Historic FAFO

Eighty years ago today, the International Military Tribunal convened in the nearly destroyed city of Nuremberg. Its purpose was to hold accountable the (surviving) leaders of Germany for the World War II horrors that went well beyond the previously held norms of warfare. It was the first and most groundbreaking of many war crimes trials in Europe. (Which continued for decades; the last significant trial of a Nazi was held in 2015, when SS junior squad leader at Auschwitz Oskar Gröning was convicted of accessory to murder in 300,000 cases; he died before serving his sentence. In 2016, SS guard at Auschwitz Reinhold Hanning was convicted of accessory to murder; he was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. As of 2024, there were still cases pending.) The thinking at Nuremberg, though, was that for crimes of such a scope as the Nazis perpetrated, it would not suffice to nail a few low-ranking perpetrators; those responsible for designing the criminal strategies and for giving the orders needed to be held accountable.

There was a bit of “we have to learn from our mistakes in 1918” in the very notion of the proceedings. (That also contributed to the decision three years before that nothing short of unconditional surrender by Axis powers would end the fighting. No bargaining, no negotiating, no weaseling—all or nothing.) There was also a good deal of, oh, differences of opinion on how to handle the big Nazis. Stalin wanted them all shot out of hand (maybe a quick run past a tribunal on the way to the scaffold), and Churchill was of a similar mind. (For context, the Soviet Union suffered more than 20 million deaths—military and civilian—between 1941 and 1945, and Britain would take nearly a decade to crawl out from the destruction.) FDR and Truman held out for legitimate trials, with defense attorneys and a judicial panel following legal standards. The French nodded their heads.

One of the issues presenting itself in this very notion of a tribunal was, in fact, what legal standards do you follow? There are international rules of war (yes—there are!), but the Nazis blew past them when they invaded the USSR and was fairly loose in following them in Western Europe. The question arose: what constitutes a crime that stands out in the mechanized destruction of that war, and what constitutes a crime for people who kept their hands remarkably clean because of their distance and their altitude in the organization?

Eventually the Allies settled on four charges for the head Nazis:

Conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity
Crimes against peace (planning, initiating and executing a war of aggression)
War crimes (fairly established internationally: killing civilians, mistreating POWs, deportation*)
Crimes against humanity (political, racial and religious persecution of civilians; genocide)

*Oh—hey!

The conspiracy charge was where they got some of the defendants who had been the farthest away from actual gunpowder and the slave labor.

There was a lot of pushback in Germany—and other places—that this would be a show trial, “victors’ justice”, sauce for the goose that the ganders would never taste. (Basically—whataboutism writ large.) But the Allies carried on. They laid out procedural rules, gave the defendants attorneys, assigned prosecutors and empaneled a bench of judges from the four major powers. They had to accommodate three systems of jurisprudence (Anglo-Saxon, French, Russian), build out a courtroom, ensure simultaneous translation of all activities, tend to the health of the 23 defendants present (Martin Bormann was tried in absentia), keep the lights on and continuously negotiate the gigantic egos of most of the participants, on both sides of the dock for nearly a year.

At the end of the trial, 19 Nazi leaders were found guilty of one or more of the charges and 12 received death by hanging sentences. Wilhelm Keitel demanded a firing squad as more befitting his military service, but it was denied. Turns out if you’re sentenced for a criminal conviction, your crime trumps any previous condition. Hermann Göring (who also demanded a firing squad) cheated the hangman by swallowing cyanide the night before execution.

Of the defendants sentenced to prison terms, only Albert Speer and Rudolf Hess served out their full terms (the former 20 years, the latter life, until his suicide in 1987). Speer whined for the rest of his life.

The IMT of 1945-46 was the precursor of the International Court of Justice at The Hague. I concede that the world’s attempts to hold the worst criminals in the world accountable have fallen short. And I acknowledge that one of the stumbling blocks arises from the United States being really uneasy about applying the term “war criminal” to actions we take in our interests. (Yes, we should have held a state funeral for irony long ago.) Dick Cheney and George W. Bush should have been in the dock alongside Slobodan Milošević and Radovan Karadžić, and the Kleptocrat’s ass should have been there since his drone strikes in Yemen and Syria in his first term. Now he’s just taking the piss, thanks to the Roberts SCOTUS’ immunity ruling.) But—like 10,000 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean—it’s a start, and we should build on it.

But here’s an interesting thing, when I searched on the Nuremberg trial (using Duck Duck Go, because I’ve had it with Google), this was at the top of the results.

So—we have a long, long way to go.

 

 

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