WWII War Crimes by Peggy Scholberg

International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg with Soviet, British, American, and French flags. Nov. 1945

My mother, during a visit to Paris right after VJ Day (Victory in Japan) my mother stumbles upon an investigator working in a small courtroom. He was preparing for the war crimes trials that were planned to be held in Nuremburg, Germany. She was invited in to watch.

Within a matter of months, something historical was about to occur. The Nuremberg Trial would be the first international tribunal to prosecute high-ranking state officials for atrocities. Four major powers, the US, UK, France, and the Soviet Union, would jointly prosecuted enemy leaders, aiming for legal justice rather than vengeance. The trials were unprecedented in their use of Nazi documents, photographs, and film to document the Holocaust and other crimes, creating a permanent historical record.

The Nuremberg Trial lasted from November 1945 to October 1946. The created "Nuremberg Principles," would lay the foundation for modern international criminal law.

What an education my mother received while serving in World War II. At the impressionable age of 16, she had witnessed firsthand the Olympics in Berlin, with Hitler showing off on a world stage just how great Germany was. Then, less than a decade later, in this tiny courtroom in Paris, this man would attempt to explain to my mother just how evil the Nazis really were. Read on in the book to see what he has to say.

Book Excerpt

Walking down the hallway, Kathy stopped at an open door marked “WAR CRIMES INVESTIGATING TEAM.” There would be something interesting in that room.

The room was an old-fashioned, dark-wood-trimmed schoolroom. The children’s desks had been replaced with consul’s tables and a judge advocate’s bench. Behind the tables sat uniformed officers and testifying civilians stood in front. A brown-haired captain waved his horn-rimmed glasses toward Kathy, inviting her in. He offered her a chair beside his table.

She listened all afternoon to testimony about the oats and cattle the Germans had taken. When court recessed, Kathy turned to the consul. “Thank you for inviting me in.”

“You are welcome to listen. This office is working to prepare for the war crimes trials that will be held in Nuremburg, Germany.”

“Thank you. Today I learned something. I had thought France’s starvation was because men were fighting instead of plowing. Does this mean babies starved because the Germans took the food?”

“There were many complicated reasons for starvation. We’re trying to estimate how much to blame on a by-product of war, poor distribution—and how much to the grabbing Germans. Crop production was reduced about 10 percent. That itself couldn’t cause the extreme starvation. The Nazis took two thirds of the production of Belgium and Holland. We’re estimating now what they took from France. So far, we’ve traced over eight million tons of French oats that went into Germany, and we’re not done.

“They must have known that the Belgians, the Dutch, and French would die if they took the food.”

“Of course. And Poles and Czechs and Slavs would die. The Nazis wanted them to die. Kill off the inferior races and populate the world with the Master Race. When starvation didn’t kill them fast enough, the Nazis shot them. When shooting them wasn’t fast enough, they built extermination camps. At Auschwitz alone they could efficiently kill 6,000 a day, mostly Jews. If you can believe their bragging, they exterminated three or four million, which was a more certain way of getting rid of people than starvation. Some camps used gas and others killed by shooting. They killed them so fast that getting rid of the bodies became a problem. They couldn’t cremate more than 6,000 bodies a day so their murdering was limited to 6,000 a day.”

“Why? Why? How could they hate so much to do such a thing?”

“If you believe that only blue-eyed blond Germans are worth living, you kill off black-haired dark-eyed people so they won’t contaminate the stock. If you do keep a few black-haired people as slaves, you sterilize them so they can’t reproduce.” His eyes looked at her dark eyes. “You’d have been exterminated.”

“I saw the patients from Dachau. I sort of thought, I wanted to think, they just ran out of food, and I didn’t try too hard to find a more sinister reason.”

“Starvation was planned from the beginning. Read Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The Nazis were radically evil,” he said.

“During war all men are driven to evil. Even our wonderful American GIs are doing some rotten things,” Kathy said.

“You resist believing that depth of their evil. Who can comprehend four million exterminations?” He took off his horned-rim glasses and rubbed his eyes. Then he pointed his glasses at Kathy. “I can show you the difference between the Nazis systematic evil and rotten things the American GIs did. After dinner, we’ll go to an M.P. station. I’ll show you.”

Girls in a World at War by Peggy Scholberg is available online wherever books are sold.