Authors: Ira Katznelson
The United States took no action. Echoing isolationist sentiment that prevailed in the United States, and still apparently convinced of Italy’s inherent attractiveness, Ambassador Long counseled against an oil embargo as a rejoinder to Italian imperialism shortly before his resignation in 1936. By accepting this advice, the
Chicago Tribune
observed, the country had decided “to work out America’s relations with the new Italian empire without a loss of face.”
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A willingness to countenance horrendous human rights violations in the name of realism, which would become even more apparent in 1938 with Kristallnacht, thus already was evident in the aftermath of this aggressive Italian war.
That February, a botched attempt to kill Rodolfo Graziani, the Italian viceroy in Ethiopia, served as the pretext for a campaign of counterterror by Italian forces that killed some thirty thousand civilians. The colonial government further responded by introducing residential segregation based on race, an action to which the United States could not have been expected to object.
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More broadly, the Italians understood how to play American opinion during this period between the initiation of this repression and Mussolini’s Libyan tour. At just this moment, Charles Lindbergh and his wife, the pilot Anne Morrow Lindbergh, were welcomed by Balbo in Tripoli, where he greeted the couple.
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The reunion of Lindbergh and Balbo brought together the two figures who had been most responsible for placing aviation in the firmament of Western imagination.
A leading isolationist, Lindbergh chose not to disentangle himself from the Fascist web in Europe. In fact, he had made five trips to Nazi Germany in the 1930s, including a celebrated appearance at the opening ceremony of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games. Even after the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 extruded Germany’s Jews from civil, economic, and political society, the anti-Semitic Lindbergh characterized Hitler as “undoubtedly a great man . . . having far more character and vision than . . . painted in so many different ways by accounts in America and England.”
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By comparison, the flogging of two Jews in Tripoli in December 1936 because they had “rebelled against Governor Italo Balbo’s ordinance” that they “keep their shops open Saturdays” seemed like a small, even petty violation.
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Aware of his predilections, Air Marshal Hermann Göring, Hitler’s designated successor and Germany’s own pilot hero, presented Lindbergh, in 1938, “in the name of the Führer,” with a medallion ornamented with four swastikas, the Service Cross of the Order of the German Eagle, the second-highest German decoration, for service by foreigners to the Third Reich.
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Addressing a rally at Chicago’s Soldier Field in August 1940, eleven months after the start of war in Europe and in the midst of the Battle of Britain, Lindbergh called for cooperation with Germany should it win the war, “adding that an agreement could maintain peace and civilization throughout the world.”
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In July 1941, after the Soviet Union had been invaded, he told a San Francisco mass meeting of the America First Committee, the country’s leading isolationist pressure group, that he would prefer an alliance “with Germany with all her faults” than with “Soviet Russia.”
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Two months later, as Hitler threatened Britain after the conquests and occupation of Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, and France, and with the Final Solution under way, Lindbergh singled out “the Jewish race,” at an America First Committee rally he addressed in Des Moines, as “one of the most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war.”
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A full year before Lindbergh’s campaign on behalf of isolation, Balbo had died mysteriously, with eight other Italian officers, when his plane crashed in flames at Tobruk, in northeastern Libya, near the Egyptian border, on June 28, 1940. Like their Nazi allies, who rarely missed an opportunity to falsify facts or accept responsibility, the Italian government blamed the event on the Royal Air Force, which, it alleged, had brought down Balbo’s plane after it had engaged the British in battle.
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In fact, Balbo was piloting a nine-seat passenger craft, and no such airplane had been encountered during the RAF’s bombing raid.
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Major Balbo’s death was accorded the pomp of a national hero. There were many scenes of public mourning as his body was transported from Tobruk to Bengasi. Balbo was immediately succeeded as commander of all the armed forces of North Africa by Rodolfo Graziani.
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A requiem Mass was held at the Church of St. Francis in Tripoli. Mussolini paid tribute by ordering that the Seventy-fifth Legion of Fascist Militia of Ferrara be named the Italo Balbo Legion.
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Germany’s message of condolence was sent by Hermann Göring: “The personality of the first Air Marshal of fascism was for all of us, in these times, a guarantee of victory. In this hour, which is so tragic for Italy, I send you, Il Duce, my deepest sympathy, and that of my air force.”
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II.
B
RECKENRIDGE
L
ONG
’
S
and Charles Lindbergh’s vision of American policy could not hold unless the United States under Franklin Roosevelt would abandon its commitments to democracy to become a bedfellow of Europe’s fascist dictatorships. This, of course, did not happen. With the war over, and with Mussolini and Hitler dead and defeated, the events of the fall of 1945 provided a stark contrast to the fanfare that had greeted Balbo in Chicago and New York just twelve years earlier.
The Grand Conference Room of Berlin’s Supreme Court Building, the seat of the Allied Control Council, provided the site for the opening session, on October 18, 1945, of the International Military Tribunal,
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marking the first time the leaders of a defeated power were tried in an international court.
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With Lord Justice Geoffrey Lawrence of Britain, Henri Donnedieu de Vabres of France, Francis Biddle of the United States, and Iola Nikitchenko of the Soviet Union on the bench, the tribunal began the process in which it would receive evidence, including captured film documenting atrocities, that had been generated by a massive staff working with the prosecutors of each of the Allies, and would hear riveting testimony, including substantiation by death-camp survivors.
In part to counteract the idea that the tribunal was nothing more than an American court dressed up as a cross-national enterprise, Britain’s Lawrence had been selected as president, or chief judge, while Nikitchenko, who had objected to this choice, was asked to preside over the opening session in Berlin.
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Though he had little sympathy for Western-style jurisprudence, Nikitchenko utilized his manifestly keen intelligence to master its basic features once he had been tapped to join the tribunal in Nuremberg. A British Foreign Office observer at the trial thought him to be “of the highest calibre and genuinely interested in Anglo-Saxon legal principles and in preserving the dignity of the court.”
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Dressed in a sharply creased chocolate-colored Red Army uniform with gold epaulets and green trim, which strongly contrasted with the gowns of the Western judges, Nikitchenko called the autumn proceedings to order at 10:30
A.M.
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Most of the first day was devoted to reading lengthy capital indictments. The twenty-two accused were Germans from the highest rungs of the Nazi regime, including Governor-General of Poland Hans Frank; Minister of Internal Affairs Wilhelm Frick; Gestapo head and the Third Reich’s second-in-command, Hermann Göring; Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess; Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel; Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop; Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories Alfred Rosenberg; architect and armaments minister Albert Speer; and the editor of the virulently anti-Semitic weekly
Der Stürmer,
Julius Streicher. They faced four sets of charges. First was the allegation of having conspired “to commit, or which involved commission of, Crimes Against Peace, War Crimes, and Crimes Against Humanity.” Second was the contention that they had, in practice, committed such crimes by planning, preparing, initiating, and waging aggressive warfare. Third was the charge of executing war crimes, which the indictment identified with the mistreatment of civilians, the use of slave labor, and the wanton destruction of villages, towns, and cities, thus violating the customs and laws of war, including the Hague and Geneva Conventions. Fourth, and most novel, was the accusation of having performed crimes against humanity on political, racial, and religious grounds, including persecution and mass extermination.
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There was no specific count for the murder of the Jews, but what later came to be called the Holocaust was the most important element in this charge.
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The tribunal gathered in a shell of what had been Germany’s most vibrant city. Berlin had been the target of more than 350 British and, later, American bombing raids since August 1940. A concerted British campaign between November 1943 and March 1944 had killed some 4,000 civilians and rendered 450,000 homeless. Carried out by the American Eighth Air Force on February 3 and February 26, 1945, the last major attacks killed approximately 3,100 people, and some 190,000 lost their homes.
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An official American history of the air war offers a sense of the intensity of this assault, a relatively moderate use of force for World War II:
The next day the Eighth sent all three of its air divisions over the capital of the Reich (Berlin), where 1,089 effective sorties employed H2X to drop 2,778 tons of bombs, 44 percent of them incendiaries, through 10/10 clouds. Each division attempted to hit a separate rail station. The Schlesischer, Alexanderplatz, and Berlin-North stations were all located within two miles of the center of Berlin. The bombing started large fires and killed many civilians. RAF Mosquito nightintruder bombers attacking 12 hours later reported fires still burning. After the 26 February mission, with its 500,000 fire bomblets, the typical Berliner, with reason, would have been hard put to distinguish between RAF area bombing and AAF precision bombing.
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The tribunal soon moved to room 600 in Nuremberg’s bomb-damaged but largely intact Palace of Justice, a building that had been restored by a workforce of 875, using “5,200 gallons of paint, 250,000 bricks, 100,000 board feet of lumber, a million feet of wire and cable,” a harbinger of the larger postwar reconstruction to come.
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The Bavarian city, famous as a leading manufacturing center for toys, had been reduced to rubble in a devastating bombing raid, lasting less than an hour, on January 2, 1945, when “the castle, three churches full of art treasures and at least 2,000 medieval houses went up in flames.”
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Writing as the trial opened, an American correspondent observed how the old town, flattened to ash and rubble, resembled “a medieval walled town razed by a giant catastrophe, a great fire or an earthquake.”
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The court sat in Nuremberg from November 20, 1945 until the announcement of verdicts on September 30 and October 1, 1946. It had been Nikitchenko who had first suggested a city closely associated with the birth of Hitler’s party.
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There, starting in 1923, the Nazis had conducted mass demonstrations in conjunction with their annual party conference. During the first six years of the Third Reich, from 1933 to 1938, massive rallies, spectacularly choreographed by Albert Speer with dramatic lighting, a flotilla of fluttering flags, and theatrical torches, were held at the vast rally area he had designed. This immense site included a marching field, a “great road” more than a mile long that served as a parade ground and a field for military maneuvers, a congress hall, and two large stadiums. One of the stadiums, the Luitpold Arena, alone could hold some 150,000. It was here that Leni Riefenstahl’s first Nuremberg documentary,
Der Sieg des Glaubens
(
The Victory of Faith
), recorded the Fifth Nazi Party Rally of 1933, while her second,
Triumph des Willens
(
Triumph of the Will
), famously captured the Sixth, in 1934.
A year later, in September of 1935, the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor, the Reich Flag Law, and the Reich Citizenship Law were all passed at a special session of the Reichstag that was convened at the close of the “the Rally of Freedom,” as the Seventh Party Congress was called. This legislation, dreaded by the nearly 500,000 Jews living in Germany, imposed an official shape on what had been previously an unsystematic and haphazard, though virulent, form of racial persecution.
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These Nuremberg Laws, as they came to be known, forbade Jews to marry or have sex with “citizens of German or kindred blood.” Jews, they announced, could no longer employ Gentile women domestics or display the national flag and colors. Most important, Jews no longer qualified for citizenship. Henceforth, “a Reich citizen” was to be defined as “a subject of the State who is of German or related blood, who proves by his conduct that he is willing and fit faithfully to serve the German people and Reich.” In announcing these decrees at the rally’s closing speech, Hitler portentously warned that if “international Jewish agitation should continue” to remonstrate against the way Jews are treated in Germany, their circumstances would be “handed over to the National Socialist Party for final resolution.”
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A decade later, the ultimate results of this more radical phase of persecution would be judged in Nuremberg.
The opening statement for the United States was delivered on November 21 by Robert Jackson, the U.S. Supreme Court justice who served as the country’s chief counsel, although he had never attended college or earned a law degree. He underscored how Nuremberg had been selected as an object lesson. He observed that “it is not necessary among the ruins of this ancient and beautiful city, with untold numbers of its civilian inhabitants still buried in its rubble, to argue the proposition that to start or wage a war of aggression has the moral qualities of the worst of crimes.”
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As the tribunal met, no fewer than thirty thousand bodies were decaying under the city’s reeking remains.
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Though the level of destruction and casualties did not equal those caused by the carpet bombing and firestorms in Cologne, Hamburg, or Dresden, the city already had suffered grievous damage to its population and infrastructure even before the last raids only eight months earlier, on March 16 and 17, which killed 500 and rendered 35,000 homeless, and burned down the Steinbuhl, the only district that had still been standing.
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During the course of that month, the fiercest in the Allied air war, a greater tonnage of bombs was dropped on Germany—67,000 tons—than had been deployed during the war’s first three years combined (though no firepower had been directed at concentration camps and death camps in Germany or Poland). So extensive were the raids that at month’s end, on March 28, Prime Minister Winston Churchill wrote to his army chief of staff to ask whether, in the wake of such ferocity, “the moment has come when the question of bombing German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed.”
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