UK opposed Nuremberg trials, preferring to execute top Nazis
MI5 diary reveals push for summary executions and jail without trial
The British government opposed the establishment of the Nuremberg war crimes tribunals at the end of the second world war because it wanted selected Nazi leaders to be summarily executed and others to be imprisoned without trial, according to a contemporary account that was declassified yesterday.
Winston Churchill made the proposal at the "Big Three" conference at Yalta in February 1945, according to the account, but was overruled by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who believed the US public would demand proper trials, and Joseph Stalin, who argued that public trials possessed excellent propaganda value.
The British eventually agreed to the war crimes trials despite the misgivings of some senior government officials who believed the decision to prosecute the surviving Nazi leadership for waging a war of aggression would set a dangerous precedent.
They also feared the prosecutions would be on a par with the high-profile show trials in Stalin's Russia.
The insight into British thinking at the time that allied leaders were attempting to reach agreement over the political shape of post-war Germany is in a diary that Guy Liddell, head of counter-espionage at the British national security service, MI5, kept during the 1940s and '50s.
Codenamed Wallflowers and supposedly kept in a safe in the office of successive MI5 directors general, the wartime volumes of the diary were declassified in 2005, and redacted copies of the post-war volumes are available at the National Archive.