Eighty years ago this week the allies pass judgement on the Nazi elite

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The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg  delivered its verdicts on 22 men accused of major Nazi war crimes. Twelve were sentenced to hang and three were  acquitted. Goering was the most important figure to be sent to the gallows followed by foreign minister von Ribbentrop, the Nazi rulers of occupied Europe were fully deserving and the sentences on generals Keitel and Jodl gave the lie to the later myth of the Wehrmacht having fought a "clean" war. They were careerist lackeys but Hitler's successor Admiral Doenitz was a convinced Nazi and still escaped the noose. Two paid the ultimate price for propagandist support: Rosenberg, a theoretican, and Streicher, a loathsome anti Jewish newspaper editor, had no direct involvement in war crimes. Albert Speer was every bit as guilty of the Nazi's murderous slave labour programme as Fritz Sauckel, head of the relevant department, but his veneer of civilised education saved his life. The Soviet judge dissented strongly from the acquittals of Schacht, the prewar economics supremo, Papen, a conservative who had enabled Hitler's appointment in 1933 and Fritzsche, a radio propagandist.

King George II returned to Greece as sovereign after the referendum in favour of the monarchy. This did not bring an instant return to stability; the right wing goverment of Tsaldaris, which had organised the referendum after its electoral victory resigned with the intention of forming a broadly based coalition which would be better able to rule the deeply divided country.

The French constitutional assembly approved by a large majority what was to be the constituion of the Fourth Republic. It tried to shelter governments from the chronic instability of the Third Republic but splitting power between the president and the prime minister was  a fatal flaw. 

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