Thread by @FranHirsch

On May 20 in #Nuremberg the Soviets finally had the chance to cross-examine Admiral Erich Raeder. Deputy chief prosecutor Yuri Pokrovsky (below) approached the witness box and began to challenge the defendant’s claims to have favored a peaceful relationship with the Soviet Union.

Hadn’t Raeder known in 1940 that Hitler was planning to attack Russia? Pokrovsky began. No, Raeder responded. Hitler had not said that he wanted to go to war, just that the German military must “be prepared.”

Pokrovsky then handed Raeder part of the memorandum that he had produced for the NKVD while in Soviet custody in Moscow: his “Moscow Statement.” Pokrovsky asked Raeder to read a highlighted passage aloud.

In this passage, Raeder had dismissed as “propaganda” statements by the German Foreign Office and High Command blaming Moscow for breaching the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact and thus precipitating the war.

If Raeder had seen through these lies, and had disagreed with Hitler’s foreign policy, then why hadn’t he resigned earlier? Pokrovsky asked.

Raeder responded that even though Operation Barbarossa had troubled him "morally," as "the highest man in the Navy” he could not have walked away at the start of the war. Doing so would have been “unsoldierly.”

The Soviets had long been eager to use Raeder’s “Moscow Statement” to embarrass and split the defense #Nuremberg. Yuri Pokrovsky now submitted to the Tribunal a pile of excerpts in which Raeder had described some of his codefendants in very unflattering terms.

Pokrovsky read aloud a section concerning Hermann Goering: “unimaginable vanity and immeasurable ambition were his main peculiarities.” He next read Raeder’s characterization of Karl Doenitz as having a “strong political inclination to the Party.”

At this point British judge Geoffrey Lawrence interrupted. The judges might read the remaining passages themselves, he suggested, if Raeder confirmed having written them.

Lawrence was also Tribunal president. I just love this photo of him taken by Evgeny Khaldei. RGAKFD 2-9624

Pokrovsky was determined to keep reading from the "Moscow Statement" in open court. He tried to skip ahead to Raeder’s descriptions of Wilhelm Keitel and Alfred Jodl.

But Raeder’s attorney, Walter Siemers, asked that the entire document be submitted to the Tribunal for private review. And the judges agreed.

Pokrovsky was visibly disappointed. He'd been anticipating a spectacle. Later that evening Raeder told U.S. prison psychologist Gustave Gilbert that he had never imagined that his personal reflections would be used in a war crimes trial, let alone one in which he was a defendant.

#OTD 75 years ago at the #Nuremberg Trials