Hitler’s Generals on Trial: The Last War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg (review)

Valerie Hébert’s Hitler’s Generals on Trial examines the High Command case, one of the important trials that carried on the work of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in bringing to justice those who had committed war crimes or crimes against humanity during the Second World War. She argues convincingly that the High Command case played a unique, if ultimately disappointing, role in the efforts of the Western Allies—especially the United States—to use war crimes proceedings for didactic purposes. Because the defendants were high officials of the Wehrmacht, the case had unique potential to teach Germans the truth about the criminality of the National Socialist regime. The Wehrmacht, in which millions of Germans served, was massively implicated in virtually every atrocity perpetrated by Germany during the war (and, one might say, since 1934). The didactic effort failed, however, and, Hébert argues, that failure fatally undermined the legitimacy of the entire trial program.

At the proceedings, which lasted from February 5 through October 29, 1948, fourteen former field marshals and generals representing all branches of the Wehrmacht were charged with “war crimes, crimes against peace, crimes against humanity,” and, most controversially, “conspiracy to commit these crimes” (p. 1). The legal foundation for the trial was by that point fairly well established. The High Command case was the twelfth and final of the Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings (SNP) that followed the November 1945 trial of Goering, Jodl, and others. By the time the High Command case opened, most procedural matters had been settled—at least to the satisfaction of the American jurists.

Hébert lays out nicely the background of the trial project, including, however briefly, post–World War I precedents. The resentment engendered by the sham justice of the Leipzig trials in the 1920s (in which Germans prosecuted—or rather, largely failed to prosecute—crimes committed by their soldiers during World War I) powerfully shaped the Allies’ planning for Nuremberg and related trials. Early on, the British in particular objected to holding trials at all; as Sir John Simon argued in 1944, the fate of the war criminals was “a political, not a judicial question” (p. 14). Subjecting major war criminals to a trial that allowed for the possibility of their release was simply too dangerous, many believed.

But the American vision eventually won out, both at Nuremberg and at the SNPs that followed. The High Command case was an entirely American affair, involving in the end only prisoners held in American custody (with the number of defendants limited, as Hébert points out in an interview on her work, to the number of chairs one could squeeze into the docket).¹

The public perception of the trials was shaped, as Hébert shows, by responses to previous proceedings. While protest at Nuremberg had been relatively mild in 1945, resistance increased as the trial program expanded. German clergy, veterans’ organizations, and officials from the political administration of what would become West Germany all objected to apparent inconsistencies in the trials. A few scandals developed; one, for example, surrounded the trial of the SS soldiers accused of carrying out the Malmedy massacre. That trial led to heightened German sensitivity and increased objections to the proceedings.

So closely does Hébert follow the documentary record of the trial that she leaves no doubt in her reader’s mind (as there should not have been in German minds) of the criminality of Wehrmacht actions. Tens of thousands of transcript pages and thousands upon thousands of exhibits documented actions that “were so patently reprehensible that no prohibitive legislation was necessary to support their legal characterization as criminal” (p. 65).

The defense case, on the other hand, was riddled with contradictions. The commonly used “superior orders” defense often was undermined by the defendants themselves. Many of them claimed, when it seemed convenient to distance themselves from the National Socialist regime, to have...