Day 9 International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg (Set A)
Day 9 - Friday, November 30, 1945 - Colonel John Amen argues with the German defense council over whether to call witness Erwin von Lahousen to the stand, with von Lahousen eventually being allowed to testify. Col. Amen interrogates von Lahousen. The Russian prosecutor, Roman Rudenko, begins to interrogate von Lahousen. As Rodenko is asking “Of course in Poland. Well, sabotage and what else?”, audio skips to Dr. Gunther von Rohrscheidt speaking as counsel for Rudolf Hess, speaking towards his mental state. Tribunal begins to ask counsel questions. Trial adjourns with a statement by Hess, stating that he had faked memory loss as part of a tactical move.
The United States Army Signal Corps produced two sets of verbatim audio recordings of the Nuremberg Trials outside of the courtroom in a studio. Set A (archived at the International Court of Justice in the Hague) consists of 1,942 double-sided black disc gramophone records with a cellulose trinitrate lacquer surface and aluminum core made by the Presto Recording Corporation. Set B (archived at the US National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, DC) consists of cardboard and aluminum gramophone discs. The two sets are not exact copies and generally stagger against each other, but sometimes have the same start or stop time corresponding to the beginning or end of a court session. The digitized and restored files made from Set A (ICJ) are much better quality than the files from Set B (NARA) which contain occasional audio distortion, especially at the beginning of a file, and skipping throughout. Technical note: Discs 171A, 172A, 173A, and 174A are missing and were not digitized. It appears that either the disc was not delivered to the ICJ or there was a technical issue at the time of recording. According to the information provided from the gramophone disc inventory (the “Index to Electrical Transcriptions of International Military Tribunal”, H-5192), the discs contain: Disc 171A - German witness questioned by Russian counsel Disc 172A - German witness questioned by Russian counsel and French counsel Disc 173A - German witness questioned by American and Russian counsels Disc 174A - Defense counsel for Hess. Part 1