“The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated.” –
Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, Chief Prosecutor for the United States at the Nuremberg Trials
If you have not seen the movie, Nuremberg, consider finding it on Netflix. It is historically accurate and includes excellent actors, like Russell Crowe, who portrays the Reichsmarshall, and minister of the German Air Force (Luftwaffe) Hermann Goring.
November 20th 1945 – The Allies have conquered the armies of the Third Reich. Europe is in ruins. The most deadly conflict in human history cannot be repeated. Those responsible will begin to answer to an international court at Nuremberg, Germany.
For months, attorneys, politicians, and worldwide leaders debate whether trying the monsters of Nazi Germany is actually legal. Proposals for how to punish the defeated Nazi leaders range from a show trial (Joseph of the Soviet Union) to summary executions (Winston Churchill of the United Kingdom).
Finally, the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the marginally involved country of France agree to convene a joint tribunal in Nuremberg with the Nuremberg Charter as its legal instrument. The International Military Tribunal (IMT) prosecutes 22 of the most important surviving leaders of Nazi Germany in the political, military, and economic spheres, as well as six German organizations. The purpose of the trial is not only to try the defendants but also to assemble irrefutable evidence of Nazi war crimes, offer a history lesson to the defeated Germans, and delegitimize the traditional German elite.
The Nuremberg court is established without legal precedent or true authority. Vengeance is stronger than technical legal arguments.
The trials against leaders of the defeated Germans centers on the plotting and carrying out invasions of several countries across Europe and committing atrocities against their citizens in the Second World War.
Between 1939 and 1945, Germany invades many countries across Europe, inflicting 27 million deaths in the Soviet Union alone. The total number of deaths is estimated at 85 million. Most of these deaths are not soldiers. They are innocent civilians.
The prosecution seeks to convict the defendants of the crime of plotting and waging aggressive war “the supreme international crime” because “it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole”. Most defendants are also charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity, the Holocaust being a major focus in the trials. Twelve further trials are conducted by the United States against lower-level perpetrators and focus more on the Holocaust. Controversial at the time for their retroactive criminalization of aggression, the trials’ innovation of holding individuals responsible for violations of international law becomes “the true beginning of international criminal law”.
During the war, the Reich invades Poland, France, Czechoslovakia, Luxembourg, Austria, Norway, Yugoslavia, Greece, Belgium, the Netherlands, and the Soviet Union. This aggression is accompanied by immense brutality in occupied areas. The legal reckoning is premised on the extraordinary nature of Nazi criminality, particularly the systematic murder of millions of Jews, Gypsies, alcoholics, drug addicts, homosexuals, political enemies, Czechs, Slavs, and anyone that Nazi Germany considers to be defective, useless, and/or “subhuman”.
There are a thousand employees from the four countries’ delegations in Nuremberg, of which about two thirds are from the United States. Besides legal professionals, there are many social-science researchers, psychologists, translators, interpreters, and graphic designers, the last to make the many charts used during the trial. Each country appoints a prosecution team and two judges.
Justice Jackson is appointed the United States’ chief prosecutor. The United States prosecution seeks to provide evidence that serves both retributive and educational purposes. As the largest and most competent of the delegation, it takes on the bulk of the prosecutorial effort.
During the trial, the horrors of the Third Reich are presented by victim testimony, photographic images, and film. The press, onlookers, and even some of those on trial were shocked. This would be the first time that the world would learn of and see the evil of the regime; particularly the concentration camps with their gas chambers and inhumane brutality.
The primary defendant is Reichsmarshall Goring. If he buckles under cross-examination, the other defendants will follow suit. He does.
Sentences are debated at length by the judges. Twelve defendants are sentenced to death by hanging; including Hermann Goring. But, as he told Army psychiatrist months before, he will escape the hangman’s noose. The day before the executions are to be carried out, he swallows a cyanide capsule and dies in his cell.
Ten are hanged. Seven are sent to Spandau Prison to serve their sentences. Three are acquitted based on a deadlock between the judges.
As a lawyer, I have some reservations regarding the legality and jurisdiction of the international trials. However, as a conservative American, I am grateful that the United States and the other Allies found a way to seek justice and provide an example of what can happen to those in power who choose to indulge in conduct that is so vile and reprehensible that mercy upon them is almost impossible.