Interview Transcript: Ex-Sergeant Clancy Sigal
Start Recording
Sigal: Okay, shoot. What’s your question? Well first of all let’s give you a little bit of background, okay? I was a perfectly ordinary GI soldier in the infantry in the army sent to occupation duty in Germany after the war. Right after the war when Germany had been bombed to ruins and there were a lot of dead people under the (rubble?) and all that, France had been bombed to Europe, most of Europe was in terrible shape … Nazi war machine. And I was one of a number of GIs who were supposed to be there and maintain order and keep a very ruined country going. You have to use your imagine and just imagine bombs having fallen, well what town are you calling from?
Nicole: [Redacted.]
Sigal: Right, well just imagine that you wake up one morning and most of the houses are gone, hold on a second… So we’re dealing with the German Civilian Population, the survivors of the war, who are dazed, bitter, angry, resentful, and really in their heart of hearts want, are very grateful to be in the American Zone and not in the Soviet Zone, because when the Russians came into Germany and they fought their way in all the way into Berlin, they had (redemption?) in their hearts, and they took it out on the German people which the Americans did not. We treated them almost justly, and the Germans were incredibly grateful, any wise German always wanted to find himself in the American zone. We Americans had not really felt the war at home, so we didn’t feel the same way toward the Germans that especially the Russians, the British, and the French did. The judges at the Nuremberg Tribunal were Russian, American, French, and British and I went down from my barracks at Frankfurt to Nuremberg to attend the trials. Now fire away. Do you have any questions?
Nicole: Oh, yeah, we do. Thank you for that background. I guess my first question is, just to clarify we listened to your NPR interview and you said that you snuck away from your unit to attend the trials themselves.
Sigal: That’s correct, my basic intention (...) very secular, and I had grown up with nightmares of all the people that were at the Nuremberg Trials. They were like cartoon figures for me, until I actually went to the trial. Around my barracks were what were called displaced persons, and this was people that had survived the murder camps that had been set up by the Nazis over Europe, and a lot of them were Jewish, not all of them. And for the first time I was confronted with the realities of what the Nazis had actually done. On the one hand there was the German people, the women and the wives, incredibly grateful to a deferential power, and we were the conquerers. On the other hand there was these displaced people who had by some miracle survived torture, and repeated attempts to kill them, and this began to really work on my mind, both as an American and as a Jew. I had not until then thought myself to be, and I thought well since I hadn’t done my part in combatting the Nazis, the least I could do was go and watch justice dealt with them at Nuremberg, which is exactly what I did. I simply took off, and I attended the trial. I also went with the intent, I took my gun, I took my pistol with me, and I had a fantasy of going in and shooting Hermann Goering, who was the top Nazi at the time. But I didn’t.
6:40
Nicole: Yeah, you said that you found a sort of peace in the courtroom, didn’t you?
Sigal: Yes, I uh… Ah, that’s an interesting question. I wouldn’t call it peace. I was sitting in the first row next to a woman army corps translator who had been born in Belgium whose family had been wiped out by the Nazis. And she was very curious why we Americans felt so gently toward the Germans, and her family was completely wiped out. The atmosphere in the courtroom, I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a criminal court. But on the one hand there’s the (murderer on the sidebar?) and then you go into the courtroom and there’s a curious antiseptic feel. It’s all handled through the wheels of justice and it seemed a million miles away from the reality of what went on. The Judges and the Allies were doing the best they could, but there was no precedent for this at all. To put political leaders on trial for war crimes and crimes against civilians was unprecedented and nobody actually knew how to deal with it. Immediately after the war, in fact, before the war was over, the first instinct of our President Roosevelt, Churchill the leader of the British, and Stalin was, (the way we deal with these people when we win the war?) you take 50 to 100 thousand Nazi officers and you shoot them. And they all said, “Great. Great, idea. Yeah, that’s what we’ll do.” And then they had second thoughts. “Now (no?), we can’t do that, we have to put them on trial, even though there’s no precedent for doing it. So they had to cobble together and improvise a kind of legal system, which still exists today. We have an international tribunal that still exists today. And so each of the 23 Nazis were put on trial and to the best of their ability evidence was presented, they had the defense counsel, and sentences were (...) down to life imprisonment. But the personal experience of sitting there blew my mind because suddenly these were not cartoon figures they were real. But I had seen in newsreels Hitler, and Goering, and Himmler, and all these villains were at the top of their power, and we in America had been subjected to a lot of Nazi Propaganda: newsreels, and I lived in a Jewish neighborhood in Chicago we were absolutely terrified, we took “Mein Kampf,” Hitler’s book, very seriously. He said, well, “I’m going to come over there and kill all the Jews,” and we said, “Yeah, we believe you.” So, we built them up into kind of, little supermen, and watching them in the courtroom, sitting there, they looked beaten down, they certainly didn’t look like supermen like what they called themselves. They looked like bums and tramps and people who you see any day in an American courtroom trying to figure out, “How can I lie my way up?” Some of them actually did. 10:43 Remember that the political leaders like Goering and Hess were put on trial, the economic leaders, the people who backed the Nazis, and who funded the war machine, pretty much got off scot-free. But we didn’t know that at the time. All we knew at the time was, “These are the people, in the dock, they don’t look like it now, but they murdered many, many, millions of people, including our own relatives. … Go ahead.
Jen: Did the American press in any way talk, form an image through newspapers and articles about 11:31 what these defendant’s roles were in the war specifically?
Sigal: I can’t remember I probably was reading the newspaper “Stars and Stripes” and “Yank Magazine” which is what GIs did. One thing that’s really hard to remember is that this occurred immediately after the war when it hadn’t really sunk in. Our aim was, “Yeah, Hitler was the enemy, we have to defeat him, we defeated him at some cost.” Remember that the Russians took 90% of the casualties, and that was our aim, “Okay, there was a war and we have to deal with the people that we have heard were doing these terrible things.” By and large most Americans felt very, very distant from this. I mean, when I got back to my barracks after the Nuremberg Trials, I was in a unit of mainly rural Texans, it wasn’t that they didn’t care, it just didn’t register. You had to see it for yourself, you had to visit the concentration camps, the whole idea of the concentration camps and mass murder 12:52 didn’t really penetrate into the American consciousness until several years after the war. All we knew was, “These guys were the enemy,” we’d heard stories, we’d seen it in newsreels, they required justice, let’s get on with it.
Nicole: And, do you think that by that train of thought, in pursuit of this justice --I mean, everyone sees these men as these enormous criminals, which they were-- do you think people were more in favor of the just, immediate “execute them and be done with this war and all of the suffering as fast as we can” or do you think most people were more in support of having the trials and trying to make things as liberal as possible?
Sigal: People, as soon as victory was declared, and the German generals showed up and surrendered to us, an unconditional surrender, hold on a second (...) Hi, you still with me? So, once the war was over, people wanted to get back to a kind of normal life in the United States. The United States had not suffered as a result of the war, it’s really important to know that. We had prospered where the European nations and the Asian nations were ruined. Take my mother for example, my mother had gone through a very long depression. She was a factory worker in the 20s and 30s and (...) we just didn’t have any money, we had foodstamps, et cetera. 14:59 Suddenly, the war comes, and my mom has got work to do, sewing American army uniforms, and we had money in our pockets. And this was true of the vast number of Americans, suddenly all that unemployment was a memory, because everybody was put to work for the war effort, and we made money out of the war, those of us who didn’t have to go into the army and didn’t get killed or wounded. So, there was a common detachment on the part of most Americans, which is why even though I’m Jewish, when I lived in Nuremberg it was a shock to understand the reality, to see the evidence, to see witnesses come to court, people who had been prisoners in the concentration camps, or lower ranking Nazis who were giving evidence against their bosses in the hope that they could escape hanging, and suddenly all of that became very real. But I was a minority, and I think probably there were commentators at the time, and news correspondents at the time who really were trying hard to get the message across to Americans about the devastation in Europe and who these people in the dock were. How much of that impacted 16:30 I don’t know. You’ll have to do your research on that. You’ve only got one person’s opinion and that’s mine.
Jen: Sir, how long did you observe the trials for? Just that day?
Sigal: No, for three or four days. Day after day I kept coming back and Hermann Goering and I got into a starting contest. He was in the front row, and for a couple days I was in the front row, and I was wearing my GI uniform and my (...) boots, et cetera, and he got into a kind of staring contest. And I (literally?) regretted not having, they took my gun away when I came into the courtroom, and I was trying to develop in my own mind, “This is the guy that was the first head of the Gestapo, this is the guy that headed the German airforce that had destroyed most of Britain and Europe. This is the guy that had passed the Nuremberg Anti-Jewish laws, this is Hitler’s right-hand man.” I kept trying to put together what I knew to be the facts, which is this former dope-fiend in a shrunken uniform, who was incredibly arrogant. Of all of the people in the dock, he was the one who gave the most defensive testimony, he was the one who stared down the prosecuting attornies, he was the one who kept repeating the, it’s a german phrase (speaks in German) “not guilty.” And he never lost that arrogance, the arrogance of power never lost, and when I realized that this guy wasn’t one of two of the top Nazis who was seeking redemption, falsely or authentically, Goering, not at all. (...) They (he?) thought what they’d done was the greatest party they’d ever had. 18:42 And Goering was smart, (...) he stood up in court and gave eloquent defenses, and he went on the offensive and said, “Why are you attacking the Nazis for what they did? Look at what you did to the negroes at home and the way you wiped out the Indians.” He wasn’t giving an inch, whereas the majority of the defendants were really scared to death of him, they thought his luster was going to hang them all. And they didn’t know, you could see it in their faces, they didn’t know whether to get up and cheer him on, or whether to recoil away from him. He still held that arrogant (...) He stood up and you could see the others leaning away from him, because after all, he was once the most powerful man in Germany. So, it was a human drama as well as a legal drama.
Jen: Do you think that the attornies and the judges and the people in the courtroom were surprised that he defended himself?
Sigal: Yes. Yes, absolutely. Our attorney general Jackson, who was the chief prosecutor, I think was stunned. But nobody was prepared for Goering making this aggressive, assertive defense of himself, and I think I could tell from the translation in my headphones, he ran rings around the prosecutor. 20:29 Because when you go to an (...) or you go to a mass murderer, and the mass murderer not only defends himself but accuses you of crimes, you’re just thrown off balance, which is what I think happened in the courtroom. I mean people, you know, mass murderers, often don’t beg for forgiveness, they defend their actions and they will attack you. We’ve seen this is Bosnia, we’ve seen this in Rwanda, we’ve seen this all over the world, which is why we need an international court or tribunal all the time. And, which is why, I mean, the Americans, the American political administration hate the idea of a war crimes trial, simply because some of the things that we have done in the recent past get us (...) was the first time world war actually went down as crimes against a civilian population (... 21:43) So this is a very, very hot topic, of all the administrations we’ve had since (...) The last thing in the world we want is for anybody to put us on trial for the war crimes.
Jen: Right, that’s why the International Criminal Tribunal, or Commission, was created in the 90s after the cold war.
Sigal: Right. Well, there’s always a lot of hypocrisy in, there was a lot of hypocrisy in the Nuremberg Trials. This is the very first time this had been attempted. The Soviet judge, I forget the name, had also been the judge in the notorious Moscow trials of the 1930s, where they sent basically innocent people, so the Soviet judges came with dirty hands, on the other hand the Soviets, the Russians, had done most of the suffering and most of the dying. And it cannot be denied that they deserved their place on the tribunal, you know, that gets complicated.
Jen: Do you think that the other judges viewed, or most people viewed the Russian prosecution as sort of lost their ability because of their past actions?
Sigal: It depends the historian, I guess, you talk to. I’m sure there are thousands of books that have been written about the Nuremberg Trials, and I’m sure some of those books have asserted, “Look, the russians had dirty hands. 23:30 Look what Stalin did, therefore the Nuremberg Trials were invalid, and in fact you have pro-Nazi, and Holocaust deniers making that argument, saying, “Well if the Russians were there and the Russians had dirty hands, therefore the Nazis that were hanged illicitly, illegally, and the next step they make is, of course, that the Nazis were innocent or that it never even happened. And you still run into people today that say, “It never really happened.” So when I run into people I say, “I was there. I saw the camps. I saw the consequences.” They kind of look at me, when you confront people with a witness testimony like that, they wanted to tell me I’m lying, but they don’t say that. But there are still a lot of people who believe that. I believe the Nuremberg Trials are desperately important to lay down the legal definition of what can and cannot be done against civilians, against prisoners of war, against people in general. I think it raised the bar to rather civilized level 24:53. And I think, basically, dealt with those Nazis very gently, a few were hanged, a few committed suicide, some had long prison terms, economic bosses got off free, lower ranking Nazis almost completely walked away. We see in the newspapers all the time some 90 year old prison guard finally died. It was not, once the Cold War started, it was not in our interests to pursue the Nazis, to pursue the Germans because, we needed them on our side. The main Nazi Rocket Engineer, Wehrner von Braun who killed huge numbers of Allied civilians, we had him enlist to bring him over here to Huntsville, Alabama, so he could make rockets for us. Once the Cold War started 25:58 the whole definition, a whole new dynamic began to play out. … Still with me?
Nicole: Yeah, sorry. Just processing information.
Sigal: It’s a lot to process. I guess you want to process as much as possible.
Nicole: Yeah, um, do remember anything about the conduct of the trials? I mean, I’m sure you probably don’t remember, like, individual testimonies or statements, as it’s been so long. But do you, I mean, not to simplify it, but did it feel fair? Did you feel like you were in a legitimate and proper trial at the time?
Sigal: Yes. 26:44 Yes, and I felt the least we could do was put them on trial. Now I, it’s odd because I had a slightly complicated (...) here. I was raised in a liberal family where the kind of mindset was, “If you’re on trial, you’re innocent.” Because we had gone through a number of scandals in the United States, the Scottsboro boys etc. and my mom’s sympathies had always been towards the accused rather than the accuser, and that’s what I was raised with. So when I see these kind of shrunken guys in the dock, there’s a kind of an instinct I had to think, “Hey, don’t look so bad.” And then, I began to hear the testimonies, and listen to their arguments, and I realized (laughing) the guys were complete monsters, including the fact that the generals had slaughtered prisoners of war from my army unit. And the more I listened, the more I heard, I thought, “My God, hanging isn’t good enough for them.” So there was a revenge thing going on there, too, also a feeling of, “Geez, the war is over, why are we going through this?” A lot of people probably thought, “The war is over, why go through this?” Which is why, before the war was over, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin all said, “Look, for God’s sake, let’s do this quickly and shoot (100,000?) of their officers and get it over and done with.” But that’s not what happened because 28:38 in the end, the Americans, the British, and the French demanded that this be done legally. And that’s why we had the trials. Some of the people in the dock, you know, when a criminal is indicted (...) Personally I don’t believe a word any of them said because when you list their crimes, which were beyond imagination, really beyond imagination, (what you really would hear is sadists?), every single one of them. And a sick sadistic streak. Had punishing, pummeling, destroying, what they call “untermensch,” people who were lesser men and women, and it didn’t matter to a lot of them whether they were Jews or Poles. The Poles were untermensch, you destroy the Polish nation, 29:51 (...) I mean, they were anti-Semites absolutely unanimously, and they had this kind of barbaric, medieval, “Kill the Jews, kill the Jews, kill the Jews.” Now that’s not what you heard in the courtroom, but that’s what you heard from the evidence. But you had old men, and old women getting up and trying to give testimony, trying to make it as legal as possibly, trying to say what happened to them. And it’s remarkably difficult, actually, to track down a war crime, it really is. We put a lot of our own detectives on it, et cetera, and it’s hard to collect the evidence of something so monstrous. It’s easy to collect the evidence of a single murder. How do you collect the evidence of a (...) where two million people were killed? It suddenly becomes almost impossible. How do you do it? Who’s to blame? So you (...) What about his wife, who helped? 31:09 What about the guards? Maybe a GI had the right idea: You don’t see this in textbooks, but when our own GI’s liberated some of the murder camps, they let some of the prisoners kill their own guards, and in some cases the GIs killed the guards. They took all the guilt, they couldn’t believe their eyes, they just killed them. Again, you don’t find that in history books, and it wasn’t even (...) it was just tombstone justice. Go ahead.
Nicole: So when you were there were you witnessing mostly defense or prosecution?
Sigal: Mostly, I’m just trying to think, I was there certainly when a case was made against Goering. He got up and he couldn’t even, I don’t think he even tried to answer specific arguments except to say, “Hey, you did it to negroes, you did it to the indians, you did it to your minorities. I’m absolutely blameless. You people are just taking unfair advantage of revenge. That’s for sure.” And then I think I was, I’m just trying to think who else, Rudolf Hess, who had been Hitler’s best friend, pretended to be crazy. That was his deal. And he was sitting next to Goering, pretending to be out of it and saying, and Goering knew his number right away. And each of these Nazis had 33:05 to deal with his own fate. Pretty much most of them knew that they were going to be executed, a foregone conclusion for them, except that that (... so desperately?) and they had good lawyers, terrific lawyers, who were looking for very small print, where that could excuse them. I didn’t really have anything to do with finding out the order, that was somebody else. At the time what I was doing was legal. The (...) at the time that much of this was happening, this was happening legally, because in choosing Nuremberg Trials, there was no law against mass murder. And quite (early/rightly?) I think some of the defense attorneys said, “Hey, you are charging these people under a law that did not exist at the time of the committing of the act.” And that’s true. It’s absolutely true. Even so, the judges and the prosecutors found a way around that. I mean, you have to ask yourself, “What would you do when confronted with 23 mass murderers? How would you deal with them? What would you do?
Jen: So we know the prosecution frequently references previous international documents like the previous Geneva conventions and the Hague conventions, um, did you see a lot of the defense response on that? Or argue about, or the prosecution reference those documents a lot?
Sigal: I wish I could remember, I think they did. I think that they referred constantly to the Geneva convention. I think they referred a lot to the Hague convention as well, that existed at the time. Certainly the Geneva convention was mentioned a lot. 35:28 Where the prosecutors were on very firm grounds was to nail the top Nazis for giving the orders to kill prisoners of war of British and Americans.
Jen: Right, because there had been established international laws about that portion.
Sigal: Right, and in a sense, that was the least of their crimes when you compared to the many many millions of people they killed elsewhere. But it was a good legal standard to get these guys on. You had to look for something solid and legal to accuse them of, and killing American POWs for example was insignificant compared to the other slaughters, but it was solid legal ground.
Jen: Did you see the charge of crimes against humanity, which had a less stable legal ground, did the prosecution try to back that up with more evidence and witness testimony?
Sigal: I’m not a lawyer, so when I heard, “Crimes Against Humanity” it was, it made absolute emotional and logical sense to me. I wasn’t worried about the law, I just hoped that the law backed it up. Because it seemed to me appropriate to the acts that were committed. “Crimes Against Humanity” was a new and fresh legal concept. But sitting in the courtroom I thought, “Right. Absolutely. That’s the crime.” It’s a new crime, but my God does it really fit. So I had no problems with that at all. My main problem was fitting my previous fantasy these supervillains with the reality in the dock. And it took a little while for me to process that, as I’m sure you’re having a little problem processing information now. And I’m not a lawyer, I don’t have that context. The only context I had was, “Gee, back in Frankfurt I know some of these Germans, none of them 38:22 remembered (...) they knew anything, of course. My friends were friendly with the Germans, and my girlfriend was German, it was hard to find my footing. At the same time in Nuremberg, there was a Jewish revenge squad, I met only one of them. And they had been Jewish soldiers, I think in the British army, and they really (...) the war, and they had lost their whole families to the Nazis and made themselves into a revenge company, a revenge platoon. And went out and thought “The law is too damn slow, they’re sentencing these people to too light a sentence, we’ll do the job ourselves. So again, you don’t find this in too many history books, and they made it their business to go around and shoot and kill Nazi war criminals. When I was in Nuremberg they pulled a stunt next to-- In Nuremberg there was a big POW camp for the Nazi SS, the worst of the worst, right?
Jen: The Einsatzgruppen, correct?
Sigal: So this Jewish revenge Squad got hold of the bakers and they put arsenic into the bread that was delivered to the SS POWs. I don’t know if they killed anybody but they made a lot of Nazi SS people very very ill. So that was going on too, it was a tense, very tense atmosphere 40:34. Nuremberg itself, except for the hall of justice where I was sitting, ruined and bombed out. It was like an other-worldly landscape, an other-worldly experience. Germany was wrecked and full of bombed institutions, and bombed people, and people who had just barely survived the war and again, were grateful that they hadn’t been captured in the Soviet zone. It’s a complicated thing, but more and more I think the Nuremberg Trials were not complicated, I think justice was done except for some people like Albert Speer, the architect who got off scot-free. Total son of a bitch, an absolute cog in the war machine, and I think Hitler’s (...) a few years. I guess the intellectuals got off and the (... murderers?) did not get off. Goering did not get off, I mean he got off by committing suicide. The Americans liked Goering, there was always a very strong rumor that Goering had special (...) given to him by his American captain and that an American officer passed him the cyanide pill. That’s the rumor. 42:16 The fact of the matter is, we Americans did not feel the same kind of anger, murderous rage, and demand for justice that the French, British, and especially the Russians felt.
Nicole: So, I mean, the crimes of the Third Reich were, and remain today, unthinkable to most people. I mean, I think that through our research we think that that’s one of the reasons why the trials were so unprecedented, is the count of “Crimes Against Humanity” seems so obvious once they’ve been committed but it was something that no one thought would have been necessary. I mean, in addition to the trials serving this kind of legal purpose, do you think they served as kind of a moral deterrent to crime? Like, was there just sort of a shock value about the whole thing?
Sigal: I think it’s incredibly useful to have the trials, I think it set a standard, and it’s an embarrassing standard for countries that treat people badly. But the standard is there, and I believe that when our own GIs are up on assaults and war crimes charges, the prosecutors do invoke the Nuremberg rules of saying you followed orders to bring (...) in the courtroom. And the Nuremberg Trials said so. And so when our soldiers, for whatever reason, killed people unnecessarily in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they’re caught at it and they are court-martialed, the military prosecutors invoked the Nuremberg Trials, saying, “You were following orders isn’t good enough, duty of a soldier that follows his conscience first.” 44:40 Then again, of course, it gets very complicated, because I mean that’s a whole other issue, but the Nuremberg Trials have been used again and again and again in various courtrooms around the world and in our own court-martial, and I think it’s a good thing. It reminds people that there is a crime beyond which you cannot go legally and morally. We do it all the time, and at least we say, “You can’t do it.”
Nicole: When you returned to your unit what was their reaction? Both to the trials and your absence?
Sigal: Oh, I don’t think they cared. You know, they were either going to the black market or getting drunk, or finding a girlfriend, or wondering when they would be sent home, or enjoying themselves in Germany, and just waiting out their time. The vast majority of American soldiers couldn’t have cared less. They wanted to get home. There was a little problem at the same time the Nuremberg Trials were held 46:03 it’s a totally forgotten chapter of American history, there was a big World War crisis that we had with Russia. This is probably news to you, but you can look it up, it was called the Iran crisis. During the war the Red army had occupied northern Iran, and then we said at the end of the war, “Okay, that war’s over, get out of Iran.” And Stalin said, “No.” And our President Harry Truman said, “You will get out,” Stalin said, “No.” So this is the first of a real Cold War, so we GIs in Germany knew about that, and we’re right on the front lines of the next war. And it blew over, but not for a few months. And there was a feeling among GIs, a kind of fatalism, “Oh God, we’re (...) gonna fight the Russians.” And the Germans encouraged us in this thinking, nothing would appease them (...) “You fought us, but now, you use us to fight the Russians.” Unanimously, 100%, they were so happy to turn us against the Russians in a new war. And our General Patton was happy to do it, too. Thank God General Eisenhower was a little more cautious about that. But, there was a crisis, we GIs thought we were on the front line, and we were really worried that another war would be breaking out, because it was (...) “Let’s finish the job.” Finishing the job meant beating the Russians, I mean it’s an insane idea, completely insane idea. And thank God the diplomats figured a way out. I think in the end Stalin knew better, and I think he withdrew his troops. 48:02 But that added to the whole tension that was there at the time. So, the whole Cold War thing looming over everything.
Nicole: Just as someone who has observed the world both then and now, do you see a noticeable shift in international relations that you think could be traced back to the trials?
Sigal: Oh my God, that’s such a big subject.
Jen: You’ve mentioned before, like, how the military--
Sigal: I never took a poli-sci class. You wouldn’t like to bring that down to earth, would you? I mean I hear the phrase “international relations,” I’m out the door.
Nicole: I’m sorry, I guess I’m just--
Sigal: Be practical, be mean.
Nicole: I guess I’m just asking how the world looks different now. Whether about war crime, or international court which you’re probably not as familiar with, I know it’s--
Sigal: Yes I am.
Nicole: Sorry?
Sigal: I helped when the Bosnians were surrounded by the Serbians, I helped deliver medical supplies to the Muslim Serbians in Sarajevo. So I know about the trials.
Nicole: Oh, wow. Well, I guess I’m just wondering, like, if you see the influences of Nuremberg today.
Sigal: That’s a terribly good question, and I think I’ll kick it back to you. I am so aware of atrocities around the world that I often don’t even think about Nuremberg. In other words, Nuremberg didn’t stop the Rwandan massacres. Nuremberg hasn’t stopped the long-running massacres in the Central African Republic. Nuremberg didn’t stop the massacres in Indonesia, in the 1960s, or Chinese (starving about?) 50 million other people. Nuremberg certainly didn’t stop the... I think, probably, this is a guess, in the so-called war on terror, which President Obama correctly said maybe we should find a different phrase for, we are doing things that are very close to the line, in our invasions. Number one in our invasion of Iraq, and in drone warfare, so-called targeted assassination. 51:21 And I’m like 99% certain that when Obama draws up what he calls his “kill list” every Tuesday night, which he says he does, he checks with the legal people in the justice department, and they probably say things like, “How does this fit with the Nuremberg rules?” I would bet a lot of money that even though we do go ahead and kill a lot of people indiscriminately, that we check with the legal people first to see whether it fits the Nuremberg rules. It even happened on the second George Bush, I think because Obama’s a constitutional lawyer, he probably checks with his legal people and the attorney general to say, “Hey, look. We’re about to send a lot of drones over to Yemen and Pakistan and we’re going to kill a lot of innocent people, (...) how does this fit with Nuremberg Rules?” And I’m sure they’re a compliant lawyer who says, “It’s okay, pal.” But at least they check. I don’t mean to be cynical about it, I’m glad the Nuremberg Rules exist, because you have to play by the rules, even when the rules tend to be broken. (Or when you?) find compliant lawyers who say, “Go ahead and do it anyway, we’ll find a way around it.” Which is what happened in the Bush administration and I think it’s probably happening in the President’s administration, too, (...) we hadn’t figured out a way how to deal with suicide bombers, except killing people (...) So, and again that’s close to the line, and you would have to talk to an A, C, and B lawyer who would probably give you much, much better information than I can. And I’m sure there are a lot of lawyers around [redacted] or around [redacted]. You say [Redacted]?
End Recording
Sigal: Okay, shoot. What’s your question? Well first of all let’s give you a little bit of background, okay? I was a perfectly ordinary GI soldier in the infantry in the army sent to occupation duty in Germany after the war. Right after the war when Germany had been bombed to ruins and there were a lot of dead people under the (rubble?) and all that, France had been bombed to Europe, most of Europe was in terrible shape … Nazi war machine. And I was one of a number of GIs who were supposed to be there and maintain order and keep a very ruined country going. You have to use your imagine and just imagine bombs having fallen, well what town are you calling from?
Nicole: [Redacted.]
Sigal: Right, well just imagine that you wake up one morning and most of the houses are gone, hold on a second… So we’re dealing with the German Civilian Population, the survivors of the war, who are dazed, bitter, angry, resentful, and really in their heart of hearts want, are very grateful to be in the American Zone and not in the Soviet Zone, because when the Russians came into Germany and they fought their way in all the way into Berlin, they had (redemption?) in their hearts, and they took it out on the German people which the Americans did not. We treated them almost justly, and the Germans were incredibly grateful, any wise German always wanted to find himself in the American zone. We Americans had not really felt the war at home, so we didn’t feel the same way toward the Germans that especially the Russians, the British, and the French did. The judges at the Nuremberg Tribunal were Russian, American, French, and British and I went down from my barracks at Frankfurt to Nuremberg to attend the trials. Now fire away. Do you have any questions?
Nicole: Oh, yeah, we do. Thank you for that background. I guess my first question is, just to clarify we listened to your NPR interview and you said that you snuck away from your unit to attend the trials themselves.
Sigal: That’s correct, my basic intention (...) very secular, and I had grown up with nightmares of all the people that were at the Nuremberg Trials. They were like cartoon figures for me, until I actually went to the trial. Around my barracks were what were called displaced persons, and this was people that had survived the murder camps that had been set up by the Nazis over Europe, and a lot of them were Jewish, not all of them. And for the first time I was confronted with the realities of what the Nazis had actually done. On the one hand there was the German people, the women and the wives, incredibly grateful to a deferential power, and we were the conquerers. On the other hand there was these displaced people who had by some miracle survived torture, and repeated attempts to kill them, and this began to really work on my mind, both as an American and as a Jew. I had not until then thought myself to be, and I thought well since I hadn’t done my part in combatting the Nazis, the least I could do was go and watch justice dealt with them at Nuremberg, which is exactly what I did. I simply took off, and I attended the trial. I also went with the intent, I took my gun, I took my pistol with me, and I had a fantasy of going in and shooting Hermann Goering, who was the top Nazi at the time. But I didn’t.
6:40
Nicole: Yeah, you said that you found a sort of peace in the courtroom, didn’t you?
Sigal: Yes, I uh… Ah, that’s an interesting question. I wouldn’t call it peace. I was sitting in the first row next to a woman army corps translator who had been born in Belgium whose family had been wiped out by the Nazis. And she was very curious why we Americans felt so gently toward the Germans, and her family was completely wiped out. The atmosphere in the courtroom, I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a criminal court. But on the one hand there’s the (murderer on the sidebar?) and then you go into the courtroom and there’s a curious antiseptic feel. It’s all handled through the wheels of justice and it seemed a million miles away from the reality of what went on. The Judges and the Allies were doing the best they could, but there was no precedent for this at all. To put political leaders on trial for war crimes and crimes against civilians was unprecedented and nobody actually knew how to deal with it. Immediately after the war, in fact, before the war was over, the first instinct of our President Roosevelt, Churchill the leader of the British, and Stalin was, (the way we deal with these people when we win the war?) you take 50 to 100 thousand Nazi officers and you shoot them. And they all said, “Great. Great, idea. Yeah, that’s what we’ll do.” And then they had second thoughts. “Now (no?), we can’t do that, we have to put them on trial, even though there’s no precedent for doing it. So they had to cobble together and improvise a kind of legal system, which still exists today. We have an international tribunal that still exists today. And so each of the 23 Nazis were put on trial and to the best of their ability evidence was presented, they had the defense counsel, and sentences were (...) down to life imprisonment. But the personal experience of sitting there blew my mind because suddenly these were not cartoon figures they were real. But I had seen in newsreels Hitler, and Goering, and Himmler, and all these villains were at the top of their power, and we in America had been subjected to a lot of Nazi Propaganda: newsreels, and I lived in a Jewish neighborhood in Chicago we were absolutely terrified, we took “Mein Kampf,” Hitler’s book, very seriously. He said, well, “I’m going to come over there and kill all the Jews,” and we said, “Yeah, we believe you.” So, we built them up into kind of, little supermen, and watching them in the courtroom, sitting there, they looked beaten down, they certainly didn’t look like supermen like what they called themselves. They looked like bums and tramps and people who you see any day in an American courtroom trying to figure out, “How can I lie my way up?” Some of them actually did. 10:43 Remember that the political leaders like Goering and Hess were put on trial, the economic leaders, the people who backed the Nazis, and who funded the war machine, pretty much got off scot-free. But we didn’t know that at the time. All we knew at the time was, “These are the people, in the dock, they don’t look like it now, but they murdered many, many, millions of people, including our own relatives. … Go ahead.
Jen: Did the American press in any way talk, form an image through newspapers and articles about 11:31 what these defendant’s roles were in the war specifically?
Sigal: I can’t remember I probably was reading the newspaper “Stars and Stripes” and “Yank Magazine” which is what GIs did. One thing that’s really hard to remember is that this occurred immediately after the war when it hadn’t really sunk in. Our aim was, “Yeah, Hitler was the enemy, we have to defeat him, we defeated him at some cost.” Remember that the Russians took 90% of the casualties, and that was our aim, “Okay, there was a war and we have to deal with the people that we have heard were doing these terrible things.” By and large most Americans felt very, very distant from this. I mean, when I got back to my barracks after the Nuremberg Trials, I was in a unit of mainly rural Texans, it wasn’t that they didn’t care, it just didn’t register. You had to see it for yourself, you had to visit the concentration camps, the whole idea of the concentration camps and mass murder 12:52 didn’t really penetrate into the American consciousness until several years after the war. All we knew was, “These guys were the enemy,” we’d heard stories, we’d seen it in newsreels, they required justice, let’s get on with it.
Nicole: And, do you think that by that train of thought, in pursuit of this justice --I mean, everyone sees these men as these enormous criminals, which they were-- do you think people were more in favor of the just, immediate “execute them and be done with this war and all of the suffering as fast as we can” or do you think most people were more in support of having the trials and trying to make things as liberal as possible?
Sigal: People, as soon as victory was declared, and the German generals showed up and surrendered to us, an unconditional surrender, hold on a second (...) Hi, you still with me? So, once the war was over, people wanted to get back to a kind of normal life in the United States. The United States had not suffered as a result of the war, it’s really important to know that. We had prospered where the European nations and the Asian nations were ruined. Take my mother for example, my mother had gone through a very long depression. She was a factory worker in the 20s and 30s and (...) we just didn’t have any money, we had foodstamps, et cetera. 14:59 Suddenly, the war comes, and my mom has got work to do, sewing American army uniforms, and we had money in our pockets. And this was true of the vast number of Americans, suddenly all that unemployment was a memory, because everybody was put to work for the war effort, and we made money out of the war, those of us who didn’t have to go into the army and didn’t get killed or wounded. So, there was a common detachment on the part of most Americans, which is why even though I’m Jewish, when I lived in Nuremberg it was a shock to understand the reality, to see the evidence, to see witnesses come to court, people who had been prisoners in the concentration camps, or lower ranking Nazis who were giving evidence against their bosses in the hope that they could escape hanging, and suddenly all of that became very real. But I was a minority, and I think probably there were commentators at the time, and news correspondents at the time who really were trying hard to get the message across to Americans about the devastation in Europe and who these people in the dock were. How much of that impacted 16:30 I don’t know. You’ll have to do your research on that. You’ve only got one person’s opinion and that’s mine.
Jen: Sir, how long did you observe the trials for? Just that day?
Sigal: No, for three or four days. Day after day I kept coming back and Hermann Goering and I got into a starting contest. He was in the front row, and for a couple days I was in the front row, and I was wearing my GI uniform and my (...) boots, et cetera, and he got into a kind of staring contest. And I (literally?) regretted not having, they took my gun away when I came into the courtroom, and I was trying to develop in my own mind, “This is the guy that was the first head of the Gestapo, this is the guy that headed the German airforce that had destroyed most of Britain and Europe. This is the guy that had passed the Nuremberg Anti-Jewish laws, this is Hitler’s right-hand man.” I kept trying to put together what I knew to be the facts, which is this former dope-fiend in a shrunken uniform, who was incredibly arrogant. Of all of the people in the dock, he was the one who gave the most defensive testimony, he was the one who stared down the prosecuting attornies, he was the one who kept repeating the, it’s a german phrase (speaks in German) “not guilty.” And he never lost that arrogance, the arrogance of power never lost, and when I realized that this guy wasn’t one of two of the top Nazis who was seeking redemption, falsely or authentically, Goering, not at all. (...) They (he?) thought what they’d done was the greatest party they’d ever had. 18:42 And Goering was smart, (...) he stood up in court and gave eloquent defenses, and he went on the offensive and said, “Why are you attacking the Nazis for what they did? Look at what you did to the negroes at home and the way you wiped out the Indians.” He wasn’t giving an inch, whereas the majority of the defendants were really scared to death of him, they thought his luster was going to hang them all. And they didn’t know, you could see it in their faces, they didn’t know whether to get up and cheer him on, or whether to recoil away from him. He still held that arrogant (...) He stood up and you could see the others leaning away from him, because after all, he was once the most powerful man in Germany. So, it was a human drama as well as a legal drama.
Jen: Do you think that the attornies and the judges and the people in the courtroom were surprised that he defended himself?
Sigal: Yes. Yes, absolutely. Our attorney general Jackson, who was the chief prosecutor, I think was stunned. But nobody was prepared for Goering making this aggressive, assertive defense of himself, and I think I could tell from the translation in my headphones, he ran rings around the prosecutor. 20:29 Because when you go to an (...) or you go to a mass murderer, and the mass murderer not only defends himself but accuses you of crimes, you’re just thrown off balance, which is what I think happened in the courtroom. I mean people, you know, mass murderers, often don’t beg for forgiveness, they defend their actions and they will attack you. We’ve seen this is Bosnia, we’ve seen this in Rwanda, we’ve seen this all over the world, which is why we need an international court or tribunal all the time. And, which is why, I mean, the Americans, the American political administration hate the idea of a war crimes trial, simply because some of the things that we have done in the recent past get us (...) was the first time world war actually went down as crimes against a civilian population (... 21:43) So this is a very, very hot topic, of all the administrations we’ve had since (...) The last thing in the world we want is for anybody to put us on trial for the war crimes.
Jen: Right, that’s why the International Criminal Tribunal, or Commission, was created in the 90s after the cold war.
Sigal: Right. Well, there’s always a lot of hypocrisy in, there was a lot of hypocrisy in the Nuremberg Trials. This is the very first time this had been attempted. The Soviet judge, I forget the name, had also been the judge in the notorious Moscow trials of the 1930s, where they sent basically innocent people, so the Soviet judges came with dirty hands, on the other hand the Soviets, the Russians, had done most of the suffering and most of the dying. And it cannot be denied that they deserved their place on the tribunal, you know, that gets complicated.
Jen: Do you think that the other judges viewed, or most people viewed the Russian prosecution as sort of lost their ability because of their past actions?
Sigal: It depends the historian, I guess, you talk to. I’m sure there are thousands of books that have been written about the Nuremberg Trials, and I’m sure some of those books have asserted, “Look, the russians had dirty hands. 23:30 Look what Stalin did, therefore the Nuremberg Trials were invalid, and in fact you have pro-Nazi, and Holocaust deniers making that argument, saying, “Well if the Russians were there and the Russians had dirty hands, therefore the Nazis that were hanged illicitly, illegally, and the next step they make is, of course, that the Nazis were innocent or that it never even happened. And you still run into people today that say, “It never really happened.” So when I run into people I say, “I was there. I saw the camps. I saw the consequences.” They kind of look at me, when you confront people with a witness testimony like that, they wanted to tell me I’m lying, but they don’t say that. But there are still a lot of people who believe that. I believe the Nuremberg Trials are desperately important to lay down the legal definition of what can and cannot be done against civilians, against prisoners of war, against people in general. I think it raised the bar to rather civilized level 24:53. And I think, basically, dealt with those Nazis very gently, a few were hanged, a few committed suicide, some had long prison terms, economic bosses got off free, lower ranking Nazis almost completely walked away. We see in the newspapers all the time some 90 year old prison guard finally died. It was not, once the Cold War started, it was not in our interests to pursue the Nazis, to pursue the Germans because, we needed them on our side. The main Nazi Rocket Engineer, Wehrner von Braun who killed huge numbers of Allied civilians, we had him enlist to bring him over here to Huntsville, Alabama, so he could make rockets for us. Once the Cold War started 25:58 the whole definition, a whole new dynamic began to play out. … Still with me?
Nicole: Yeah, sorry. Just processing information.
Sigal: It’s a lot to process. I guess you want to process as much as possible.
Nicole: Yeah, um, do remember anything about the conduct of the trials? I mean, I’m sure you probably don’t remember, like, individual testimonies or statements, as it’s been so long. But do you, I mean, not to simplify it, but did it feel fair? Did you feel like you were in a legitimate and proper trial at the time?
Sigal: Yes. 26:44 Yes, and I felt the least we could do was put them on trial. Now I, it’s odd because I had a slightly complicated (...) here. I was raised in a liberal family where the kind of mindset was, “If you’re on trial, you’re innocent.” Because we had gone through a number of scandals in the United States, the Scottsboro boys etc. and my mom’s sympathies had always been towards the accused rather than the accuser, and that’s what I was raised with. So when I see these kind of shrunken guys in the dock, there’s a kind of an instinct I had to think, “Hey, don’t look so bad.” And then, I began to hear the testimonies, and listen to their arguments, and I realized (laughing) the guys were complete monsters, including the fact that the generals had slaughtered prisoners of war from my army unit. And the more I listened, the more I heard, I thought, “My God, hanging isn’t good enough for them.” So there was a revenge thing going on there, too, also a feeling of, “Geez, the war is over, why are we going through this?” A lot of people probably thought, “The war is over, why go through this?” Which is why, before the war was over, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin all said, “Look, for God’s sake, let’s do this quickly and shoot (100,000?) of their officers and get it over and done with.” But that’s not what happened because 28:38 in the end, the Americans, the British, and the French demanded that this be done legally. And that’s why we had the trials. Some of the people in the dock, you know, when a criminal is indicted (...) Personally I don’t believe a word any of them said because when you list their crimes, which were beyond imagination, really beyond imagination, (what you really would hear is sadists?), every single one of them. And a sick sadistic streak. Had punishing, pummeling, destroying, what they call “untermensch,” people who were lesser men and women, and it didn’t matter to a lot of them whether they were Jews or Poles. The Poles were untermensch, you destroy the Polish nation, 29:51 (...) I mean, they were anti-Semites absolutely unanimously, and they had this kind of barbaric, medieval, “Kill the Jews, kill the Jews, kill the Jews.” Now that’s not what you heard in the courtroom, but that’s what you heard from the evidence. But you had old men, and old women getting up and trying to give testimony, trying to make it as legal as possibly, trying to say what happened to them. And it’s remarkably difficult, actually, to track down a war crime, it really is. We put a lot of our own detectives on it, et cetera, and it’s hard to collect the evidence of something so monstrous. It’s easy to collect the evidence of a single murder. How do you collect the evidence of a (...) where two million people were killed? It suddenly becomes almost impossible. How do you do it? Who’s to blame? So you (...) What about his wife, who helped? 31:09 What about the guards? Maybe a GI had the right idea: You don’t see this in textbooks, but when our own GI’s liberated some of the murder camps, they let some of the prisoners kill their own guards, and in some cases the GIs killed the guards. They took all the guilt, they couldn’t believe their eyes, they just killed them. Again, you don’t find that in history books, and it wasn’t even (...) it was just tombstone justice. Go ahead.
Nicole: So when you were there were you witnessing mostly defense or prosecution?
Sigal: Mostly, I’m just trying to think, I was there certainly when a case was made against Goering. He got up and he couldn’t even, I don’t think he even tried to answer specific arguments except to say, “Hey, you did it to negroes, you did it to the indians, you did it to your minorities. I’m absolutely blameless. You people are just taking unfair advantage of revenge. That’s for sure.” And then I think I was, I’m just trying to think who else, Rudolf Hess, who had been Hitler’s best friend, pretended to be crazy. That was his deal. And he was sitting next to Goering, pretending to be out of it and saying, and Goering knew his number right away. And each of these Nazis had 33:05 to deal with his own fate. Pretty much most of them knew that they were going to be executed, a foregone conclusion for them, except that that (... so desperately?) and they had good lawyers, terrific lawyers, who were looking for very small print, where that could excuse them. I didn’t really have anything to do with finding out the order, that was somebody else. At the time what I was doing was legal. The (...) at the time that much of this was happening, this was happening legally, because in choosing Nuremberg Trials, there was no law against mass murder. And quite (early/rightly?) I think some of the defense attorneys said, “Hey, you are charging these people under a law that did not exist at the time of the committing of the act.” And that’s true. It’s absolutely true. Even so, the judges and the prosecutors found a way around that. I mean, you have to ask yourself, “What would you do when confronted with 23 mass murderers? How would you deal with them? What would you do?
Jen: So we know the prosecution frequently references previous international documents like the previous Geneva conventions and the Hague conventions, um, did you see a lot of the defense response on that? Or argue about, or the prosecution reference those documents a lot?
Sigal: I wish I could remember, I think they did. I think that they referred constantly to the Geneva convention. I think they referred a lot to the Hague convention as well, that existed at the time. Certainly the Geneva convention was mentioned a lot. 35:28 Where the prosecutors were on very firm grounds was to nail the top Nazis for giving the orders to kill prisoners of war of British and Americans.
Jen: Right, because there had been established international laws about that portion.
Sigal: Right, and in a sense, that was the least of their crimes when you compared to the many many millions of people they killed elsewhere. But it was a good legal standard to get these guys on. You had to look for something solid and legal to accuse them of, and killing American POWs for example was insignificant compared to the other slaughters, but it was solid legal ground.
Jen: Did you see the charge of crimes against humanity, which had a less stable legal ground, did the prosecution try to back that up with more evidence and witness testimony?
Sigal: I’m not a lawyer, so when I heard, “Crimes Against Humanity” it was, it made absolute emotional and logical sense to me. I wasn’t worried about the law, I just hoped that the law backed it up. Because it seemed to me appropriate to the acts that were committed. “Crimes Against Humanity” was a new and fresh legal concept. But sitting in the courtroom I thought, “Right. Absolutely. That’s the crime.” It’s a new crime, but my God does it really fit. So I had no problems with that at all. My main problem was fitting my previous fantasy these supervillains with the reality in the dock. And it took a little while for me to process that, as I’m sure you’re having a little problem processing information now. And I’m not a lawyer, I don’t have that context. The only context I had was, “Gee, back in Frankfurt I know some of these Germans, none of them 38:22 remembered (...) they knew anything, of course. My friends were friendly with the Germans, and my girlfriend was German, it was hard to find my footing. At the same time in Nuremberg, there was a Jewish revenge squad, I met only one of them. And they had been Jewish soldiers, I think in the British army, and they really (...) the war, and they had lost their whole families to the Nazis and made themselves into a revenge company, a revenge platoon. And went out and thought “The law is too damn slow, they’re sentencing these people to too light a sentence, we’ll do the job ourselves. So again, you don’t find this in too many history books, and they made it their business to go around and shoot and kill Nazi war criminals. When I was in Nuremberg they pulled a stunt next to-- In Nuremberg there was a big POW camp for the Nazi SS, the worst of the worst, right?
Jen: The Einsatzgruppen, correct?
Sigal: So this Jewish revenge Squad got hold of the bakers and they put arsenic into the bread that was delivered to the SS POWs. I don’t know if they killed anybody but they made a lot of Nazi SS people very very ill. So that was going on too, it was a tense, very tense atmosphere 40:34. Nuremberg itself, except for the hall of justice where I was sitting, ruined and bombed out. It was like an other-worldly landscape, an other-worldly experience. Germany was wrecked and full of bombed institutions, and bombed people, and people who had just barely survived the war and again, were grateful that they hadn’t been captured in the Soviet zone. It’s a complicated thing, but more and more I think the Nuremberg Trials were not complicated, I think justice was done except for some people like Albert Speer, the architect who got off scot-free. Total son of a bitch, an absolute cog in the war machine, and I think Hitler’s (...) a few years. I guess the intellectuals got off and the (... murderers?) did not get off. Goering did not get off, I mean he got off by committing suicide. The Americans liked Goering, there was always a very strong rumor that Goering had special (...) given to him by his American captain and that an American officer passed him the cyanide pill. That’s the rumor. 42:16 The fact of the matter is, we Americans did not feel the same kind of anger, murderous rage, and demand for justice that the French, British, and especially the Russians felt.
Nicole: So, I mean, the crimes of the Third Reich were, and remain today, unthinkable to most people. I mean, I think that through our research we think that that’s one of the reasons why the trials were so unprecedented, is the count of “Crimes Against Humanity” seems so obvious once they’ve been committed but it was something that no one thought would have been necessary. I mean, in addition to the trials serving this kind of legal purpose, do you think they served as kind of a moral deterrent to crime? Like, was there just sort of a shock value about the whole thing?
Sigal: I think it’s incredibly useful to have the trials, I think it set a standard, and it’s an embarrassing standard for countries that treat people badly. But the standard is there, and I believe that when our own GIs are up on assaults and war crimes charges, the prosecutors do invoke the Nuremberg rules of saying you followed orders to bring (...) in the courtroom. And the Nuremberg Trials said so. And so when our soldiers, for whatever reason, killed people unnecessarily in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they’re caught at it and they are court-martialed, the military prosecutors invoked the Nuremberg Trials, saying, “You were following orders isn’t good enough, duty of a soldier that follows his conscience first.” 44:40 Then again, of course, it gets very complicated, because I mean that’s a whole other issue, but the Nuremberg Trials have been used again and again and again in various courtrooms around the world and in our own court-martial, and I think it’s a good thing. It reminds people that there is a crime beyond which you cannot go legally and morally. We do it all the time, and at least we say, “You can’t do it.”
Nicole: When you returned to your unit what was their reaction? Both to the trials and your absence?
Sigal: Oh, I don’t think they cared. You know, they were either going to the black market or getting drunk, or finding a girlfriend, or wondering when they would be sent home, or enjoying themselves in Germany, and just waiting out their time. The vast majority of American soldiers couldn’t have cared less. They wanted to get home. There was a little problem at the same time the Nuremberg Trials were held 46:03 it’s a totally forgotten chapter of American history, there was a big World War crisis that we had with Russia. This is probably news to you, but you can look it up, it was called the Iran crisis. During the war the Red army had occupied northern Iran, and then we said at the end of the war, “Okay, that war’s over, get out of Iran.” And Stalin said, “No.” And our President Harry Truman said, “You will get out,” Stalin said, “No.” So this is the first of a real Cold War, so we GIs in Germany knew about that, and we’re right on the front lines of the next war. And it blew over, but not for a few months. And there was a feeling among GIs, a kind of fatalism, “Oh God, we’re (...) gonna fight the Russians.” And the Germans encouraged us in this thinking, nothing would appease them (...) “You fought us, but now, you use us to fight the Russians.” Unanimously, 100%, they were so happy to turn us against the Russians in a new war. And our General Patton was happy to do it, too. Thank God General Eisenhower was a little more cautious about that. But, there was a crisis, we GIs thought we were on the front line, and we were really worried that another war would be breaking out, because it was (...) “Let’s finish the job.” Finishing the job meant beating the Russians, I mean it’s an insane idea, completely insane idea. And thank God the diplomats figured a way out. I think in the end Stalin knew better, and I think he withdrew his troops. 48:02 But that added to the whole tension that was there at the time. So, the whole Cold War thing looming over everything.
Nicole: Just as someone who has observed the world both then and now, do you see a noticeable shift in international relations that you think could be traced back to the trials?
Sigal: Oh my God, that’s such a big subject.
Jen: You’ve mentioned before, like, how the military--
Sigal: I never took a poli-sci class. You wouldn’t like to bring that down to earth, would you? I mean I hear the phrase “international relations,” I’m out the door.
Nicole: I’m sorry, I guess I’m just--
Sigal: Be practical, be mean.
Nicole: I guess I’m just asking how the world looks different now. Whether about war crime, or international court which you’re probably not as familiar with, I know it’s--
Sigal: Yes I am.
Nicole: Sorry?
Sigal: I helped when the Bosnians were surrounded by the Serbians, I helped deliver medical supplies to the Muslim Serbians in Sarajevo. So I know about the trials.
Nicole: Oh, wow. Well, I guess I’m just wondering, like, if you see the influences of Nuremberg today.
Sigal: That’s a terribly good question, and I think I’ll kick it back to you. I am so aware of atrocities around the world that I often don’t even think about Nuremberg. In other words, Nuremberg didn’t stop the Rwandan massacres. Nuremberg hasn’t stopped the long-running massacres in the Central African Republic. Nuremberg didn’t stop the massacres in Indonesia, in the 1960s, or Chinese (starving about?) 50 million other people. Nuremberg certainly didn’t stop the... I think, probably, this is a guess, in the so-called war on terror, which President Obama correctly said maybe we should find a different phrase for, we are doing things that are very close to the line, in our invasions. Number one in our invasion of Iraq, and in drone warfare, so-called targeted assassination. 51:21 And I’m like 99% certain that when Obama draws up what he calls his “kill list” every Tuesday night, which he says he does, he checks with the legal people in the justice department, and they probably say things like, “How does this fit with the Nuremberg rules?” I would bet a lot of money that even though we do go ahead and kill a lot of people indiscriminately, that we check with the legal people first to see whether it fits the Nuremberg rules. It even happened on the second George Bush, I think because Obama’s a constitutional lawyer, he probably checks with his legal people and the attorney general to say, “Hey, look. We’re about to send a lot of drones over to Yemen and Pakistan and we’re going to kill a lot of innocent people, (...) how does this fit with Nuremberg Rules?” And I’m sure they’re a compliant lawyer who says, “It’s okay, pal.” But at least they check. I don’t mean to be cynical about it, I’m glad the Nuremberg Rules exist, because you have to play by the rules, even when the rules tend to be broken. (Or when you?) find compliant lawyers who say, “Go ahead and do it anyway, we’ll find a way around it.” Which is what happened in the Bush administration and I think it’s probably happening in the President’s administration, too, (...) we hadn’t figured out a way how to deal with suicide bombers, except killing people (...) So, and again that’s close to the line, and you would have to talk to an A, C, and B lawyer who would probably give you much, much better information than I can. And I’m sure there are a lot of lawyers around [redacted] or around [redacted]. You say [Redacted]?
End Recording