|
January 4: Colonel Telford Taylor presents the prosecution's case against the German High Command. He will be appointed lead prosecutor in subsequent Nuremberg trials.
January 28: During the French phase of the prosecution, French journalist Marie Claude Vaillant-Courturier provides eyewitness testimony to atrocities at the Auschwitz and Ravensbruck camps. She describes the process of selecting who would go to the gas chamber and the medical experiments performed on the inmates. The soon-to-be-notorious Auschwitz doctor Dr. Josef Mengele is mentioned for the first time at the trial.
February 11-12: Chief Soviet Prosecutor Roman Rudenko examines Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, who incriminates Göring, Jodl, and Keitel in the aggressive war launched against Russia. When Paulus's testimony concludes, Göring shouts at his lawyer: "Ask that dirty pig if he's a traitor! Ask him if he has taken out Russian citizenship papers!"
February 22: George Kennan, an American diplomat based in Moscow, sends Washington the so-called "long telegram," which explains Soviet hostility toward the West and suggests a policy of containment.
March 5: In Fulton, Missouri, Winston Churchill delivers his famous "Iron Curtain" speech, urging the United States and Western Europe to unite against the Soviets.
March 13-22: Göring testifies. In long answers, he justifies German rearmament and seizing of territory as necessary for the growth of the Third Reich. In cross-examination Göring frustrates Jackson with his discursive answers and side comments permitted by the tribunal.
April 15: A defendant calls Rudolf Höss, a commandant at the Auschwitz concentration camp, who testifies that "hundreds of thousands of human beings were sent to their deaths." When confronted about his apparent indifference, Höss says, "Don't you see, we SS men were not supposed to think about these things; it never even occurred to us. ... We were all so trained to obey orders without even thinking that the thought of disobeying an order would never have occurred to anybody."
Late July: Prosecutors make closing arguments concerning individual defendants.
August 31: Defendants make their final statements.
September 2: The I.M.T. judges begin deliberations.
October 1: The I.M.T. hands down verdicts against 21 defendants. Three are acquitted, six are sentenced to prison terms, and twelve are condemned to death.
October 15: Göring commits suicide by swallowing a smuggled cyanide pill hours before his scheduled execution.
October 16: Eleven war criminals are hanged in Nuremberg. (The remains of Martin Bormann, who was convicted in absentia, will be located decades later in Berlin.) The bodies are placed face up in wooden coffins and photographed before being taken to Munich for cremation. The shocking photographs are made available to the press and published to wide disproval.
October 25: The United States Military Government for Germany establishes Military Tribunal I, which tries 23 Nazi physicians. The doctors are charged with carrying out the Nazi euthanasia program and conducting medical experiments on thousands of concentration camp prisoners, many of whom died or were permanently crippled. Sixteen of the doctors are found guilty. Seven are executed. This is the first of 12 Nuremberg trials prosecuted by the U.S. alone. |