Number of the day
of 270 towns and districts in Belarus were destroyed or burned down during the German occupation
Source:
Report by the Extraordinary State Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of Crimes and Damages Perpetrated by German-Fascist Invaders
Key Evidence Against Hitler
On 26 November at 10 a.m., US lawyer Sidney Alderman appeared before the prosecutor’s stand. His mission was to prove to the International Military Tribunal that Germany had planned the war long before it began. Alderman presented the tribunal with what he called the Hossbach Protocol, “one of the most striking and revealing of all the captured documents which have come to hand”. Dmitry Astashkin, a specialist in Nazi war crimes and senior researcher at the Saint Petersburg Institute for History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, contributed to the understanding of the content and importance of the document.
Ladies, Pugs, and a Slippery Floor: Unrecorded Nuremberg Curiosities
The participants of the Nuremberg trials remembered many details that would not become part of serious monographs about this epoch-making event. What kind of audience gathered in the courtroom? How did journalists try to outwit the guards? And why did an honest Soviet girl find herself in the arms of the defendant Göring?
Passion of the Teutons
Robert Jackson, who led the US prosecution, spent all of 21 November on his feet, behind the podium, reading out the opening speech, which outlined, in general terms, what his team would be doing.
The Winners Are Judging
"The Tribunal was an absolute innovation in history as it created the very procedural norms it observed."
Enemy, Sponsor, Renegade
How Gustav Krupp made his way from being a Hitler opponent to being a Nazi supporter and back.
Forgetful and Unforgiven: Rudolf Hess' 'Retrograde Amnesia' Show
A large, ascetic wall clock placed above the defendant's bench showed exactly 4 p.m. The working day on 30 November was coming to an end. The President of the International War Crimes Tribunal, Sir Geoffrey Lawrence, ordered the quarter guard to withdraw all the defendants except Rudolf Hess. They obediently headed for the doors.
Beginning of the Holocaust in Occupied Territories of USSR
A map from a secret report on the mass murder of Jews by Einsatzgruppe A in the Occupied Eastern Territories dated 15 October 1941 - 31 January 1942. Presented at the Nuremberg Trials on 20 December 1945.
American Military Tribunal Sentences 36 Dachau Guards to Death
The Dachau concentration camp was liberated by American troops on 29 April 1945. When the soldiers saw the condition of the prisoners, they immediately executed more than a hundred of the camp's guards. On 30 October, the US Army Joint Chiefs of Staff issued an order for a tribunal to be held over the employees of the Dachau concentration camp. On 13 December, the tribunal handed down its judgments.
'Hitler's Shadow' Martin Bormann Was Sought by CIA, Found by Dentist
For over 30 years, Martin Bormann, head of the Nazi Party Chancellery, was considered one of the most wanted international criminals. With no verifiable evidence of his fate at hand at the time, the International Military Tribunal tried him in absentia.
How Hitler Stole Germany
On the afternoon of 22 November, US Major Frank B. Wallis, the American prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, described “legitimate” steps taken by the NSDAP to seize power.
The Pillaging of Europe
The pillaging of occupied territories by Nazis was not limited to isolated incidents of looting; it reflected a systematic policy. On 29 January 1940, Hitler appointed one of the most influential Nazi Party ideologists, Alfred Rosenberg head of an organisation tasked with appropriating works of art in European countries. Formed within the Nazi Party's foreign policy department, the new organisation was named the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce (ERR).
