Finis

Three and a half years ago, in the name of all humanity, the victors of World War II put the leaders of the vanquished on trial. In over 50 million words of testimony, the Niirnberg mill ground out the story of six million Jews murdered, millions of laborers held in near-slavery. So huge were the figures that the world could scarcely grasp them. Though Hermann Goering postured in the dock and Rudolf Hess bellowed his insane laughter, interest in the courtroom scene flagged. But last week, crowds once more flocked to the big red-roofed Palace of Justice. The 13th and last of the Nurnberg trials was drawing to an end.

The defendants were bureaucrats and diplomats, the technicians of terror and the bookkeepers of tyranny. In the glare of the klieg lights, they looked almost pitiful. When grey-haired Baron Ernst von Weizsaecker was led into the dock, a U.S. colonel's wife in the gallery whispered: "Why, look at that nice old man."

The court did not think he was so nice. As undersecretary in Ribbentrop's Foreign Ministry, he was found guilty of preparing for aggressive war and crimes against humanity, sentenced to seven years in prison. In rapid succession, the judges pronounced sentence on 19 of the defendants, acquitted only two. Among the condemned: Hans Heinrich Lammers, 69, one-eyed chief of the Reich Chancellery and Hitler's man of all work, 20 years; Wilhelm Keppler, Hitler's economic adviser, ten years. When mousy little Otto Dietrich, Hitler's press chief, heard his sentence he turned to one of his tall G.I. guards, held up seven fingers and asked: "Sieben?" The guard confirmed his question with a brief nod and gently steered him from the room.

Before the judges wrote finis to the Nuernberg record, the world got one more close-up glimpse of the Nazi nightmare. SS Lieut. General Gottlob Berger, 52, one of the few men Himmler ever called by his first name (translated it means "Praise God"), had set up the dreaded SS Sonderkommando units. One Sonderkom-mando, one of his own officers had testified, used to pick out the prettiest Jewish girls. "They stripped them," he recounted, "injecting them with strychnine, and watched them die." The bodies, said the witness, were then boiled into soap. "Praise God" got 25 years.

Now they were all tried--the big, obvious criminals and the men who could argue with some justice that they had only obeyed orders.* According to their lights, the victors had done their best to mete out justice.

*A total of 199 men were tried: 36 were sentenced to death by hanging; 22 got life; 103 got shorter sentences; 38 were acquitted; five committed suicide before the end of their trial.

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