmen,
Master Sergeant John C. Woods. Jesus, you about this guy.
He was somewhat accused of botching these executions on purpose.

Speaker 1 (52:27):
Well, it certainly seems that way based on how long
these guys dangled. But hey, nobody feels bad.

Speaker 2 (52:33):
God damn, the ropes were too short and the trap
doors are too small, and most of these guys were
strangled to death for like ten twenty minutes.

Speaker 1 (52:45):
Oh my, yeah, the process by which they're supposed to
happen at the time was still done where you had
a long enough rope that it would break your neck.
One of them dangled for like half hour.

Speaker 2 (52:56):
They were executed one by one from a scaff erected
in the prison gymnasium. This was kind of unceremonious.

Speaker 4 (53:06):
So you said, this was the official military hangman where
it was hanging was not common anymore at this point, right.

Speaker 1 (53:15):
I would think not. I'm trying to find that. Actually,
I'm just.

Speaker 4 (53:18):
Wondering if he, like, you know, dude, just didn't have
very much practice with hanging. You know what I'm saying.

Speaker 1 (53:24):
It's like hanged on by and hung a person in
a while.

Speaker 4 (53:30):
That's canonically how that guy sounds made from non for sure.

Speaker 2 (53:34):
Yeah, I guess Time Magazine interviewed this guy at some point.
There's a quote, I wasn't nervous. I fell. I can't
afford to have nerves in this business.

Speaker 4 (53:46):
Okay, Yeah, that's definitely what Dave said. That's definitely what
that guy sounds like.

Speaker 1 (53:50):
Yeah, I think I got it, Yeah, and nailed it.
I'm trying to see. I don't know. Oh, I also
got there. All their final statements here.

Speaker 2 (54:01):
Any good ones.

Speaker 4 (54:02):
We'll give us a couple couple of choice ones.

Speaker 1 (54:05):
Fritz Sackle try not saying that, right, I am dying innocent.
The sentence is wrong. God protect Germany and make Germany
great again. Oh man, he's a maga guy. Oh Jesus,
long live Germany, God protect my family.

Speaker 4 (54:19):
Well that's a good I could think that's good, A
good exemplar because almost all these guys were adamant to
their death that they did nothing wrong and that this
was trials unfair.

Speaker 1 (54:37):
Well, not all of them. Hans Frank said, I am
thankful for the kind treatment during my captivity, and I
asked God to accept me with mercy. Now one of
their statements is just no. Alfred Rosenberg, no, I'm guessing.
He was asked, do you want to make a final statement,
and he said no, and then dangled for a while.

Speaker 4 (54:55):
Yeah, Jesus, what I thought was kind of interesting.

Speaker 1 (55:01):
Jesus, Wait, I got I got a good one. Von Rippentrop.
He said, God protect Germany, God have mercy on my soul.
My final wish is that Germany should recover her unity
and that for the sake of peace, there should be
an understanding between East and West. I wish peace to
the world. Okay, fine, then this is it, says Nuremberg

(55:23):
prisoned Commandant Burton c. Andris later recalled that Ribbentrope turned
to the prisoners Lutheran chaplain immediately before the hood was
placed over his head and whispered, I'll see you again.
Mmm the fuck?

Speaker 2 (55:40):
What the fuck's pretty on the nose? Summation of the
whole West East Germany.

Speaker 1 (55:47):
I would say so yeah, but like, what's what the
fuck's all that mean? Oh? I got one more good one.
I have read this one before. Mark helped me. Hear
Arthur Seiss in court.

Speaker 2 (56:00):
Yep.

Speaker 1 (56:01):
I hope that this execution is the last act of
the tragedy of the Second World War, and that the
lesson taken from this World War will be that peace
and understanding should exist between people's I believe in Germany.
What the hell did this guy do? Again?

Speaker 2 (56:15):
Says Ironcourt. He was the did the anschlue. He was
briefly the Austrian Chancellor. He was kind of like appointed
into Austria by Hitler and was also the right Commissioner
of occupied Netherlands. He was one of the few that

(56:41):
was sort of like remorseful about what happened.

Speaker 1 (56:44):
Well, if you get curious, there's pictures of all of
their bodies here afterwards, and they didn't bother to take
the nooses off of them when they laid them down.

Speaker 4 (56:55):
Well, I want to have to talk about a couple
of things real quick. One was like the reactions to
the trial interesting because I guess when we learn about
these now in like history class, you you think that
these were like maybe in Germany they weren't popular, but
that this is a fairly popular thing elsewhere. But that's

(57:19):
it's it's a little bit more complicated than that. So
that was like a bunch of journalists that were allowed
to cover the International Military Tribunal. So this is the
the Nuremberg Trial that most people think about, not those
subsequent twelve So in France a lot of people were
outraged because not everyone was executed. Essentially, they thought that

(57:45):
some of the sentences were too lenient, especially and this
is especially in France because of the organizations for deportees
and resistance fighters kind of influenced this. In the UK
they were mostly positive, but they kind of lost interest

(58:07):
in the Nuremberg Trial. I think the UK was I
guess you might say that they were interested in trying
to rebuild Germany. Is very interesting because most people in
Germany were just trying to make trying to survive because
obviously the country was crushed by their own leadership and

(58:28):
then by the invasion forces. But in nineteen forty six
they polled people in seventy eight percent of Germans thought
the trial was fair, but four years later only thirty
eight percent people thought that the trial was fair, So
that's kind of interesting. So it's like, as time went on,
more and more people thought that this was basically just

(58:49):
the victorious powers exerting their dominance over Germany. Later on,
the pendulum swung again towards this being a fair trial.
The German churches, both Catholic and prosistently mentioned the Bishop Dave,

(59:11):
they were vocal proponents of amnesty and any guys mentioned
in Your Nazi Hunter's episode that there's at least an
idea that the Vatican was somewhat complicit in allowing Nazis
to escape capture a.

Speaker 1 (59:29):
Little bit more than an idea, as yes, if research,
if I remember correctly from the research.

Speaker 4 (59:36):
Yeah, the Americans actually ended up releasing some some people
early in order to appease people in West Germany and
get solidarity with West Germany and begin the process of
remilitarizing West Germany to fight the Cold War. That's just

(59:59):
a a little bit about what people thought about the
Nurburg trials at the time. There was definitely mixed reception
and even a lot of people that thought that the
trials were unfair, not just in Germany.

Speaker 2 (01:00:11):
I imagine that there were a lot of Allied people
who were just kind of tired of hearing about this stuff.

Speaker 4 (01:00:15):
That's what it sounded like from the UK that they're
just like done with the war and everything about it.
But it's kind of interesting because I think that apathy
or ambivalence kind of led to the ability of many
of these people, who many of whom committed war crimes,
to be able to escape.

Speaker 1 (01:00:34):
Well, I think it's that, and I think it's also
that anti Semitism was not isolated in Europe. It's true,
and it's still it's not obviously, I think there are
a lot of sympathizers, and we know this ideology carries
on to today.

Speaker 4 (01:00:51):
So yeah, that's a very good point. Just because you know,
if the German military lost the war doesn't mean that
you know that those sentiments that were there prior to
the war went away.

Speaker 1 (01:01:06):
Remind me Mark, who was pope at the time.

Speaker 2 (01:01:09):
Uh, I don't know. John.

Speaker 1 (01:01:13):
One of the numbers, Pious, Pious, the seventh Pious.

Speaker 4 (01:01:16):
Yeah, I mean it was a Pious. I just did
another number.

Speaker 1 (01:01:19):
I remember watching. I mean it was a sixty minutes interview.
They were talking to somebody, some representative of the Vatican
because Pope Pious was made a saint. And they said, well,
he ignored the Holocaust. Yeah, and they said, well, I
mean it would have been really dangerous if had he
said anything. And the interviewer said, well, I don't disagree

(01:01:42):
with that, but you're gonna make him a saint. That's
what takes to be a saint.

Speaker 4 (01:01:47):
He's fucking Christ.

Speaker 1 (01:01:49):
You know. Also, now that I've looked at all these
pictures of corpses, I'm not I'm not unhappy that I did.

Speaker 4 (01:01:56):
This is one of Dave's pastimes.

Speaker 1 (01:01:58):
Looking at dead Nazis. Fuck yet is two of them
are pretty bloody in the face, and I wondered why.
And it's because not only was the hangman's rope not
long enough, the trap door was very small, and two
of them just smacked their heads on the way down.

Speaker 4 (01:02:13):
Oh Jesus, I mean they didn't.

Speaker 1 (01:02:16):
They didn't, they didn't try to make this smooth at all.

Speaker 4 (01:02:19):
No, I mean, fuck them, but yeah, what a way
to go.

Speaker 1 (01:02:23):
Yeah, the one dude smacked his head and then dangled
for twenty four minutes. God, so, uh, pretty rough, pretty
rough stuff there.

Speaker 4 (01:02:34):
So I don't know. Maybe this is as good as
we're getting towards end here, but there's something he did
want to mention that I had brought up at the beginning,
which is the Wehrmach. So we talked about, Dave, You're
talking about various like neo Nazi movements and things like
that going even into the modern day. One of the
ideas about World World War two is that the only

(01:02:57):
people are the only organizations that committed a were the
SS and entities like that, and that the military were
not involved in these war crimes. This is I think
there's a very interesting parallel between this and our last

(01:03:17):
episode where we talked about the common infantrymen and foot
soldiers fighting for the Confederacy, who again were basically fighting
on behalf They were not slaveholders themselves. They were fighting
on behalves of slaveholders. That being said, many of them
themselves held you know, were purpose you know, defending slavery

(01:03:42):
and things like this. But it's definitely like a little
bit more complicated than the Confederates were the quote unquote
bad guys. But anyway, because the Wehrmacht was not part
of the trial, this led to this myth called the
clean Hrmacht myth that has carried on into modern day

(01:04:03):
with you know, people saying like, you know, these trials
were unfair, the military was, you know, pure and all
this stuff. I just want to say this was not true.
Probably not surprised, but the military was not only aware,
but they also participated in the atrocities, just as a

(01:04:26):
few examples. By nineteen thirty nine, Hydrich had already arranged
coordination between the military and the Einsat's group in which
are the SS death squads. It will go around and
round up people and execute them. They were killing of
POW's and civilians on the very first day of the

(01:04:48):
war when during the invasion of Poland. One of the
worst places to be in World War two was Belarus
Soviet Belarus. One even three Belaru died in World War two,
and they were largely at the hands of the military,
not the SS. In fact, most of the people who

(01:05:14):
were killed victims in the Eastern theater of the war
were not taken to concentration camps. They were simply rounded
up and executed by gunfire. And this was again mainly
done by normal soldiers, not the specialized units of the SS.

Speaker 1 (01:05:36):
I think people forget that. Yeah, the concentration camps were
a ladder or a move later in the war.

Speaker 4 (01:05:43):
Yeah, but even when you talk about the concentration camps,
it was often the military that was tasked with transporting
victims to the SS and then lastly their estimated rapes
in the millions by the German soldiers. So just as

(01:06:04):
like a contrast with the the Italians in the areas
where there were often instances where Italian soldiers defended Jews
against Wehrmacht units to the point of even allowing people

(01:06:25):
to escape into Italy. So when you contrast these two again,
this goes against some of the defenses that they gave
during the trial, which is, well, everyone did these kinds
of atrocities. That's not the case, as evidence by the
behavior contrasting some of the Italian units and the German units.

(01:06:48):
So anyway, that's like a myth that evolved after the
Nuremberg trials of the clean Wehrmacht. But actually this was
a very popular idea some by some estimates it was
the predominant thinking about the Wehrmacht in Germany until there

(01:07:11):
was actually started to be some pushback against this in
the seventies. But really it was a museum exhibit in
nineteen ninety five.

Speaker 2 (01:07:28):
That.

Speaker 4 (01:07:31):
Yeah, it's called the Hmacht Exhibition that toured around the
country and started to change people's minds about this history
that had been kind of distorted because of this sort
of lost cause myth. So anyway, I just thought that
it was really interesting of the parallels to what we

(01:07:53):
talked about last time. There's this idea of the lost cause,
that you know, the Confederates are really fighting this just war,
and there was a lost cause myth that kind of
developed about the German military after World War Two and
the Nuremberg trials. Found that fascinating.

Speaker 1 (01:08:15):
Yeah, agreed, Mark, you said you wanted to mention the
trials that happened in Tokyo.

Speaker 2 (01:08:24):
Yeah, I let's do that real quick. So the tribunal
for the Nuremberg trials you was used as a template
for prosecution of Japanese war criminals as well. There was
a board of representatives from the eleven countries that Japan
fought against, and the people prosecuted in that court were
not as well known as many of these high ranking

(01:08:46):
Nazi officials. And I think that there's definitely like a
racial aspect of it that this isn't more well known
or more covered but you know, maybe we can save
that and talk about it at a different time. But
I also wanted to mention that without the Nuremberg Trials,
we wouldn't have the United Nations Genocide Convention and Universal

(01:09:12):
Declaration of Human Rights, as well as the Geneva Convention
on the Laws and Customs of War, which came about
in the late forties as a reaction to all of
this stuff being presented about, you know, what the Nazis
did during the war and the culmination of the Nuremberg Trials.
So that's interesting to think about.

Speaker 4 (01:09:34):
Yeah, that's definitely the lasting legacy, or at least part
of the lasting legacy of the Nuremberg Trials.

Speaker 1 (01:09:39):
Absolutely, all right, Well that kind of concludes Episode one
nine for two hundred coming up in a few weeks.
We'll try to.

Speaker 5 (01:09:54):
Keep it a little lighter, especially minimal war crimes, unless
people submit their topics that they want us, things that
they want us to talk about, and it is oops,
all war crimes.

Speaker 2 (01:10:08):
Captain Crene, Oops, all war crimes, Oops, all war crimes.

Speaker 4 (01:10:11):
Yeah, I've obviously you know, our listeners are in this
dark shit like us, asence by the fact that the
Nazi Hunters episode is our most popular episode.

Speaker 1 (01:10:23):
So maybe maybe they're not in the dark ship. I
think maybe they're just into like, come up and.

Speaker 4 (01:10:31):
That's true, you know, I'm all about that be smirched
our audience.

Speaker 1 (01:10:37):
Damn it.

Speaker 2 (01:10:37):
Joe.

Speaker 4 (01:10:39):
All right, well, goodbye everybody.

Speaker 1 (01:10:41):
We'll talk to you soon.

Speaker 2 (01:10:43):
Bye. Thank you for listening to an Hour of Our Time.

Speaker 4 (01:10:49):
If you like what you heard, we encourage you to
explore our catalog of over one hundred and fifty episodes.

Speaker 1 (01:10:53):
And rate and review on your platform of choice.

Speaker 2 (01:10:55):
And if you have any comments or episode topics suggestions,
contact us at An Hour of Her Time podcast at
gmail dot com.