Why nuremberg trials significant

In East Germany, a Soviet puppet state, the government released thousands of Nazis and enlisted their help in forming a police state. The Soviet Union also began promoting the belief that western capitalists were basically responsible for the rise of the Nazi Party.

Meanwhile, in West Germany the Western Allies ended all their efforts at denazification in favor of enlisting the help of former Nazis in the fight against Communism. Discussion of the Holocaust virtually disappeared from the public sphere in West Germany in the s. By the s, nearly 90 percent of judges in West Germany had formerly belonged to the Nazi Party. Just as alarming, in a survey of West Germans indicated that a third of Germans believed the IMT had been unfair.

The same proportion of respondents stated that the Holocaust had been justified. These developments led many scholars and social commentators to condemn the trials at Nuremberg and denazification as complete failures. Germans did not express widespread public regret in the immediate postwar years. Nor did the majority of Nazis receive punishments commensurate with their crimes. Still, the judgments at Nuremberg established the legal precedent for denazification and created a record of evidence so compelling that, when shown to the German public, it dispelled any suggestion that the Nazi regime had been innocent of the accusations leveled against it.

In the s, when a new generation that did not remember the war came of age in West Germany, they questioned the silences surrounding World War II and rediscovered the record of evidence produced for the IMT. Justice Robert H. This article is part of a series commemorating the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II made possible by the Department of Defense.

As an adult, Janine Simone Hopkins was encouraged by her family to record her experiences and reflections of her life in Paris during the German occupation. Attached to Canadian and British forces, the first Americans to see ground combat in Europe witnessed disaster at Dieppe.

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During the war, Mexican Americans served in the military and worked on the Home Front to support their country, and when it ended, were no longer willing to accept second-class citizenship. This essay offers some ways of thinking about how to make sense of the complicated post-war moment through the case of Yugoslavia.

This article examines how World War II marked an important moment in the political history of modern zoos. The Nuremberg Trial and its Legacy. That tribunal identified ten principles , which now form the basic text of modern medical ethics known as the Nuremberg Code. Although not legally binding, the declaration has moral force for physicians.

What is often forgotten is that, during the first Nuremberg trial, there were also similar trials being held in Tokyo. The Nuremberg trials were effectively the start of international criminal law, an area which is still in the early stages of its development. It means that individuals and organisations are held accountable for some of the worst crimes imaginable. But things changed after the return of concentration camps to Europe in the Former Yugoslavia.

In , the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia was formed to respond to mass atrocities then taking place. Following the genocide in Rwanda, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda was established. When the UN adopted the Genocide Convention on 9 December , it also invited the International Law Commission to study the possibility of establishing a court to try persons charged with genocide or other international crimes.

This Friday is the 70th anniversary of the end of the Trials. Karina is a law reporter for LexisNexis. She is fascinated by international criminal law. The antagonism to ex post facto laws is not based on a lawyer's prejudice encased in a Latin maxim. It rests on the political truth that if a law can be created after an offense, then power is to that extent absolute and arbitrary.

To allow retroactive legislation is to disparage the principle of constitutional limitation. It is to abandon what is usually regarded as one of the essential values at the core of our democratic faith. But, fortunately, so far as concerns murders of German minorities, the indictment was not required to invent new law. The indictment specifically mentions "internal penal laws. Under universally accepted principles of law, an occupying belligerent power may and indeed often does establish its own tribunals to administer the domestic law of the occupied country for the inhabitants.

Thus if Adolph killed Berthold before the American Army occupied Munich, it would be normal for the United States government to set up a military tribunal to try and punish Adolph. But suppose Adolph raised as a defense the contention that he was acting pursuant to orders form superiors which were the law of Germany. If that defense were raised, and if we assume contrary to what some German jurists tell us that in Germany there were on the statute books pertinent exculpatory laws, nonetheless under well-known principles of German law, going back to the middle Ages and differing from current Anglo-American theories, the superior order could be disregarded by a court applying German law, on the ground that it was so repugnant to "natural law" as to be void.

That is, perhaps a German tribunal or one applying German law can disregard an obviously outrageous statute or executive order as offensive to natural law just as the Supreme Court of the United States can disregard a statute or executive order as offensive to the United States Constitution. But further suppose that Adolph raised as a defense the point that the wrong was so old as to be barred by some statute of limitations.

If there is such a statute in Germany, the limitation may be set aside without involving any violation of the ex post facto principle. As our own Supreme Court has pointed out, to set aside a statue of limitation is not to create a new offense. I turn now to Count 2 of the indictment, which charges "crimes against peace. It alleges that the defendants participated "in the planning, preparation, initiation and waging of wars of aggression, which were also wars in violation of international treaties, agreements and assurances.

This charge is attacked in many quarters on the ground it rests on ex post facto law. The reply has been that in the last generation there has accumulated a mounting body of international sentiment which indicates that wars of aggression are wrong and that a killing by a person acting on behalf of an aggressor power is not an excusable homicide.

Reference is made not only to the Briand-Kellogg Pact of August 27, , but to deliberations of the League of Nations in and subsequent years--all of which are said to show an increasing awareness of a new standard of conduct. Specific treaties outlawing wars of aggression are cited. And, having regard to the manner by which all early criminal law evolves and the manner by which international law grows, it is claimed that now it is unlawful to wage an aggressive war and it is criminal to aid in preparing for such a war, whether by political, military, financial, or industrial means.

One difficulty with that reply is that the body of growing custom to which reference is made is custom directed at sovereign states, not at individuals. There is no convention or treaty which places obligations explicitly upon an individual not to aid in waging an aggressive war. Thus, from the point of view of the individual, the charge of a "crime against peace" appears in one aspect like a retroactive law. At the time he acted, almost all informed jurists would have told him that individuals who engaged in aggressive war were not in the legal sense criminals.

Another difficulty is the possible bias of the Tribunal in connection with Count 2. Unlike the crimes in Counts 3 and 4, Count 2 charges a political crime. The crime which is asserted is tried not before a dispassionate neutral bench, but before the very persons alleged to be victims. There is not even one neutral sitting beside them.

And what is most serious is that there is doubt as to the sincerity of our belief that all wars of aggression are crimes.

A question may be raised whether the United Nations are prepared to submit to scrutiny the attack of Russia on Poland, or on Finland or the American encouragement to the Russians to break their treaty with Japan.

Every one of these actions may have been proper, but we hardly admit that they are subject to international judgment. These considerations make the second count of the Nuremberg indictment look to be of uncertain foundation and uncertain limits. To some the count may appear as nothing more than the ancient rule that the vanquished are at the mercy of the victor.

To others it may appear as the mere declaration of an always latent doctrine that the leaders of a nation are subject to outside judgment as to their motives in waging war. The other feature of the Nuremberg indictment is Count 1, charging a "conspiracy.

In international as well as in national law there may be for almost any crime what the older lawyers would have called principal offenders and accessories. If Adolph is determined to kill Sam, and talks the matter over with Berthold, Carl, and Dietrich, and Berthold agrees to borrow the money to buy a pistol, and Carl agrees to make a holster for the pistol, and all of them proceed as planned and then Adolph gives the pistol and holster to Dietrich, who goes out alone and actually shoots Sam without excuse, then, of course, Adolph, Berthold, Carl, and Dietrich are all guilty of murder.

They should not be allowed to escape with the plea Macbeth offered for Banquo's murder, "Thou canst not say I did it. If the conspiracy charge in Count 1 meant no more than that those are guilty who plan a murder and with knowledge finance and equip the murderer, no one would quarrel with the count. But it would appear that Count 1 meant to establish some additional separate substantive offense of conspiracy.

That is, it asserts that there is in international law a wrong which consists in acting together for an unlawful end, and that he who joins in that action is liable not only for what he planned, or participated in, or could reasonably have foreseen would happen, but is liable for what every one of his fellows did in the course of the conspiracy.

Almost as broad a doctrine of conspiracy exists in municipal law. But what is the basis for asserting so broad a substantive crime exists in the international law? Where is the treaty, the custom, the academic learning on which it is based? Is this not a type of "crime" which was first described and defined either in London or in Nuremberg sometime in the year ? Aside from the fact that the notion is new, is it not fundamentally unjust? The crime of conspiracy was originally developed by the Court of Star Chamber on the theory that any unlicensed joint action of private persons was a threat to the public, and so if the action was in any part unlawful it was all unlawful.

The analogies of the municipal law of conspiracy therefore seem out of place in considering for international purposes the effect of joint political action. After all, in a government or other large social community there exists among the top officials, civilian and military, together with their financial and industrial collaborators, a kind of over-all working arrangement which may always be looked upon, if its invidious connotation be disregarded, as a "conspiracy.

To take a case which is perhaps not so obvious, is everyone who joins a political party, even one with some illegal purposes, to be held liable to the world for the action that every member takes, even if that action is not declared in the party platform an was not known to or consented to by the person charged as a wrongdoer? To put upon any individual such responsibility for action of the group seems literally to step back in history to a point before the prophet Ezekiel and to reject the more recent religious and democratic teachings that guilt is personal.

Turning now from the legal basis of the indictment, I propose briefly to consider whether, quite apart from legal technicalities, the procedure of an international military tribunal on the Nuremberg pattern is a politically acceptable way of dealing with the offenders in the dock and those others whom we may legitimately feel should be punished.

The chief arguments usually given for this quasi-judicial trial are that it gives the culprits a chance to say anything that can be said on their behalf, that it gives both the world today and the world tomorrow a chance to see the justice of the Allied cause and the wickedness of the Nazis', and that it sets a firm foundation for a future world order wherein individuals will know that if they embark on schemes of aggression or murder or torture or persecution they will be severely dealt with by the world.

The first argument has some merit.