The weight of history
Visiting the Nuremberg courtroom.
I recently fulfilled an important travel goal—to visit the site of the trials held by the International Military Tribunal at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, Germany. There the four major Allies, the United States, the UK, France, and the Soviet Union, tried 24 Nazi officials for, among other things, crimes against humanity.
For more than 25 hours of everything you ever wanted to know about the Nuremberg trials, I recommend this audiobook. It boggles the mind to contemplate how the husband and wife team managed to produce this book.
It also boggles the mind to contemplate the enormity of the task of establishing the tribunal, from defining the charges to employing the newly coined term “genocide,” to the practicalities of housing and feeding the delegations in a largely destroyed city, to one of the first uses of simultaneous translation, to a huge obstacle I had never even thought of—the scarcity in 1945 of copy machines, Russian typewriters, and the like, all required to give the parties access to documents.
And speaking of documents, there were, I estimate, gazillions, thanks in part to the German obsession with recordkeeping, which had to be seized/found, translated, studied, sifted through, organized, archived, summarized, entered into evidence, and on and on it went.
If I keep on going in this vein, this newsletter will have to turn into The Nuremberg Trials by Faith, so let me move on!
There is a permanent exhibition above the actual courtroom. It is excellent. I spent several hours there, reading, watching, and listening. It’s a lot to take in, obviously. Fortunately, all of the audio guides are available here, so anyone can “visit” the exhibits.
The courtroom then and now is shown below. Since the Nuremberg trials, it has been used as a regular courtroom, so if court was in session, you could not go in. Now it is no longer being used for trials, but it was closed the day I was there on account of some film-making that was going on. You can peek into the courtroom from the exhibition floor, so I took this poor photo from there.
This tremendously moving and informative visit gave me a lot to think about, especially how few people were charged, how few tried, how few convicted. Just adding that to my list of things I continue to be unable to understand.
Finally, American friends of my generation and earlier may be interested to see a young Walter Cronkite as a United Press reporter at the trials!
