Victors’ Justice? The Nuremberg Tribunal
Victors’ Justice? the Nuremberg Tribunal
Fifty years on, the Nuremberg Trial continues to haunt us. This is not simply a matter of the Nazi horrors revealed or confirmed in the courtroom. It is a question also of the weaknesses and strengths of the proceedings themselves. The undoubted flaws rightly continue to trouble the thoughtful. Yet, equally, we remain disturbed by the fact that, over the subsequent half-century, the world community has done so little to build upon the positive features also attaching to this great event.
The enormity of the murderous terror unleashed by the Third Reich is now so evident to us that the mounting of some full-scale trial of its defeated leaders might well seem, in retrospect, entirely inevitable. The path to Nuremberg was, however, much more tortuous than that. The Moscow Declaration of November 1943 certainly made plain the aim of Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill to punish, by some form of joint action, those major Nazis whose offences could not be regarded as limited to any particular geographical location. Yet, as Germany’s defeat approached, there was urgent need for the Allies to become less vague about actual procedures.
During the Tehran Conference at the end of 1943, Stalin had toasted ‘the justice of the firing squad’ and mentioned the need for 50,000 shootings. Roosevelt and Churchill seem to have been shocked by the number, even while sympathising with the method. In any case, the Soviet leader was probably jesting - something suggested by the fact that his regime (itself well-versed in the propagandist value of political trials) remained thereafter consistent in its demand for some form of detailed judicial enquiry. Conversely, it was the American and British governments that continued in 1944 to focus chiefly on schemes of summary process and prompt execution. Not until early 1945 did Roosevelt become fully converted to the ‘Bernays Plan’, devised during the previous September within the US Department of War. Once this proposal concerning comprehensive legal proceedings had won the day in Washington, Churchill found himself facing combined American and Soviet pressure to mount a major trial conducted by some specially constituted international tribunal.