Nuremberg between November 1945 and October 1946 was more than a trial: it was the elaborate centrepiece of an enormous act of national exorcism. The Allied powers believed that the prosecution of the surviving members of the Nazi elite would be a key step in the ‘de-Nazification’ of the German people. The post-war settlement was, in part, predicated upon the willingness of Germany’s battered and exhausted population to reject Nazism. With every major city in ruins, five million Germans dead and four armies of occupation on German soil, all but the most fanatically pro-Nazi were willing to acknowledge that the Third Reich had been an unparalleled national calamity. When confronted at Nuremberg with the stark truth of what Germany had done under the Nazis, some came to other conclusions. The Nazi leaders in the dock, and the thousands of henchmen who had enacted their decrees, came to be seen as ‘other’. Their actions had showed them to be inhumane; perhaps, therefore, they were unhuman. Led by such men, the Third Reich had been capable of crimes that were both terrible and unique in history. Nazism, so the argument went, had been an aberration in European history, a discontinuity.
This is the great post-war myth: the comforting fantasy that the Nazis were a new order of monsters and that their crimes were without precursor or precedent. They were not. Much of Nazi ideology and many of the crimes committed in its name were part of a longer trend within European history. Nazism was both a culmination and a distortion of decades of German and European history and philosophy. It was, in part, the final homecoming of theories and practices that Europeans had developed and perfected in far-flung corners of the world during the last phase of imperial conquest. There is nothing within that historical subsoil that made the ultimate flowering of Nazism inevitable, but there is much that makes it understandable. At Nuremberg, however, all such historical precedent was plunged intodarkness. ‘The greatest history seminar ever’ did not look back far enough into history.
The Nuremberg Trials took as their start date the year in which a new age of barbarism had seemed to overwhelm Europe – 1914. This was year zero for the prosecuting nations, all of whom agreed that World War I had been the calamity that set Europe on course for the greater tragedies of World War II. The generation who had mutilated their own continent had, in the process, been disfigured politically and ideologically. The national enmities and the trauma of mass, mechanised killing had sown the seeds for the savagery that lay at the heart of Nazism. At Nuremberg, everything before the Somme, Verdun and Ypres was regarded as mere detail, as it was presumed that Nazism as an ideology had emerged fully formed from the chaos and resentment following Germany’s defeat in 1918.
In its narrow historical focus, if in no other way, the trial of Hermann Göring was typical. When questioning began, on the morning of 13 March, Göring was asked for a ‘short account of his life up to the outbreak of the First World War’. The president of the court repeatedly stressed the need for brevity. It was only when Göring’s account reached 1914 that he was encouraged to elaborate and detailed questioning began. 2 Over the course of the 218-day trial, Hermann Göring, the lead defendant, delivered only four sentences about his life before World War I and the role of his family in Germany’s longer history.
Had the Nuremberg prosecutors looked further into Göring’s past, and his nation’s, they would have discovered another story of death camps and racial genocide. They would have seen that the ideas of many of the philosophers, scientists and soldiers whose theories inspired Hitler had underpinned an earlier, forgotten holocaust. Perhaps they might have recognised a continuity in German history and understood that Nazism was anything but unique. They might also
This is the great post-war myth: the comforting fantasy that the Nazis were a new order of monsters and that their crimes were without precursor or precedent. They were not. Much of Nazi ideology and many of the crimes committed in its name were part of a longer trend within European history. Nazism was both a culmination and a distortion of decades of German and European history and philosophy. It was, in part, the final homecoming of theories and practices that Europeans had developed and perfected in far-flung corners of the world during the last phase of imperial conquest. There is nothing within that historical subsoil that made the ultimate flowering of Nazism inevitable, but there is much that makes it understandable. At Nuremberg, however, all such historical precedent was plunged intodarkness. ‘The greatest history seminar ever’ did not look back far enough into history.
The Nuremberg Trials took as their start date the year in which a new age of barbarism had seemed to overwhelm Europe – 1914. This was year zero for the prosecuting nations, all of whom agreed that World War I had been the calamity that set Europe on course for the greater tragedies of World War II. The generation who had mutilated their own continent had, in the process, been disfigured politically and ideologically. The national enmities and the trauma of mass, mechanised killing had sown the seeds for the savagery that lay at the heart of Nazism. At Nuremberg, everything before the Somme, Verdun and Ypres was regarded as mere detail, as it was presumed that Nazism as an ideology had emerged fully formed from the chaos and resentment following Germany’s defeat in 1918.
In its narrow historical focus, if in no other way, the trial of Hermann Göring was typical. When questioning began, on the morning of 13 March, Göring was asked for a ‘short account of his life up to the outbreak of the First World War’. The president of the court repeatedly stressed the need for brevity. It was only when Göring’s account reached 1914 that he was encouraged to elaborate and detailed questioning began. 2 Over the course of the 218-day trial, Hermann Göring, the lead defendant, delivered only four sentences about his life before World War I and the role of his family in Germany’s longer history.
Had the Nuremberg prosecutors looked further into Göring’s past, and his nation’s, they would have discovered another story of death camps and racial genocide. They would have seen that the ideas of many of the philosophers, scientists and soldiers whose theories inspired Hitler had underpinned an earlier, forgotten holocaust. Perhaps they might have recognised a continuity in German history and understood that Nazism was anything but unique. They might also
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