Times Observer file photos Spring Creek native Robert H. Jackson speaks from the rostrum at Nuremberg where he served as the chief U.S. prosecutor in the tribunal that brought top Nazi war criminals to justice.

The idea of Hitler’s thousand year reich was in tatters.

But there were just as many unanswered questions that remained on the table.

Amid the human destruction, economic devastation and a litany of humanitarian crises was one that would prove to have several different answers – What do you do with the people who perpetrated these crimes?

Readers of the Warren Times Mirror heard about those early effects on May 15 with a headline “Mission Reports on Planned Torture and Extermination.”

A clipping from the Warren Times Mirror that - finally - got at the heart of what Nazi Germany was attempting to accomplish in Europe.

“A Congressional mission reported today its inspection of German concentration camps … the Nazis carried out a calculated and diabolocal program (of) planned torture and extermination,” the wire report read.

The tour included Dachau, Buchenwald and Nordhausen.

“In their report, the group termed the Nazi program of starvation torture and unhonored death for slave laborers and political prisoners ‘no less than organized crime against civilization and humanity,'” the report continued. “Those who were responsible should have meted out to them swift, certain and adequate punishment.”

But what would that look like?

Most notoriously, that took the form of the Nuremberg Trials. While the Nazi leadership was prosecuted there, it was one of just several trials.

The numbers may have been inflated but as the war approached its end the full extent of Nazi destruction started to come into clearer focus.

One such trial was mentioned last week – the trail of 45 Nazis, including Josef Kramer, the “Beast of Belsen.” That was held before a British military court and included the charge of conspiracy to commit mass murder.

As the first great trial of Nazi war criminals entered its second day, the prosecution summoned Brigadier Glyn Hughes, formerly chief medical officer of the British Second Army,” an article in the Sept. 18, 1945 Times Mirror detailed.

“Brig. Hughes entered the grim mill of death at Belsen when it was liberated by British troops April 15. Two days later in a press conference he gave the world the famous account of Belsen’s nameless thousands of dead, of the degraded and despairing living, some of them driven in the torture of starvation to cannabalism.

“The prosecution announced Hughes would be the first of a parade of witnesses who who would give evidence that Kramer and his 44 aides were guilty of inhuman and unbelievably cruel practices at Belsen, and that Kramer and 11 of the 44 were guilty of equal if not greater crimes of extermination at the concentration camp at Auschwitz.”

The humanitarian crisis re-energized the Palestine debate, which was reported in Nov. 1945.

“President Truman announced today the United States has agreed to the establishment of a joint Anglo-American committee to examine the whole Palestine problem,” the account said. “The British suggested the creation of the committee after Mr. Truman had proposed admission of an additional 100,000 Jews to Palestine….”

The nation of Israel was founded three years later and, today, is 74.2 percent Jewish by demographic.

The Nuremberg trials commenced in late November and a headline in the Dec. 13 Times Mirror provided an update with a gruesome headline – “Human Head is Grim Exhibit of Atrocities Perpetrated in Nazi Concentration Camp.:

The story was the lead story in Times Mirror with two additional sub-headlines – “BARBARIC TROPHIES ADDED TO EVIDENCE OFFERED AGAINST 21 TOP GERMAN WAR CHIEFS” and “Jew-Baiter Julius Streicher, Alone of the Defendants, Remains Unmoved As Others Avert Eyes From Grisly Display at Trial.”

“Nuermberg, Dec 13,” the story begins, ” A preserved head and lamp shades made of human skin were, presented as evidence of atrocities in Nazi concentration camps at the war crimes trial of 21 top German war leaders today.

The grisly exhibits were added to the Germans’ own records of murder and brutality plated before the four-power international military tribunal by Allied prosecutors charging the once powerful Nazi warlords with “crimes against humanity.”

The preserved head shrunk to the size of a baseball and resembling the war trophy of an aboriginal head hunter, was that of a Pole who had been caught fraternizing with a German girl.

The three pieces of human skin tanned into parchment for lampshades for the wife of SS Standartenfuhrer

Koch came from victims at Buchenwald selected because of their “artistic” tattooing, according to an affidavit by a former inmate of the concentration camp.

Jew-baiter Julius Streicher, alone of all the defendants, remained unmoved. The others averted their eyes but from time to time stole glances at the barbaric trophies.

The “death ledgers” of the Mauthausen concentration camp recorded the deaths of more than 35,000 inmates from 1939 to 1945. On March 19, 1945, 203 persons died in 12 hours, the records showed.

Mauthausen was the camp where Joseph Morton, Associated Press war correspondent, according to available evidence, was executed last winter on the signed order of Secret Police Chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner, one of the 21 defendants. An American army investigator declared that the camp ”was conducted with the sole purpose in mind of exterminating any so-called prisoner who entered within its walls.”

I’ve written many column inches on the fact that the chief prosecutor for the United States is Spring Creek-native Robert H. Jackson so I won’t rehash all of that here.

But his wife did some to Warren while her husband was overseas.

From the Oct. 4, 1945 Times Mirror’s society column: “Mrs. Robert H. Jackson of Washington, D.C., is visiting at the home of Mr. and Mrs. John L. Blair, 105 East street. Her husband, United States Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson is in Europe as chief prosecutor of Nazi war criminals at trials to be held in Nuremberg, Germany this fall.”

The following March, a columnist on the opinion page was critical of the work of the Supreme Court falling behind while Jackson, an associate justice, was at Nuremberg.

“With all due respect to the abilities of Justice Jackson, there are probably dozens of legal lights in the country who could have been appointed to the chore in Europe without disrupting the proceedings of the Supreme Court.” the columnist claimed.

An article in the Dec., 18, 1945 Times Mirror appears to have captured what the Germans intent actually was – “NAZIS POTTED DESTRUCTION OF ALL JEWS.”

Seeking conviction of thousands of minor Nazi party officials as war criminals along with Hitler’s top leaders, American prosecutors today outlined details of an alleged Nazi plot to exterminate the Jews and wipe out the influence of christian churches in Germany and the rest of Europe,” the report states.

Orders for anti-Jewish pogroms and confiscation of Christian church properties were carried through the 600,000 members of the Nazi leadership Corps who spread Hitler’s anti-religious doctrines throughout Germany, according to evidence laid out before the international military tribunal.

Relating how Nazi party leadership secretly inspired anti-Jewish pogroms, Col. Robert G. Storey, assistant U.S. prosecutor, read a directive from party headquarters at the Munich brown house that “the party should not appear outwardly as the originator of the demonstrations but in reality organize and execute them.”

The scope of the human extermination, over 75 years later, continues to heavily impact demographics in Europe.

According to the Pew Research Center, the Jewish in Europe was 9.5 million in 1939 and fell to 3.8 million by 9145.

By 2010 that number had continued to decline to $1.4 million.

So what?

Why did I just drag you through eight weeks of 75-year-old newspaper clippings?

Because from the Tree of Life synagogue killing to, in recent weeks, Kanye and Kyrie to tacit endorsement or engagement with anti-semitic individuals by state-wide political candidates, the same hatred that drove the Nazis to do what they did is still with us.

And we’d be foolish – if not outright irresponsible – to forget it.