Nuremberg Trials - The Prisoners

Two examples - BBC - History - World Wars: Nuremberg: Nazis on Trial - from  http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/nuremberg_article_01.shtml

 

Hermann Goering: 'Prisoner Number One'

Hermann Goering at Nuremberg  ©
Goering was captured shortly after the end of the war with large quantities of his looted artworks. He thought he could negotiate with the Allies as Germany's most senior politician, but he found himself under arrest, stripped of everything, and held in an improvised prison camp before his transfer to Nuremberg to stand trial.
He was a big personality in every sense. The guards nicknamed him 'Fat Stuff' and bantered with him. He was charming, aloof and confident, and from the start was determined to dominate the other prisoners and make them follow his line of defence.
Goering insisted that everything that they had done was the result of their German patriotism. To defy the court was to protect Germany's reputation and to maintain their loyalty to their dead leader.

From the start Goering was determined to dominate the other prisoners and make them follow his line of defence.

With the start of the trial, Goering assumed at once the informal role as leader and spokesman for the whole cohort of prisoners. He was given the most prominent position in the dock.
When it came to his cross-examination he prepared carefully and in the opening exchanges with the American chief prosecutor Robert Jackson he emerged an easy winner.
So frustrated did Jackson become with Goering's clever, mocking but evasive responses that at the end of the session he threw down the headphones he had been wearing to hear the translated answers and refused to continue.
'If you all handle yourselves half as well as I did,' Goering boasted to the other prisoners, 'you will do all right.' Only after his cross-examination by the more experienced British barrister, Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, was Goering at last cut down to size.
For the prosecution teams, Goering's domineering role among the prisoner body posed a problem. In mid-February 1946, on the recommendation of the psychologist who monitored prisoner behaviour, Goering was forced to exercise and take his meals on his own.
His isolation allowed the other prisoners to talk freely to each other and in the courtroom. The united front that Goering wanted soon collapsed.
During the long summer months, when he had to listen to the catalogue of crimes and atrocities laid at the door of the system he had served, he became less confident. But he maintained his loyalty to Hitler until the very end, when he finally confessed to the prison psychologist his realisation that in the eyes of the German people Hitler had 'condemned himself'.
Goering was found guilty on all the charges laid against him and condemned to death. He regarded the whole trial as simply a case of victors' justice and had not expected to escape with his life. At the very end he cheated his captors. On 14 October 1946, the night before he was to be executed, he committed suicide with a phial of cyanide either hidden in his cell or smuggled in by a sympathetic guard.

Albert Speer: The 'Decent Nazi'

Albert Speer in his cell at Nuremberg  ©
Speer was the opposite of Goering in almost every respect. Tall, conventionally good-looking, capable of a quiet charm, he impressed his captors and interrogators more than any of the other prisoners. For some time he had not expected to be one of the major war criminals.
From the start he posed as an efficient and helpful technocrat, willing to give detailed information quite voluntarily on German weapons, economic performance and strategy. He was held separately from the other war criminals and was transferred to Nuremberg only in the autumn when it was clear that he was one of those chosen for trial.
Despite the reservations of his defence lawyer, Speer decided that his best defence was to admit his share of collective responsibility for the crimes of the regime and to distance himself from Hitler, a man who Speer freely admitted had once held him in thrall like all the rest.
At the same time in his interrogations and cross-examinations, he seldom expressed his individual guilt. He succeeded in presenting himself as part of the system, but not a driving force.
Just before the trial opened he sent a four-page letter to Robert Jackson reminding him again of just how useful he had been as a source of intelligence and technical information since his capture.

He posed as an efficient and helpful technocrat, willing to give detailed information quite voluntarily.

Speer was bound to clash with Goering. He resented Goering's efforts to dominate the prisoners and to dictate the course of their defence. When Goering was separated from the other prisoners in February, Speer was free to talk openly with them about the crimes of the regime.
The others did not all share his candour, any more than they shared Goering's ebullience, but for the rest of the trial period the cohort of prisoners divided into small groups rather than presenting a united front.
Speer added to the division when he dramatically revealed early in the trial that at the very end of the war he had tried to find a way to assassinate Hitler by pouring poison gas into his underground bunker. The plot was abortive, but it again presented Speer to the prosecution as someone different from the rest of the defendants.
When Speer was cross-examined he got off more lightly than others. At the end of the trial, even though he had been responsible for the mass exploitation of forced foreign labour, he was given a 20-year sentence. The man who supplied the labour, Fritz Sauckel, was executed.
The Speer story has remained an enigma. No doubt he benefited from his pose as a technical manager (whose social background was not very different from those who were trying him) and from his willingness to confess responsibility. The extent to which he manipulated his story to win sympathy or genuinely believed that the regime he served was criminal is still open to conjecture.