Justice at Nuremberg. Robert E. Conot.

Justice at Nuremberg
Robert E. Conot
New York: Harper & Row, Publishers. 1983.

Why read it? To understand the enormity of the Nazi atrocities. And to understand that vengeance might have been better served by summarily executing the German leaders without a trial, which refused to allow the defendants the logical defense that the Allies had done in their histories the very things with which the Germans in WWII were charged. John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage quotes Robert A. Taft about the American view of justice and its failure at Nuremberg: "About the whole judgment at Nuremberg there is the spirit of vengeance, and vengeance is seldom justice: the hanging of the eleven convicted will be a blot on the American record which we shall long regret."

The purposes of the trial of the Nazi leaders at Nuremberg were to convict organizations and the individuals in them of conspiracy for the deaths of five million Jews and others, to reveal the horror and terrorism of the Nazi regime and to condemn wars of aggression in the future. The defendants could not use the justification that they were following orders nor the justification that the Allies during their histories had engaged in, and, in fact, initiated the same practices as the Nazi Germans. The trial was criticized for being based on a law constructed "ex post facto," after the war was over, and the conviction for committing a war of aggression, a concept that has never been satisfactorily defined. The trial did seem to succeed in introducing graphic evidence of the merciless slaughter of human beings by extermination and through terrorism--five civilians shot for every German soldier injured. The trial made no effort to convict the millions of common German citizens who participated in that slaughter. The trial failed to account for the phenomenon of Hitler. The trial raised many more issues than it resolved.

The British felt that the trial would not achieve its objectives and felt that the leaders of Germany should be court-martialed and summarily executed. If you're determined to execute someone, who needs a trial? Problem: condemn all wars of aggression or just the Nazi war of aggression? Charges were filed before the facts had been studied sufficiently. Germany was charged with violating the Treaty of Versailles, but French and British violations could not be mentioned by the German defendants. They also could not cite the Allies' roles in German rearmament.

The defendants all defended themselves as doing what they had been told to do by superiors. The Nuremberg trial could become a precedent for putting on trial countries that had been defeated in war. Crimes are not committed by corporations or by organizations, but by people. The people on trial never soiled their hands with blood, but used others as their tools. Goering takes "credit" for the killing of individuals by police bullets: "I assume the responsibility, and I am not afraid to do so." The defendants did not have access to the documents being used against them. The defendants were confronted with the product of the regime they had led. To break Poland, Hitler ordered all Polish intelligentsia and Jews to be destroyed so that the people would be without leadership.

The Nazis created a modern murder machine. Thousands involved but each thought of his role as simply a cog in the machine. Himmler: You have to be tough to shoot thousands of innocent people; much easier to be in combat. Himmler: did not want just to kill men; their children must be exterminated also to avoid their vengeance in the future. The German leaders did not think in terms of human beings in despair, agony, terror and tortured, but only of numbers of carcasses to be delivered. Goebbels: Either we destroy the Jews or they will destroy us. Himmler: You must slaughter, but you must remain decent fellows. Note: in slaughtering the Jews, the Germans were depriving themselves of skilled labor.

Of the total of 5.25 million Jews murdered, 3,465,000 had come from Poland, 458,000 from Hungary, 420,000 from Romania, 250,000 from Czechoslovakia, 220,000 from France, 180,000 from Germany and the remainder from a variety of other countries.

German reaction to resistance was to intensify terror. DuBost: Evil masters came who awakened Germany's primitive passions and made possible the atrocities which I have described to you." Ribbentrop compared Germany's actions to America's slaughter of the American Indians and concentration camps to the genius of the British who used them in the Boer War. "Tu quoque": "If I am guilty, you are too." Goering: It's technically impossible to kill as many people as you have charged us with. Nazi double talk: "Final solution" was extermination; "special treatment'" meant killing; and "protective custody" meant concentration camps.

Biddle's definition of "War of aggression": to initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." [RayS.: What the hell does that mean?]

Attorney for Jodl: The simplest proof that 'aggression' is a crime only for the vanquished is furnished by the case of Russia which had conspired with Hitler against Poland and the Baltic countries.

A major deficiency of the trial was that it did not count for the rise of Hitler. "How could it happen that an intellectual high-ranking people--a people who gave so much to the world in terms of cultural and spiritual gifts as the German people--could hail a man such as Hitler, follow him into the bloodiest of wars, giving him the best part that it had?"

[RayS. Justice was not served at Nuremberg. Vengeance was. For the crimes committed by the German Nazis, human beings needed vengeance. Vengeance committed by the Nazi Germans and Hitler in response to defeat in WWI resulted in vengeance by the Allies. Draw your own conclusions and morals. But don't forget the Marshall Plan. In the history of the world, no country did so much to rehabilitate the conquered as America. Abraham Lincoln would have accomplished the same after the defeat of the South, but he was assassinated and was replaced by leaders who wanted only vengeance.]