Junto Boys

TODAY IN 1945

The Nuremberg War Trials begin

WHO

24 of the biggest Nazis were put on trial for their lives among them Hitler Deputy Rudolf Hess, Commander of the Luftwaffe Hermann Göring, Nazi Party Secretary Martin Bormann and Nazi Architect Albert Speer.

BACKGROUND

It was one of the few times in European history in which a war ended in unconditional surrender and that event meant that the Allies had far greater room in which to hold the loser’s guilty.

The Allies had several ideas of what to do with the captured Nazis. Early in the war, Winston Churchill advocated summary execution of the leading figures without trial. Joseph Stalin’s plan went further saying that they should execute up to 100,000 German staff officers. It was eventually decided that the defendants would stand trial under an occupational powers and Nuremberg was chosen for its symbolic power as the former home of Nazi rallies.

The Soviets, British, French and Americans each named judges to the panel. The U.S. chose Attorney General Francis Biddle, the man responsible for interning Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor. The Soviets sent Major-General Iona Nikitchenko, a man who presided over Stalin;s infamous show trials in the 1930s.

U.S. Supreme Court justice, Robert Jackson was the main prosecutor.

RESULTS

Half of the men were executed, two were acquitted. Speer and Hess and four others wound up as the only guests at the giant Spandau prison. Hess remained there until the late 1980s. Hundreds of other trials followed into the 1950s.

The case that they were war criminals was well made, but so were criticisms that the trials were simply “victor’s justice” since German’s were convicted of crimes against Poland while no Soviet faced trial for the same abuses.

The trial has lent some amount of credibility to the idea that Nazi atrocities were a singular act of history when they weren’t even unique in the 20th Century. Those trials brought out specific details that make the crimes more vivid so the same atrocities elsewhere seem more remote or speculative. Notice how few in the media are interested in cataloguing Iraq’s crimes over the last 20 years. To do so would be to justify the war under the terms in which they lionize FDR’s actions during World War II. You don’t need to compare Saddam to Hitler you only need to compare Saddam’s actions to the actions of the over 800 Nazis we executed during the war trials.

Since we have since adopted a different standard to accommodate our non action, we allow ourselves the moral space to permit the continued existence of Castro, Saddam or Kim Jong-il. Rather than a continuation of ancient policy or a direction of new responsibility, these trials seem an aberration of how the world works, a time when the bad guys really paid the price.