Robert H. Jackson Center

Robert H. Jackson Center Dynamic programs, exclusive exhibits, and curated collections housed in an historic 1858 mansion

06/01/2026

OTD in — June 1, 1946 — Trial Day 144:
Defense witness Max Timm, who had served on Sauckel's labor allocation staff, resumed testimony under examination by Dr. Servatius. Timm described Sauckel's administrative relationships with the Four Year Plan office, the Reich Ministry for Food, and Himmler's apparatus.

Contact with the SS was maintained through a liaison on Sauckel's staff covering police matters such as badge requirements and other restrictions for foreign workers.
Timm testified that Sauckel's deputies in the occupied territories had been unable to function independently because regional military and civilian governments refused to permit representatives with separate authority.

The deputies were folded into local administrations in dual-role positions, an arrangement Timm said originated from demands of the regional governments. On recruitment, he estimated approximately two to three million foreign workers could be considered voluntary, with a comparable number arriving under compulsory service laws.

On conditions in Germany, Timm testified that complaints reaching Sauckel's office concerned housing, clothing, food, badges, and barbed wire, and that abuses of the severity alleged by the Prosecution had not come to his knowledge. Dr. Flachsner, counsel for Speer, then questioned Timm on the tension between Sauckel and Speer over labor allocation authority, which Timm said had been resolved through a series of agreement conferences sometimes chaired by Reichsminister Lammers.

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06/01/2026

in — May 31, 1946 — Trial Day 143:
Soviet Prosecutor General Alexandrov cross-examined Sauckel on the scale of the foreign labor program. He presented Document 1296-PS, Sauckel's own July 27, 1942 report, which showed 5,124,000 foreign workers then employed in Germany including 1,576,000 prisoners of war.

He then presented Document 1739-PS, Sauckel's November 1942 survey, which contained a sentence referring to the total of foreign workers including prisoners of war as having reached 7 million.

Sauckel confirmed both figures as accurate for their respective dates while attempting to explain that the number was in constant flux as workers completed short-term contracts and returned home, and that the figures for different dates reflected a rolling population rather than a cumulative total.

The President repeatedly told Sauckel to answer the questions directly without extended explanation.

Defense witness Max Timm then began testimony on the mechanisms of foreign labor recruitment and deployment, providing detail on the administrative structure Sauckel's office operated within and the extent to which actual day-to-day management of foreign workers was handled by other agencies.

05/30/2026

in — May 30, 1946 — Trial Day 142:
The International Military Tribunal was in session on this day, the American holiday of Memorial Day. The multinational composition of the Tribunal meant no recess was taken for the observance.

French Prosecutor M. Herzog cross-examined Sauckel, presenting Document 3057-PS, a statement Sauckel had signed on September 4, 1945, in which he declared he had been a convinced National Socialist since 1921, had agreed 100 percent with Hi**er's program, had made approximately 500 speeches advancing the National Socialist position, and had obeyed Hi**er's orders blindly until the collapse.

Sauckel flatly rejected the document as obtained under duress, testifying that he had been told he would be handed over to Soviet authorities and that a Polish or Russian officer had threatened his family would be taken to Soviet territory. He stated he had signed without reading the document carefully out of fear for his ten children.

The President directed Sauckel to go through the document sentence by sentence and identify specific inaccuracies. Sauckel declared every sentence wrong as written, stating he could not have formulated them that way himself. He acknowledged the signature was his but maintained the document had been presented to him in finished form for signature under coercion, and that his actual views were more qualified than any of the statements it contained.

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05/29/2026

in — May 29, 1946 — Trial Day 141:

The session opened with administrative matters. Thomas Dodd informed the Tribunal that document D-880, containing extracts from a pre-trial interrogation of Raeder, had in fact already been offered in evidence as GB-483.

The Tribunal then stated that no further hearing in open court was necessary at that stage on the document questions for Jodl, Seyss-Inquart, von Papen, and Speer.

Dr. Servatius next raised continuing difficulties with Sauckel’s witnesses. He said the wrong Hubert Hildebrandt had again been brought to Nuremberg instead of the witness he had actually requested, calling attention to what had become a repeated error in the defense’s efforts to secure testimony.

Sauckel then resumed the stand. Servatius turned to Document R-124, a record of a March 1944 Central Planning Board meeting, and asked Sauckel about his use of the word “shanghai” in discussing labor recruitment. The questioning also addressed a passage concerning the arming of French units to protect recruiting offices.

Sauckel testified that his use of “shanghai” was not meant literally and was not an instruction for actual kidnapping methods. He said it was a figure of speech, used to convey the pressure he was under from industrial demands for labor and the increasingly difficult position in which he found himself.

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05/28/2026

in — May 28, 1946 — Trial Day 140:

The session opened with matters related to the Bormann defense. Dr. Bergold, counsel for the absent Bormann, argued before the Tribunal that proceedings against Bormann should be terminated if he could be shown to be dead, contending that the Charter's provisions for trial in absentia applied only to living persons.

Bormann's remains were discovered in 1965 and DNA testing provided conclusive proof in 1998.

Bergold had been unable to locate exculpatory witnesses and described his situation as particularly difficult because all available witnesses were hostile to Bormann and wished to incriminate him. The Tribunal heard argument and deferred decision.

Witness Hoepken continued his testimony on Von Schirach's relationship to the Church in Vienna, confirming that Schirach had maintained a regular dialogue with Protestant theology faculty and had intervened where possible on Church matters.

Additional defense witnesses Wieshofer briefly testified. Defendant Fritz Sauckel then took the stand for the first time and began his direct examination before Dr. Servatius.

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05/27/2026

in — May 27, 1946 — Trial Day 139:
Prosecutor Dodd cross-examined Von Schirach on a teletype message he had sent to Martin Bormann in June 1942, shortly after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. Von Schirach confirmed the message was genuine and that it had suggested bombing a British cultural city in retaliation.

He also acknowledged, after Dodd presented minutes of a Vienna City Council meeting of June 6, 1942, that he had publicly stated all Jews would be removed from Vienna by late summer or autumn of that year and that removal of Czechs would follow as "the necessary and right answer" to Heydrich's assassination. Von Schirach maintained he had subsequently dropped the Czech evacuation idea and it was never carried out.

Dodd pressed Von Schirach on his knowledge of Heydrich's reputation as head of the Gestapo at the time of the assassination. Von Schirach stated he had known Heydrich was Gestapo chief but did not know of specific atrocities, characterizing Heydrich primarily as the Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia.

Following completion of cross-examination, defense witnesses Hartmann Lauterbacher and Gustav Hoepken began testimony on Von Schirach's relations with various Party and administrative bodies.

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05/24/2026

in — May 24, 1946 — Trial Day 138:
Von Schirach continued direct examination on anti-Semitism and his relationship to the Hi**er Youth's ideology. He described his view in 1924-1925 as favoring Jewish exclusion from the civil service and a proportional numerus clausus for university admissions rather than total exclusion, and testified that he had refused repeated requests from Goebbels' Propaganda Ministry to publish a special anti-Semitic issue of the official Hi**er Youth publication.

He stated that Der Stuermer was not distributed within the Hi**er Youth organization, with the sole exception of youth in Gau Franken where Streicher's local influence was unavoidable, and that the paper was definitively rejected by youth leaders throughout the organization.
Concerning a signed introduction he had contributed to Der Stuermer, Von Schirach testified he could not recall writing it and believed it had been drafted by his press office and presented to him in the routine evening mail for signature.

On the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, Von Schirach stated he had been surprised to learn of the Reichstag session only the day before it was held and had no prior knowledge of the laws' contents.

He testified that his generation of youth leaders considered the Jewish question settled after 1935 and did not expect further measures, and denied having made inflammatory anti-Semitic speeches to youth at any point during his time as Reich Youth Leader.

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05/23/2026

in — May 23, 1946 — Trial Day 137:
The Tribunal opened by ruling on the Seyss-Inquart document disputes, admitting six of the seventeen contested documents and rejecting the remaining eleven.

Flottenrichter Kranzbuhler then submitted the Nimitz interrogatory as Doenitz-100, an affidavit from the Commander-in-Chief of the United States Navy in the Pacific addressing American submarine warfare practices, which Kranzbuhler had pursued for months as a direct parallel to the charges against Doenitz. The Tribunal noted that the Soviet delegation had not yet received a translation and deferred formal submission.

Defendant Baldur von Schirach then took the stand and began direct examination by Dr. Sauter. Von Schirach described his career: National Socialist Students' Union leader from 1929, Reich Youth Leader of the NSDAP from 1931, Youth Leader of the German Reich from 1933, and Gauleiter and Reich Governor of Vienna from 1940.

He described the successive structures of youth organization, his relationship to the Ministry of Interior under Frick and then the Education Ministry under Rust, and addressed his early involvement with the Party as stemming from his reading of Henry Ford's anti-Semitic writings as a student.

On May 23, 1946, assistant Soviet prosecutor Nikolay Zorya was found dead from a gunshot wound in his rented apartment at 22 Guntermüllerstrasse in Nuremberg, an event officially ruled an accidental shooting but one that has remained controversial.

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