Jackson helped lead the Allies—American, British, French, and Soviet governments—to an agreement called the London Charter , setting the procedures for the Nuremberg Trials. The proceedings would be simultaneously translated into English, French, German, and Russian. The trial would make history being the first of its kind with judges from four countries. Hitler was the first dictator of Germany but he was not the last. Nuremberg, Germany was chosen as the location of the trials for being a focal point of Nazi propaganda rallies leading up to the war.
The Allies wanted Nuremberg to symbolize the death of Nazi Germany. The court convened in the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg that was previously expanded by German prisoners to fit up to 1, detainees. The jurisdiction of the Tribunal included crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The IMT defined crimes against humanity as "murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation The indictment was read on November 20, with 21 defendants appearing in court.
Between November 20, to October 1, , the Tribunal tried 24 of the most important military and political leaders of the Third Reich and heard evidence against 21 of the defendants. During the trial, the Tribunal—and the world—learned about the the Nazi Party and its "planning, initiating and waging of aggressive war" from the beginning.
Footage of Nazi concentration camps taken by Allied military photographers during liberation was shown to the court. He swallowed cyanide he had concealed in a copper cartridge shell, while lying on a cot in his cell.
The one-time Number Two man in the Nazi hierarchy was dead two hours before he was scheduled to have been dropped through the trap door of a gallows erected in a small, brightly lighted gymnasium in the gaol yard, 35 yards from the cell block where he spent his last days of ignominy. Joachim von Ribbentrop, foreign minister in the ill-starred regime of Adolf Hitler, took Goering's place as first to the scaffold.
Last to depart this life in a total span of just about two hours was Arthur Seyss-Inquart, former Gauleiter of Holland and Austria. As they went to the gallows, most of the ten endeavored to show bravery. Some were defiant and some were resigned and some begged the Almighty for mercy. All except for Rosenberg made brief, last-minute statements on the scaffold.
But the only one to make any reference to Hitler or the Nazi ideology in his final moments was Julius Streicher. Three black-painted wooden scaffolds stood inside the gymnasium, a room approximately 33 feet wide by 80 feet long with plaster walls in which cracks showed.
The gymnasium had been used only three days before by the American security guards for a basketball game. Two gallows were used alternately.
The third was a spare for use if needed. The men were hanged one at a time, but to get the executions over with quickly, the military police would bring in the man while the prisoner who proceeded him still was dangling at the end of the rope. The ten once great men in Hitler's Reich that was to have lasted for a thousand years walked up thirteen wooden steps to a platform eight feet high which also was eight square feet. Ropes were suspended from a crossbeam supported on two posts.
A new one was used for each man. When the trap was sprung, the victim dropped from sight in the interior of the scaffolding. The bottom of it was boarded up with wood on three sides and shielded by a dark canvas curtain on the fourth, so that no one saw the death struggles of the men dangling with broken necks.
Von Ribbentrop entered the execution chamber at a. Nuremberg time. He was stopped immediately inside the door by two Army sergeants who closed in on each side of him and held his arms, while another sergeant who had followed him in removed manacles from his hands and replaced them with a leather strap. It was planned originally to permit the condemned men to walk from their cells to the execution chamber with their hands free, but all were manacled following Goering's suicide.
Von Ribbentrop was able to maintain his apparent stoicism to the last. He walked steadily toward the scaffold between his two guards, but he did not answer at first when an officer standing at the foot of the gallows went through the formality of asking his name.
When the query was repeated he almost shouted, 'Joachim von Ribbentrop! When he was turned around on the platform to face the witnesses, he seemed to clench his teeth and raise his head with the old arrogance. When asked whether he had any final message he said, 'God protect Germany,' in German, and then added, 'May I say something else? The interpreter nodded and the former diplomatic wizard of Nazidom spoke his last words in loud, firm tones: 'My last wish is that Germany realize its entity and that an understanding be reached between the East and the West.
I wish peace to the world. As the black hood was placed in position on his head, Von Ribbentrop looked straight ahead. Then the hangman adjusted the rope, pulled the lever, and Von Ribbentrop slipped away to his fate.
Field Marshall Keitel, who was immediately behind Von Ribbentrop in the order of executions, was the first military leader to be executed under the new concept of international law - the principle that professional soldiers cannot escape punishment for waging aggressive wars and permitting crimes against humanity with the claim they were dutifully carrying out orders of superiors.
Keitel entered the chamber two minutes after the trap had dropped beneath Von Ribbentrop, while the latter still was at the end of his rope. But Von Ribbentrop's body was concealed inside the first scaffold; all that could be seen was the taut rope. Keitel did not appear as tense as Von Ribbentrop. He held his head high while his hands were being tied and walked erect towards the gallows with a military bearing. Facebook users have shared a photo said to show journalists and doctors executed at Nuremberg in Germany.
However, the image was taken in Ukraine and shows Nazi war criminals who were charged with mass murder. But, like claims that medical staff administering COVID vaccines are war criminals here , the facts do not add up.
Despite the complexities of the trial and inevitable differences and tensions between US and Soviet prosecutors, the Nuremberg process resulted in the conviction of twenty of the twenty-three defendants on trial Martin Borman, Hitler's deputy, was included and condemned in absentia among these though he may by then have been already dead in the ruins of Berlin.
Eleven of the defendants including Hermann Goring, Alfred Rosenberg, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Ernst Kaltenbrunner - were condemned to death and in the early hours of October 16th, all bar Goring were hanged, their bodies laid out in the prison gymnasium for photographs to prevent any subsequent fabrication and then cremated at a secret destination. Goring's body was there too - though he had cheated the hangman by taking a cyanide capsule the previous evening; Himmler and Goebbels, the other key Nazi war criminals, had like Hitler himself, escaped justice by previously committing suicide as well.
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