Justice at Nuremberg
Before 1945, the city of Nürnberg
was most famous for producing a type of gingerbread called Nürnberger
Lebkuchen; now the city is known the world over as the location
of the International Military Tribunal where the Nazi war criminals
were put on trial in the aftermath of World War II. To Americans,
the name Nuremberg is synonymous with Justice, just as the name
Munich is synonymous with Appeasement. The Palace of Justice
(Justizgebäude) at Fürtherstrasse 22, where the trial
took place, is still being used as a courthouse; the building
is shown in the photographs on this page.
Trials are still being conducted in room
#600, the very room where the Nazi leaders sat as they listened
to testimony about their Crimes against Peace and Crimes against
Humanity over half a century ago. The Justizgebäude, where
the defeated Nazis faced the judgment of the Allies, is on the
opposite side of the city, and a world away, from the Zeppelin
Field where Hitler addressed the cheering crowds and the German
Army once paraded in all its glory.
The entire trial was captured on film
and shown to the world on TV. The complete transcript of the
trial, with the 216 days of testimony, given by almost 200 witnesses
against the 22 defendants, was published in book form and is
now available on the world wide web.
In 1961, a Hollywood movie called "Justice
at Nuremberg," which had fictional characters but was based
on the Nazi Judges trial at Nürnberg in 1947, educated a
new generation of Americans about the Nazi crimes. The movie
used actual footage from newsreel films showing the city of Nürnberg
as a pile of rubble, which had not yet been cleared when the
trial started; the bodies of 20,000 German civilians were still
buried under the destroyed buildings as the Nazi war criminals
were brought into the courtroom of the Palace of Justice. The
Palace of Justice had suffered some damage in the Allied bombing
of Nürnberg, but it was restored by the forced labor of
the conquered Germans before the trial began.
It was at the Nuremberg trial that the
whole world learned for the first time about the Nazi atrocities,
including all the gory details of the medical experiments on
prisoners, the shrunken heads, the soap made from human fat,
the leather goods made from the skin of concentration camp prisoners,
and the gas chambers which accounted for the majority of the
deaths at Auschwitz and Majdanek, where the Russians testified
that not less than 4 million people had died in the Auschwitz
complex and another 1.5 million had died at the Majdanek camp.
The horror films of the Allied liberation
of the Nazi concentration camps at Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald
and Dachau were shown at the trial, to the defendants and to
the public. An American-made documentary film, which showed all the graphic details
of the gas pipes and control wheels which regulated the flow
of poison gas through the shower heads of the Dachau gas chamber,
was shown in the courtroom. The German military and economic
leaders were visibly stunned by this proof of a gas chamber at
Dachau, and claimed that they were seeing and hearing about this
unprecedented atrocity for the first time. The American public
was horrified that such a thing could take place in the civilized
world.
For the most part, the International
Military Tribunal charged the defendants, not with individual
responsibility for specific crimes, but with a "Common Plan"
to commit crimes. Under the Common Plan charge, the accused military
and civilian leaders, including one journalist, were indicted
for Crimes Against Peace, including the launching of an aggressive
war; War Crimes in violation of the provisions of the Hague Convention
of 1907 and Geneva Convention of 1929; and Crimes Against Humanity,
covering any and all atrocities committed against civilians by
the Nazi regime during its entire reign. Under the Common Plan
concept, organizations as well as individuals were charged, so
that membership in an organization, such as the Nazi party, the
SS or the Gestapo, was enough to make one a war criminal.
The Nazis were specifically charged with
violating the Hague convention of 1907 by invading and attacking
countries without a formal declaration of war and with the violation
of the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 which called for Renunciation
of War as an Instrument of National Policy. Under each of the
three counts in the indictment, a detailed list of all the Nazi
crimes was entered by each of the four Allied countries: Great
Britain, the United States of America, France and the Soviet
Union.
The Soviet Union accused the German military
and specifically Hermann Goering, head of the German Air Force,
of committing the Katyn Forrest Massacre of 11,000 Polish army
officers in September 1941. An American soldier, who had been
a Prisoner of War in Germany, testified for the defense regarding
the Katyn Forrest Massacre; in 1989 the world learned that his
testimony was correct when the Soviet Union admitted that it
was really the Russians who had murdered a total of 15,000 Polish
army officers before June 1941, and had falsely accused the Germans.
According to the book "Justice at
Nuremberg" by Robert E. Conot, the idea for the Common Plan
charges against the Germans came from Lieutenant Colonel Murray
C. Bernays, a Lithuanian Jew who had emigrated to American in
1900 at the age of six. Before the trial, according to Conot's
book, Churchill and Roosevelt's advisor Henry Morgenthau, Jr.
had advocated that "the principal Nazi leaders should be
charged with their crimes, then summarily shot." Bernays
argued for a trial as "the educational and therapeutic opportunity
of our generation." Regarding the Nazi crimes, Bernays wrote
"The crimes and atrocities were not single or unconnected,
but the inevitable outcome of the basic criminal conspiracy of
the Nazi party."
The Nuremberg trial had far-reaching
consequences - for America and the world. In 1948 President Harry
Truman desegregated the American armed forces, and in 1954 after
the Supreme Court ruled that school segregation was unconstitutional,
Justice Robert Jackson who participated in the decision said
that the Nuremberg experience and the "awful consequences
of racial prejudice revealed by ... the Nazi regime" had
influenced his decision. Justice Jackson was one of the judges
who had presided over the Nuremberg trial.
According to Conot's book, before the
trial there was no international criminal code; the barbaric
practices of the Nazis became war crimes under international
law only after the trial when the United Nations passed the Genocide
Convention and a Declaration of Human Rights.
After World War II, the rules of warfare
changed: reprisals cannot be taken against hostages or Prisoners
of War; forced labor is now outlawed; captured partisans are
given equal status with regular POWs. Regulations of all the
major World War II armies now state that orders which would constitute
the commission of a crime need not be obeyed. All the crimes
that were revealed at the Nuremberg trial have now been incorporated
into international law and the defense used at the Nuremberg
trial by the German generals and admirals that they were just
obeying orders is no longer viable.
Below is an old photograph of the east
wing of the Palace of Justice where the trial was held. The courtroom
in Room 600 is in the center of the east wing on the top floor.
In the photo, the room can be identified by the curtains covering
two of the windows.
Room 600 is in the
center of the east wing
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