historian mark hull gives a history of a case. in an eight-month preceding, nazis were put on trial for murdering more than one million jews and tens of thousands of others including partisan writers, disabled persons, and roma. >> we mark the 70 anniversary of the nuremberg trials -- we present our program in partnership with the chairman presidential library, the german center of kansas city, the holocaust education, and the u.s. army general command and staff college. tonight's program speaker, dr. mark hull, teaches the war crimes law in american history. he earned his undergraduate degree from citadel.

his doctorate from the school in ireland, and the cumberland school of law. worked as a criminal prosecutor and served as a brigade intelligence adviser with the u.s. army intelligence transmission team from his books 2006 2 2007 in iraq. his books include "irish secret: german espionage in wartime island." and he has written many books on persecuting war crimes to military intelligence. he is an elected fellow of the royal historical society. please join me in welcoming dr. mark hull this evening. [applause] dr. hull: thank you. thank you and welcome. i'm kind of glad that they not -- that they scheduled this talk

tonight instead of during the world series, because i have a feeling most of you would rather not be here. the nature of this can be complex. i will try to keep this from being disturbing, but it is serious. i would like you to imagine me as a lawyer trying to make a case. the case and going to try to make to you is why this is profound, why it is important and why you should think it is important maybe more , important in 2015 as the trial , was in 1948 when it finished. i should probably tell a story. last year, i had the honor of going to nuremberg. for someone, a lawyer who does not nuremberg trial stuff, this is wonderful. i was the guest of the bavarian supreme court justice and i got to go to courtroom 600 and spend time just there. we went around.

i got to look at the place where this trial happened. when we finished we went to the , back room, which is the one on the right hand side, and it's where the justices gathered after the trial to consider their verdict. the justice brought me a book. it was the distinguished visitors book from the house of justice. i am looking through. it has prosecutors, and presidents there are incredible , signatures in it. she said to me, i'd appreciate it if you would write something. and i froze because i had nothing. it's like, can you do a profound on a click of your fingers? and i had nothing. in i'm figuring, you know, be cool, best wishes, dr. h is probably not going to get the job done. [laughter] dr. hull: i had this deer in

headlights panic. i said, i will buy myself a couple of extra seconds. what i will do is write this with my fountain pen. that goes ok until i looked down at my hand and realize the pen exploded, and i have ankle over my hand and a getting ready to put this down on the distinguished visitors book in the palace of justice, a place i wanted to be for my whole life. the moral of the story is, if you are expecting me to be profound, you make a home with ink on your hands. [laughter] dr. hull: i guarantee nothing. the trials, specifically the subsequent trials are , distinguished from the main military trial in a national tribunal. a lot of people do not even know that one happened. if you can find people that know the int occurred -- the chances

of you finding someone who knows that there were 12 trials afterward is pretty remote. i will pick what i think to be the most significant, the einsatzgruppen case for a variety of reasons. that is the main int. goering is seated to the far left. it's an international tribunal organized by the allied powers. the u.s., the soviet union, great britain, and france. it is the one that drew the most attention. it revealed for the first time the degree and the extent of nazi crimes during world war ii. the trial has a lot of purposes. one of the purposes is educational. it is supposed to tell people what happened with documentary evidence in a judicial, legalistic format. another part is perhaps political.

it is designed as a springboard to the new united nations. it is designed as a vehicle to help the new germany take the place of the germany that has just been destroyed. it is designed to set into documentary record so that any time after 1946 no one in their right mind can ever deny what happened during the war. when this trial finishes, a second set of trials occurs. and there are two figures in particular that, again, most people have never heard of. if you start to think about great or famous american trial lawyers, you will probably think of clarence darrow. he is probably the most famous trial lawyer we have ever produced. i think one of the best is the guy to the left, general taylor.

he was a prosecutor at the main trial of the int, and he was the architect and founding father of each of subsequent trials. the stuff we talk about tonight will largely be the result of taylor's vision and his insistence on these things coming out. he was also one of extraordinary morals. he is one of the handful of people who in the 1950's under mccarthy, he promised -- he probably cost himself a supreme court judgeship because he spoke out. the guy on the right, ben ference. when he took the case when he was 27 years old. he had never tried a case in his life. he had never been in a courtroom before. and we made him the chief prosecutor for the army for the einsatzgruppen case. he is also one of the kindest, most generous people i have ever met. he is 95. he is still alive. he is sharp. he has better memory and better

recall that i probably will ever have the rest of my life. a good guy, great lawyer, and he is also one of the architects we are going to be talking about. when i do my classes for war crimes, i show them this picture. it's one of the most terrifying things i think i've probably ever seen. and it's terrifying in a lot of different ways. the picture is taken in the southern ukraine in september 1941. the person, the nco there with a pistol who is ready to kill this man, is a member of what is called einsatzgruppen d. everybody, all of the other jews of the town are laying in a ditch. there's about 30,000 of them. the einsatzgruppen thought this

was so singular that to capture , the moment of execution of the last of the jews, the last jew of the town, they wrote it on the back. again it's a horrible thing. , it's horrible for the person who knows what is going to happen because he see's everybody in front of him is dead. but just as scary to me are the people in the background. you have members of the einsatzgruppen that are there. you have members of the german army that are there. there is a guy second to the left in the front row wearing a german army band. you have people from the labor service. the people you do not see that also would have been there, people from the local village who came out just to watch. it's a terrible thing.

and to my mind, it is sort of -- narrows the scope of what happened and what we will be talking about. the reason the einsatzgruppen case happened, occurred, of the 12 trials planned after the main int trial, something happened during the main trial that made this almost inevitable. once of the prosecution witnesses was an ss general. this guy. was captured otto by the british in 1945. he talked absolutely freely of what happened during the war and what he did. he commanded one of the einsatzgruppen. his testimony was used by the prosecution with his cooperation during the main trial against the other german defendants. he testified on the stand that his einsatzgruppen had murdered 90,000 people. he said at one point another

commander had had more people murdered, and he said, oh, he is just exaggerating. i killed many more people than he did. with his testimony on the record, you had the beginning of a case that could be devoted entirely to the einsatzgruppen. at this point the americans and the british have decided joint power trials are probably not something we want to be involved in. the decision was made for the allies to separate the process and they will continue to try war criminals separately. the 12 subsequent trials, the ministry's, the high command trial they are going to be , entirely under american, and specifically american army, jurisdiction. ndrof, and we will see him again, he will be a

continuing participant in the story because there is something disquieting about who he is i want to come back to and why this trial is important. combined with his testimony during the main trial in early 1946, the lawyer, ben ference, who had been enlisted in the army. he had been discharged in 1940 five, gone back. i believe he was a harvard graduate. had been recruited to come back and work for the army for the office of war crimes in berlin. while he is in the berlin documentation center, which is where we brought all of the captured not see --nazi documentation, he's looking through the records, which is no easy task because there are tons and tons of them and none of them are are in english. they are all in german. he recovers the reports of the different einsatzgruppen from

the east and then says, once you says once he started looking at the figures and the tabulation, he went and got a calculator, a hand calculator. when he reached a total of a million people, he called taylor. the combination of ohlendorf's discovery ofs the these documents is what made the einsatzgruppen case mandatory. now the way the case is organized is kind of interesting. in the legal philosophy, i have never heard of one, never been involved in one -- this trial lasts eight months from september 1947 until april 1948. out of all of those days of testimony, the prosecution takes two days.

they put on no witnesses. think about every courtroom drama you have ever seen. you direct, you cross, but that is not happening here. the only people on the stands for the document -- for the prosecution are the document custodians reading into the record the einsatzgruppen reports, of which there are many, and the testimony of people who testified either during interrogation or during the main trial. so, as far as the prosecution's case is concerned, the einsatzgruppen trial turns into a cross examination test. for a trial lawyer, this is the coolest thing ever. i've been advised by the way there are things trial lawyers find cool that normal people do not find cool -- [laughter] dr. hull: but this really is. you do have to work about direct testimony and prepping back, but you have to be prepared to cross

examine every one of the defendants. the procedure with the int and subsequent trials is a little different then you may be used to. the defendants do not testify, but they are interrogated and the defendants are also interrogated and interviewed before they are captured and there is no attorney present. the talk freely, for different purposes. here in a few minutes, we will talk about categories the defense is broken down into and some are very interesting. one of the things that has puzzled me and still puzzles me is how you get people to commit the crimes that these people had committed. in fact, i suspect on a greater scale than he could even prove. the einsatzgruppen performed first in the invasion of poland.

in there were 7 of them. 1939. , is ansatzgruppen collective noun. a little bit before the invasion of russia, there are 4. a, b, c, and d. the guy running point for the einsatzgruppen is hiring him . they are assigned to german army command. einsatzgruppen d is assigned to the 11th army in the crimea. their mission and recruiting begins in 1941 before the invasion. the members of the einsatzgruppen are, in every respect you can imagine, absolutely ordinary, which is one of the things that makes it

so difficult. they are trained. that task is literally by the time we get to 1941, to act as mobile extermination squads to go anywhere in the occupied soviet union and murder people. they are meticulous record keepers. actually, every three weeks they submit different reports on the numbers of jews killed back to headquarters. i got this big book sitting on my desk at work. it's called the crime classification manual. it is prepared by the fbi. and it is designed for every violent offense to tell you the kind of offender you could probably expect. none of these people fit that, any of those categories. they are -- if you had to pick the kind of person likely to commit mass murder, none of

these people would fit that category. of the einsatzgruppen leaders, just from a, you had 70 17 officers.-- nine of them had doctorate degrees. you had an opera singer. you have accountants, you have lawyers, you have medical doctors serving as the heads of these mobile extermination units. what is -- how does that occur? this is not the crazy person with a weapon that you think might do this sort of thing. they are exactly the sort of people you think would never do this sort of thing. they are professional. none of them have a criminal record. the ones that live on radar, none of them commit a crime. there is one exception, by the way. one of these guys. how can that be possible? and the sad truth of it is it is extremely possible, even likely. but as you are continuing with

the prosecution of the case, you're not prosecuting the kind of offenders you normally prosecute. these are highly intelligent, highly adapted, smart people who are going to concoct stories, in most cases, to try to obscure the truth. and you've got to break that. one exception to the criminal record rule is this guy on the bottom right. he was afraid of being captured by the americans, so he murders his driver and assumes his identity. the worst of this group, certainly the ss general who is down at the bottom, he is a doctor of law. he's an economist. everyone who ever met him, including the prosecuting attorneys and the judges commented on how intelligence

-- intelligent and well spoken and reasonable. all of these people are psych tested. all of them come back normal. the only thing that distinguishes them is the fact that they all self-selected for the ss. and you can probably draw some reasonable conclusions from that. you don't volunteer for ss service unless you are an anti-semite. just like you don't volunteer for service in the ku klux klan unless you hate people. that's the distinction. this is a map of some of not all , of, the sites where the einsatzgruppen massacres occurred. they are everywhere. and one of the advantages the prosecution has when you're using the documents of the defendants themselves -- it is

impossible for them to deny this. even the defendants often confirm the documents. yes, that is my signature. it seems that they were almost offended by the idea that their math was not right to rid that was the worst offense of anything else. the map on the left-hand side accompanied the situation report from einsatzgruppen a. so, the baltic states, northern russia, the northern extremity of the map. there are no more jews left to there. and as you go down, you can see the numbers killed that einsatzgruppen a is reporting. so from that center left 136,421. this is like a normal situation report. obviously if you are submitting reports of this kind in the

open you are not worried about going toeption it is get on the other side. this is called the yegor report. it is officially an added total date by date, place by place, numbers of people that are killed. it's there for everybody to see, who wants to see it. this is also inner in the -- entered as prosecution exhibit. and there was a fascinating book -- if you haven't read it, you probably should -- called "ordinary men" by christopher browning that came out a while ago. it documents the experience of a police battalion 101 in this extermination campaign in the east. the question that browning asks and the question that the trial judge is going to ask is, again, what is going to motivate you?

why are these people doing these things? because their photos sent home look like snapshots anybody would send home. except they are taking other kinds of photographs that are not in circulation and there are a lot of them. the photograph on the left-hand side is from einsatzgruppen c. the more i looked at this picture, the more something looked weird to me, and the weird thing is the person standing with their back to you in the center of the panel. it's a woman. she's a police reservist. and there's just no end of these. and we are not going to do any more of them because it's bad enough this stuff has to live in and doesn't need to live

in yours. but there's no denying this. this is a scale that is on -- unthinkable and even unimaginable, and that's part of the problem when you're presenting the case. because at the outset in the opening statement to the einsatzgruppen judges, we are dealing here with a number that is beyond comprehension, and it is beyond comprehension. the senior -- the judges are -- the judges can make a difference in any trial and have an interesting one of these here. the senior judge is a guy that is from new jersey area it -- my bad, from pennsylvania. joe, that's just for you. he is the kind of judge the trial lawyers hate because if he does not think you are doing a

good enough job questioning the witness, he's going to take that over for you. if he just wants to know something, and that's not one of the questions you plan to ask, it's ok, he's going to break in and ask a question. and he will go on for a while. meanwhile, ben ference, the german defense attorney is just watching the train accident happen and lose nothing you can do about it. the two other judges -- one from alabama, dixon from north carolina -- if they said anything or make any contribution to the trial, the record does not reflect it. this is his show. he is the center of attention. he talks to the press a lot. he goes to the eichmann trial to sell a new book he has written. the most famous thing with him -- there is interesting stuff here, too -- it's not totally negative.

when the defense is trying to introduce evidence that is extraneous and irrelevant, ben ference objects and the judge gets on his soapbox and says, listen, i will allow any evidence whatsoever to include the sex life of a penguin if i think it's relevant. and at the end of the case, the german defense attorney gave him a small little bronze statue of a penguin, just as a reminder. but he's a difficult personality, but on one of the positive sides, he is string to -- is trying to answer the question that a prosecutor simply probably does not care about, motive. i don't have to prove motive. i have to prove intent. motive is a separate animal. motive is nice if you can do it. if you can't, it's fine, because

the elements of the crime don't call for it. he will ask the same sorts of questions for each of the 24 defendants at this trial. why? why did you think that? some will be evasive. some of them won't. he does not let them off the hook until he gets an answer. preserving that for the record is an achievement and it's still very useful now. to go back to the defendants in this case, we start out with 24 that are indicted. why do you think it's 24? this is audience participation night. you get to say. >> 24 hours a day. dr. hall. hull: or her hull -- dr.

no. but that is ok. >> [indiscernible] dr. hull: that is partially right. >> [indiscernible] dr. hull: most of them did or at least some of them did, but that's not the answer either. the answer is simple mathematics. there are 24 seats in the defendants' box at nuremberg. so you don't have 25, because you have to get a folding chair and at does not look very good. so 24 defendants in the main trial, the cap is 24 because that's how many you can seat. most of the senior, but not all of the senior einsatzgruppen people, are brought here. the decision was made by the prosecution. we are going to take this essentially like an organized crime case. the people doing the shooting -- in some cases they are these defendants, but in some cases they are not. the idea is to put on trial the responsible parties, but the nature of the trial differs from

the int. none of them ever killed anybody with their hands. they are people in an office ordering the killing of others. box, thesein this 24, are there. they are at the site, they are at the pit. when they start to experiment using gas fans to murder people, they are there. and that is the difference. again it puzzles me that people , know about the one trial and they do not know about the trial where the actual killers are being brought to justice. the defendants in this case are an interesting mix. they are atypical. their defenses break down into three rough categories. about a third each -- that's not perfect, but close enough -- the -- a third of them are going to

justify on the witness stand exactly what they did and they are going to tell you what they did. they are not going to hide from it. they're not going to quibble about numbers. absolutely, that is what is in the report. that's what we did. and so forth. some will say they did it -- group --he justified because it is well-known bolshevism or communism is a mortal threat to germany. it's well known that all communists are jews, and therefore it is perfectly legitimate to kill them as a preventative measure before they can destroy germany. when specifically asked about then how can you justify killing women and children, the answer is they will grow up and seek revenge. so the action is justified if your ideology is on this track. others will say, well, defensive necessity or self-defense.

if i did not carry out this order, i would be arrested or killed. you know, there's not one instance anywhere of that ever happening? germans in the 1970's went back and looked at court-martial records. they did not find a single case when anyone on a single einsatzgruppen asked to be let go and were punished. because some people did ask to be let go. so, that also fails. or, if i didn't do it, they would bring in somebody even worse. it's extraordinary, but that's what they did. group two, the deny group, it wasn't me, i didn't do it, the numbers are wrong, you can't prove i was there, i was on leave when that bad that -- bad stuff happened. just flat out deny. if you've got a document, that's not right. that was somebody boasting.

that did not happen. flat out, not admitting to anything. the ss general is very vocally in the first group -- here is what i did, here is why i did it, that is it. group three is in some ways more interesting. group three is people who will grudgingly, to some degree, admit what they did, but there seems to be some conflict. some of them kind of have a late case of remorse, some of them, not all of them. it's difficult to fathom. it could be very easily a trial strategy because this worked very well in the main trial. he famously said i feel terrible about what i did and what was done, and he saved his life when he probably should have hanged. but in this case, one of the worst offenders at the einsatzgruppen case is an officer.

he is the person who masterminded a massacre in 1941, 33,000 people killed over two days. he is an unwritten -- unrepentant killer. in a sense. he suffers from severe alcoholism. he is suffering evidence of personality disintegration by the time we get to this trial. after the einsatzgruppen units are round up, he is sent back into occupied russia to burn the evidence of their crimes, to destroy the physical remains. and he really is somebody -- if you had to pick someone for the poster that needs hanging, he's probably a good guy. ironically, when the decision comes out -- we will get to that here and it -- the second group, the deniers, none of them got the death penalty.

turned out to be a pretty workable strategy. because it seemed clear -- and the main judge, the driving force of the judges, he needed a confession. he needed you to admit on the stands, i did it, yes, this is true. only in that way because he was a death penalty opponent before the trial. he kind of turns into one again after the trial. so i think in his own mind he could only justify giving a death sentence to someone who flat-out admitted it. the evidence against every one of these defendants was overwhelming, whether they admitted it or not. think how fun the justice system would be if you could only sentence people who said they did it. again, the ss general is the star. as a defendant in the case, he

is acting more like a prosecution witness. he will testify against the others. and if they say something that is wrong, you can call him back up to rebut the testimony. the rules of evidence -- at int as well is this trial, whatever the trial judge says there are. there are no written guidelines . you can only admit evidence under these conditions, with this authentication. it's whatever the trial judge determines to be relevant. you can bring him back a lot. and they do because he is a perfect witness. he's a weird man, a little bit more weirdness coming from him. after eight months of testimony, when this case finally wraps up, the written opinion of this that

the judge writes -- this is him writing the case. the other two guys, i don't know what they are doing, but they are not doing this. he's remarkable. penguin stuff aside, this is a guy who actually seems to get it and understand and gets the right words to explain to people why it is important. "the defendants are not charged with planning or killing through channels or sitting in an office. they are in the field taking an active part in the bloody harvest." that's exactly what this is. these are guilty people. at least some of them are going to get sentences commensurate with that level of guilt, but not everybody. when the verdict is delivered,

april 10, 1948, we have 22 defendants. we started with 24. because 24 chairs. one of them committed suicide. one guy had severe parkinson's disease and had kind of a wait out -- kind of a wig out when they were doing the indictments. so they proceed with 22. 20 guilty on three counts. war crimes, crimes against humanity, and membership of a criminal organization. the int, which is a remarkable trial and i hope maybe you asked -- ask me back to talk about that sometime, said that organizations, just like people, can be determined to be criminal. the int declared the parent organization of the einsatzgruppen, part of the ss,

the gestapo, the nazi leadership and so on, to be criminal organizations. that decision was final in 1946. all you have to do to prove someone guilty of count three is, let me see your membership card, and you are guilty. one, were crimes. two, crimes against humanity was eventually going to of all into genocide. 20 of these people are guilty of and three., -- two people are guilty only 3. on count three because the trial judge determined their participation did not rise to the level of guilt on count one and two. of 22 are sentenced to death. two get a life. five get prison anywhere between

10 and 20 years. one is sentenced to time served. he probably was not the best defendant in the world to pick, but you've got to fill 24 seats, so, hey, you get the get. -- you get who you get. and here is the weird part. the ss general who started the ball rolling on this back at the int trial, after he is sentenced to death, he continues to go to other trials and testify there. for the prosecution. after he had gotten a death sentence. he will volunteer to go testify in other cases. it's hard to get your mind around that. but it seems pretty clear that he thought the more they talk, the better chance they had convincing you what they did was right. people under interrogation do that all the time.

you get people you can't shut them up because they are convinced the more they talk, the more you're going to believe them. and he continued to do this for years. very up front. very accurate. and he is guilty as hell. the problem with the einsatzgruppen case -- and maybe there are a couple of problems. i recommended a book to you, "ordinary men" by christopher browning. i recommend a movie to you now. a lot of you have probably seen it. if you have, go at it and see it again. called "judgment at nuremberg" with spencer tracy. i show it every year. i could watch it all day. thee is a great line in movie where a reporter is talking to one of the generals, and the reporter says, you know, i could not give away a story on

the nuremberg trials right now, and he's right. because what is happening at the same time this verdict is being delivered in 1948? the world has shifted. nazi crimes have started to become secondary. what has become primary is the soviet union. the reconstruction of europe. the marshall plan, which is going to come into effect soon. as soon as the verdicts are let down -- and again, 14 death sentences out of this case -- people are tripping over themselves, americans and eventually germans to get these sentences dismissed, reduced, nullified. the americans are under the impression you're going to make the german people unhappy if you sentence more of their leaders to death.

it's time to -- not forget exactly, but focus on new priorities. the new chancellor of germany makes it a specific points that -- point that if the allies want german cooperation, one of the things they will have to do is start reducing these war crimes sentences. clear choice. do you want germany, modern, reorganized federal republic of germany in 1949? this is what you're going to have to do. where is general taylor is aghast at this and then ference is aghast at this. it's exactly what happens. 1948, 49, 50, and 51. by the time we get to 51, we have reduced 14 death sentences to 4. all of those people sentenced

for death for these millions of murders and all of these places that don't even have names, jewish communities where everybody has been killed. and by the way, that is one of the reasons why ben ference has decided not to put on any witnesses. when the einsatzgruppen comes into town, they kill all of you. that goes away. and new reconstruction justice takes its place. and one of the things the ss general kept thinking, i'm in economics expert. i know the russians. i fought the russians. or at least murdered people on the russian front. surely the allies are going to want to take advantage of my expertise. he does not miss it by much. and i want to talk about what the trials mean or they don't

mean. he did miss the train when it left the station because in 1951, he is put to death, hanged, along with the guy that orchestrated another massacre. nobody misses him. one of the other defendants sentenced to death is a colonel named martin sandberg -- excuse me, martin sandberger. evidence of the einsatzgruppen report put his personal tally at about 20,000 people. he lasted longer than the other ss leaders. he volunteered to stay longer.

he is sentenced to death in 1948. his sentences reduced from a certain death sentence to -- that probably would have been carried out if it happened during the int trial -- he actually served six years. he died five years ago. at a retirement home in stuttgart. he drew a state pension every month until the day he died. after the war, his law license -- which by the way, was not suspended. he was a lawyer. he got work with a german concern and made a bunch of money and people just forgot about him. the german magazine "der spiegel" interviewed him a few months before he died. he remembered certain things with incredible clarity.

that had nothing to do with the murders. but when it came to the murders, this is the picture that they took of him. he just could not seem to recall those details. if we look at this case and the series of cases is kind of an outlier that this is something that they did to innocent people, i think we are probably missing the boat on that one. 1963, they conducted in interesting series of experiments. probably heard about them. amazingly, few people -- younger people now -- no one has heard about these unless you study psychology. the point here is if you can take average american citizens that are going to worked for -- going to work for a few dollars

in 1962, put you in a room with a person, and you conduct experiments in reinforced the learning, yes, the person who is with a up to this device electrode is questioned. if they get it right, you ask another question. wrong, you are supposed to flip an electrical switch and send a current through them. tois marked from level 1, 2 two lethal level 50. how many people do you suppose would continue -- or what percentage of people would you suppose would administer shocks all the way to a lethal level? it has been reproduced a number of times in a number of different locations. the numbers are pretty consistent. just over half of the people tested will continue, if the

person in the lab coat tells you to flip the switch. 70 years are not nazis ago, these are our people right now. a really disturbing study, and the fact is i think if you conducted a new way now and you study changing the math a little bit, and you had people administering shocks -- by the way, this is of course a setup, they are actors -- the person who is flicking the switch does not know that. but if you try to do that again now, and suppose you had them administering a learning reinforcement has to a group of people they may not like for a much, what do you suppose would happen? if you made them different, if you made them other. if you don't give somebody ideological conditioning to get them to hate or to have the sort the depth of dismissal

that the ss had for the people they killed. i simply would be very shocked by this. think, aally is not, i 70-year-old thing. if you really want to, you can talent spot for good stuff, and i think you can talent spot for evil. if i work with a group for long enough, i can pretty much pick, if i want something done, who those people are that are likely to do it. and that is the frightening part to me about this trial. the legal part, i get it. the other part, i'm a never get this. i don't know, maybe i shouldn't get it. but if we walk with thinking this is something in the past that isn't -- even going back to those three kinds of defenses we group the einsatzgruppen

case, if you pull the statements of the perpetrators in the massacre or look at the investigations that were conducted in rwanda, they are the same. yes, i did it and i was justified in doing it. no, i didn't do it and you can't provide it. or i can of did something, but i'm really not going to be very forthcoming about that. there is no distinction. and it doesn't matter. it doesn't have anything to do with the nationality or race or religion, i think it is the fact that it is around. admittedly better question is, is there a better way to short-circuit that? which is probably another talk for another day. trial, howook at the did we do? is trials by their very nature are not supposed to

produce justice. going to get pelted by lawyers for that, but they don't. trials produce a result, you get guilt and innocence. in this case, you get guilt and guilt. you get clarity, some historical truth, you get a record of what happened, but whether or not these trials or any of the subsequent trials, the doctors trial, whatever, produce justice . i think only it is known after the trial is over. it offends me as a lawyer and as a person that martin sandberg are was able to live the rest of his life on the pension and nobody cared about it. to beoesn't seem to me whatever notion of justice you carry, that is probably not close to it. but the trials were important,

and i cannot even imagine where in would be in terms of -- many fields if we hadn't had them, if we hadn't produce the evidence, because the stuff did not come out during the int. if we stopped during the main trail, the picture we would have would be so incomplete and cannot even calculated. -- calculate it. if there is ever a lawyers hall of fame, we need to get some funding for that, so start hitting people up. get on that. taylor needs to be in it and bend parents needs to be -- ben erance needs to be in it because i think they did the best they could under adverse circumstances. this does really qualitatively matter. and it should matter. got?do you

yes, ma'am. >> because there are -- we are filming this program for national television, we would ask you step to the microphone. l will hopefully be able to answer them. >> first of all, i would like to thank you for your presentation because it was very informative and that type of information is not put out to the public too often. and it is really important because people have short-term memories. the other thing i wanted to ask you about is a friend of mine was looking up something and she accidentally got on this website where they had all sorts of theories. and one of the theories was that there was not this one million jews killed.

like 800,000. and they were saying that this cannot be proved and it was greatly exaggerated, etc., etc., etc. so my question is, obviously there is some proof of some jews that were executed, do you know what the tally that we can say for sure that we know this many? we might not know it million, 6 million, but we can say for certainty that this number is killed and we can extrapolate the rest. kind of: i think that precision is probably be honest. with the einsatzgruppen, i think you contain with a pretty high degree of confidence what the number is paid with the constant -- constant -- what the number camps, the concentration the exact total might have been with the railroad system in terms of how many people were put on what kind of transport. but there is such a comprehensive biological

extermination. it is happening with these mobile extermination squads. it is happening -- with einsatzgruppen a, one of the things they had going for them was the local help they got from people who were already spun up to kill people. thattestified at nuremberg his camp had killed about 2 million. i think that was probably a little bit too high. not by much, but a little bit. the short answer is we don't know, and we will never know. i think can of going back to one of the things that he said in the decision, the inability of our minds to absorb and to get around these kinds of numbers -- i am not even sure certainty would help out with that. and it really disturbs me, the people would start to quibble

that it is only 800,000. for crying out loud, if you have him sentenced to death, he is still telling you here is what we did. ok. you know. >> that is true. good point. thank you. dr. hull: yes, ma'am. by the way, nobody that i worked with is allowed to ask a question. [laughter] they are actually very mean to me during the workday and i'm not going to give them a platform here. [laughter] hi. can you speak to why the nazis quit using the einsatzgruppen and shifted their tactics to the death camps? again, i the germans, think the better model of the holocaust is kind of an evolving thing. kind ofn to do universal biological extermination probably happened

after the german invasion of russia. was split andion starts and there is not really a straight line holocaust story. once they got into russia and the jewish populations were much louder -- larger, that is when the einsatzgruppen was deployed. but there were not enough. and even inside a highly and related not to system, you are not able to pony up enough people to do this by bullets. 1942, they start experimenting with gas fans and realize that is harder on the attendance on the ss than even the shooting. so they have to come up with another shooting -- system. in 1942,he is killed they set up a number of truly extermination centers. auschwitz was partially extermination, partly a main camp with the different chemical

companies. theye camps are purely -- have population. they are appealing to get people in to exterminate them and to dispose of the bodies. and that is a difference that happens in early 1942 that was not even true with the einsatzgruppen. >> how many questions can i ask? [laughter] dr. hull: she is a lawyer, which means you should not trust her. [laughter] >> not at all. i'm curious -- and i do not really study the trials, but who determines the statutory structure, whether crimes were going to be, what the elements of those crimes were going to be, the fact that there really were no rules of evidence, who made those determinations? dr. hull: it happens pretty late in june 1945, so the war has

just ended. it was called the london conference. russians, british, french, americans get together, and over about three weeks, they hash out what is going to be known as the nuremberg trial policy. the nuremberg charter, or 32 articles of it -- i can't remember how many articles there were -- here is how the trial is going to work. and one of them is relevant is the only thing that matters. >> how did they select the judges? why would they pick somebody who is an opponent of the death penalty? dr. hull: by 1948, that is another problem. they had trouble recruiting judges. the judges at the nuremberg tribunal were, in some cases, the best they thought they could get paid in this case, they wanted people that would do it, which was hard finding people who would volunteer to spend maybe a year trying a case.

they needed people who knew how to write an opinion, which in the army procedure you don't normally write opinions. so it had to be a civilian to do it. sometimes you got what you got. some of them were phenomenal judges. the one from alabama had never been a judge before. >> i am assuming they had defense attorneys? dr. hull: yes. >> i cannot think of a was dubbed to have, but i do believe in due process, who were they and how do they get select? dr. hull: they volunteered. their fees were paid by a number of different organizations. rudolph one guy named who represents a think 100 something were criminals over the course of his career. some of them were very, very good. but the german system is not like this anglo-american system.

so they had to get smart about that fast. >> did they get any civilian lawyers? dr. hull: i think in every case but one, all the lawyers were civilian lawyers. >> i will ask -- [indiscernible] [laughter] [laughter] [laughter] dr. hull: does that end the question and the answer section? [laughter] >> can you comment on the fact that while these trials were wereng in europe, they

bringing over men who had committed equally heinous crimes to try to use them for questionable intel? and they discover that they didn't have much to tell them. and they lived next door, sometimes a block away from the them. it is called operation paperclip. i don't think anybody knows how many they brought over, people who had worked for the ss or the german government whose professed knowledge was considered to outweigh their criminal past. there were a lot of different examples. he was later convicted. he worked for the americans. we brought over rocket scientists.

in some cases, we are -- we were not too particular about the ones we brought over. but it is a part of the same pattern. after the war is over, political again, youshifted to get the result you get. yes, ma'am. >> i guess that is my question, more about the political priorities. what do you think would've happened if we would have continued, the allies, and enforcing the death sentences and not backing away from it? he said the german chancellor would not participate. explain to me what you think that would have looked like. dr. hull: the issue is sovereignty. we wanted to bring germany back a unit against the soviets. and that simply was one of the

priorities. to turn the process as much as possible back over to the germans. cracks we needed their economy to be a strong. dr. hull: we needed their economy to be star, a political infrastructure -- at the same time we had been doing an expensive detoxification program. so as quick as we could, we were trying to get out of that business and turn any prosecution were criminals over to the new government. and we have is -- the same thing, this is not a german specific issue -- people trying their own those not go well. i mentioned the case from 1969. the -- we seem incapable of handling out, you know, reasonable sentences to people of our own who commit crimes. there is a famous trial that goes on after the first world

war in 1922, where the germans are asked to put german citizens on trial. suspects, it of 900 think 12 02 trial. think 12 go to trial. of the 12, two of them escape under circumstances that were pretty peculiar. they are dropped. none of them serve longer than four years. really you get into some weird issues once you start asking people to pass judgment on their own. >> now they can't hold positions in government? were their positions --

there positions? dr. hull: we convicted 185 out of the 12 trials. the last henson's -- sentence ended in 1958. it is one of these kind of shocking statements. the best face i could probably put on it is it is not an optimal outcome. >> thank you. dr. hull: yes, ma'am. anybody else? thank you, seriously, for your attention. i really appreciate it. [applause]

[captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2015] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> [indiscernible] [applause] [indistinct chatter] announcer: you are watching "american history tv," 48 hours of programming on american history every weekend on c-span3.

follow us on twitter for information on our schedule and to keep up with the latest history news. all weekend long, "american history tv" is joining our comcast cable partners to showcase the history of oakland, california. to learn more, visit c-span.org/citiestour. we continue now with our look at the history of oakland. ms. sandifur: where i am standing right now is in the heart of the port of oakland. and it is a park that we build right in the middle of all this industrial activity. so you may even hear the sounds while i in talking about the history in the background of goods movement. and we rely on goods movement in t