Kaiser's Holocaust by Unknown

INTRODUCTION
    Cell 5
    At 10.30 p.m. on 14 October 1946, Private Harold F. Johnson of ‘C’ Company, 26th US Infantry, walked along the corridor leading to Cell 5. Taking up the position he was to occupy for the next few hours, he leaned forward and peered through the viewing hole into the cell. ‘At that time’, Johnson later informed a Board of Inquiry, the prisoner was ‘lying flat on his back with his hands stretched out along his sides above the blankets. He stayed in that position for about five minutes without so much as moving.’ At about 10.40, Johnson informs us, the captive man ‘brought his hands across his chest with his fingers laced and turned his head to the wall … He lay there for about two or three minutes … Later he seemed to stiffen and made a blowing, choking sound through his lips’. Private Johnson raised the alarm. He shouted for the Corporal of the Relief, Lieutenant Cromer, who ran noisily down the spiral staircase from the corridor above, quickly followed by the Prison Chaplain, Captain Henry F. Gerecke. Only when all three were assembled did Johnson unlock and swing open the cell door. Cromer rushed past and was the first inside, followed by the Chaplain; Johnson came in behind ‘holding the light’. Chaplain Gerecke leaned down and grasped hold of the prisoner’s right arm, which hung limply over the edge of his metal bunk. He searched frantically for a pulse. ‘Good Lord,’ he said, ‘this man is dead.’ 1
    The prisoner who lay in Cell 5 of the Nuremberg Prison, with shards of glass from an ampoule of cyanide still in his mouth, had once been Prime Minister of Prussia and President of the Reichstag. He was the former Commander-in-Chief of the most feared air force in Europe and a ruthless administrator whohad overseen the deadly exploitation of Eastern Europe. He considered himself – as he had boasted to his jailers only weeks earlier – a ‘historical figure’, and was convinced that ‘in fifty or sixty years’ statues in his image would be erected all across Germany. He was Hermann Göring, and in the last twist of his strange life he had cheated the hangman, committing suicide just two hours before his execution.
     
    Seven months earlier, in one of the opening addresses of the Trial of German Major War Criminals, one of the American prosecutors, Robert Kemper, had described the Nuremberg Trials as ‘the greatest history seminar ever’. The case for the prosecution was in itself a monumental piece of historical research. Outside the chamber, a team of historians, translators, archivists and documentary filmmakers had assembled to catalogue and file, estimate and quantify the litany of aggression and murderous criminality committed during the twelve years of Hitler’s ‘Thousand-Year Reich’. From millions of individual tragedies, they had formed a prosecution case. The documents linking these crimes to the twenty-three accused men had been duplicated, indexed and translated into French, Russian and English. The indictment alone ran to twenty-four thousand words. The preparation of the case for the prosecution could perhaps have lasted longer than Nazi rule itself. As it was, the first three days of the trial were entirely taken up just reading the indictment into the official record.
    Over the course of the trial, the defendants were condemned by the records from their pasts. Their own signatures, on their own documents, were submitted against them. The minutes of incriminating meetings they had attended were recited to them; their speeches and edicts read, sometimes shouted, back at them. Those who had escaped their prisons and concentration camps recounted their appalling stories. Perhaps at no other time and in no other place has the work of historians and archivists been putto such dramatic effect. In our time, only the Truth and Reconciliation Committees of post-Apartheid South Africa have come close to replicating the drama of Nuremberg.
    What happened at