28th November 1945
Pages from 'PUNCH'

The caption reads

THE STRANGER IN NUREMBERG

Justice at Nuremberg?

From Wikipedia:

In all, 249 journalists were accredited to cover the IMT and 61,854 visitor tickets were issued. In France, the sentence for Rudolf Hess and acquittal of organizations were met with outrage from the media and especially from organizations for deportees and resistance fighters, as they were perceived as too lenient.

In the United Kingdom, although a variety of responses were reported, it was difficult to sustain interest in a long trial. Where the prosecution was disappointed by some of the verdicts, the defense could take satisfaction.

Many Germans at the time of the trials focused on finding food and shelter. Despite this, a majority read press reports about the trial. In a 1946 poll, 78 percent of Germans assessed the trial as fair, but four years later that had fallen to 38 percent, with 30 percent considering it unfair. As time went on, more Germans considered the trials illegitimate victor's justice and an imposition of collective guilt, which they rejected—instead considering themselves victims of the war.

As the Cold War began, the rapidly changing political environment began to affect the effectiveness of the trials. The educational purpose of the Nuremberg Military Tribunals was a failure, in part because of the resistance to war crimes trials in German society, but also because of the United States Army's refusal to publish the trial record in German for fear it would undermine the fight against communism.

The German churches, both Catholic and Protestant, were vocal proponents of amnesty. The pardon of convicted war criminals also had cross-party support in West Germany, which was established in 1949. The Americans satisfied these wishes to bind West Germany to the Western Bloc, beginning early releases of Nuremberg Military Tribunal convicts in 1949. In 1951, High Commissioner John J. McCloy overturned most of the sentences and the last three prisoners, all convicted at the Einsatzgruppen trial, were released in 1958. The German public took the early releases as confirmation of what they saw as the illegitimacy of the trials. The IMT defendants required Soviet permission for release; Speer was not successful in obtaining early release, and Hess remained in prison until his death in 1987. By the late 1950s, the West German consensus on release began to erode, due to greater openness in political culture and new revelations of Nazi criminality, including the first trials of Nazi perpetrators in West German courts.

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