Last Days of WWII: Goering at the Nuremberg Trials

Most lectures are badly delivered and boring; I avoid them. Documentaries are another story. I often sit transfixed by them. Today I watched the second part of "The Last Days of World War II", dealing with the Nuremberg war crimes trials. I thought of WAISer Siegfried Ramler, who was an interpreter there. It was the best account I have seen of the trials and the period preceding it. The most attention was given to Hermann Goering. I had stood close to him on the entrance to the Bayreuth Wagner theater in 1933. He was surrounded by adoring  women, and clearly enjoying it. Now, twelve years later, he was still cocky. He gave himself up, thinking he would be treated as an officer. He arrived in his military uniform and gave a press conference.  He enjoyed being the center of attention, but his mood changed when someone told him he was to be tried as a war criminal. As the opening of the trial, he wanted to make a speech, but the judge told him he must simply pleased guilty or not guilty.  He made up for that later, when he defended himself in a six hour speech. That did not save him; he was condemned to death by hanging.  He escaped the noose by taking strychnine, a vial of which he had hidden in his bag, which was stored in the storage room. He probably obtained it with the complicity of an American lieutenant with whom he had become friendly and who boasted about this friendship. Goering gave him his watch, engraved with his name.  The American died before he could  be thoroughly investigated,.

The Russians took the Auschwitz concentration camp and reported what they had found.  At first this was dismissed as Soviet propaganda, but then the Western forces captured some concentration camps and secured direct evidence of the atrocities there.  There were the usual pictures of corpses and starved inmates.  In view of this, one wonders about the sanity of the holocaust deniers. Some of them admit the killings, but deny there were gas chambers.  This technicality does not diminish the horrors of the killings. Official Germany rightly wishes to make the truth known, and the Goethe Institute collaborated in the making of these documentaries. Are there Holocaust deniers in Germany?

We would welcome any comments by Siegfried Ramler. What does he think of Goering's performance? Has he published anything about what he saw?

Siegfried Ramler was an interpreter at the Nuremberg war crimes trials.  Here is his impression of Hermann Goering: If one can speak of a dominant personality in the dock, Hermann Goering definitely fits that description as the leading defendant.  Prison diet and discipline seem to have improved his health, since he was forced to wean himself from a drug dependency.  He lost weight and he was mentally alert, as demonstrated by his ability to spar effectively with Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson during his cross examination.   From the very beginning of the trial he took it on himself to direct the strategy of his codefendants by sending notes from the dock to various defense lawyers with suggestions of issues to be raised, questions to be asked, and witnesses to be called.   This manipulative behavior became an irritant to the court and he was ordered to limit his communications to his own defense counsel and to issues pertaining to his own defense.  During a period of time during the trial one of my duties was to check his notes to counsel before they were passed on and to ascertain that they were related to his own defense.   Goering wanted the German leaders in the dock to present a united front, an aim in which he could not succeed.  The disparity among the defendants in their backgrounds and in their roles in relation to Hitler was too great.  For example, such individuals as the banker Hjalmar  Schacht or the diplomat Constantin Von Neurath would not even deign to speak to such defendants as Gauleiter Julius Streicher or SS Chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner.   Goering's personal vanity was evident throughout the trial.  When testimony was presented about his penchant for luxury or his looting of art works from occupied countries, he became visibly angry - more so than when the larger issues of his involvement with aggressive war and war crimes were the subject during his examination on the stand.   He escaped hanging by swallowing a concealed cyanide pill in his cell shortly before the scheduled execution. It is likely that the pill was passed to him by an American officer of the guard detail whom he had befriended.  I recall him sitting in the first seat in the front row of the dock, often with a supercilious smile, perhaps knowing that he would cheat the hangman.    

Siegfried Ramler's account of the behavior of Hermann Goering at the Nuremberg war crimes trial moved Tim Brown to write: I took my first college political science course in the early 1960s from Sig Ramler at the University of Hawaii. Then as now, Sig's remembrances of the Nuremberg process and unique insights into the personalities of the defendants are extraordinary, as he clearly demonstrates here. His many memories of this are truly treasures that need to be preserved.

RH; I agree. Perhaps he could simply dictate them; they could then be made available on  DVD. Siegfried's memories of the Nuremberg trials would be of great interest to the Hoover archives. I am copying this to Elena Danieldson, Director of the Hoover Library and Archives.  She might be able to facilitate this.