"We Were Not Supposed to Think"

After the first set of trials ended, the United States held twelve others at Nuremberg. These trials were authorized by multinational agreements and based on international law. Telford Taylor, who served in the United States Army Intelligence during the war and was transferred to Justice Jackson’s staff during the first trials, supervised the new proceedings. He said of them, “The judgments of these subsequent trials added enormously to the body and the living reality of international penal law. No principle deserves to be called such unless men are willing to stake their consciences on its enforcement. That is the way law comes into being, and that is what was done at Nuremberg.” Among those brought to trial were:

• 26 military leaders, including five field marshals;

• 56 high-ranking SS and other police officers, including leaders in the Einsatzgvuppen and key officials in Heinrich Himmler’s central office which supervised the concentration camps and the extermination program,

• 14 officials of other SS organizations that engaged in racial persecution.

The defendants did not deny the accusations against them. Often their own testimony was used to convict them. Otto Ohlendorf, the former Chief of one of the Einsatzgruppen, was sentenced to death for the murder of about ninety thousand Jews and “Gypsies” after admitting that he ordered his men to kill children as well as adults.

At the trial, Rudolf Hoess, the Commandant at Auschwitz, was asked if he had considered whether the Jews he murdered deserved such a fate. He responded:

Don’t you see, we SS men were not supposed to think about these things: it never even occurred to us. – And besides, it was something already taken for granted that the Jews were to blame for everything... We just never heard anything else. It was not just newspapers like Der Stuermer but it was everything we ever heard. Even our military and ideological training took for granted that we had to protect Germany from the Jews... It only started to occur to me after the collapse that maybe it was not quite right, after I had heard what everybody was saying... We were all so trained to obey orders without even thinking that the thought of disobeying an order would simply never have occurred to anybody and somebody else would have done just as well if I hadn’t... You can be sure that it was not always a pleasure to see those mountains of corpses and smell the continual burning. – But Himmler had ordered it and had even explained the necessity and I really never gave much thought to whether it was wrong. It just seemed a necessity.