The Forgetful Rudolf Hess
The most bizarre choice to stand trial was Hitler's deputy and head of the party chancellery, Rudolf Hess. There was no doubt that he had been a key figure in organising and running the party in the 1920s and early 1930s. He it was who took down the dictated draft of Hitler's 'Mein Kampf'. But from the mid-1930s he became a more marginal political figure - 'one of the great cranks of the Third Reich', in the words of Speer.
In May 1941 - apparently anxious at his loss of favour with Hitler and pre-occupied with the dangers of the impending two-front war which would follow Germany's attack on the USSR scheduled for June - Hess took a plane and flew it to Scotland. Here he was captured by the British, interrogated and put in an institution. He became increasingly paranoid and eventually descended into long periods of self-induced hysterical amnesia.
'Hess spent his time in court reading, occasionally laughing and disregarding the process around him.'
It was in this state of almost complete forgetfulness that Hess was eventually flown to Nuremberg in October 1945 at the insistence of the Soviets, who had been puzzled and distrustful about what Hess had been doing in Britain for four years.
It became clear that a decision had to be taken about whether he was fit to plead. A panel of medical and psychiatric experts was recruited and finally recommended on 29 November, more than a week after the trial had started, that Hess was fit to plead. The following day, to the shock of the court, Hess suddenly stood up apparently lucid at last and announced: 'My memory is in order again.'
Hess retained his lucidity for a few weeks, but with partial memory loss. He then relapsed into complete amnesia again and spent his time in court reading, occasionally laughing and disregarding the process around him. In a conventional criminal court he would have been deemed to be of unsound mind, but the Allies were worried about the effect it might have on the public perception of the trial if Hess were removed.
He was sentenced to life imprisonment, though he pretended not to hear or understand the judgement. He committed suicide in Spandau prison, Berlin, in 1987.
Goering, Speer and Hess represented extreme responses to the trial at Nuremberg, but they all shared with the others in the dock some degree of responsibility. In Goering's case a very great one for the programme of oppression, war and genocide on which Hitler's regime embarked from its inauguration in 1933.
This did not make them criminals in the ordinary sense, and for many of the offences for which they were tried there was as yet no body of internationally agreed law.
They were indicted for the most part under retrospective law. But over the following years conventions on the laws of war, genocide and human rights were signed which embodied much of the 'law' made up at Nuremberg.
Those legal instruments have not safeguarded innocent populations from violation over the last 60 years, but thanks to Nuremberg there is at least a proper understanding of what violation means, even if the international community still lacks an entirely effective means of punishing it.
Published: 2006-09-19
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