Back to Nuremberg: Allied prosecutors recall the horror

Whitney Harris, one of the chief American prosecutors at the trials, which convicted 19 Nazi leaders of crimes against humanity, joined former Allied lawyers and German court reporters who took part in the proceedings that began on 20 November 1945.

Mr Harris, who is now in his eighties, admitted yesterday that before the trial started, he and his colleagues had little idea of the enormity of the Nazis' crimes. "I did not have the slightest idea of the scale of the genocide that had taken place in Germany. We did not have much solid evidence when we started our investigations," he said.

Evidence of the Holocaust was gained at the trial through Mr Harris's questioning of the Auschwitz commandant, Rudolf Höss, who admitted turning the concentration camp into an extermination centre for Jews and Gypsies. During the trials, the court heard evidence from Holocaust victims and was shown a series of heart-rending documentary films showing the piles of emaciated corpses and skeletal survivors found in the camps after they were liberated by the Allies in 1945.

Mr Harris said yesterday that it had taken him 20 years to cope with his memories of the trial. "Even nowadays, this most horrific event in the history of humanity still really affects me. But all theses gruesome crimes are not exclusively a German phenomenon."

The first day of the trial was taken up entirely by the Allied chief prosecutor's reading of a 24,000-word indictment against Nazi leaders, including the former German air marshall, Hermann Goering, Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess, and the Nazi foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop.

Goering, who committed suicide in his cell shortly before he was due to be executed, was among 12 Nazi leaders sentenced to death. Three were acquitted. The remainder, including Rudolf Hess and Albert Speer, Hitler's architect, were sentenced to long prison terms. Hess killed himself in Berlin's Spandau prison in 1986.

Markus Wolf, 82, the former head of Communist East Germany's intelligence service, covered the Nuremberg trials for a German radio station in 1945. "I was sitting in the seventh row in the Nuremberg court. Perhaps I was naive, but I had seen the photographs of all these Nazi leaders in all their pomp and glory. Then in Nuremberg, I saw normal people sitting in the dock. They seemed like staff in a railway station or post office," he said yesterday.

Mr Wolf recalled how Goering and Speer turned their heads away as the court was shown documentary evidence of the death camps. "In just the same way, many Germans did not want to hear anything about the concentration camps," he said.

Despite the Nuremberg trials' role in setting a precedent for the prosecution of war criminals, polls suggest its findings were largely dismissed in Germany as "victors' justice" for decades after the war.

But the German media was unanimous yesterday in its praise of the trials. "Without Nuremberg, the International Court of Justice in the Hague and trials of the likes of Slobodan Molosevic and Saddam Hussein would have been unthinkable,'' wrote Berlin's Der Tagesspiegel yesterday. "Sixty years after Nuremberg, reunified Germany no longer has to argue about victor's justice. It can stand up for justice's victory."