"Forgive Us Our Sins . . ."

For years the world would remember--perhaps with honor, perhaps with shame --the final scene. The empty dock with its bare wooden benches had looked vast and strange. An almost intimate solemnity, unbroken even by the mundane presence of photographers, had pervaded the packed courtroom. The brittle silence had given way to the firm, clear voice of Lord Justice Sir Geoffrey Lawrence (pronouncing eleven times: ". . . death by hanging") and to the noise of a paneled door, eleven times closing behind a condemned man. The occasion had lifted the eleven men from past bravado and past cowardice alike.

But last week, as the condemned awaited the judgment's execution, their composure, and that of some of the nations which judged them, began to crack.

"Men against Death." Only a few days before, Hermann Goring had jested: "I have got the best sentence of all." But last week, his calm broke when he sobbingly surrendered pictures of his wife and daughter to his attorney. A prison psychologist reported that Goring dreamed of "secret revenge on the Allies."

Joachim von Ribbentrop wept repeatedly while he saw his wife for the last time. Ernst Kaltenbrunner desperately tried to kiss his mistress (and mother of his two children) through the grille of the visitors' room. Wilhelm Frick moaned: "All is finished, and there isn't much use waiting around." Goring read Bengt W. K. Berg's To Africa with the Migratory Birds. Funk (who had escaped with life) read Paul de Kruif's Men against Death.

On their last Sunday, the condemned were visited by prison chaplains. The Catholics among .the eleven made their confessions. Only Streicher and Rosenberg refused the Sabbath solace. For the Protestants, the Rev. H. F. Gerecke, of the German Lutheran Church, intoned a prayer (which the prisoners repeated after him): "Over an ocean of hatred, His forgiving love is spread. . . . We may die at His side. . . . Lord Jesus, You have descended to human pain and felt death. You will not abandon us. Have mercy on us. Forgive us our sins. . . . We come from the erring . . . from the misery and the guilt of earth. Let us remain with You for all eternity."

On the executions' eve, many Russians, French and even Germans believed that the sentences had been too light. It was perhaps typical of the world's comparative ethics that the heaviest twinges of conscience were experienced in the U.S. and Britain.

Conspicuous Disparity. Thoughtful people throughout the Western World realized that not merely eleven wretched lives were at stake, but Western democracy's moral position in the inevitable trials of history. Their doubts about Nu"rnberg's justice were perhaps best summed up by two British publications. Said London's Economist:

"The result of the Nu"rnberg trial has been a well-deserved fate for a group of evil men . . . yet the force of the condemnation is not unaffected by the fact that the nations sitting in judgment have so clearly proclaimed themselves exempt from the law which they have administered." Said the Manchester Guardian Weekly: "Behind [the Nu"rnberg case] lie the outraged feelings of whole peoples whose memories carry a far heavier load than ours. . . . If they demand a brutal penalty which is yet hopelessly inadequate we may not gainsay them. . . . [But] there are many features of this process which do not sit lightly on a civilized conscience. . . . Certainly, if we had been defeated ... we should have had some difficulty in justifying Hiroshima. . . . There needs to be a consistency between the law of the judges and the conduct of the powers [behind the judge?]. There exists a disparity which the world must notice. . . . The Nu"rnberg judgment will look well or ill in history according to the future behavior of the four nations responsible for it. . . . If they behave as nations have invariably behaved till now, it will seem no more than the quirk of an oddly assorted bunch of victors. . . ."

The doubts had their answerers. Most defenders of Niirnberg fell back on the U.S.'s Robert Jackson, who at the trial's start had summed up the still precarious but deeply urgent aspirations of millions in the memorable sentence: "If there is no law now under which to try these people, it is about time the human race made some."

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