Nuremberg Tribunal on War Crimes

Norway is freed from German occupation in May 1945. The German Reich capitulates. Willy Brandt returns to Oslo from Stockholm. He reports from there for Swedish and American newspapers about the liberation of Norway. In October 1945 Brandt travels to Nürnberg to attend the war crimes trials on assignment from the Scandinavian Workers' Press. He visits Lübeck en route to see his mother, whom he last saw in 1935 in Copenhagen.

Willy Brandt`s Press Credentials for the Nürnberg Tribunal
© Willy-Brandt-Archiv

Willy Brandt considers the war crimes prosecutions essential in order to illumine the darkest chapter of German history, the rule of the National Socialists. At the same time, Brandt regrets that the victors have admitted no German judges, who might have called the National Socialist criminals to account in the name of the German people. Brandt collects his impressions concerning the tribunal in a book that appears in 1946 under the title Forbrytere og andre tyskere ("Criminals and other Germans"). Brandt distinguishes between political responsibility, which applies to all Germans under the rule of National Socialism, and guilt, which must be determined in individual cases. He rejects the idea of stamping all Germans as criminals. In order to disparage Brandt, political opponents later assert that the title of the book is "Germans and other Criminals". 
 
On September 6, 1946, Brandt for the first time again appears publicly in Germany. He talks on the subject "The World and Germany" to a meeting of the Lübeck SPD . Brandt establishes contact with the SPD leadership, which is engaged in rebuilding the party. In November 1945 he offers his collaboration to Kurt Schumacher, the SPD representative for the Western occupation zones. In 1946 Brandt participates as a guest delegate in the first postwar Party congress of the SPD in Hannover. 
 
Schumacher, who was detained and tortured for years by the National Socialists, considers himself and his party as representing the other Germany, which never made common cause with Hitler . He derives his claim to leadership of the SPD from this moralistic legitimization. Schumacher's slogan is that "in Germany democracy will be socialist or it will not be". Germany, as conceived by the SPD leadership, has a right to self-determination and equal entitlement, even after the rule of Hitler.

Willy Brandt rejects Schumacher's authoritarian leadership style. He considers the political course proposed by the Party Chairman to be too uncompromising.