list of guards at nuremberg trials

I would like any information that would lead me to a more detailed understanding of what my father did while part of this undertaking. During his three-month tour of duty at Nuremberg prison, Prestianni was assigned to 16 different prisoners. 23rd September 2021 at 5:18pm. [175][176], Four organizations were ruled to be criminal: the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party, the SS, the Gestapo, and the SD, although some lower ranks and subgroups were excluded. The speech was favorably received by the prosecution, the tribunal, the audience, historians, and even the defendants. Institutional rivalries hampered the search. He told multiple stories of his time there. He just celebrated his 93 birthday, and is smart and caring as he has always been. By early 1946, Western prosecutors were uneasy about the Katyn charge, although they never publicly rejected it for fear of casting the entire proceedings into question. Examine some of the collection's most-accessed trial topics. My dad was a guard at the trials he had a Picture of himself standing behind the prisoners he died at 86 in 2015 the picture is gone and he never wanted to talk about he was a sgt and received a purple heart. I sure would like to find out more about his service. They even accused guards of watching them undress. If one inadvertently looked up at her, she arbitrarily ordered the prisoner shot. Most of the defendants had surrendered to the United States Army, but the Soviet Union also held a few top Nazis who were extradited for trial at Nuremberg. [127] Evidence was presented on the murder of children, attempts to cover up atrocities,[128] systematic plunder of occupied territories, and confiscation or destruction of cultural heritage. Im always looking for pictures of the guards and hoping one day I will see him as a young soldier. There was a large clock on the wall that was above his right shoulder. Ribbentrop was held in low esteem by others close to Hitler due to his perceived ineptness in many areas. Franz von Papen helped pave the way for Hitlers ascension to power in 1933. He was sent to Nuremburg and stood guard at the Judges quarters. The film, compiled from footage of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps, shocked both the defendants and the judges, who adjourned the trial. Prestianni particularly liked Speer, Hitlers architect and the designer of many of Berlins most spectacular buildings and later minister of armament and munitions. It was the last thing Streicher was known to have written. I played checkers with him on a number of occasions, Prestianni revealed. [106][107] The Americans summoned Einsatzgruppen commander Otto Ohlendorf, who testified about the murder of 80,000 people by those under his command, and SS general Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, who admitted that German anti-partisan warfare was little more than a cover for the mass murder of Jews. [58], The charge of conspiracy was spearheaded by the United States prosecution and was less popular with the other Allies. He thought a mature, Lutheran, German-speaking chaplain who had worked in prisons . [61], The problem of translating the indictment and evidence into the three official languages of the tribunal, as well as German, was severe due to the scale of the task and difficulty in recruiting interpreters, especially in the Soviet Union. The Nrnberg trials were a series of trials held in Nrnberg, Germany, in 1945 and 1946 following the end of World War II. That was enough. [22][23] War crimes already existed in international law as criminal violations of the laws and customs of war. [169][170] The judges did not agree that the conspiracy extended to anyone who participated in the affairs of the Nazi government, only taking being present at the high-level meetings discussing war plans in 1937 and 1939 as evidence of belonging to the conspiracy. My mother had pointed his photo out to me on several occasions but I was too young to remember. The names were -- Wippern, Hahnefeld and myself carried out the checking. He was found innocent and released but sentenced in 1949 by a German court to nine years in prison. Later 19 other nations accepted the provisions of this agreement. She was given the nickname "Bloody Brigette" by the camp . Examine the Nrnberg (Nuremberg) trials of formerleaders of Nazi Germany for war crimes, This article was most recently revised and updated by, https://www.britannica.com/event/Nurnberg-trials, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum - Holocaust Encyclopedia - The Nuremberg Trials, Famous Trials - Nuremberg Trials (1945-49), Nuremberg Trials - Children's Encyclopedia (Ages 8-11), Nuremberg trials - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up), Konstantin von Neurath at the Nrnberg trials, Ernst Kaltenbrunner at the Nrnberg trials. [43] The United States prosecution believed that Nazism was the product of a German deviation from Western history (the Sonderweg thesis) and sought to correct this deviation with a trial that would serve both retributive and educational purposes. my father david c bergeron was a 1st LT with the guards at the war trials. Back in 1945, his grandfather was stationed in Germany for the infamous Nuremberg trials, during which he got his hands on a pair of sunglasses allegedly worn by a high ranking Nazi. [6][7] Trainin's ideas were reprinted in the West and widely adopted. Strict attention was always paid to the prisoners. In addition to this brass pot I have three skeleton keys to the cells that held the Nazi war criminals, as well as a pair of wooden spoons used by them. Between 1939 and 1945, Nazi Germany invaded many countries across Europe, inflicting 27 million deaths in the Soviet Union alone. The defendants at Nuremberg. My father was a guard in the courtroom (Palace of Justice) at the Nuremberg trials in 1946. The first of the trials was the Major War Crimes Trial, in . During his service in Korea, Prestianni was wounded twice and decorated for valor numerous times. American chow was prepared for the guards and other Army personnel. He died 21 months later on August 15, 1956. [135] The Soviet Union also called two Holocaust survivors as witnesses, Samuel Rajzmana Treblinka survivorand poet Abraham Sutzkever, who eloquently described the murder of tens of thousands of Jews from Vilna, although their testimony did not directly incriminate any of the defendants. As a good military officer I was only following orders, he steadfastly maintained with quiet military bearing. [21] At the conference, it was debated whether wars of aggression were prohibited in existing international customary law; regardless, before the charter was adopted there was no law providing for criminal responsibility for aggression. He argued that he was being persecuted.. Front row, from left to right: Hermann Gring, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Julius Streicher, Walther Funk, Hjalmar Schacht. [114], In mid-December the Americans switched to presenting the case against the indicted organizations, while in January both the British and Americans presented evidence against individual defendants. [201], At the same time as the Nuremberg Charter was finalized, the Allies also signed the Potsdam Agreement, which provided for the mass expulsion of millions of Germans from central and eastern Europe, so that certain acts for which Nazis were convicted at Nuremberg were therefore made an official policy of the Allies. He was a rather low key person at Nuremberg who caused the guards no problems at all, said Prestianni. Despite this precaution, such limited, semiamicable relationships did exist. It was also a way to indirectly charge crimes committed before the beginning of World War II, which the charter placed outside the court's jurisdiction. He always was respectful, always the consummate gentleman. Speer was convicted and served 20 years in prison. My mother gave the journal to my oldest brother who died in 1998. He argued that Germans needed Lebensraum (living space) and that they were looking only for land expansion. During the Nuremberg Trial, American guards maintain constant surveillance over the major Nazi war criminals in the prisonattached to the Palace of Justice. During numerous argumentative discussions, Neurath referred to the Polish population and others that were slaughtered by German troops as untermenschen, the German expression for inferior beings. Prompt medical attention was readily available to all prisoners. While he was held at Nuremberg, he portrayed himself in a quiet, unassuming demeanor. He didnt really talk to me very much. After trial, incarcerated at. Again, without a word being spoken, the door was slammed shut. [143] Although a few defense lawyers inverted the arguments of the prosecution to assert that the Germans' authoritarian mindset and obedience to the state exonerated them from any personal guilt, most rejected such arguments. Hans Frank, known as the Slayer of Poles, was small, outwardly arrogant, and had a cruel face, Prestianni revealed. [228] The most controversial charge was crimes against peace. . Wells, was military policeman and a Provost Sergeant in charge of a special confinement unit whose responsibilities included providing security for the war crimes trials in Nrnberg. These were the intellectuals; the ramrod-stiff military officers; the cunning politicians; the worlds most vicious, depraved, notorious mass murderers; an architect; a filthy-minded and sex-obsessed anti-Semitic newspaper publisher; a gentle writer of poetry; the bombastic bullies; an unrepentant, ghost-like figure; the subservient military lackeys; and even their self-appointed leader, a bloated, drug-addicted former war hero. April 22, 2020. In most respects, fraternization between guards and prisoners was closely monitored by those who set the policies for the prisoners confinement. [232] On 11 December 1946, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously passed a resolution affirming "the principles of international law recognized by the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and the judgment of the Tribunal". Three days on and three days off with shifts of four hours on, four hours off each day was the standard work assignment for guards. [95][96] As Jackson made clear, the purpose of the trial was not just to convict the defendants but also to assemble irrefutable evidence of Nazi crimes, establish individual responsibility and the crime of aggression in international law, offer a history lesson to the defeated Germans, delegitimize the traditional German elite,[97] and allow the Allies to distance themselves from appeasement. Usually these are prosecution chargeslike crimes against humanityor a defense response. [182] Nikichenko released a dissent approved by Moscow that rejected all the acquittals, called for a death sentence for Hess, and convicted all the organizations. [235] In the 1990s, a revival of international criminal law included the establishment of ad hoc international criminal tribunals for Yugoslavia (ICTY) and Rwanda (ICTR), which were widely seen as part of the legacy of the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials. [153] Midway through the trial, Winston Churchill's Iron Curtain speech denouncing the Soviet threat delighted the defense. Koch was later tried at Buchenwald and sentenced to life imprisonment. I have searched photos of the trials to see if I could find my dad. was on Court room duty. The 24 accused were, with respect to each charge, either indicted but not convicted (I), indicted and found guilty (G), or not charged (), as listed below by defendant, charge, and eventual outcome: Gustav was selected for indictment in error, instead of his son Alfried, who ran Krupp during most of the war. He was short but very powerfully built. So the court then allowed him to choose any lawyer he wanted and Stahmer was his pick. The Nuremberg trials were held by the Allies against representatives of the defeated Nazi Germany, for plotting and carrying out invasions of other countries, and other crimes, in World War II. He considered himself the senior member of the prison military fraternity., Former president of the Reichsbank Hjalmar Schacht was one of three war crimes defendants who were found innocent of all charges against them. One was sentenced in absentia. The same routine was followed for each of the condemned prisoners. Gring was one of the surviving leaders of the Third Reich and the highest-ranking Nazi to be tried at the Nuremberg Trials where he was convicted of war crimes and sentenced to death. If he is American it will be easier to find some kind of information about him. Uncover the topics related to the Nuremberg trials. All eight judges participated in the deliberations, but the alternates could not cast a vote. Many were resistance fighters or political opponents. However, one thread of similarity was woven among them. Nuremberg was chosen as the location for the trials because of its symbolic value. [231], The International Military Tribunal for the Far East (Tokyo Trial) borrowed many of its ideas from the IMT, including all four charges. Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students. He guarded the prisoners in their cells and also stood guard in the court room. Among those brought to trial were. [233] In 1950, the International Law Commission drafted the Nuremberg principles to codify international criminal law, although the Cold War prevented the adoption of these principles until the 1990s. I look forward to hearing from him. Michael Prestianni served as a guard at Nuremberg as high-ranking Nazis stood trial for their lives. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. [102] Jackson's focus was on the aggressive war charge, which he described as the root of the crimes against humanity and of war crimes. His initial assignment was as a guard at the Nuremberg prison. [187] Pursuant to this law, United States forces had arrested almost 100,000 Germans as war criminals. Prestianni, the guard contingent, and supervisors under the command of Colonel B.C. [87] In France, some verdicts were met with outrage from the media and especially from organizations for deportees and resistance fighters, as they were perceived as too lenient. They saw the horrible films the NAZIs took and heard the case the prosecution presented with all the evidence and saw the brutal photos, It was very hard on these young women, but they did their job they were asked to do. The Nuremberg trials were a series of 13 trials carried out in Nuremberg, Germany, between 1945 and 1949 to try those accused of Nazi war crimes. Give me information about your Dad and I will help you research about your fathers deployment to Germany.