The situation was made worse by the fact that the Chinese government decided not to inform the public before destroying the dyke, for fear of the news leaking out to the Japanese. This meant that as the flood water submerged millions of homes, the people had no time to flee. Had they had prior warning it is possible that many lives would have been saved.
The dykes on the Yellow River were rebuilt in 1946 and 1947 and the water returned to its original course. Today, the Chinese are managing to control the floods on the Yellow River, but this could be only a temporary measure. The authorities are aware that another ‘100-year’ flood like the floods of 1761 or 1843, would be unstoppable.
PART FIVE: WAR CRIMES TRIALS
Nuremburg War Crimes Trial
The Nuremberg Trials were a series of trials designed to bring the perpetrators of the Nazi holocaust in World War II to justice. Over 100 defendants took the stand in 12 major trials, revealing an extraordinary picture of what Hannah Arendt later called, ‘the banality of evil’. What emerged was that the men and women who committed hideous acts of cruelty on a grand scale in the name of the Third Reich were, in their private lives, often ordinary people: who were responsible, respectable citizens, loving family members and kind neighbours.
The Nuremberg Trials showed that, despite these qualities, the defendants were completely unable to empathize with their victims, or, indeed, regard them as human beings; and that, further, they were able to put aside what moral qualms they may have had by thoroughly identifying with the ideology of Nazism and conforming to what the authorities demanded of them. What also emerged from the trials was just how horrifically cruel, to the point of insanity, the Nazi regime had been: the dreadful stories of what had gone on in the concentration camps traumatized Germany, Europe and the rest of the world, and remind us just how barbaric ‘modern’ civilization continues to be.
As World War II came to a close, the United States President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, raised the question of how to bring the leaders of the Third Reich to justice as war criminals. The Allies had discovered that atrocities in the concentration camps went beyond the scale of what anyone had imagined, and that the Nazis had been involved in the full-scale genocide of the Jewish people, not only gassing them to death in great numbers but torturing and brutalizing them as well. In addition, people with mental and physical disabilities, homosexuals, communists, gypsies, twins and others, had been abused, as Nazi doctors conducted horrific experiments on them.
Roosevelt felt that the captured Nazi leaders should be tried in a court of law, but there was some disagreement about this. Churchill favoured immediate execution of the Nazi leaders, and Stalin wanted to execute thousands of officers. According to some sources, Roosevelt initially thought that Stalin was joking about this, but soon realized his mistake. The US Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau Jr, then came up with a plan to punish the Germans with a series of crushing economic and other sanctions. However, when Roosevelt died in April 1945, his successor Harry S. Truman rejected the Morgenthau Plan, realizing that it would create problems for the future (as had the previous agreement, The Treaty of Versailles, at the end of World War I), and he went on to devise a plan for a judicial war crimes review with the head of his War Department, Henry L. Stimson.
In the meantime, several leading Nazi figures had committed suicide once it became clear that their cause was lost. Hitler, as is well known, shot himself in his Berlin bunker when news of the Allied victory reached him, shortly after marrying his mistress Eva Braun, who also killed herself. Heinrich Himmler, the head of the notorious SS and Gestapo, which had been responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews and others, also took his own life, poisoning himself with cyanide when he was captured. Joseph Goebbels, who became chancellor for one day after Hitler’s death, also committed suicide, along with his wife, Magda, who had earlier drugged and poisoned their six children. Martin Bormann, Hitler’s private secretary, escaped; some believe that he died while doing so, others that he went on the run for many years after the war.
Eventually, it was agreed that the war criminal trials should take place in the German city of Nuremberg, at the Palace of Justice. The first of the trials, in which 24 prominent members of the Nazi administration were charged, took place from 20 November, 1945 to 1 October, 1946, and became the most famous, attracting worldwide attention.
During the trial, evidence of the extreme brutality and sadism of the Nazi regime came to light as the prosecution presented their case. In one instance, prosecutors produced a tattooed piece of human skin, which had been tanned for use as a lampshade. Apparently, the wife of the Commandant of Buchenwald, Isle Koch, liked to have the skin of concentration-camp victims made into decorative household objects for her home. She even used the shrunken head of one victim as a paperweight. In another instance, the prosecution read out descriptions of experiments performed by Nazi doctors on camp inmates. For example, Dr Sigmund Rasher forced victims at Dachau to strip naked before being thrown into tanks of iced water, then threw them into hot water to see how rapidly they warmed up. All the while, the victims had thermometers thrust into their rectums. Dr Rasher’s notes also reported how, in most cases, the victims went into convulsions and died during the experiments.
Inmates who had survived the concentration camps also gave their testimony. In one case, a Frenchwoman, Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, described her ordeal at Auschwitz. According to her, Nazi soldiers had gone through the crowds of inmates, sizing up which were to be gassed and which could be forced to perform slave labour on the basis of their physical condition. In another instance, she described how the Nazi soldiers ran out of gas in the chambers, so begun to hurl live children into the furnaces instead. In total, 33 witnesses and hundreds of exhibits were produced, confirming that the Nazi regime had perpetrated some of the worst crimes in human history, and on a scale much larger than ever before.
One of the most interesting aspects of the trial was the evidence of psychiatrists, such as Leon Goldensohn, who was charged with caring for the mental health of the defendants during the trial and detailed the personality traits of those involved. (His notes describing his conversations with the former Nazi officers were later published as The Nuremberg Interviews.) In most cases, the defendants alleged that they knew nothing about the concentration camps and what had been going on in them, although this was hard to believe. For example, Joachim von Ribbentrop alleged that he knew nothing of the concentration camps, even though several of them were located near his homes. In other cases, they reported what they had done without seeming to understand that it was wrong. For instance, Colonel Rudolf Hess, speaking as a defence witness for SS head Ernst Kaltenbrunner, described how in an average day at the concentration camp, 10,000 inmates could be gassed to death. His matter-of-fact tone of voice and demeanour shocked many people in the courtroom to the core.
In some cases, those accused admitted their guilt and expressed repentance for their heinous crimes. For example, Albert Speer, who had been Minister of Armaments, expressed his regret for participating in the genocide, calling the Nazi regime a disaster, and saying, ‘A thousand years will pass and still Germany’s guilt will not have been erased.’ However, there were others, such as Hermann Goering, who refused to accept that they had committed crimes and continued to maintain that what they had done was right. Shortly before his conviction, Goering made a statement saying that it had been his pleasure to work under Hitler, ‘the greatest son which my people produced in a thousand-year history’.