Archive of the Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, 1945-46
library.stanford.edu
library.stanford.edu
Also it is full of courtroom art/sketches from the proceedings.
0: http://web.archive.org/web/20160709210523/https://www.svobod...
The Soviets for sure, but are you really arguing that the US and UK (and Empire) were operating on the same industrial level? Incidents that come to mind for me would include the Bengal famine, and it was terrible, but it wasn't the systematic and controlled killing at which the Soviets and Nazis became so expert.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/29/winston-church...
The Brits invented the modern concentration camp during the Boer War, see also the Opium Wars. The Philippines War, Banana Wars,
Nobody is a saint, it seems to be the story of 'civilization'.
Especially given that I'm of a generation born near the end of Apartheid, we grew up with the "badge of honour" mentality around the TRC. But almost 30 years later, many of the victims of these crimes are left feeling like the perpetrators got off scott-free, for an often half-recounting of the event and not much more. It's not uncommon to hear references to Nuremburg when discussing the more henoius crimes described - for example, a doctor performing the sorts of acts those at Nuremburg were tried for, who was recently discovered to be a family GP in one of the Nation's capitals, quietly continuing his life. However, it's not an opinion I would say is particularly strong in those who have it, nor too commonly discussed - but it's an interesting weighing up of "an appropriate justice which would please all participants was difficult, or impossible to decide", versus "it's incredible that the participants and organisers were able to come to a decision that did what it said on the box, mostly".
I was particularly interested to see suggestions of a TRC (based on South Africa's own) introduced to deal with the after-effects of the 'Troubles' in Ireland, England and Northern Ireland - and it appeared to be a strong "NO" from all sides, which I found fascinating as it did not seem driven only by a need for appropriate retributive justice, but rather (in my opinon) seemed driven by the belief that we have the ability to draw finer lines as a group, and need not polarize our decisions between harsh, message-sending retribution and amnesty for participation.
All that being said I couldn't tell you which pick given the choice, but it certainly feels hopeful reflecting on just how much care in group decision making and inclusive participation has been displayed in the past in such events.
If they think they'll be given the Gaddafi treatment [0] then the rational thing for powerful monsters to do is go down swinging.
It is better to have systems to punish crimes, but it is also important to have meaningful amnesty even at the expense of fairness.
And then most of them were paroled less than half way through their sentences.
Most of them weren't even tried.
And of those that were, most of the ones who fought the charges weren't convicted, or were convicted of far lesser charges. Only a few got death sentences.
... For instance, the industrialists that bankrolled the Nazis, ran their factories with slave labour, and made posion gas for exterminating Jews and other victims of fascism got 2 to 7 years, with most of them being acquitted.
Of the four death sentences handed out in the SS trials, only one was actually carried out. None of them, including the people who got life sentences actually served more than 10 years!
If this is victor's justice, the victors did a shit job of actually punishing the losers.
I would beg to differ. The industrial magnates of this German era where all well aware of what their supplies were going towards: A 'total war' that didn't stop at exterminating anybody considered inferior.
Each individual case is certainly difficult but there is a line where you can and should be tried as an employee for participating in something which violates laws and or ethical boundaries. And this doesn't apply only to the manufacturing of something like Zyklon B nerve gas.
It certainly wouldn't help their case if they also used slave labour, and bankrolled the fringe party that went ahead to seize power, and unleash that horror upon the world.
'Just following orders' isn't a valid defense for a lieutenant, and it absolutely isn't a viable defense for a general. Or for someone like Krupp.
Zyklon A (the predecessor product) was banned after the first world war due to its use as a weapon in the war.
And Bruno Tesch - the inventor of Zyklon B - was executed in 1946 for knowingly selling the product to the SS for use on humans (at least according to Wikipedia).
In essence, the people in Germany knew very well what their leadership was doing and they supported it. Too few were ever held accountable.
This is not about vengeance (there isn't such a concept in the modern justice systems, right?). It is about accountability for your own atrocities. Germans grow up learning this in the hope it can prevent another event like the Holocaust.
This kind of accountability extends to everyone. Even scientists in the trenches who participate developing those technologies that might be misused.
That idea is absurd.
Are you absolutely sure you need to humiliate a nation even after you achieved total military victory?
That the Allies choose the Marshall over the Morgenthau plan was a good call so, even if the former would have worked as well including a complete purge of Nazis from Germany.
If Versailles went too far in punishing the country, Nuremberg went nowhere near far enough in punishing the Nazis involved. And if bringing Nazis to justice is 'humiliating the country', I would suggest that country should consider disentangling itself from them.
Tying your national identity to those monsters is not a good look.
It's a mistake to think you're not crushing a nation's pride and self-respect by exacting vengeance against your monsters. Their restraint was wise and showed they learned valuable lessons.
Could you give some examples?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defendants_at_the_In...
SS Sturmbannführer Wehrner von Braun almost certainly knew of forced labour used in the V2 program but rose to prominence in NASA with no reckoning of his past.
The book “Operation Paperclip” delved into this and other examples.
And the US knew of the slave labor used by Belgium in Congo to extract uranium for the nuclear weapons program which killed dozens to hundreds of Congolese but for some reason we never talk about that as it's always "hey, don't look over there, look at the evil Nazis instead".
> The Tribunal shall not be bound by technical rules of evidence. It shall adopt and apply to the greatest possible extent expeditious and nontechnical procedure, and shall admit any evidence which it deems to be of probative value.
You can't have a fair trial when the prosecution gets to admit whatever evidence it wants, including evidence that would normally be inadmissable (eg. Hearsay, admissions made through coercion or torture, etc). The tribunal was effectively a show trial, and in my opinion they should have just dispensed with the theater and carried out the predetermined punishments.
So although the Nuremberg trials were fashioned as a court of law and followed legal-esque principles, there was no written law or could follow; it simply didn't exist.
Hence, the tribunal was considered by some lawyers to be a mockery of court. The verdicts were effectively known ahead of time and no laws could really be cited, no legal process to follow.
That said, I'm not sure what would be a better alternative.
> Everyone in the court was issued with headphones to allow them to hear the charges being read in their native language, but the accused showed little interest.
They were probably already resigned to the idea that they would be executed and thought there was little point in trying to pay attention and defend themselves. Most of them wished they were already dead.
> The British Government wanted to shoot the leaders once they were caught and formally identified - but the Soviet Union and US favoured a legal process.
It's ironic how the British wanted to resort to such uncivilized methods as summary execution without trial, while the Soviet preferred a legal path.
A good example are the Cossacks that fought on the side of the Axis. Although they were taken as POWs by the US and UK, they were put on trains and shipped back to the USSR to their eventual deaths.
again something nobody talks about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Smoke
The reviews are less than stellar: "Historian Noel Malcolm described it as a "strangely childish book"[3] and journalist William Grimes in The New York Times as a "self-important, hand-wringing, moral mess of a book."[4] Christopher Hitchens accused Baker of ahistoricism and wrote that numerous passages in the book served as a reminder of how "fatuous the pacifist position can sound, or indeed can be."
Instead, IIRC, the US blockaded oil deliveries to Japan to the extent that the Japanese economy was within a month or so of collapsing. The Japanese - who had been invading other asian countries - were left with little choice but to attack the US to stop the blockades.
My understanding is that the US goal was to avoid Japanese hegemony in Asia. Certainly, the idea that the Japanese attack was a “surprise” was a convenient myth. The form of the attack, maybe, but not the expectation.
I don’t have references handy. This is just from memory.
The US blockaded oil deliveries to Japan in response to their invasion of Manchuria, and was willing to remove the blockade if Japan withdrew.
I'm not sure you could say the US "wanted" war any more than you could say Ukraine "wanted" war with Russia.
As far as I can see, there is very little to compare that situation and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
No doubt some in the government wanted to attack, no different than you could find who want to attack Iran in today's government, but it's not the US government's position. FDR was definitely more interested in getting involved internationally, but the Republicans were staunchly isolationist.
The comparison to Russia and Ukraine is there. Russia preemptively attacked Ukraine because it wanted to prevent NATO from getting a foothold in it's sphere of influence. Japan considering the Pacific Ocean and namely the resources in South East Asian there's, so preemptively attacked the US to prevent it from opposing it's control over the Pacific.
They were except for their nominee running against FDR in 1940. His interventionist stance (and otherwise complete lack of political experience) made FDRs victory all but assured.
I’m not sure how you have a base so aligned on a topic that gives them an excellent chance on defeating the incumbent nominate a political nobody who holds a dissenting opinion. The same nobody who went on to serve in FDRs administration.
Other reviewers praised the book's use of documentary research as well as its intricate construction. Irish novelist Colm Toibin wrote in his New York Times review that "the issues Baker wishes to raise, and the stark system he has used to dramatize his point, make his book a serious and conscientious contribution to the debate about pacifism."[1]
Anyway, I've actually read it and found the perspective enlightening even as someone obsessed with WWII since I was 12.
He later helped start the Hague and dedicated his life acting as a voice for the voiceless due to war crimes and genocides.
Despite the horrors he witnessed, Ben was a beam of light for all around him. I highly recommend his works. Especially "Parting Words: 9 Lessons for a Remarkable Life"
[1] https://benferencz.org/stories/
[2] https://benferencz.org/stories/1943-1946/getting-home-as-a-s...
The Nuremberg trials were international. Judges came from all occupying powers.
When they were done, America rented out the courthouse and used it for America-only trials.
The initial trials were for top-tier Nazis. The subsequent trials were for mid-tier Nazis who committed especially heinous crimes.
But Nuremberg was very successful in de-Nazifying the country. I mean there are neo-Nazi elements in Germany today but they're really fringe elements. If anything they're far less fringe in the United States now (fun fact: the United States had a lot of Nazi sympathizers eg the Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden).
This is where we went wrong with the Civil War: we failed to cull the slave-owning class when such attitudes needed to be snuffed out entirely. I mean Emancipation came with compensating the slave owners rather than the slaves themselves. Lincoln's assassination was really unfortunate here too just because of who his VP was: a Confederate sympathizer who, among other things, pardoned all the secessionists and rebels.
I really wonder if we'd snuffed out the slave owning class and compensated the former slaves where we'd be today. Slavery economics simply moved to the prison system and forced labor.Segregation persisted for another century and the echoes of all that still exist today.
Denazification was an entirely different process. The Nuremberg trials were for the very top leaders (and only a handful). The apparatus of the Nazi government never went to trial, they went through a Denazification process that was abandoned pretty quickly.
There are numerous examples of relatively high level Nazi's being a part of the new German government. The best example is Reinhard Gehlen who led the build up of West Germanys entire intelligence agency. Numerous Nazi officers ended up in high ranking positions in the Bundeswehr (German Armed Forces) and in high ranking political positions.
We just differ on what "de-Nazification" means. It's partly about cutting the head off the snake but also making a public spectacle of it, laying Germany's war crimes bare for all the world to see, especially ordinary Germans. The Nuremberg Trials weren't solely responsible for this but they provided a key focal point.
Imagine if we'd cut the head off the Confederate snake in the same way.
But it seems an important difference, in judging the participants, whether those systems were inherited from hundreds of years of precedent, or newly-built by the current perpetrators.
Um what?! You seem to know very little about post-war bureaurcats in West Germany. They failed completely at de-nazifying then country.
Example, the first secret service (Organisation Gehlen, precursor to BND) was headed by a Wehrmacht general. The CIA put him there and didn't care. He was useful against the Soviets.
Even the first chancellor (Adenauer) eas basically blind on the right eye.
The East was much more effective in de-nazifying, sometimes a little too eager even. (And Adenauer refused to accept even the existence of the East German state. Surprise.)
> The IMT contributed to the definition of war crimes and the outlawing of wars of aggression.
that hints at what really happened at the tribunal. chomsky has some details:
https://chomsky.info/20070803/
The Nuremberg case is a very interesting precedent. First of all, the Nuremberg trials—of all the tribunals that have taken place, from then until today—it is, I think, the most serious by far. But, nevertheless, it was very seriously flawed. And it was recognized to be. When Telford Taylor, the chief prosecutor, wrote about it, he recognized that it was flawed, and it was so for a number of fundamental reasons. For one thing, the Nazi war criminals were being tried for crimes that had not yet been declared to be crimes. So, it was ex post facto. ‘We’re now declaring these things you did to be crimes.’ That is already questionable.
Secondly, the choice of what was considered a crime was based on a very explicit criterion, namely, denial of the principle of universality. In other words, something was called a crime at Nuremberg if they did it and we didn’t do it.
So, for example, the bombing of urban concentrations was not considered a crime. The bombings of Tokyo, Dresden, and so on—those aren’t crimes. Why? Because we did them. So, therefore, it’s not a crime. In fact, Nazi war criminals who were charged were able to escape prosecution when they could show that the Americans and the British did the same thing they did. Admiral Doenitz, a submarine commander who was involved in all kinds of war crimes, called in the defense a high official in the British admiralty and, I think, Admiral Nimitz from the United States, who testified that, ‘Yeah, that’s the kind of thing we did.’ And, therefore, they weren’t sentenced for these crimes. Doenitz was absolved. And that’s the way it ran through. Now, that’s a very serious flaw. Nevertheless, of all the tribunals, that’s the most serious one.
If he and Kissinger were on fire and I only had one glass of water, I'd drink it.
When war comes to your doorstep, yes, not being a warmonger is a bad thing. Bullies understand only force and violence. They will not listen to reason, and they will not return the favor after you come to their aid. Kissinger, who spent his youth being bullied by real, live Nazis, should have understood that.
And when your cause is just, you need to be able to count on help from friendly Western democracies, not debates over how much of your country should be turned over to your attacker.
that kind of whataboutism?
See also Roger Waters, who wouldn't get any from me either.
He didn't get out early because he wouldn't denounce his allegiance to Hitler, either.
Examples of action nobody was tried for, Axis or Allies: Strategic terror bombing of civilians and civilian infrastructure, unrestricted submarine warfare.
The US committed atrocities in the war, and it also took extreme measures in the war which shouldn’t be judged as harshly. But we don’t have a meaningful framework to reconcile those because reconciling them is intentionally excluded from the framework.
Slavery in the US ended in the 19th century.
International Military Tribunal: 24 accused
Nuremberg Military Tribunals (12 trials): 185 accused
Using that fact to what, discredit the Nürnberg trials is disengenious. Because a) they included all allies and actually tried to prosecute (the equivilant in Japan was already much more influenced by the looming Cold War) and b) a lot more, albeit still not enough, war criminals were tried in other places than Nürnberg.
Yes this was my point. I do not want to discredit the Nuremberg Trials, they did the right thing and they did a good job.