NUREMBERG, THE LAST BATTLE David Irving NUREMBERG THE LAST BATTLE ‘David Irving is in the first rank of Britain’s historical chroniclers’ – THE TIMES F FOCAL POINT NUREMBERG, THE LAST BATTLE David Irving is the son of a Royal Navy commander. Edu- cated at Imperial College of Science & Technology and at Uni- versity College London, he subsequently spent a year in Ger- many working in a steel mill and perfecting his fluency in the language. Among his thirty books the best-known include Hit- ler’s War; The Trail of the Fox: The Life of Field-Marshal Rommel; Accident, the Death of General Sikorski; The Rise and Fall of the Luftwaffe, and Göring: a Biography. He has translated several works by other authors. He lives in Grosvenor Square, London, and is the father of five daughters. In he published The Destruction of Dresden. This became a best-seller in many countries. In he issued a revised edi- tion, Apocalypse , as well as his important biography, Goebbels. Mastermind of the Third Reich and the second volume of Church- ill’s War. For source notes go to ( + N) page et seq. NUREMBERG, THE LAST BATTLE For Jessica Copyright © , Parforce (UK) Ltd. Copyright Website edition © Focal Point Publications All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. Copies may be downloaded from our website for research purposes only. No part of this publication may be commercially repro- duced, copied, or transmitted save with written permission in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who does any un- authorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. Parts of this book were first published by Welt am Sonntag, Hamburg, and as a paperback edition by Wilhelm Heyne Taschenbuchverlag, Munich. It has been re- vised and expanded on the basis of materials available since then. This edition first published by FOCAL POINT PUBLICATIONS Duke Street, London WM DJ British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue recod for this book is available fromthe British Library ISBN Paper edition printed and bound in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner Ltd, Frome and London NUREMBERG, THE LAST BATTLE ‘There is more dynamite in this question than Krupp ever produced out of his plant!’ – JUSTICE ROBERT H. JACKSON at a secret meeting of the Nuremberg chief prosecutors, November , ‘The trials served both to illuminate and to falsify history. In the hand of the experienced historian, their documenta- tion is a good guide; in the hand of a demagogue it is a dangerous knobkerry.’ – Naval judge advocate Captain OTTO KRANZBÜHLER, lecturing at the University of Göttingen in September For source notes go to ( + N) page et seq. NUREMBERG, THE LAST BATTLE [Click on chapter titles] Contents Author’s Introduction ................................................................ 6 1: In Which Stalin Says No to Murder........................................ 11 2: Lynch Law ............................................................................ 31 3: Mr Morgenthau and the All-American Judge .......................... 57 4: If We Can’t Lynch Them, Flog Them..................................... 72 5: The Origin of ‘Six Million’ ..................................................... 95 6: Architect of a New International Law ................................... 105 7: Meeting with Two Traitors ................................................... 125 8: The London Agreement ....................................................... 143 9: Those Boys Are Out for Blood ............................................. 163 10: I’m Running the Show....................................................... 181 11: Hess Can’t Quite Remember the Reichsmarschall............... 198 12: An Honourable Criminal ................................................... 218 13: Showtime .......................................................................... 242 14: Much Vodka and Fun ........................................................ 263 15: The Cadavers Concerned................................................... 282 16: Cooking Göring’s Goose.................................................... 300 17: Schacht Saved on the Square ............................................. 322 18: Final Solution ................................................................... 340 19: Behind Closed Doors ........................................................ 357 20: Deadly Alliances ................................................................ 379 21: Prize Day .......................................................................... 399 22: The Lion Escapes .............................................................. 429 Notes ..................................................................................455 NUREMBERG, THE LAST BATTLE NUREMBERG THE LAST BATTLE Author’s Introduction THIS BOOK is an intimate look at the origins and conduct of the first post-war trial of major war criminals held at Nuremberg from to . It has as its nucleus a series of articles which I wrote for the German weekly Welt am Sonntag in the late s under the title Nürnberg, die letzte Schlacht. These articles were then published under one cover by Wilhelm Heyne Taschenbuchverlag in Munich under the same title, which has long been out of print. Much research has been carried out since then. In the course of preparing my biographies of Hitler and some of his principal lieuten- ants (Göring, Milch, Hess, Rommel), I had already met many of the participants in this final drama of World War Two – those, that is, who had survived the hangman’s noose – and I had had perforce to talk things over with several of their legal counsel too, in whose hands were still concentrated important historical records. In the years since publishing that German newspaper series I col- lected additional significant materials on the trial, including the dia- ries of several of the German defendants, as well as of the Allied pros- ecuting counsel and judges; and after the British archives opened, I was enabled to adjust the balance of what had until then been investi- gated primarily from the American archival angle. The richest quarry, and one to which I have returned several times in the intervening years, is the files of the American chief prosecutor, the late Justice Robert H. Jackson. For source notes go to ( + N) page et seq. NUREMBERG, THE LAST BATTLE If this story needs a hero, then he is Jackson. As will be seen from the footnotes, I first used his private papers when they were held by Pro- fessor Philip Kurland of the University of Chicago Law School; a debt of thanks is owed to Professor Kurland for his patience and generosity in allowing me to delve into his files thirty years ago, and to review the contents of several filing cabinets of Jackson’s private and legal papers which he was holding in his basement with the pious, but alas unfulfilled, intention of one day writing the definitive biography of the great jurist. The folder listed tantalisingly as ‘diary kept by Jackson from April to November , ’ was at that time missing, but it turned up years later in box of his confidential papers, which had by then been transferred to the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and William Eldred Jackson gave me the formal permission needed to make use of his late father’s diaries. Jackson’s no less voluminous official papers, designated his Main Office files, now form part of Record Group at the National Ar- chives in Washington. The fact that my source notes indicate ‘Chi- cago’ as the location does not however imply that those papers are still held there now, over a quarter of a century later. As indicated above, most of them have been relocated in the Library of Congress and the National Archives, both in Washington. Of scarcely less importance than Jackson’s are the private papers of his bête noire at Nuremberg, Judge Francis Biddle, the senior Ameri- can member of the Tribunal. The George Arents Research Library at the University of Syracuse, New York, allowed me to study his diaries, private letters, and trial notes, which often included caustic observa- tions about the prosecutors and about the evidence heard before him. After corresponding several years earlier with the former American commandant of Mondorf prisoner-of-war cage (‘Ashcan’) and Nu- remberg prison, I was permitted by his son, Lieutenant-Colonel Burton C Andrus Jr., to make use of his late father’s files of papers which were held at the family home in Colorado Springs, including his hand-writ- ten diaries dated from February to November , . Similarly the son of the late Selkirk Panton, the journalist covering the trial for the Daily Express, gave me permission to use his father’s papers in the National Library of Australia in Canberra. Among oth- ers to whom I express gratitude are Ben Swearingen, one of those indefatigable amateur historians to whom the professional is so in- debted: he provided to me the ultimate clues on the suicide of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, about which he had already writ- NUREMBERG, THE LAST BATTLE ten a fine book. Dr Daniel P. Simon, director of the Berlin Document Center controlled by the U.S. Mission in Berlin, opened up for me the hitherto closed safe-file containing Göring’s enigmatic last letters. John Taylor, of the Archives & Reference Branch of the Textual Reference Division at the U.S. National Archives, kindly provided me with