My family’s seat at the Nuremberg trials
Seventy-five years on, film-maker Jenny Ash tells Luke Mintz how her aunt helped bring Nazis to justice
Seventy-five years ago, the south German city of Nuremberg was in a state of disrepair. Allied bombs had obliterated its medieval centre, and weeks of gunfights, fought street by street, had damaged or destroyed thousands of homes.
Bodies lay beneath the rubble, producing a foul odour that haunted the air for months.
But it was in that once splendid city, on November 20 1945, that Lord Justice Sir Geoffrey Lawrence opened the International Military Tribunal for the investigation of Nazi war crimes, described by judge Sir Norman Birkett, who also presided, as the “greatest trial in history”.
The trial was held in Courtroom 600 of the Palace of Justice, one of the few public offices left intact.
It was a creaky, Imperial-era building with no ventilation system that was never designed to house so many people. Those watching from the public gallery found themselves engulfed by suffocatingly warm air.
Twenty-four senior Nazis were in the dock, only a fraction of those thought to have been involved in designing or carrying out the Final Solution.
But the power of the trial was mostly symbolic: an opportunity to show the world the architects of the Third Reich were subject to the same rules as everybody else.
It also provided catharsis for Holocaust survivors, of whom there were about 3.5 million across the world; a chance to see their captors face justice.
It is that human element of the trial that has always moved Jenny Ash, a British filmmaker whose new documentary, Nuremberg: The Nazi Trials, feels deeply personal.
Ash’s father Eric and aunt, Anne Goodwin, were raised in a middleclass Jewish family in Berlin in the Thirties. As children, they were pulled out of primary school when Hitler came to power, and attacked in the street because of their yellow stars. After the Kristallnacht in 1938, when Anne was 16, the family made use of their grandfather’s connections to escape to London.
But in 1945, Anne returned to Germany with her boyfriend to work for the International Military Tribunal.
For 18 months, in the western city of Offenbach, she used her German language skills to translate letters written by the Nazis and build evidence against Third Reich officials.
“She found it very strange being in those German towns with all those people who suddenly weren’t Nazis,” Ash says. “She said when she was there, suddenly no one was a Nazi.
“As I was growing up, [my aunt] always showed me letters between her and her best friend, Rosemary, who didn’t escape and was killed in Auschwitz. They’re so heartbreaking.
“Rosemary was begging her to find a way to get them out and let her join them in Britain. My aunt had a real belief in finding justice, she really believed in Nuremberg. She was always proud that it was a fair trial, it wasn’t just a show trial, and that the
Allies had the moral high ground.”
Anne died of cancer during lockdown, making today’s Nuremberg anniversary particularly poignant.
“I spent a lot of time visiting her and talking about Nuremberg – we were always really close,” says Ash.
“It was great, because I didn’t have to talk about how ill she was, or where her medication was. We just got into these great chats, and she had all these visceral details that I probably wouldn’t have come across in history books, like the fact that the whole town stank in 1945 because corpses were rotting under the rubble.”
For her documentary, Ash spent days poring over grainy, black-andwhite footage of the trial, almost all of which was filmed – unusual for a British-led case.
She had assumed the trial was a cut-and-dried formality, and was surprised to instead find a courtroom drama, in which the outcome was by no means certain. There was fear on the British benches, for example, that Hermann Göring, the most senior Nazi in the dock, would refuse to answer questions, making a mockery of his cross-examination.
On day one of the trial, Göring was asked to plead guilty or not guilty, but instead was shouted down by the judge after trying to make a defiant, longwinded statement.
In the end, though, the British prosecutor, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, methodically unveiled a series of documents that made his defence – that he was unaware of plans to exterminate Jews – appear ridiculous.
Ash was staggered by the harrowing testimony of Auschwitz survivor Marie-claude Vaillant-couturier, who spoke slowly and powerfully as she told the court: “We saw heartbreaking scenes: old couples separated, mothers forced to abandon their young daughters. One night, we were awoken by terrible screams. The next morning, we learned… that they had run short of gas, and so had thrown the children into the ovens alive.” On her way out, Vaillant-couturier made pointed eye contact with Göring.
“Every time I listen to it, it sends shivers down my spine,” says Ash. “She was so dignified and brave.”
Ash also made use of the diary of Gustave Gilbert, a psychologist appointed to keep an eye on the defendants, and assess their suicide risk. His notes paint a fascinating picture of some of history’s most evil men at their lowest psychological ebb.
When the US prosecution presented the court with video footage of Bergen-belsen and other camps, which showed naked corpses being thrown into a burial pit, and a lamp shade made of human skin, Gilbert wrote: “Funk [ Walther Funk, minister for economic affairs] covers his eyes, he looks as if he’s in agony. Frank [Hans Frank, governor-general of occupied Poland] swallows hard, blinks eyes, trying to stifle tears; mutters ‘Horrible…’.”
Of how the men behaved in their prison quarters, Gilbert said: “Frank was extremely depressed and agitated. Streicher [Julius, founder of Der Stürmer] admitted the film was ‘terrible’, without any apparent feeling, then asked whether the guards couldn’t be more quiet at night, so he could sleep.” It is impossible to know if the men were putting on a show for the court, or were upset because of their fear of being convicted and hanged – or, maybe, experiencing the smallest tinge of remorse.
Ultimately, 21 of the 24 were convicted; of those, 12 were hanged, with the others given long prison sentences. The acquittal of three of the men only serves to show that it was a fair trial, Ash says, as her aunt wanted it to be; a real case assessed on the evidence, rather than the sort of show trial preferred by Hitler.
“It was a symbolic trial – you couldn’t possibly try every Nazi in Germany – but those were a lot of the architects. It showed that justice can rise above vengeance.”
‘My aunt was proud that it was a fair trial, and not a show trial’
Nuremberg: The Nazi Trials is on Channel 5 on December 1, at 10pm