Hitler's Generals on Trial: The Last War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg is a 2010 book by Canadian historian Valerie Hébert dealing with the High Command Trial of 19471948. The book covers the criminal case against the defendants, all high-ranking officers of the armed forces of Nazi Germany, as well as the wider societal and historical implications of the trial. The book received generally positive reviews for its mastery of the subject and thorough assessment of the legacy of the trial.
Contents
Premise
Hitler's Generals on Trial details the High Command Trial, officially known as "War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals", which was part of the Subsequent Nuremberg trials. Hitler's Generals on Trial focuses on two goals set out for the trials. The first, a didactic goal, which attempted to use the trials as a learning experience for the German nation regarding the depth of the complicity of their armed forces, the Wehrmacht, in the criminality of the Nazi regime. The second goal involved obtaining justice for the victims by punishing those involved.
Handling the subject from an interdisciplinary perspective, Hebert addresses the issues of international military justice, post-war developments in West Germany, and how political considerations superseded the quest for justice. In this atmosphere the myth of the "clean Wehrmacht" thrived, and in the words of the author, the trial had "virtually no impact on German public consciousness".
Prosecution and defence cases
Using primary and secondary materials, Hébert discusses the proceedings themselves, the evolution of the American judicial policy towards war crimes, the preceding trials, and the post-conviction developments. Hébert focuses in particular on the cases against senior field commanders Hermann Hoth, Georg von Küchler, and Georg-Hans Reinhardt, who led armies and army groups on the Eastern Front and were responsible for mass war crimes and crimes against humanity. She also details the cases against two key members of the OKW, German military's supreme command: Walter Warlimont, who composed the Barbarossa Jurisdiction Order, and Hermann Reinecke, in charge of the prisoner of war regulations, which led to the deaths of millions of Soviet POWs.
In covering one tactic shared by defence counsels from different trials, Hébert reviewed a memorandum put forth at the Nuremberg Trial in 1945–1946. Co-authored by former chief of staff of the OKH (German Army High Command) Franz Halder and former field marshals Walter von Brauchitsch and Erich von Manstein, along with other senior military figures, the document aimed to portray the German armed forces as apolitical and largely innocent of the crimes committed by the Nazi regime. Hébert shows how that strategy was also adopted by the lead counsel for the defence in the High Command trial, Hans Laternser.
Conclusion
Hébert implicates the court's greater pedagogical failure as the cause of its failure to enact justice. While evidence of the specific war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the accused was damning, the book found that it was the defence that won the case in the court of Germany's public opinion. The German public proved to be too recalcitrant towards the idea of imposing consequences upon their military leaders. In a country where society has long-revered the military, the German public found the concept of punishment for its military leaders as anathema to their own personal sense of a moral, legal culture.
Those motivations brought about various campaigns conducted by the German clergy and the government of the new Federal Republic on behalf of the convicted, which ultimately impacted the trial's conclusion. Faced with their concerted lobbying efforts, the American sentence review and clemency program reduced or commuted many of the sentences, which according to Hébert, brought failure to both of the trial's goals. Former military officers were the first to be released, including those convicted in the High Command Case. With various areas of German society doing what it could to influence the sentences of those on trial, none of the defendants remained in prison after 1957. Nevertheless, none of those found guilty were ever publicly exonerated of their crimes.