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Volume 19, Fall 2006
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Nuremberg Trials 60th Anniversary
Preparation of the Palace of Justice
at the Nuremberg Trials
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| Nuremberg in 1945 |
Renovating the Palace of Justice for the Nuremberg Trials
While the four Allied powers were in London discussing the procedures and logistics of an International Military Tribunal, the decision was made that Nuremberg would be the location for the International Military Tribunal.
There were two major factors that entered into the decision of the location at Nuremberg:
- First, Nuremberg was the center of many major events held by the Nazi Party during the Third Reich.
- A second factor contributing to the decision was the condition of the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg. While much of the city lay in ruins from Allied bombing, the palace was relatively intact and had ample space to house the courtrooms, offices, and prison facilities necessary for the war crimes tribunal. The historians John and Mary Tusa have described the condition of the palace in mid-summer 1945, only months before the International Military Tribunal was scheduled to begin.
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| Palace of Justice |
In midsummer the courthouse had been a shambles... One wing had been smashed in the bombing and further damage inflicted in the course of a last stand by SS units. Over everything hung a pink powdery dust which rose each time the wind blew over the devastated centre of the building. The courthouse itself was being used as a recreation centre for a US antiaircraft unit - the future judges' bench was the bar with pin-ups behind it, there was debris in all the corners, and spent shells, rags and rusty cans littered the floor. The room only seated 200, so a wall had to be ripped out and a gallery constructed to make room for 500. Just as construction work was making some impact in August, the floor suddenly collapsed and faced the engineers with yet another problem. Yet when representatives of the prosecution teams flew out for a two day visit on 17-18 August they were reassured by the progress which had been made.....
Dan Kiley, an architect with the American OSS (Office of Strategic Services) was selected to design and supervise the renovations. As a young architect in his twenties, he found himself in charge of an immense task. |
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Courtroom in the Palace of
Justice being renovated |
| Dan Kiley |
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Read more about Dan Kiley's renovation of the Palace of Justice at Nuremberg
..... I started really to design the [Nuremberg Trials site] in July, and it opened in November, and it involved five or six million dollars' worth of work. We had very little time to do it. In America, it usually takes two years to do something like that, by the time you do all the drawings and bid it out.....
Besides designing the facilities, OSS Presentation Branch had to document the Nazi organizations by way of charts, document the atrocities by way of film, etc. . John Ford was in charge of the photography unit of OSS. We had the top people in the country. One of my jobs was to arrange housing for them, and also office space. I had 10 offices, myself. I gave out offices to all the different people. . . . There were 650 offices in the building, on several stories. . . . I had an entrance, kind of a vestibule, a big reception area for people coming in to find out about it. And then we had to have restaurants. We had a PX - that's army stores. We had to have dental and medical clinics. We had those kinds of facilities like a little town - over two thousand people, really.....
We had a battalion of engineers to work, and then we had 500 Germans. Two hundred and fifty SS troopers, and 250 German civilians. The battalion of engineers supervised them. We had to take brick and stone, pass [from] hand to hand, all the way up to the roof. I had to staff factories for the tile, factories for the glass, factories for beautiful old plywood. I designed all the furniture, and used old plywood to do it. It was very simple, modern kind of furniture.
Dan Kiley had to attend to many details that had not been anticipated at the beginning of the renovation. The complexity of his task was captured in a recent interview in which he recalled:
I arranged [the design of the courtroom] . . . , but also getting all that furniture, too. I built the lectern, for instance, that Justice Jackson and they all spoke from. I had a gray velvet panel, so his papers wouldn't slip off. And I designed the prisoners' benches. I thought it would be good to make it hard for them, so they didn't have any backs on them. But a person can't sit all day long without a back, and so we had to add backs to them . . . . Then I had to design the translators' [booths]. There was a quadrilingual translation system. Earphones, and so forth. I have pictures of myself, during one of the practice trials, before the trials, showing that. . . I designed the judges' seats and everything . . . I had to design the walkway [from the prison, to go into the elevator, up to the courtroom.] I had to take a wall out and put this balcony in because it wasn't big enough. The courtroom was not that big. We had to have a dock for the prisoners. We had to have a wall to show charts and movies of atrocities, and so forth.
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Courtroom Diagram and Legend
(Diagram and Text from Martin, Inside Nurnberg, 12-13)
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Robert Conot, in Justice at Nuremberg, describes the results of Kiley's work:
The building with its endless stone and marble corridors, mysterious crannies, and 650 rooms was being restructured into a self contained entity embracing, in the basement, a cafeteria, a huge PX, a barbershop, mail room, money exchange, dispensary, travel service, and eventually, even a British pub! Signs were posted in four languages: "German first, Colonel Wheeler explained, "because German is the language of the defendants; second, English, because there are two English powers; third Russian, because they're the most sensitive; and fourth, French because the French representative is a teacher whose spirit was crushed in a concentration camp." (60).
Dan Kiley returned to the United States before the International Military Tribunal was finished. He never again designed courtrooms, but the challenges he faced in designing the Nuremberg Palace helped him in all future projects. In his post Nuremberg career he gained an international reputation as a landscape architect. He died in 2004. Selections from interview of Dan Kiley drawn from Witness to Nuremberg, Bruce Stave and Michele Palmer, eds. with Leslie Frank (New York: Twayne, 1998. 15-36).
Prison for Defendants at the Palace of Justice
A whole wing of the prison was reserved for the major defendants at the International Military Trial.
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| Prison wing |
Colonel Burton C. Andrus, commandant of the prison and head of security, insisted that prisoners be watched at all times and laid down strict rules to prevent friendships developing between guards and prisoners.
More about the prison
According to one American guard, each guard worked two hours and was off two hours for twenty four hours and then had a day off. The guards had different prisoners each day they worked. Moreover, guards were warned to make sure that the prisoners slept with both hands outside their blankets and had their heads facing forward and not turned toward the wall. If a prisoner turned his head or tried to sleep face down, guards were ordered to prod the prisoner into the correct position.
The cells for the defendants were Spartan (bare). Each cell had a bed, table, chair, and water closet (toilet and sink). Guards, selected from the American Army, were able to keep constant surveillance, looking through the hole in the door and only part of the water closet was blocked from the guards' view. The defendants had relatively little contact with others: they could receive and write one letter a week; on their daily walks they were to keep apart from one another; and only on the way to lunch during the trial did they have an opportunity to interact with one another.
Historian and journalist Robert Conot describes how the prisoners were brought from the prison wing to the courtroom at the Palace of Justice on the opening day. Since the prisoner Robert Ley had managed to commit suicide a month before the trial opened, security was tightened more than ever and special precautions were taken while transporting the prisoners to the Palace once the trial began:
At 6 AM, two hours before dawn, the Nazi leaders were awakened. Crawling from beneath their half-dozen blankets, they pulled on the felt boots that protected their feet against the icy stone floor. . . .At seven o'clock the defendants were served breakfast of oatmeal and coffee, and their chairs and spectacles were returned to them. They were shaved by a German POW, then issued their "court" clothing - uniforms with the insignias removed for the military men, suits and ties for the civilians . . . . A few minutes before nine o'clock they were lined up for Andrus's inspection. Striding up and down like a headmaster of a reform school, Andrus flicked his swagger stick and gave them a small lecture: He hoped that they would cooperate and engage in no action that might disrupt the trial - if they behaved they would make the best impression, and he would not have to take punitive measures against them.
Then in groups of three and four, they were marched out of the prison and through the covered walkway that had been built early in the fall after an SS dagger had mysteriously plummeted out of the sky and imbedded itself near Goering's feet. Guards equipped with field telephones passed each group from one checkpoint to the next. Admitted into the Palace of Justice, the defendants were halted before an iron door. This opened to reveal a large elevator with a cage for the prisoners in back and space for the guards in the front. (Excerpt from Robert Conot, Justice at Nuremberg, 99.
Questions for discussion:
- Discuss why Colonel Andrus and other prison officials took so many precautions to prevent suicides among the defendants.
- On the eve before twelve defendants were to be hanged, Goering managed to commit suicide, swallowing a cyanide capsule. To this day, historians and witnesses at the Nuremberg Trials discuss how Goering was able to "cheat the hangman." Why do you think Goering's action has been a continuing source of discussion and debate sixty years after the trials?
- In March 2006, at the Hague, Slobodan Milosevic, on trial for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, died supposedly from heart trouble in his cell. Some suspect suicide. Why do you think the prosecution is upset at his death?
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Dimensions Online
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Volume 17, No. 2, Fall 2003
Using Testimonies for Researching and Teaching about the Holocaust--Part II
Volume 17, No.1, Spring 2003
Using Testimonies for Researching and Teaching about the Holocaust-- Part I
Volume 16, No. 1, Fall 2002
Remembrance and Commemoration of Two Catastrophes:
September 11th and the Holocaust
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