New exhibit for 65th anniversary of Nuremberg trials
AFP
NUREMBERG- The actual dock where Hermann Goering and other top Nazis sat in the Nuremberg trials features in a new exhibit opening this weekend in the same courthouse, exactly 65 years on.
The exhibit, due to be inaugurated on Sunday by Russia's foreign minister and senior US, British, French and German officials, is aimed at meeting growing interest in the groundbreaking trials in Germany and around the world.
Goering was sentenced to death after 218 trial days, together with 11 others including Joachim von Ribbentrop, foreign minister. Martin Bormann, Hitler's secretary, was sentenced in absentia.
Goering cheated the gallows by swallowing cyanide in his cell hours before his scheduled hanging but the others were all executed in a gymnasium adjacent to the courthouse which was later knocked down.
Three defendants were acquitted and four given jail sentences, including Albert Speer, Hitler's architect, and the Fuehrer's deputy Rudolf Hess, who died in Spandau prison in Berlin in 1987.
The Bavarian city of Nuremberg was strongly associated with the Nazis. It was here that the Nuremberg race laws against Jews were drawn up and where Hitler held enormous party rallies.
It was the success of a documentation centre opened in 2001 on the grounds of these rallies that prompted authorities to create the new exhibit, as well as an increasing number of people making a pilgrimage to courtroom 600.
The new exhibit also covers the legacy of the Nuremberg trials, which has inspired other countries recovering from conflicts, such as the former Yugoslavia, as well as the International Criminal Court.
"It was so clear that they were guilty but still they had a trial," said Juliana Rangel, head of the library and documentation division at the UN's International Court of Justice in The Hague, calling the importance of the trials "enormous."
"It was so well done, with the respect of the defendants' rights. It was very important, it was a landmark. It was the beginning of the end for impunity," she told AFP.
Due to represent the United States at Sunday's ceremony is Stephen Rapp, US ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues. Britain is sending Dominic Grieve, attorney general, and France Roland Dumas, former foreign minister.
The exhibit opens to the public on Monday.
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