Courtesy of guest blogger, Olga Touloumi
Design played an important role in the preparation of the Nuremberg Trials, setting up the character of the proceedings and producing a model for future war crimes tribunals. In May 1945, a memorandum reached the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), asking designers to build the case for the prosecution of “the leaders of the European Axis.” OSS’s Presentation Branch, which had been providing the War Department with design services, agreed to partake the production and organization of “evidence” in coherent legal arguments.[1]
Dan Kiley, soon to become one of the most celebrated American landscape architects, led the team. The directives asked for a space where the cases would be “clearly presented, expeditiously handled, and well reported to the world at large,” with accommodations for the “inconspicuous” presence of the mass media to render the trial a global event.[2]
In mid-June, Kiley left for Europe as part of the team working on the ground and researching possible sites.[3] The Presentation Branch started preparing courtroom layouts in absence of a building. The first proposal to reach the Chief of Counsel organized the human landscape of the trial around a schematic cross, rotated by 45-degrees to offer the press with an “unobtrusive” view of the proceedings and the cameramen with “better angles.” One axis occupied judges and clerks, the representation of international law, facing defense and defendants, with the prosecution on the trasverse bar pointing to the evidence on the exhibit wall.[4] Officials welcomed the proposal for innovating the organization of courtrooms.
By early August, the city of Nuremberg took precedence over competing options in Munich and Wiesbaden, for its railway network, symbolic value as the host of Nazi party rallies from 1933 to 1938, and its almost intact Palace of Justice, a juridical complex with courtrooms, ample office spaces, and a four-wing prison adjacent to its rear side. However, the implementation of the generic scheme inside Courtroom 600 of the Palace of Justice annex brought forth programmatic differences between the German inquisitorial system and the ideal legal order the US prosecution hoped to put at place. With its elevated bench facing defendants, prosecution, and public all at once, the layout placed the judges on the top of the juridical hierarchy, undermining the role of the prosecution in the investigation, and the importance of evidence in the legal process. Kiley was forced to remove benches and balustrades; built new docks, seating areas, and stands; and adjust the initial proposal for the existing room and its architecture.
More than that, the Presentation Branch had to fit the room with rooms for projections, sound control, press representatives, interpreters, as well as for the filming and recording of the proceedings to render the trials international in nature. “I thought it was going to be a world spectacle,” Kiley recalled, “it wasn’t just an ordinary trial.”[5] In fact, to reinforce the global and transparent character of the trials, designers staged the presence of interpreters behind glass booths, articulating in space international law as an efficient, fact-driven, and global system of justice, a technocratic network at work.
Kiley’s team set up construction shops in the Palace of Justice. In a historical reversal of the labor economy that produced the concentration camps, two hundred fifty SS troopers and two hundred fifty German civilians replaced windows and floors; removed walls; built furniture; polished and painted wooden paneling; in short assembled the site of justice within which Nazi war crimes would be prosecuted. Kiley reopened factories in the area to produce glass, plywood, and tiles needed for the renovation. He brought a gray-green rug from Paris, repurposed old material from the ruins of Nuremberg, and confiscated the red plush theater seats from a nearby cinema for his auditorium.[6]
At the heart of Courtroom 600’s “mise-en-scène” stood a presentation board, flanked by defendants and judges in an agonistic dialogue that ceiling-mounted theatrical lighting dramatized.[7] Designed to fit the wooden interior, with an unfolding projection screen and hidden lightning, the board illuminated the evidence carefully gathered and organized by the prosecution, which was presented to the public as the backbone, the human infrastructure of this landscape of justice. Standing behind the podium with his back to the public, the chief prosecutor spoke to the stories revealed by the data mounted on the presentation board. Rather than being the center of the drama, judges and defendants became the frame of a story that prosecutors had carefully laid out in advance on diagrams, charts, and films. Two huge chandeliers, one above the judges and the other above the defendants illuminated the opposing sides as films demonstrated the atrocities of the Nazi regime. Following with the OSS presentation strategies, the courtroom reiterated the spatial conditioning of “facts.” Within the space of the courtroom, data would replace judges in the attribution of international justice, radically entangling what we today call data visualization with visions of internationalism. In centering the trial on the presentation board, Courtroom 600 indicates that “facts,” or “evidence” do not only constitute technical and social constructions, but also spatial and aesthetic fabrications.
In the aftermath of the trials, the courtroom became the model for military tribunals across the globe, initially at the International Military Tribunals for the Far East, later to Dachau to Hamburg to Krakow, to Tallinn, to Dusseldorf, Frankfurt, and Jerusalem. Although mobile, the model was not immutable. More often than not, reflecting the new realities of the trial, the courtrooms featured centrally the judges’ bench, with the defendants facing the prosecution. What remained immutable throughout time and space were the schematic arrangement of this new landscape of law: (1) a dock of defendants facing either the “truth” of the evidence or their inevitable judgment, (2) a prominent exhibit wall to construct data-as-facts, (3) and the inconspicuous presence for mass media. After traveling through institutional networks, this interior that emerged from the meeting of the industrial, military, and entertainment complexes, reminds us that models of juridical practices are not only organized on paper, but also in space, involving as much technocrats and diplomats, as designers and architects.
–Olga Touloumi, Assistant Professor of Art History, Bard College
References:
[1] Assistant Secretary of War, “War Crimes Prosecutions, Planning Memorandum,” May 17, 1945. US National Archives and Records Administration. RG 226, Box 42, Folder 689. For a critical history of the OSS Presentation Branch and its role in the preparation of the trial see: Barry Katz, “The Arts of War: “Visual Presentation” and National Intelligence,” Design Issues, Vol. 12, No. 2 (Summer 1996): 3-21.
[2] “Presentation Branch Work on War Crimes Project,” June 14, 1945. US National Archives and Records Administration. RG 226, Box 42, Folder 688.
[3] In his oral history, Dan Kiley claims that Eero Saarinen drafted him as Chief of Design, while working for the US Army Corps of Engineers in Fort Belvoir. See: Dan Kiley, “Architect of Palace of Justice Renovations,” in Witnesses to Nuremberg: An Oral History of American Participants at the War Crimes Trials, eds. Bruce M. Stave and Michele Palmer with Leslie Frank (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998), p. 17.
[4] Gordon Dean, “Memorandum to the Chief of Counsel,” July 17, 1945. US National Archives and Records Administration. RG 238 PI21-51, Box 39, Folder “Nuremberg – Physical Arrangement”
[5] Dan Kiley, “Architect of Palace of Justice Renovations,” p. 20.
[6] Dan Kiley, “Architect of Palace of Justice Renovations,” pp. 20-25.
[7] I am borrowing the term from Jean Louis-Cohen, who, in Architecture in Uniform, described the courtroom as a “mise-en-scène” to emphasize the theatrical staging of the trial. See: Jean Louis-Cohen, Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), pp. 386-388.
Images available in Thomas J. Dodd Papers.