Transcript:
Winston Churchill: ‘From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe: Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow. […]
‘There never was a war in history easier to prevent by timely action than the one which has just desolated such great areas of the globe. It could have been prevented, in my belief, without the firing a single shot, and Germany might be powerful, prosperous, and honoured today… but no one would listen, and one by one we were all sucked into the awful whirlpool. We surely—ladies and gentlemen, I put it to you—surely we must not let that happen again!’
Audience: [Applause.]
Walter Rockler: ‘[It was a] total split between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union; uh, Churchill’s speech crystallized into talk of the Iron Curtain.’
Narrator: ‘Germany was the front‐line in the Cold War. America’s Marshall Plan of 1947 gave economic aid to rebuild Europe in exchange for assistance in helping to fight communism there. The Soviets viewed the Marshall Plan as an act of extreme aggression.
‘German postwar recovery was slow, partly because its leading industrialists were on trial for war crimes. Among the German manufacturers accused of using slave labour for arms production was industrial giant Krupp. Gustav Krupp had been a loyal Nazi. He helped fund Hitler’s rise to power, he gave signed copies of Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf, to his German workers, and Hitler reserved a special place for Krupp and his employees at the Nuremberg rallies.
‘The German lawyer, Otto Kranzbühler, who represented Dönitz at the first trial, defended Krupp against the slave labour charges at Nuremberg.’
Otto Kranzbühler: ‘The general line of the defense was, all these so‐called programmes were state programmes, and the industrialists participated in carrying out the orders, the laws and decrees of their government.’
Narrator: ‘Alfried Krupp and ten of his fellow directors were convicted at Nuremberg; the company’s assets were seized.
‘After the war, Berlin had been divided into separate Soviet and Western‐controlled sectors. In June 1948, the American‐backed Deutsche Mark was introduced as the new currency in West Berlin. The Soviets responded by blockading the western sector. The crisis changed German–American relations dramatically. A major relief operation, the Berlin Airlift, was mounted to beat the blockade. It was a Cold War battle in which the West Germans and Americans could cooperate against the Soviets.’
Arno Hamburger: ‘The former enemy, Germany, became—I don’t want to say a friend, but a necessary… helper—I don’t want to say ‘allied’—at that time, and the former friends, the Soviet Union, became more or less an enemy.’
Narrator: ‘When Walter Rockler was assigned to prosecute German bankers, the Nuremberg trials had been underway for three years.’
Walter Rockler: ‘Early in ’48, three of us lawyers were working on bank cases, which—the impetus from which originally came from treasury officials in Washington, they had gathered some data on ’em. We’re called into Telford Taylor’s office, and told that the trials were going to be curtailed, and we couldn’t prosecute representatives of two of the principal German banks: the Deutsche and Dresdner Banks, but we probably would be limited to a single defendant from one of the banks. Because the Dresdner Bank had… superior S.S. connexions, and some of the members of its Vorstand or governing board were themselves S.S. officers, we finally decided we would go with the Dresdner Bank—although the activities of the Dresdner and the Deutsche Bank were not, by any means, dissimilar.’
Narrator: ‘West Germany was becoming America’s partner in the Cold War against the Soviets. A strong German economy was viewed as essential to counter the influence of communism in Western Europe.
‘After serving only two years of a twelve‐year prison sentence, Alfried Krupp was released along with fellow directors. The Krupp fortune was restored. Today, Otto Kranzbühler lives in the luxurious surroundings of Lake Tegernsee, near Munich. After defending the directors of Krupp, Kranzbühler was employed for the next forty years as an adviser to the company.
‘In 1949, after four years of work, the last American prosecutors had left Nuremberg. While the first trial had been successful, Cold War politics has overtaken the American commitment to justice at Nuremberg. Of the ninety‐nine Germans sentenced to prison at the subsequent trials, the majority were released within two years.’
Walter Rockler: ‘We thought it tended to make a mockery of the trials. We pursued legitimate prosecution goals and legitimate legal principles, but to some degree, the times had passed us by; it was a different world by ’48 and ’49. The prosecution activities were, to a certain extent, counter the stream.’