The Nuremberg Trials

International Criminal Law Since 1945

Die Nürnberger Prozesse

Völkerstrafrecht seit 1945
 The Nuremberg Trials
International Criminal Law Since 1945
60th Anniversary International Conference

On behalf of
Touro College Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center

edited by
Herbert R. Reginbogin
Christoph J. M. Safferling
in collaboration with
Walter R. Hippel

K G - Saur München 2006

 Die Nürnberger Prozesse
Völkerstrafrecht seit 1945
Internationale Konferenz zum 60. Jahrestag

Im Auftrag des
Touro College Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center
herausgegeben von
Herbert R. Reginbogin
Christoph J. M. Safferling
unter Mitwirkung von
Walter R. Hippel

K G - Saur München 2006

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Contents/Inhaltsverzeichnis 5

Contents/Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements/Danksagung 8

Introduction/Einführung - Lessons of Nuremberg: Returning to Courtroom 600 on the

60th Anniversary of the Nuremberg Trial against the Major German War Criminals/
Lehren von Nürnberg: Rückkehr in den Saal 600 zum 60. Jahrestag des Nürnberger Prozesses
gegen die deutschen Hauptkriegsverbrecher 11

I. History and National Perspectives of the IMT at Nuremberg/

Historische und nationale Aspekte des IMT von Nürnberg

Raymond M. Brown: The American Perspective on Nuremberg: A Case of Cascading Ironies/

Die amerikanische Sicht auf Nürnberg: Ein Fall wechselnder Ironien 21

David Cesarani: The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg: British Perspectives/

Das Internationale Militärtribunal von Nürnberg: Britische Perspektiven 31

Hervé Ascensio: The French Perspective/Die französische Perspektive 39

Michael J. Bazyler: The Role of the Soviet Union in the International Military Tribunal at
Nuremberg/Die Rolle der Sowjetunion vor dem Internationalen Militärtribunal in Nürnberg 45

Albin Eser: Das Internationale Militärtribunal von Nürnberg aus deutscher Perspektive/
The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg from a German Perspective 53

II. Different Perspectives on the Nuremberg Trials/

Die Nürnberger Prozesse aus verschiedenen Perspektiven

Michael R. Marrus: A Jewish Lobby at Nuremberg: Jacob Robinson and the Institute of
Jewish Affairs, 1945-46/Eine jüdische Interessenvertretung in Nürnberg: Jacob Robinson
und das Institut für jüdische Angelegenheiten, 1945-46 63

Donald Bloxham: Genocide on Trial: Law and Collective Memory/Völkermord vor Gericht:
Recht und kollektives Gedächtnis 73

Sam Garkawe: The Role and Rights of Victims at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal/
Rolle und Rechte der Opfer vor dem Nürnberger Internationalen Militärtribunal 86

Lawrence Douglas: History and Memory in the Courtroom: Reflections on Perpetrator

Trials/Geschichte und Erinnerung im Gerichtssaal: Reflektionen über Kriegsverbrecherprozesse 95

Whitney R. Harris: Tyranny on Trial - Trial of Major German War Criminals at Nuremberg,
Germany, 1945-1946/Tyrannen vor Gericht - Das Strafverfahren gegen die NS-Hauptkriegs-
verbrecher in Nürnberg, 1945-1946 106
6 Inhaltsverzeichnis/Contents

III. Civilized People - Heinous Crimes, Philosophical-Historical Perspectives/

Zivilisierte Menschen - grauenhafte Verbrechen, historisch-philosophische Perspektiven

Herbert R. Reginbogin: Confronting "Crimes Against Humanity", from Leipzig to the Nuremberg
Trials/,, Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit", von Leipzig nach Nürnberg 115

Klaus Kastner: Rückblick: NSDAP, Reichsparteitage, Rassengesetze/In Retrospect: Nazi Party,

the Rallies, the Racial Laws 123

John Q. Barrett: "One Good Man": The Jacksonian Shape of Nuremberg/„Ein guter Mann":
Jacksons Einfluss auf Nürnberg 129

Rodger D. Citron: The Nuremberg Trials and American Jurisprudence: The Decline of Legal
Realism and the Revival of Natural Law/Die Nürnberger Prozesse und die amerikanische Rechts-
wissenschaft: Der Niedergang des Rechtsrealismus und die Wiedererstehung des Naturrechts 139

IV. The Later Nuremberg Trials/Die Nürnberger Folgeprozesse

Benjamin Ferencz: The Einsatzgruppen Trial/Der Einsatzgruppen-Prozess 153

Louise Harmon: The Doctors' Trial at Nuremberg/Der Mediziner-Prozess in Nürnberg 164

Harry Reicher: The Jurists' Trial and Lessons for the Rule of Law/Der Juristenprozess und
die Lehren für den Rechtsstaat 175

Roland Bank: The Role of German Industry: From Individual Criminal Responsibility of Some
to a Broadly Shared Responsibility for Compensatory Payments/Die Rolle der deutschen Industrie:
Von individueller strafrechtlicher Verantwortung zur gemeinsamen Verantwortung für
Entschädigungszahlung 182

Lisa Yavnai: Military Justice: War Crimes Trials in the American Zone of Occupation in
Germany, 1945-1947/Militärjustiz: Kriegsverbrecherprozesse in der amerikanisch besetzten Zone
in Deutschland, 1945-1947 191

V. National Prosecution in Germany, Israel, Australia and Other Nations/

Nationale Strafverfolgung in Deutschland, Israel, Australien und anderen Ländern

Hinrich Rüping: Zwischen Recht und Politik: Die Ahndung von NS-Taten in beiden
deutschen Staaten nach 1945/Between Law and Politics: The Prosecution of
NS-Criminals in the Two German States after 1945 199

Rebecca Wittmann: The Normalization of Nazi Crime in Postwar West German Trials/Die
Normalisierung von NS-Kriegsverbrechen in den Nachkriegs-Prozessen der Bundesrepublik
Deutschland 209

Gabriel Bach: Genocide (Holocaust) Trials in Israel/Völkermord (Holocaust)-Verfahren in Israel 216

Greg James: A Summary of the History of Nazi War Crime Trials in Australia/
Eine Zusammenfassung der Geschichte der Nazi-Kriegsverbrecherprozesse in Australien 224
Contents/Inhaltsverzeichnis 7

VI. Germany's Attitude towards International Criminal Law/

Deutschlands Haltung zum Völkerstrafrecht

Claus Kress: Germany and International Criminal Law: Continuity or Change?/Deutschland

und das Völkerstrafrecht - Kontinuität oder Wandel? 235

VII. The Legacy of Nuremberg/Das Vermächtnis von Nürnberg

Hans-Peter Kaul: The International Criminal Court: Key Features and Current Challenges/
Der Internationale Strafgerichtshof: Hauptmerkmale und künftige Herausforderungen 245

Anne Bayefsky: The Legacy of Nuremberg/Das Vermächtnis von Nürnberg 251

Wanda M. Akin: Nuremberg, Justice and the Beast of Impunity/Nürnberg, Gerechtigkeit und das
Schreckgespenst der Straflosigkeit 257

Andreas Zimmermann: Das juristische Erbe von Nürnberg - Das Statut des Nürnberger
Internationalen Militärtribunals und der Internationale Strafgerichtshof/The Judicial Legacy of
Nuremberg - The Statute of the International Military Tribunal of Nuremberg and the
International Criminal Court 266

Dan Derby: Enforcement of Nuremberg Norms: The Role for Mechanisms other than the
ICC/Durchsetzung der Normen von Nürnberg: Strafverfolgungsmechanismen jenseits des
Internationalen Strafgerichtshofs 278

Roger P. Alford: War Reparations, the Holocaust, and the ICC/Kriegsentschädigung,

der Holocaust und der ICC 284

VIII. Totalitarianism and German Resistance/Totalitarismus und deutsche

Widerstandsbewegungen

Winfried Heinemann: Das Attentat auf Hitler: 20. Juli 1944 und die Geschichte des deutschen
Widerstands/The Plot to Kill Hitler: July 20, 1944 and the Story of the
German Resistance Movement 293

Joachim Gauck: Totalitarismus im 3. Reich und in der DDR - eine vergleichende Analyse/Under
Totalitarian Regimes: A Comparative Analysis of National Socialism and the German Democratic
Republic 301

IX. A Different Story/Eine andere Geschichte

Robert Wolf son: Liberating Perspectives/Eine andere Geschichte 311

List of Authors/Autorenverzeichnis 319

8 Acknowledgements/Danksagung

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As editors o f the "Gedachtnisschrift" in commemoration o f the Nuremberg trials 60 years ago, we

take great pride and pleasure in thanking the authors for their outstanding presentations. They were
presented in Nuremberg during a four-day international conference in the summer o f 2005 called
"Judging Nuremberg: The Laws, The Rallies, The Trials: Returning to Courtroom 600 on the 60 th
Anniversary o f the Nuremberg Trials". This conference was made possible through the generous
logistical and financial support o f the following major sponsors

Touro College Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center,

Superior Court Nuremberg,
Foundation "Remembrance, Responsibility and Future", "Remembrance and Future" Fund,
Faculty of Law at the University Erlangen-Nuremberg,
German-American Lawyers' Association, Bonn,
The State o f New York

as well as many other German and American sponsors listed below.

The "Gedachtnisschrift" provides an opportunity to read the presentations made at the conference
last year and is dedicated to the many victims o f World War II and those who have sought justice
through international law in the 60 years since the Nuremberg trial.

We would also like to express our sincere appreciation to all the speakers and especially to the
following colleagues:

Dean Professor Lawrence Raful, Touro College Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center for giving us the
opportunity to edit this book; President and Vice-President o f the Superior Court Nuremberg, Dr. Stefan
Franke and Ewald Behrschmidt; Dean Professor Dr. Mathias Rohe, Faculty o f Law at the University o f
Erlangen-Nuremberg, for unbureaucratic help in so many regards; Attorney at Law Walter R. Hippel,
Member o f the Board o f the GALA, without whose assistance in editing and so many other ways, this
book would (probably) not exist. We are also grateful to K. G. Saur Verlag for publishing the book.

Naturally, a book o f this scope includes the efforts o f many others than those already mentioned.
We are grateful to all them and can only say, thank you: Brigitte Grafll, Ulrike Seeberger, Dagmar
Schwarzbach, Sabine Trippmacher, and the always helpful students from Erlangen University Louisa
Brennecke, Laura Wevelsiep, Alexander Horlamus and Werner Thienemann.

Finally we would like to thank each other for the cooperation and exceptionally pleasant work in
editing and writing this book together.

June 2006

Herbert R. Reginbogin Christoph J.M. Safferling

Danksagung/Acknowledgements 9

DANKSAGUNG

Als Herausgeber dieser „Gedächtnisschrift" zum 60. Jahrestag der Nürnberger Prozesse ist es uns
eine besondere Ehre und Freude, den Autoren für die herausragende Qualität ihrer Beiträge zu danken.
Die Referate wurden in Nürnberg im Sommer 2005 im Rahmen der viertägigen internationalen
„Nürnberger Konferenz: Rückkehr in den Gerichtssaal 600 zum 60. Jahrestag der Nürnberger Prozesse"
gehalten. Die Durchführung dieser Konferenz war nur durch die großzügige finanzielle wie auch
logistische Unterstützung von

Touro College Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center,

Oberlandesgericht Nürnberg,
Stiftung „Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft", Fonds „Erinnerung und Zukunft",
Juristische Fakultät der Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg,
Deutsch-Amerikanische Juristen-Vereinigung e.V., Bonn,
dem Bundesstaat New York

sowie vielen anderen nachstehend aufgeführten deutschen und amerikanischen Sponsoren möglich.

Mit der vorliegenden „Gedächtnisschrift" können die Referate auch nach Abschluss der Konferenz
dem interessierten Leser zur Verfügung gestellt werden. Die „Gedächtnisschrift" ist den vielen Opfern
des Zweiten Weltkrieges gewidmet und denen, die in den 60 Jahren seit Nürnberg durch das
Völkerrecht Gerechtigkeit einforderten.

Unser tiefer Dank gilt allen Rednern für ihre Präsentation. In ganz besonderer Weise möchten wir
die Verdienste hervorheben von

Dekan Professor Lawrence Raful, Touro College Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center, der uns die
Möglichkeit zur Herausgabe dieses Buches geboten hat; Präsident und Vize-Präsident des
Oberlandesgerichts Nürnberg, Dr. Stefan Franke und Ewald Behrschmidt; Dekan Professor Dr. Mathias
Rohe, Juristische Fakultät der Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, für seine
unbürokratische Unterstützung in vielen Fällen; Rechtsanwalt Walter R. Hippel, Regionalvorstand der
DAJV, dessen unschätzbare Hilfe das Zustandekommen dieser Gedächtnisschrift ermöglicht hat; dem
K.G. Saur Verlag für die Veröffentlichung dieser Gedächtnisschrift.

Es steht außer Zweifel, dass ein Buch dieser Art seine Existenz noch vielen Anderen als den bereits
Erwähnten verdankt. Wir bedanken uns außerdem für Hilfe und Beistand in verschiedener Weise bei
Brigitte Gräßl, Ulrike Seeberger, Dagmar Schwarzbach und Sabine Trippmacher und bei den stets
hilfreichen Erlanger Studierenden Louisa Brennecke, Laura Wevelsiep, Alexander Horlamus und
Werner Thienemann.

Schlussendlich möchten wir uns gegenseitig für die Kooperation und außerordentlich angenehme
Zusammenarbeit bei der gemeinsamen Erstellung und Herausgabe dieses Buches bedanken.

Juni 2006

Herbert R. Reginbogin Christoph J.M. Safferling

10 Acknowledgements/Danksagung

German and American Sponsors/Deutsche und U.S.-amerikanische Sponsoren:

Universität Karlsruhe (TH) Institut für Geschichte Forschungsstelle „Widerstand gegen den
Nationalsozialismus im deutschen Südwesten"
German-American Institute Nuremberg/Germany
Documentation Centre Nazi Party Rally Grounds
The International Association of Genocide Scholars
Faber-Castell, Stein/Nürnberg
VAG Verkehrs-Aktiengesellschaft Nürnberg

With Underwriting Support from/Mit finanzieller Unterstützung durch

The New York State Assembly; Hon. Sol Wachtler; Melvyn Weiss/Milberg Weiss Bershad &
Schulman, LLP; United States Department of State, US Embassy Berlin and The Ethel and
Alexander Nichoson Foundation

Initiated by/Initiiert von

Professor Michael J. Bazyler
Whittier Law School
Professor Herbert R. Reginbogin
Touro College, Potsdam Germany Law Program, University of Potsdam, and Bogazici University,
Istanbul
Professor Lawrence Raful
Dean, Touro College Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center

With Special Thanks to/Besonderer Dank an

Hon. Sol Wachtler
Chief Judge of the New York State Court of Appeals (ret.)
Professor Howard A. Glickstein

Dean Emeritus, Touro College Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center

Conference Organizational Committee/Organisationsleitung

Dr. Stefan Franke, President, Superior Court Nuremberg; Ewald Behrschmidt, Vice President,
Superior Court Nuremberg-, Prof. Dr. Klaus Kastner, former President, Regional Court Nürnberg-
Fürth; Walter R. Hippel, Attorney at Law, Member of the Board of the German-American Lawyers'
Association-, Monika Müller-Rieger, Büro Müller-Rieger GbR, Prof. Herbert R. Reginbogin, Touro
College, Potsdam Germany Law Program, University of Potsdam, and Bogazici University
Istanbul; Dr. Christoph J.M. Safferling, Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg;
Mario Schaffer, Superior Court Nuremberg-, Hans-Christian Taubrich, Director of the
Documentation Centre, Nuremberg; Linda Howard Weissman, Assistant Dean, Touro College
Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center
Staff Organization/Sekretariat

Allison Flor and Carol Howell, Touro College Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center

Sponsors/weitere Sponsoren:
Siemens AG, OBI Baumarkt Franken, Stadtsparkasse Nürnberg, Eckart GmbH, Alpha
Projektentwicklung, City West, Nuremberg; Weiß Glimm & Kollegen, Erlangen; Hildmann,
Langenwalder, Lüders, Hoffmann, Erlangen; Dr. Beck & Partner, Nuremberg; Beiten Burkhardt,
Nuremberg; Salleck und Partner, Erlangen; Alumni Association of the Law Faculty of the
University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, the Vinzl-Foundation, Erlangen.
Introduction - Lessons of Nuremberg 11

Introduction - Lessons of Nuremberg

Returning to Courtroom 600 on the 60th Anniversary of the Nuremberg Trial against the Major
German War Criminals

Herbert R. Reginbogin & Christoph J.M. Safferling

I.
On November 20, 1945, the English President of the International Military Tribunal, Sir Geoffrey
Lawrence, opened trial proceedings to try twenty-one war criminals sitting in Courtroom 600 at the
Palace of Justice at Nuremberg. 1 The next day, Chief Counsel of the United States of America, Justice
Robert Jackson, presented the case for the prosecution pointing out the abominable acts of cruelty and
unmistakably confronted the world with the horrors of the German concentration camps. For the first
time in history, an international tribunal took on the grave responsibility of hearing a case against
economic, political and military leaders charged with crimes involving the commission of conspiracy,
crimes against the peace, war crimes, and 'crimes against humanity' (involving persecution, mass
deportation, and extermination on political, racial, or religious grounds). Although the Nuremberg trial
was an attempt to reconcile justice by punishing Nazi leaders, it has been difficult for people and
nations to live as neighbors with Germany again due to the amount of cruelty exhibited through the
awesome brutality and meticulousness with which Germans killed millions of harmless people. While
the mere shock of the Holocaust continues to leave a void in international affairs even sixty years after
World War II, attempts have been made to heal the wounds of the past by calling for the establishment
of an international system of justice modeled after the Nuremberg trials, which has met a good deal of
opposition. "We must never forget," Jackson declared in his opening address "that the record on which
we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow." This book will
examine a range of aspects surrounding the trials' legacy.

II.
The collection of papers in this book contains 33 different expert opinions and eyewitness accounts
of the Nuremberg trials, which were presented during a four-day-conference held in Nuremberg last
summer in July, 2005. A broad range of historical and contemporary topics are offered about the
historical pretext of the Nuremberg trials and impact on modern international criminal law. Papers
presented in this book were submitted in form of a manuscript for oral presentation, or transcripts of the
spoken word, or as an academic publication. Each paper includes an abstract in either German or
English to allow scholars, students and other interested readers greater accessibility to the valuable
contributions held at the conference and important references made in the papers.
At the outset of the conference, five scholars represented each of the countries that convened at the
International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Nuremberg, which constituted the four presiding allied nations
(the United States of America, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and France) over Germany's war
crimes. In this session we are told of the dominant role played by the American prosecution team in
planning and organizing the trial through Chief Prosecutor Robert H. Jackson, whose predominant aim
focused mainly to incriminate the Nazi defendants on conspiring to wage an aggressive war and not on
account of the Holocaust (Raymond Brown). In contrast the UK (David Cesarani) was at first skeptical
about holding a trial, but due to the enormous pressure exerted by the many exiled European
governments headquartered in London and the U.S. position, the UK decided to participate. France
(Hervé Ascensio), the last to join the IMT, was particularly interested in punitive justice for the

1
The Tribunal had originally planned to try twenty-four Nazi leaders, but Robert Ley committed suicide on October 25,
1945 and the trial of Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Hallbach had been postponed indefinitely owing to a serious health
condition. Martin Borman was not in the custody of the court and tried in absentia, who was officially proclaimed dead by
a German court almost ten years later, declaring he was killed on May 1 or 2, 1945.
12 Introduction - Lessons of Nuremberg

atrocities that occurred within its borders. The same held true for the Soviet Union (Michael Bazyler),
which suffered the greatest losses among the Allies in the 2nd World War with as many as 20 million
killed Soviet civilians, but had at the same time tried to cloud the issue that Stalin had ordered mass
atrocities. Finally, many in the German legal profession at the time viewed the trial (Albin Eser) as
nothing more than a piece of "victor's justice" and invalidation of retroactive lawmaking.
When reviewing the procedures of Nuremberg, discrepancies and flaws can be found as a result of
the challenges between the aims of criminal prosecution and history. Specifically, it is striking to note
that the Holocaust did not play the decisive role we would expect today in the prosecution of the Nazi
leaders. Even if Jewish organizations had considerable influence on the US prosecution (Michael
Marrus), the Nuremberg trial did little to enhance a collective understanding or consciousness of the
Holocaust {Donald Bloxham). The victims did not play the role at Nuremberg that they could and
should have (Sam Garkawe), as in any criminal trial, where victim's testimony is heard as evidence
giving survivors the opportunity to describe the life experiences and stories of cruelty they endured.
This would have made the trial much more dramatic and memorable to the public, and lent substantial
weight to the "guilty" verdict (Lawrence Douglas). The address of the former member of the US
prosecuting team, Whitney R. Harris, recalled the Nuremberg trial as a remarkable event.
Nuremberg was, however, not the first time ever that war crimes were prosecuted. In fact, after
World War I, Germany put hundreds of its own people on trial before national courts for committing
war crimes (Herbert Reginbogin), almost all of whom were acquitted. The city of Nuremberg was not
only the venue for the trial; it played quite an extraordinary role during the time of the Nazi regime
(Klaus Kastner). However, Justice Robert Jackson had different reasons to choose Nuremberg in
preparation of the IMT in 1945 other than the city's notorious Nazi past. (John Barrett). The legal
difficulties in prosecuting the Nazi criminals in Nuremberg had an impact on American jurisprudence,
which led to a revival of theories about natural law (Rodger Citron).
After the IMT in Nuremberg rendered its verdicts against the 21 accused Nazi leaders present and
one in abstentia, it concluded its assignment in October 1946. Twelve more trials were held in
Nuremberg under the sole jurisdiction of the USA as the occupying power in this sector of Germany.
The trial against members of the Nazi extermination squads (Einsatzgruppen) was presented by the
former Chief prosecutor, Benjamin Ferencz. Other trials were conducted against Nazi doctors (Louise
Harmon), against Nazi jurists (Harry Reicher) and against the Nazi-supporting German industry,
whereas the matter of compensation for forced labour was settled only in 2001 (Roland Bank). Also
after the end of World War II, several war criminals were prosecuted in the different German occupied
zones. The US administration conducted besides the trials at Nuremberg also special proceedings in
Dachau (Elisabeth Yavnai).
It is a different story about the national prosecution of Nazi criminals. After West Germany regained
its sovereignty, it retained the full responsibility to put former Nazis on trial. The record of both the
West- and East-German legal systems in prosecuting former Nazi collaborators is actually quite
shameful (Hinrich Riiping), and Germany's civil servants and judges were either not inclined or unable
to enforce existing laws to bring Nazi criminals to justice (Rebecca Wittmann). Maybe the most
spectacular and debated national crime against a former Nazi was the trial against Adolf Eichmann in
Jerusalem. The former prosecutor of Eichmann in Israel, Gabriel Bach, presented this and other cases in
Israel. A final presentation was made by (Greg James) about Australia and ist country's effort to
prosecute accused Nazi war criminals.
Before turning to the latest developments in international criminal law, one presentation (Claus
Kress) describes the German attitude towards international criminal law and finds that it has changed
considerably since Nuremberg. Today, Germany is a member of the International Criminal Court (ICC)
and a report was presented on the latest achievements at the ICC by one of its judges (Hans-Peter
Kaul). A quite different view was expressed by (Anne Bayefsky), who sees clearly an anti-Israeli bias in
decisions rendered by both the ICC and the United Nations. Several tribunals have been created to
protect human rights and prosecute crimes against humanity like the UN backed Special Court for
Sierra Leone (Wanda Akin). Although the ICC is still a fairly young institution, it is considered by the
Security Council of the United Nations to have the legal authority to bring war criminals to justice. The
Introduction - Lessons of Nuremberg 13

origins of the ICC can be traced back to the Nuremberg trials although many things have changed in
terms of enhancing both the efficiency of the proceedings and protecting the rights of the victim as well
as those of the accused {Andreas Zimmermann). Despite this international institution, international
criminal law depends on national, i.e. indirect enforcement; the ICC's jurisdiction is after all supposed
to be complementary to national jurisdictions (Dan Derby). Finally the role and the rights of the victim
deserve attention. The ICC has found quite an interesting and promising way to integrate the victim into
the overall procedure of the court (Roger Alford).
When looking at the history of Nazi Germany it cannot be overlooked that there were resistance
movements against Hitler, which included high profiled military and political leaders involved in
unsuccessful plots to kill Hitler (Winfried Heinemann).
Germany's fate was dramatically shaken as its eastern territory was occupied by the Soviet Union,
which set-up a socialist regime. This second totalitarian regime continued to exist until the end of the
Cold War marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany. Many people which
had lived through both regimes, experienced similar forms of suppression (Joachim Gauck).
At the very end of the conference, a paper was presented, which portrayed quite a different story,
the story of a photograph. Memories and pictures of Dachau's liberation, so horrible, one would never
be able to forget (Robert Wolfsori).

III.
A thread of international human rights law did exist even before World War I. Yet the idea of
inalienable right of human beings and humanity materialized in 1945 at the Nuremberg trials. While
human rights were promoted around the world and the United Nations embraced the Nuremberg
principles by adopting and codifying provisions of humanitarian law, the ideals of Nuremberg to
internationally prosecute crimes against humanity were put on ice during the Cold War. Yet the thread
of international criminal law was never completely forgotten as the United Nations, some national states
and the international civil society represented by a number of NGOs kept the fire burning to create a
permanent international criminal court. The UN International Law Commission continued drafting
codifications of international criminal law and statutes for an International Criminal Court, while some
countries never ceased to try bring former Nazi criminals to justice as in the case of the Eichmann Trial
in Israel. However, it would not be before the fall of the Berlin Wall that the thread of international
criminal prosecution would finally reappear as a means to respond to the ethnic cleansing and
massacres on the Balkans. Since then, international criminal law has been seen as a political tool
serving international peace and security while used sporadically to seek justice. At the moment, the
International Criminal Court is the knot at the end of the thread, which is heavily disputed currently as a
tool of "judicial intervention" and political agendas, which need to be rectified.
The "Gedachtnisschrift" attempts to shed light on some of the inconsistencies and complexities by
Judging Nuremberg: the Rallies, the Laws and the Trials sixty years after the proceedings began against
some of the major German war criminals. We are still mid-way upstream as reports are filed about
atrocities from around the world pointing out the need to develop a system of international justice. As
we turn to Nuremberg and its legacy, we can only hope that the papers in this volume will contribute in
finding an answers to enforce laws against war criminals how to effectively bring them to justice.
14 Einfuhrung - Lehren von Nürnberg

Einführung - Lehren von Nürnberg

Rückkehr in den Saal 600 zum 60. Jahrestag des Nürnberger Prozesses gegen die deutschen
Hauptkriegsverbrecher

Herbert R. Reginbogin & Christoph J.M. Sajferling

I.
Am 20. November 1945 eröffnete der englische Vorsitzende des Internationalen Militärtribunals, Sir
Geofirey Lawrence, die Hauptverhandlung im Strafverfahren gegen 21 anwesende Angeklagte im
Gerichtssaal 600 des Nürnberger Justizpalastes. 1 Am darauf folgenden Tag trug der Chefankläger der
Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika, der Bundesrichter Robert Jackson, die Anklage vor. Darin beschrieb
er die ungeheuerlichen Grausamkeiten des NS-Regimes und konfrontierte die Weltöffentlichkeit mit
dem Horror der Konzentrationslager. Zum ersten Mal in der Geschichte der Menschheit wurde
wirtschaftlichen, politischen und militärischen Führern vor einem internationalen Tribunal wegen des
Verbrechens der Verschwörung, Verbrechen gegen den Frieden, Kriegsverbrechen und „Verbrechen
gegen die Menschlichkeit" (darunter Verfolgung, Massendeportationen, Vernichtung wegen politischer,
rassischer oder religiöser Gründe) der Prozess gemacht. Mit diesem so genannten Nürnberger Prozess
wurde der Versuch unternommen, durch die strafrechtliche Verfolgung von wichtigen Nazi-Führern ein
Zusammenleben der Völker und Nationen als Nachbarn Deutschlands, das Millionen unschuldiger
Menschen mit erschreckender Brutalität und Perfektion ermordet hatte, wieder zu ermöglichen. Der
durch die Bekanntmachung des Holocaust ausgelöste Schock hat sich selbst 60 Jahre nach den
furchtbaren Ereignissen des 2. Weltkrieges noch nicht völlig verflüchtigt und überschattet auch heute
noch die internationalen Beziehungen. Nach Beendigung des Nürnberger Prozesses sind immer wieder
Versuche unternommen worden, internationale Strafgerechtigkeit nach dem Nürnberger Modell zu
etablieren, nicht ohne dabei auf erhebliche Opposition zu stoßen.
„Wir dürfen nie vergessen", betonte Jackson in seinem Eröffnungsplädoyer, „dass der Maßstab, mit
dem wir diese Angeklagten heute beurteilen, derselbe ist, mit dem die Geschichte uns morgen
beurteilen wird." In diesem Buch werden verschiedene Aspekte im Zusammenhang mit dem
Vermächtnis des Nürnberger Prozesses untersucht.

II.
Die hier vorgelegte Aufsatzsammlung enthält 33 Beiträge von Augenzeugen und Wissenschaftlern
der Nürnberger Prozesse, die anlässlich einer viertägigen Konferenz im Juli 2005 in Nürnberg
präsentiert wurden. Die Spannbreite des Buches umfasst historische und aktuelle Themen, ausgehend
von der geschichtlichen Entwicklung hin zum Nürnberger Prozess bis zu dessen Auswirkungen auf das
moderne Völkerstrafrecht. Die Beiträge liegen teilweise in Form eines Redemanuskripts, als
Niederschrift des gesprochenen Wortes, oder als wissenschaftliche Ausarbeitung vor. Um
Wissenschaftlern, Studierenden und anderen interessierten Lesern den Zugang zu den Vorträgen der
zweisprachigen Konferenz zu erleichtern, umfasst jeder Beitrag entweder eine deutsche oder englische
Zusammenfassung.
Zu Beginn der Konferenz stellten fünf Wissenschaftler, stellvertretend für die am Internationalen
Militärtribunal (IMT) in Nürnberg beteiligten Nationen (die Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika, das
Vereinigte Königreich, die Sowjetunion und Frankreich als Richtemationen und Deutschland als
Heimatstaat der Angeklagten) die Interessen ihres Landes an dem Prozess dar. Dabei wurde die
herausragende Rolle des US-amerikanischen Anklageteams um den Chefankläger Robert Jackson bei
der Planung und Durchführung des Verfahrens deutlich, dessen primäres Interesse darin bestand, die

1
Ursprünglich waren 24 ehemalige NS-Größen angeklagt. Robert Ley nahm sich am 25 Oktober 1945 das Leben; das
Verfahren gegen Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Hallbach wurde wegen Verhandlungsunfahigkeit auf unbestimmte Zeit
vertagt; gegen Martin Bormann wurde in Abwesenheit verhandelt. Zehn Jahre später wurde Bormann von einem deutschen
Gericht für tot erklärt, wobei festgestellt wurde, dass er am 1. oder 2. Mai 1945 umgekommen war.
Einfuhrung - Lehren von Nürnberg 15

Angeklagten für den Angriffskrieg und weniger für den Holocaust strafrechtlich zur Verantwortung zu
ziehen (Raymond Brown). Im Vergleich dazu war England (David Cesarani) zunächst skeptisch, was
die Durchführung von Strafverfahren insgesamt anbelangte, entschloss sich schließlich aber auf Grund
des enormen Drucks seitens der vielen in London anwesenden europäischen Exilregierungen und den
USA doch zur Kooperation. Frankreich (Hervé Ascensiö) kam als letzte Nation zur Teilnahme am IMT
und war besonders daran interessiert, die auf französischem Territorium verübten Verbrechen zu
sühnen. Das Gleiche gilt für die Sowjetunion (Michael Bazyler), die mit fast 20 Millionen toten
Zivilisten die höchsten Verluste unter den Alliierten zu beklagen hatte, zugleich aber darauf bedacht
war, die von Stalin befohlenen Massenverbrechen zu verschleiern. In Deutschland schließlich (Albin
Eser) war die Ansicht weit verbreitet, dass „Nürnberg" nichts als blanke „Siegeijustiz" war und ein
Verstoß gegen das Rückwirkungsverbot darstellte.
Das Verfahren in Nürnberg bringt die Schwierigkeiten zu Tage, die entstehen, wenn Strafverfahren
zugleich einer geschichtlichen Aufarbeitung gerecht werden sollen. Im Speziellen ist es erstaunlich,
dass der Holocaust im Nürnberger Prozess bei weitem nicht die Rolle gespielt hat, die wir heute
erwarten würden. Trotz des nicht unerheblichen Einflusses jüdischer Organisationen vor allem auf das
Anklageteam der USA (Michael Marrus) ist unser kollektives Verständnis des Holocausts wenig vom
Nürnberger Prozess geprägt (Donald Bloxham). Opfer fanden dort nicht das Podium, das ihnen
zugestanden hätte, um als Überlebende ihre Erfahrungen der unsagbaren Grausamkeiten öffentlich zu
formulieren (Sam Garkawe). Das Nürnberger Verfahren wäre durch eine breitere Opferbeteiligung für
die Öffentlichkeit um einiges dramatischer und einprägsamer gewesen; zugleich hätte der Schuldspruch
dadurch eine höhere Legitimität erhalten (Lawrence Douglas). Der Vortrag des früheren Mitglieds des
Anklageteams der USA, Whitney R. Harris, brachte die damaligen Vorgänge im Gerichtssaal 600
neuerlich lebendig vor Augen.
Grundsätzlich stellte Nürnberg für die strafrechtliche Verfolgung von Kriegsverbrechen kein
Novum dar. Tatsächlich waren in Deutschland nach Ende des 1. Weltkriegs gegen Hunderte von
Deutschen vor nationalen Gerichten Anklagen erhoben worden; die Verfahren endeten jedoch fast alle
mit einem Freispruch (Herbert Reginbogin). Nürnberg war nicht nur der Ort, an dem die Prozesse
abgehalten wurden; die Stadt spielte auch eine besondere Rolle in der Geschichte des NS-Regimes
(Klaus Kastner). Trotz dieser NS-Vergangenheit Nürnbergs standen für Robert Jackson 1945 andere
Gründe für die Standortwahl im Vordergrund (John Barrett). Die rechtlichen Schwierigkeiten mit der
strafrechtlichen Ahndung der NS-Verbrecher blieben auch in den USA nicht ohne Wirkung und führten
zu einer Wiederbelebung von Naturrechtstheorien (Rodger Citron).
Nach der Urteilsverkündung gegen die 21 anwesenden und einen abwesenden Angeklagten schloss
das IMT in Nürnberg im Oktober 1946 seine Tore. Zwölf weitere Verfahren fanden im
Schwurgerichtssaal in Nürnberg statt, allerdings unter der alleinigen Kompetenz der amerikanischen
Besatzungsmacht (sog. Nürnberger Nachfolgeprozesse). Im Verfahren gegen Mitglieder der
„Einsatzgruppen" vertrat Benjamin Ferencz die Anklage. Es wurden noch weitere Verfahren gegen
Nazi-Ärzte (Louise Harmon), gegen Juristen (Harry Reicher) und gegen die deutsche Industrie
durchgeführt, wobei die Frage der Entschädigung für Zwangsarbeit erst im Jahr 2001 geklärt wurde
(Roland Bank). Es wurden nach Ende des 2. Weltkriegs in den individuellen Besatzungszonen
verschiedene Prozesse gegen deutsche Kriegsverbrecher durchgeführt. So fanden auch in Dachau neben
den Nürnberger Nachfolgeprozessen Kriegverbrecherverfahren statt (Elisabeth Yavnai).
Auf der Konferenz wurden auch die nationalen Verfahren gegen Nazi-Verbrecher angesprochen, die
sehr unterschiedlich verlaufen sind. Nach der Wiedererlangung staatlicher Souveränität war
Deutschland für die Strafverfolgung der eigenen Nazi-Verbrecher verantwortlich. Im Rückblick muss
man allerdings feststellen, dass die Geschichte der west- wie ostdeutschen gerichtlichen Aufarbeitung
eher beschämend ist (Hinrich Rüping) und dass die deutschen Beamten und Richter nicht willens oder
unfähig waren, die bestehenden Gesetze des Landes anzuwenden, um die NS-Verbrechen zu ahnden
(Rebecca Wittmann). Vielleicht der spektakulärste und umstrittenste nationale Prozess gegen einen
früheren Nazi-Verbrecher war der Prozess gegen Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Der frühere Ankläger
Eichmanns in Israel, Gabriel Bach, berichtet von diesem und anderen Prozessen in Israel. Zuletzt wurde
noch ein Blick auf Kriegsverbrecherprozesse in Australien geworfen (Greg James).
16 Einfuhrung - Lehren von Nürnberg

Vor verschiedenen Beiträgen zu jüngsten Entwicklungen im Völkerstrafrecht, wird die Haltung

Deutschlands zum Völkerstrafrecht betrachtet, die seit dem Nürnberger Verfahren erstaunliche
Wendungen genommen hat (Claus Kress). Heute ist Deutschland ein wichtiges Mitglied des
Internationalen Strafgerichtshofs (ICC). Über den dortigen aktuellen Stand berichtete der deutsche
Richter am ICC (Hans-Peter Kauf). Die nächste Rednerin erhob sowohl gegen den ICC als auch die
Vereinten Nationen den Vorwurf einer insgesamt offenkundig anti-israelischen Haltung (Anne
Bayefsky). In den letzten Jahren wurden verschiedene Tribunale zum Schutz der Menschenrechte und
der strafrechtlichen Ahndung von Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit eingerichtet, wie das von den
Vereinten Nationen unterstützte Sondergericht für Sierra Leone (Wanda Akiri). Trotz seines jungen
Alters wird nun der ICC vom Sicherheitsrat der Vereinten Nationen mit der Verfolgung von
Kriegsverbrechen beauftragt. Er entwickelt sich so zur wichtigsten Institution der Durchsetzung von
Völkerstrafrecht. Die Ursprünge des ICC können zum Nürnberger Tribunal zurückverfolgt werden,
auch wenn sich zwischenzeitlich viele Dinge verändert haben, um die Effizienz des Gerichts zu erhöhen
und die Rechte der Opfer sowie der Angeklagten zu verbessern (Andreas Zimmermann). Trotz der
Existenz dieser internationalen Institution hängt die Durchsetzung von Völkerstrafrecht von nationaler
Strafverfolgung, d.h. indirekter Durchsetzung, ab. Schließlich ist die Kompetenz des ICC komplementär
zur Zuständigkeit nationaler Behörden (Dan Derby). Zuletzt verdienen die Rolle und Rechte der Opfer
gesonderte Aufmerksamkeit. Beim ICC wurde ein interessanter und viel versprechender Weg gefunden,
Opfer in das Strafverfahren zu integrieren (Roger Alford).
Die Nazi-Geschichte in Deutschland wäre nicht vollständig, würde man nicht auch den Aktivitäten
der innerdeutschen Widerstandsbewegungen Beachtung schenken. Eine davon bestand in dem von
hohen militärischen und politischen Persönlichkeiten initiierten, allerdings missglückten Attentat auf
Hitler ( Winfried Heinemann).
Das Schicksal Deutschlands wurde nach dem Krieg auf dramatische Art und Weise durch den
Umstand beeinflusst, dass in der sowjetischen Besatzungszone ein „sozialistisches" Regime nach
kommunistischem Vorbild errichtet wurde. Dieses im Anschluss an den Nationalsozialismus zweite
totalitäre System auf deutschem Boden mit ähnlichen Formen der Unterdrückung konnte sich bis zum
Ende des Kalten Krieges halten. Der Fall der Berliner Mauer und die Vereinigung der beiden Teile
Deutschlands stehen gleichsam als Symbol für das Ende der Blockbildung (Joachim Gauck).
Das Ende der Konferenz bestand in einem etwas anderen Vortrag. Es handelte sich dabei um die
Geschichte eines Fotografen, der mit erschütternden Bildern und Erinnerungen, die man niemals wird
vergessen können, die Befreiung des Konzentrationslagers Dachau schilderte (Robert Wolfson).

III.
Hinweise auf ein universelles Konzept von Menschenrechten waren schon vor dem 1. Weltkrieg
existent. Im Nürnberger Prozess allerdings hat sich die Idee unveräußerlicher Rechte der Menschen und
der Menschheit auf wundersame Weise materialisiert. Daran anschließend wurden Menschenrechte auf
dem gesamten Globus publik gemacht und die Vereinten Nationen verabschiedeten neben den
„Nürnberger Prinzipien" verschiedene Menschenrechtspakte, das Ideal von Nürnberg aber, nämlich die
internationale strafrechtliche Verfolgung von Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit, wurde während
des Kalten Kriegs auf Eis gelegt. Trotzdem erlitt die Idee eines Völkerstrafrechts niemals eine völlige
Niederlage; im Gegenteil: die Vereinten Nationen, verschiedene Nationalstaaten und nicht zuletzt eine
internationale Zivilgesellschaft vertreten durch eine Reihe von Nichtregierungsorganisationen, fachten
die Flamme für einen ständigen Internationalen Strafgerichtshof immer wieder an. Der Rechtsausschuss
der Vereinten Nationen formulierte in regelmäßigen Abständen Entwürfe sowohl für eine Kodifikation
von Völkerstrafrecht sowie für Statuten eines internationalen Strafgerichts. Einige Nationalstaaten
ließen nicht in ihrem Eifer nach, Nazi-Verbrecher zu verfolgen und vor Gericht zu bringen, wie Israel
im Fall Eichmann. Die Idee eines internationalen Strafgerichtshofs kehrte erst nach dem Fall der
Berliner Mauer auf die politische Agenda zurück, um damit auf ethnische Säuberungen und Massaker
auf dem Balkan reagieren zu können. Seitdem wird Völkerstrafrecht als ein politisches Mittel zur
Erhaltung und Wiederherstellung von internationalem Frieden und Sicherheit eingesetzt. Am Ende
Einführung - Lehren von Nürnberg 17

dieser Entwicklung steht zum jetzigen Zeitpunkt der ICC, der zwar zur Juristischen Intervention"
herangezogen wird, aber politisch international hoch umstritten ist.
60 Jahre nach dem Verfahren gegen die deutschen Hauptkriegsverbrecher versucht dieses Buch, den
Nürnberger Prozess zu bewerten und dabei Zusammenhänge und Widersprüche aufzuzeigen.
Angesichts stetig wiederkehrender Berichte über Massenverbrechen in der Welt befinden wir uns erst
auf halbem Weg hin zu einem effektiven System internationaler Strafgerechtigkeit. Mit dem Blick auf
das Vermächtnis von Nürnberg hoffen wir, dass dieser Band dazu beiträgt, Antworten auf die Fragen zu
finden, wie Recht durchgesetzt werden kann und Menschenrechtsverbrecher wirkungsvoll für ihre
Taten zur Verantwortung gezogen werden können.
I. History and National Perspectives of the IMT at Nuremberg/
Historische und nationale Aspekte des IMT von Nürnberg
The American Perspective on Nuremberg: A Case of Cascading Ironies 21

Raymond M. Brown
The American Perspective on Nuremberg: A Case of Cascading Ironies
It is an honor to attend this 60th Anniversary Nuremberg conference and to explore the American
perspective on the Nuremberg trials. There are many states of mind appropriate to examining the US
point of view. At this moment in history, however, the most appropriate mental state is a healthy taste
of irony. 1 1 would like to explore three of these ironies.
The first emanates from the contrast between the profound impact the Nuremberg trials have had on
international law, and the fact that the United States, a prime moving force behind the trials came close
to neither fostering nor participating in them. A second flows from the fact that the paramount legal
principle motivating US participation at Nuremberg, criminalizing aggression, has been the least
durable of the Nuremberg principles. The final, and most dramatic irony lies in the efforts of the current
American Administration to advocate new norms governing the use of force and to foster new attitudes
suggesting US unwillingness to adhere to international law. These efforts could nullify much of the
meaning of Nuremberg for the US.
However, before examining these ironies let me suggest a framework for analyzing the American
role at Nuremberg. Professor Richard Falk has described a post war "normative architecture"2 which
rejects "genocide, crimes against humanity" and other violations of human rights and humanitarian law.
The foundation for this architecture can be found in a trilogy3 of documents, the London Charter, the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the UN Charter. This trilogy and the resulting normative
architecture has provided a quantum leap in the protections afforded to two vulnerable groups: (1) non-
combatants during armed conflict and (2) all human beings subject to persecution by government
authorities. Those protections include establishing and confirming norms, criminalizing violations of
many of those norms and, where necessary, conferring jurisdiction on international courts and tribunals
to adjudicate major norm violations.
Within this trilogy of documents and the resulting normative architecture, the London Charter is
unique in providing all these forms of protection. It assessed individual criminal responsibility before a
multinational tribunal, established new norms and reaffirmed aspects of customary law. Additionally, in
charging violations of "crimes against humanity" the Charter challenged the idea that Westphalian

' It is not suggested that this paper constitutes an exhaustive or comprehensive exploration of the US contribution to
Nuremberg. See for example Evan J. Wallach, The Procedural And Evidentiary Rules of the Post-World War II War
Crimes Trials: Did They Provide An Outline For International Legal Procedure?' 37 COLUMB. J. TRANSNAT'L L. 851
(1999) on the US contribution to the Rules of Procedure and Evidence at the trial.
2
Richard Falk has explained the term in the following way: "There has been the remarkable emergence of what I would
call a normative architecture that repudiates genocide and crimes against humanity that has been erected in the half century
since World War II." Keynote Speech, Remembering the Holocaust and the Geopolitical Persistence of Indifference,
Conference on Law and the Humanities: Representation of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Other Human Rights Violations at
Thomas Jefferson School of Law (Jan. 17, 2005). For those who might see the "normative architecture" as an ideological
construct, see the view from a career military officer, Lt Col. Schmitt.
[f]or nearly as long as humans have engaged in organized violence, there have been attempts to fashion normative
architectures to constrain and limit it. Such architectures - labeled the law of armed conflict in late Twentieth century
parlance - are the product of a symbiotic relationship between law and war.
Michael N. Schmitt, 'Bellum Americanum: The U.S. View of Twenty-First Century War and its Possible Implications
for the Law of Armed Conflict', 19 MICH. J. INT'L L. 1051, 1051 (1998). The "Deep Concerns" expressed by twelve senior
Flag and General Officers about the nomination of Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General because of his characterization of
Geneva Convention protections of POWs from torture as "quaint" further reflects the legal rather than political nature of
the normative architecture. An Open Letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, (available at
http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/us_law/etn/gonzales/statements/gonz_military_010405.pdf.
3
I note with interest Professor Rebecca Witmann's observation that one of the prosecutors at the Auschwitz Trial
conducted in the German municipal court system in 1967 "sought to place his efforts in the context of the worldwide
human rights movement that had begun with the creation of the United Nations and been solidified with the human rights
convention." See comment on closing argument of Hans Grofmann BEYOND JUSTICE: THE AUSCHWITZ TRIAL, 195
(2005).
22 Raymond M. Brown

sovereignty was absolute and laid the groundwork for extending international jurisdiction to
humanitarian law (and ultimately human rights) violations even during peacetime.4
The notable contributions of the United States to this process include its role in spawning the
Nuremberg trials, its determination, to reinforce existing norms governing the use of force, and its
desire to criminalize violations of the norm prohibiting aggressive war. (Additionally, the United States
supported, albeit inconsistently, evolution of much of the balance of the normative architecture.)

Trial, "Punishment" or Both

The initial irony surrounding American participation in Nuremberg springs from the very existence
of multinational postwar trials for "major war criminals of the European Axis counties." Despite the
huge shadow that the trials have cast in retrospect, judicial proceedings for leading Nazis and alleged
German war criminals were not a foregone conclusion for most of the war. Both the US and Great
Britain were undecided about non-judicial punishment for Senior Nazi's as late as 1944.
The 1943 Moscow Declaration's 5 Statement of Atrocities noted that most offending German
military personnel and Nazis would face legal process. The Statement warned that those who took
"consenting part" in
"...atrocities, massacres and executions will be sent back to the countries in which their
abominable deeds were done in order that they may be judged and punished according to the laws of
these liberated countries and of free governments which will be erected therein.
However, the major potential offenders, "German criminals whose offenses have no particular
geographical localization,"7 faced the calculatedly ambiguous promise of being "punished by joint
decision of the government of the Allies."8
At the Quebec Conference of 1944 Roosevelt and Churchill endorsed both the "Napoleonic
Precedent" (punishment without trials) and the Morgenthau Plan (Germany reduced to an agrarian non
industrial society and summary executions of leading Nazis).9
The draconian nature of Morgenthau's proposal left little room for trials for major violators. It
advocated the following:
APPENDIX B
PUNISHMENT OF CERTAIN W A R CRIMES AND TREATMENT OF SPECIAL GROUPS.
A. Punishment of Certain War Criminals
(1) Arch-Criminals.
A list of the Arch criminals of this war whose obvious guilt has been recognized by the United
Nations shall be drawn up as soon as possible and transmitted to the appropriate military authorities.
The military authorities shall be instructed with respect to all persons who are on such list as follows:
(a) They shall be apprehended as soon as possible and identified as soon as possible after
apprehension, the identification to be approved by an officer of the General rank.
(b) When such identification has been made, the person identified shall be put to death
forthwith by firing squads made up of soldiers of the United Nations.10

4
See, e.g. Telford Taylor FINAL R E P O R T T O THE S E C R E T A R Y OF T H E A R M Y ON THE N U R E M B E R G W A R
C R I M E S TRIALS U N D E R C O N T R O L C O U N C I L L A W NO. 10, at 64-5, 69, 224-229 (1949).
5
See Declaration of Four Nations on General Security, 9 DEP'T ST. BULL. 308 (1943), reprinted in 38 AM. J. INT'L L. 5
(1944) (Hereafter M o s c o w Declaration).
6
Moscow Declaration, Statement of Atrocities.
7
Ibid.
8
Ibid.
9
Ibid. There does appear to be a subordinate irony that on September 15th, the day the President "initialed" the
Morgenthau Plan in Quebec, that Col Murray Bernays, assigned to G - l in the War Department distributed a memorandum
in which the beginnings of the "Nuremberg ideas" were to be found Telford Taylor THE A N A T O M Y OF T H E
N U R E M B E R G TRIALS (Hereafter A N A T O M Y ) at 35 (1992).
The American Perspective on Nuremberg: A Case of Cascading Ironies 23

The first official indication that the US position would change came on January 3, 1945. Roosevelt
sent a brief note to Secretary of State Stettinius which constituted the President's first and only written
communication on the subject. Please send me a brief report on the state of the proceedings before the
War Crimes Commission, and particularly the attitude of the US representative on offenses to be
brought against Hitler and the chief Nazi war criminals. The charges against the top Nazis should
include an indictment for waging aggressive warfare, in violation of the Kelloggf-Briand] Pact. Perhaps
these and other charges might be joined in a conspiracy indictment."
Of course this memo did not spring without prompting from the President's pen. Both Nuremberg
participants12 and subsequent scholars13 believe that Roosevelt was heavily influenced by the work of
Colonel William Chandler of the War Department, one of the moving forces shaping American
perspectives on the eventual trials and an advocate of prosecuting the crime against peace. However,
even Chandler and other War Department lawyers did not begin actively working on the legal
foundations for post war trials until the fall of 1944.
The broader American consensus for trials developed slowly as well. In April of 1945, just weeks
before President Truman appointed Associate Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson as the US Chief
Counsel for war crimes, Jackson had suggested in his famous "Rule of Law Among Nations" speech14
that he would not enter into the "controversy" about the wisdom of a "military or political" decision to
execute war criminals "high or humble."15 (The speech has become better known for Jackson's warning
that no man should be tried "if you are not willing to see him freed if proven not guilty"). Although
Jackson accepted Truman's offer and was committed wholeheartedly to the notion of war crimes trials,
he more than once threatened the British, Soviets and the French with the prospect of withdrawing from
the London Charter negotiations and holding separate American proceedings.1
The substance of President Roosevelt's Note of January 1945 provides additional evidence of the
late hour at which the US decided to conduct international post war trials. If the President had
determined early in the war to focus primarily on "aggression" and "conspiracy" much of the legal
analysis for the trials could have commenced as early as 1942. We now know that the Tribunal's verdict
focused on Germany's long list of treaty violations in lieu of an element analysis of the crime against
peace. These treaty violations were well known before 1944, as were the contents of Me in Kampf. cited
in the Judgment's analysis of the German preparation for war. For example, the fate of Rudolf Hess
hinged almost entirely on documents available early in the war. He was convicted on Counts 1 and 2 in
large part on the basis of public speeches made and orders he had signed before his 1941 flight to the
United Kingdom.
These observations do not denigrate the significant evidence accumulated by the prosecution during
the occupation of Germany or suggest that prosecutors or pre-war planners could have known the

10
Italics in original, bold text added for this paper. Memorandum from Henry Morgenthau Jr. to President Roosevelt
(the Morgenthau Plan), September 5, 1944 Bradley F. Smith THE AMERICAN ROAD TO NUREMBERG, THE
DOCUMENTARY RECORD, 27-8 1944-1945 (1982).
11
Roosevelt Memorandum to Stettinius cited in ANATOMY at 37.
12
ANATOMY at 38.
13
Professor Jonathan A. Bush has observed that Roosevelt's note was a "milestone on the road to Nuremberg" and that
Chandler's apparent involvement in inspiring it is "a humble reminder of a time when Pentagon lawyers were well in
advance of activists and academics in formulating human rights theories," in: '"The Supreme ... Crime" And Its Origins:
The Lost Legislative History o f the Crime Of Aggressive War' 102 COLUMB. L. Rev. 2324, 2363-4 (2002) Hereafter Lost
Legislative History.
14
This section of the speech cited ANATOMY 44-5. The entire text can be found at http://www.roberthjackson.org/
Man/theman2- 7- 7-1/.
15
Jackson would later declaim in his opening statement at the trials "That four great nations, flushed with victory and
stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one
of the most significant tributes that Power ever has paid to Reason."
16
In July of 1945, during the four power negotiations on the London Charter Jackson threatened to withdraw and hold
separate American sponsored trials because he was not satisfied with the authority held by the other negotiators.
(ANATOMY, 63). Subsequently Jackson issued the same threat in frustration at the substantive disagreement over the
scope of the crime against peace. (ANATOMY, 66-7).
24 Raymond M. Brown

principle evidence on which the Judges would rely. However, it is clear that preparatory analysis for
"conspiracy" and "aggression" could have begun earlier than the work on Counts 3 and 4 had there
been a decision before 1945 to proceed with trials.
The possibility that there might not have been any Nuremberg trials becomes more dramatic when
we acknowledge the belated endorsement of trials by the United Kingdom. The impact of two twentieth
century wars involving Germany, and the conduct of the leaders of the insatiably bellicose17 Third
Reich, left the British war Cabinet still favoring summary executions as late as April of 1945.18
The more we value the trials' historic and legal impact, and closer we study the catalytic role of the
US, the more pronounced is the ironic possibility that the trials could easily have been replaced by
summary executions or by the exclusive use of national traditional military tribunals, processes that
would have lacked Nuremberg's profound legacy.

Victor's Justice or Not

Some contemporary voices charged that the entire Nuremberg effort was fatally flawed. All of those
charges did not emanate from sources as tainted as Hermann Goering, who when he received his
indictment, allegedly added to it the phrase, "The victor will always be the judge and the vanquished the
accused."19 The Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Harlan F. Stone, (annoyed that he
had not been consulted about Jackson's appointment to serve as war crimes prosecutor while remaining
on the Supreme Court) opined,
"Jackson is away conducting his high-grade lynching party in Nuremberg. I don't mind what he
does to the Nazis, but I hate to see the pretense that he is running a court and proceeding according to
common law. This is a little too sanctimonious a fraud to meet my old-fashioned ideas. "2
Immediately after the trials, Senator Robert Taft used the criticism of crimes against peace
to condemn both the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials.
"I believe that most Americans view with discomfort the war trials which have just been concluded
in Germany and are proceeding in Japan. They violate that fundamental principle of American law
that a man cannot be tried under an ex post facto statute. The trial of the vanquished by the victors
cannot be impartial, no matter how it is hedged about with the forms ofjustice. I question whether the
hanging of those who, however despicable, were the leaders of the German people will ever
discourage the making of aggressive war, for no one makes aggressive war unless he expects to win.
About this whole judgment there is the spirit of vengeance, and vengeance is seldom justice. The
hangings of the eleven men convicted will be a blot on the American record which we shall long
, ,»21
regret.
Over the ensuing 60 years that broad criticism of Nuremberg has receded22 even as uncertainty
about the viability of the crime against peace has remained. The establishment during the post cold war
years of the Ad Hoc Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the Special Court for Sierra
Leone and the entering into force of the Rome Treaty for the International Criminal Court have built on
the legal precedents, the political example, and the spirit of Nuremberg. As a lawyer practicing as co-

" For an excellent synthesis of the relationship of Hitler's regime and military Aggression see Richard Bessel NAZISM
AND WAR (2004).
18
ANATOMY at 35.
19
Lieutenant Colonel Michael A. Newton, 'Comparative Complementarity: Domestic Jurisdiction Consistent with the
Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court ',167 MIL. L. REV. 20, 23 (2001).
20
Graeme A. Barry, "The Gifted Judge": An Analysis of the Judicial Career of Robert H. Jackson', 38 ALBERTA L.
REV. 880, 883 (2000).
21
See Mary Margaret Penrose, 'Lest We Fail: The Importance of Enforcement in International Criminal Law', 15 AM.
U. INT'L L. REV. 321, 330 fn 34 (2000).
22
But see, Istvan Deak, The Thinkable, "Acting on the basis of [the Llandovery Castle case at Leipzig], the Nuremberg
Court and the postwar German courts, at least in my own view, could have tried and severely punished all the Nazi mass
murderers. Instead the courts chose to create legally doubtful ex-post-facto laws so as to punish the defendants." [Review
essay] The New Republic, February 18, 2002.
The American Perspective on Nuremberg: A Case of Cascading Ironies 25

counsel for an accused 23 at the Special Court for Sierra Leone during 2004, I was continuously
impressed at the frequency and vigor with which Nuremberg was cited as a precedent by Judges,
Prosecutors, and Defense Counsel. 2 In fact some observers maintain that "contemporary international
criminal courts typically treat Nuremberg precedent as canonical." 25
The American commitments to "aggression" and "conspiracy" found the US pressing against the
boundaries of existing international law. Although conspiracy, has gained traction 6 since Nuremberg,
in 1945 and 1946 it endured vigorous attacks. The French and Soviet delegates were confounded by the
concept during the Charter negotiations. During deliberations, the French Judge Donnedieu de Vabres
believed that the charge was "ex post facto" 27 and would likely lead to a revised version of the German
"stab in the back-legend." 28
Despite the Judges' ultimate acceptance of conspiracy to wage aggressive war, their sentencing
calculus suggests it was a less than wholehearted embrace. Only defendants convicted of war crimes
and crimes against humanity were executed. 29 Hess, convicted only on Counts 1 and 2 was sentenced to
Spandau. An intellectual fault line existed between the conspiracy and the crime against peace on one
hand, and war crimes and crimes against humanity on the other.
Despite this skepticism, conspiracy has continued to remain a viable part of international criminal
law. A much less favorable view can be taken of the charge most important to the US and to Robert
Jackson, the crime against peace. Once the US was committed to holding the trials, (or at least to
negotiating the London Charter) it was primarily motivated by a desire to solidify legal norms
governing aggression and to criminalize the violation of those norms.
This highlights the irony that this objective was only partially achieved and is now being challenged
by the United States. The U N ' s ratification of the Nuremberg judgments 30 and the adoption of Article
51 of the UN Charter 31 reflect the rapid acceptance of the prohibition of aggression in international law.
However, the criminalizing of the violation of this norm has been the most heavily and trenchantly
resisted aspect of the Nuremberg experience.
This negative reaction has not been restricted to legal scholars or critics with questionable anti-Nazi
credentials. General Matthew Ridgeway, wartime commander of the 82nd Airborne Division and
ultimately President Eisenhower's Army Chief of Staff believed that, 32

23
There were nine detainees in the Special Court Detention Facility. (No accused had been granted bail.) Except for the
Sierra Leonean Army, each of the main military forces active during the conflict was represented. Three accused were from
the Revolutionary United Front, RUF, three from the Civilian Defense Force, CDF, and three from the Armed Forces
Revolutionary Council, AFRC. Although prosecutors originally sought a joint trial, the Special Court severed the
proceeding into three different trials. The three RUF accused were Issa Sesay, Augustine Gbao, and Morris Kallon; they
faced indictment SCSL-04-15-T. I was co-counsel to Kallon.
24
This was especially intense in citations to the High Command Case in disputes over distinctions between "staff" and
"command" functions during arguments about the scope of command responsibility, and in citations to the Nuremberg
Judgment over the nature of "criminal enterprise," a critical theory of liability in the AFRC and RUF indictments.
25
See Allison Marston Danner and Jenny S. Martinez, 'Guilty Associations: Joint Criminal Enterprise, Command
Responsibility, and the Development of International Criminal Law Guilty Associations: Joint Criminal Enterprise,
Command Responsibility, and the Development of International Criminal Law93 CALIF. L. RFV. 75, 118 (2005).
26
Id.
27
Bradley F. Smith, REACHING JUDGMENT AT NUREMBERG, 122 (1977).
2
" Id., at 1256.
29
Except for the frequently criticized Streicher verdict.
30
Affirmation of the Principles of International Law recognized by the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal. Resolution
95 (I) of the United Nations General Assembly, 11 December 1946.
31
All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity
or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.
32
Cited in THE LAWS OF WAR: A COMPREHENSIVE COLLECTION OF PRIMARY DOCUMENTS ON
INTERNATIONAL LAWS GOVERNING ARMED CONFLICT (W. Michael Reisman and Chris T. Antoniou eds. 1994),
334 citing, DOENITZ AT NUERMBERG: A REAPPRAISAL; WAR CRIMES AND THE MILITARY PROFESSIONAL
(H.K., Thompson Jr. and Henry Sturtzeds. 1975) 181, 194.
26 Raymond M. Brown

"[t]o apprehend, arraign and try an individual for the wanton killing - murder, if you please, - of
prisoners of war, for example, is one thing. To do likewise to individuals who waged war in the
uniform of their nation and under the orders or directives of their superiors is another and quite
different thing. I believe the former is fully justified. I believe the latter is unjustified and repugnant to
the code of enlightened governments. ... Until such distant date, if this ever transpires, as nations can
and will agree on a world political organization with judicial tribunals whose jurisdiction is
acknowledged and whose judgments are accepted, I think trials in the second category described
above, are steps backwards to the instant past when the fate of a defeated people was determined at the
whim of a victor. "
Raymond Aran who edited France Libre, newspaper of the Free French forces and became a
prominent post-war intellectual 33 held a similar view.
Interestingly, two of Jackson's Nuremberg assistant's abandoned their defense of the crime against
peace against the ex post facto charge in their later years. Telford Taylor's 1992 memoir recites his own
1945 memorandum evaluating the draft executive agreement for the London Charter. In his
memorandum he offered the elegant but unpersuasive argument that the aggressive war charge survives
the ex post facto attack,34 because "this is a political decision to declare and apply a principle of
international law."35. However, in the memoir's final chapter, Epilogue and Assessment, Taylor
conceded that,
"Arguments in support of punishing individuals ex post facto for violation of the crime against
peace can be made, but, if conducted on a plane devoid of political and emotion factors will be won by
the defense. But in 1945 those very factor were overwhelming. Peoples whose nations had been
attacked and dismembered without warning, wanted legal retribution whether or not this was a first
time.' The inclusion of the crime against peace vastly enhanced the world's interest in a support to the
trials at Nuremberg. "36
Professor Bernard Meltzer, who served under Jackson at Nuremberg, also expressed a change of
heart concerning the ex post facto criticism of the crime against peace.
"The international formulations relied on by Justice Jackson were silent about individual
responsibility for aggressive war. Indeed, such responsibility was disclaimed during the confirmation
discussions in the United States Senate of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, a pact on which Jackson heavily
relied. Thus, Senator Borah, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, had declared
that the pact was an appeal solely to the conscience of the world and that its breach was not to lead to
any punitive consequences. "37
Although the International Military Tribunal convicted twelve defendants of the crime against peace
and generally defended the Charter, this aspect of the trial and verdict has been the most heavily

33
...There is no international court. To that you will retort that after the last war, there was the Nuremberg court. But
we know now - and I think I wrote at the time - that any nation losing a war will be subjected to the decisions of a Court
like that of Nuremberg. But it is sure that the country subjected to a Nuremberg court will be the guilty country; it will
certainly be the country that has been conquered. In the case at hand, the conquered nation was also the guiltiest one that is
Nazi Germany. But as soon as we begin condemning 'crimes against peace,1 for example, I am sure the country that wins a
war will demonstrate that the vanquished was responsible for it." Raymond Aron FROM THE COMMITTED OBSERVER
LE SPECTATEUR ENGAGÉ - CONVERSATIONS WITH JEAN-LOUIS MISSIKA AND DOMINIQUE WOLTON, 247
(1983).
34
Taylor regarded the arraignment of the Kaiser in Article 227 of the Treaty of Versailles as lacking precedential value
because the language of Versailles was "opaque" and "had no roots in international legal doctrine." ANATOMY 16.
Professor Bush is slightly more open to Versailles as precedent but regards the language of Article 227 as "loose" and
"never put to the test." Lost Legislative History at 2332. See Treaty of Versailles, June 28, 1919, art. 227, 2 Bevans 43, 136.
35
ANATOMY at 51 (emphasis Taylor's).
36
ANATOMY at 629.
31
Bernard D. Meltzer, 'TRIBUTE: Robert H. Jackson: Nuremberg's Architect and Advocate', 68 ALB. L. REV. 55, 60
(2004).
The American Perspective on Nuremberg: A Case of Cascading Ironies 27

criticized.38 The inability of the international community after years of debate and a concerted effort at
the Rome Conference for the International Criminal Court to arrive at a suitable definition of aggression
are signs that a principle American Nuremberg objective, to criminalize aggression, has still not been
achieved.39

Supreme Irony or Reasoned Response to Latent Threats

Technical difficulties offer a partial explanation for the lack of a post-Nuremberg treaty banning
aggressive war. However, no such ambiguity surrounds the underlying norm governing the use of force.
The United States currently asserts that it will use force to pre-empt "emerging" threats as well as those
which are imminent. It argues that changing circumstances warrant new strategies. On its face, this
suggests movement away from the accepted norm embodied in Article 51 of the UN Charter. Although
there is a rich and growing literature debating this point, it would be ironic if the US were deemed to be
taking the lead in changing a norm it sought to criminalize at Nuremberg, even if it does so in response
to new technological and geopolitical threats.
However, a larger irony would surface if as some suspect, the US is asserting that the world's
"hyperpower" is not bound by any international norms governing the use of force. Such a position
would be in dramatic contrast to the position asserted by the US at Nuremberg and supported in the UN
Charter.
The Bush Doctrine, articulated shortly after the attacks of September ll l h announced that the US
would use force to "to preempt emerging threats."40 This doctrine was ultimately employed to justify
the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. As the British and American publics learned during the May 2005
British Parliamentary election, even America's staunchest ally had reservations about this extension of
the parameters governing the use of force. The now famous "Goldsmith Memorandum" submitted by
the United Kingdom's Attorney General to British PM Tony Blair41 March 7, 2003, set forth the
following view:
" ...It is now widely accepted that an imminent armed attack will justify the use offorce if the other
conditions are met.... However, in my opinion there must be some degree of immanence. I am aware
that the USA has been arguing for recognition of a broad doctrine of a right to use force to pre-empt
danger in the future. If this means more than a right to respond proportionately to an imminent attack
(and I understand that the doctrine is intended to carry that connotation) this is not a doctrine which,
in my opinion, exists or is recognized in international law. "
In response to the controversy surrounding the United States' articulation of this new doctrine the
UN Secretary General has announced the need for a "consensus" on "when and how force can be used
to defend international peace and security..." specifically focusing on whether states "may use force
against 'latent' or non-imminent threats...." 42 However, there remains a large gap between much of the

38
Despite the principle of tu quoque, certain factual discrepancies between the wartime conduct of victor nations and
the factual bases of the convictions of the leading Nazi's on the crime against peace created embarrassment and broadly
raised questions about the Tribunal's credibility. The Soviet invasion of Poland and the fact that the allegation of Nazi
aggression against the USSR hinges on the German violation of Nazi - Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939 was
embarrassing at the time the verdict was rendered. Serious questions about whether the German Invasion of Norway was a
response to earlier British invasion plans also raises difficult questions. Bradley F. Smith, REACHING J U D G M E N T A T
N U R E M B E R G 144-150.
39
ICC Article 5 which defines "Crimes within the Jurisdiction of the Court" provides that "The Court shall exercise
jurisdiction over the crime of aggression once a provision is adopted in accordance with articles 121 and 123 defining the
crime and setting out the conditions under which the Court shall exercise jurisdiction with respect to this crime. Such a
provision shall be consistent with the relevant provisions of the Charter of the United Nations."
40
See National Security Strategy of the United States of America (2002), available at www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.pdf.
41
First made public on in May of 2005.
42
Report of the Secretary-General, In Larger Freedom: Towards Development, Security and Human Rights for All,
U.N. GAOR, 59th Sess., Agenda Items 45 and 55, U.N. Doc. A/59/2005 (2005) para 122.
28 Raymond M. Brown

world and the US on whether the new "consensus" will endorse unilateral action or find that the
prevailing norms require action by the Security Council.
Underlying this serious debate about whether the "war on terror" will be a catalyst for a new
international consensus on the use of force is the suspicion that the US is rejecting the idea that it is
bound by international norms governing force. The controversial Downing Street Memorandum43 hints
at the possibility that the Bush Administration attempted to "fix" the evidence that Saddam Hussein was
a latent threat possessing Weapons of Mass Destruction. If the United States employed a pretext in
order to bring its Iraq invasion within the parameters of its new use of force doctrine such conduct
would constitute a flagrant affront to the rule of law. It would also suggest that America's UN
Ambassador Bolton44 should be taken literally when he says,
"It is a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law even when it may seem in our
short-term interest to do so, because over the long term, the goal of those who think that international
law really means anything are those who want to constrict the United States. "4S
Eventually, participants at this Conference, diplomats, scholars, NGO and rights activist will be
forced to explore in the future a supreme Nuremberg irony. This controversial irony will center around
the questions of whether the American responses to the terrorist46 attacks of September 11, 2001, the
promulgation of the Bush Doctrine and the invasion of Iraq without unambiguous Security Council
support, have neutralized the American contributions to Nuremberg. In fact the debate will extend to
whether the current US position is in derogation of the use of force principles articulated throughout the
normative architecture. One American "realist" has already announced that,
"The effort to subject the use of force to the rule of law was the monumental internationalist
experiment of the 2tfh century; the fact is that that experiment has failed. "4?
Another American "realist" has announced that US legitimacy in the world stems from military
power not from commitment to international law.48 While realists can make valuable contributions to
debates about the rule of law their contributions often warrant close scrutiny. Had the realist plans of
Secretary Morgenthau been embraced in 1945, 2500 49 "arch criminals"50 would have been "summarily

4:1
See http://www.timesonline.co.Uk/article/0, ,2087-1593607,00.html.
44
At the time of the Judging Nuremberg Conference, John Bolton was the UN Ambassador Designate. He subsequently
received a recess appointment on August 1, 2005. Bush Names Bolton U.N. Ambassador in Recess Appointment, Jim
VandeHei and Colum Lynch, Washington Post August 2, 2005.
45
Nomination of John R. Bolton: Hearing Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 109th Cong. (April 12,
2005) (testimony of John R. Bolton, then nominee for U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations). It should be acknowledged
however, that there is a school of thought that argues that during its pre-war diplomatic efforts the Bush Administration
believed it was "acting on behalf of international, and not exclusively national, interest " see Jonathan Monten, 'The Roots
of the Bush Doctrine: Power, Nationalism and Democracy Promotion in U.S. Strategy', INTERNATIONAL SECURITY 29:4,
112, 146 (2005).
46
For purposes of this article "terrorism" describes ideologically motivated violence against civilian targets. This is not
the forum for an extended discussion of "terrorism" or the lack of a universally accepted definition but see the
acknowledgment of the UN's High Level Threat Panel that "The United Nations ability to develop a comprehensive
strategy has been constrained by the inability of Member States to agree on an anti-terrorism convention including a
definition of terrorism," UNITED NATIONS, A MORE SECURE WORLD: OUR SHARED RESPONSIBILITY,
REPORT OF THE SECRETARY-GENERAL'S HIGH-LEVEL PANEL ON THREATS, CHALLENGES AND
CHANGE, UN Doc. A/59/565, para. 157 (2004) See also Johnathan Weinberger, 'Defining Terror', 4 SETON HALL
JOURNAL OF DIPLOMACY AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, 63 (2003) and for an earlier exploration of this definitional
problem from a widely respected scholar of international law currently serving as an advisor to the Iraqi Special Court see
M. Cherif Bassiouni Crimes of Terror Violence in INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL LAW 2ED. Ill et seq. (M. Cherif Bassiouni
ed. 1999).
47
See Michael J. Glennon, 'Why the Security Council Failed', FOREIGN AFFAIRS, May/June 2003 at 24.
48
See Robert Kagan, 'America's Crisis of Legitimacy', FOREIGN AFFAIRS, March/April 2004, at 65. Kagan maintains
that American legitimacy since World War II stems from its ability to contain the Soviets during the cold war, not from its
commitment to emerging international legal norms.
49
Howard Ball PROSECUTING WAR CRIMES AND GENOCIDE: THE TWENTIETH CENTURY EXPERIENCE.
46(1999).
The American Perspective on Nuremberg: A Case of Cascading Ironies 29

executed" and the normative architecture to which Nuremberg has made such a significant contribution
might never have been constructed.
In fact, these departures from Nuremberg's legacy suggest the possibility of a US retreat from the
normative architecture itself. There has been a strong, though not unanimous consensus5' among
speakers at this Conference that the establishment of the International Criminal Court is an effort to
extend Nuremberg's legacy.52 If history confirms this view, the United States' rejection of the Rome
Treaty provides further evidence of the Bush Administration's abandonment of a set of human rights,
and humanitarian law principles the US has championed since the Second World War. Even more
troubling is the enthusiasm which has accompanied this repositioning. It is difficult to misinterpret the
ironic portent of the comments of Ambassador Bolton who described the signing of the Rome Treaty as
"the happiest moment in my government service."53

50
Bradley F. Smith THE A M E R I C A N ROAD T O N U R E M B E R G , T H E D O C U M E N T A R Y RECORD, 27-8 1944-
1945(1982).
51
See for example the comments of Benjamin Ferencz, Whitney Harris, and Judge Hans-Peter Kaul.
52
Interestingly, the criticisms by General Ridgway and Raymond Aron of the employment of the crime against peace at
Nuremberg disappear with the creation of an "international court" See Notes 32-3 above.
53
UN will refer Darfur crimes to court in Hague. U.S. decides not to oppose resolution, Warren Hoge, International
Herald Tribune, April 2, 2 0 0 5 , 6 .
30 Die amerikanische Sicht auf Nürnberg: Ein Fall wechselnder Ironien

Raymond M. Brown
Die amerikanische Sicht auf Nürnberg: Ein Fall wechselnder Ironien
Dieser Beitrag beschäftigt sich mit der Haltung der USA zu den Nürnberger Prozessen. Die
Vielschichtigkeit der amerikanischen Perspektiven vor und nach den Verfahren vor dem IMT in
Nürnberg lässt sich zum jetzigen Zeitpunkt - nach Meinung des Autors - am ehesten mit einem
gesunden Schuss Ironie beschreiben. Dabei ist zunächst festzustellen, dass die USA maßgeblichen
Anteil an der Erstellung der „normativen Architektur" des nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg geschaffenen
Menschenrechtssystems hatten, das insbesondere auf der Trias Londoner IMT Statut, Allgemeine
Erklärung der Menschenrechte und UN Charta fußt.

Die erste Ironie besteht darin, dass die USA die durch Nürnberg gerade auf Grund des
kompromisslosen Engagements der USA im Vorfeld und während der Prozesse teilweise gegen den
Widerstand der anderen Alliierten erreichte Fortentwicklung des Völkerrechts in der Folgezeit weder
nährten noch überhaupt mittrugen. Eine zweite Ironie zeigt sich darin, dass das primäre Interesse der
USA bei der strafrechtlichen Verfolgung von NS-Verbrechen, die Ächtung des Angriffskriegs, von
allen Errungenschaften in Nürnberg von kürzester Dauer war. Auch wenn das Gewaltverbot in Art. 51
der UN Charta unmittelbar nach Nürnberg völkerrechtliche Normierung erfuhr, bleibt doch die
völkerstrafrechtliche Ahndung der Aggression bis heute, bis hin zum Statut des Internationalen
Strafgerichtshof umstritten.

Die dritte, letzte und zugleich größte Ironie liegt in dem Umgang der derzeitigen amerikanischen
Regierung mit Völkerrecht insgesamt und Völkerstrafrecht im Besonderen. Nicht nur das in Nürnberg
vehement geforderte internationale Gewaltverbot scheint für die heutige USA selbst keine Bindung zu
besitzen; die Relevanz der völkerrechtlichen Ordnung wird insgesamt jedenfalls dann abgelehnt, wenn
diese mit politischen Interessen der USA in Konflikt gerät. Die Größe der USA basiert, so heißt es aus
„realistischer" Sicht, nicht auf internationalem Recht, sondern auf militärischer Macht. Der Unwillen,
an der weiteren internationalen Entwicklung teilzuhaben, könnte indes die Bedeutung Nürnbergs für die
USA zunichte machen und letztlich den Ausstieg aus der normativen Menschenrechtsarchitektur
bedeuten.
The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg: British Perspectives 31

David Cesarani
The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg: British Perspectives
Sixty years after the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg (IMT) sat in judgment on the
surviving leaders of Nazi Germany its proceedings still cast a shadow over history. Since 1946 it has
informed the ways in which diplomats, politicians and lawyers have attempted to reckon with war
crimes, atrocity, and the mass violation of human rights.1 However, it was not self-evident that the IMT
should have attained the salience it commands today. Nor has it necessarily served well as a beacon to
jurisprudence, policy makers or public opinion.
In the public mind the IMT has been sanctified by time. It exercised an almost magical effect on the
debates that raged during the 1990s when politicians approached the question of retribution for crimes
of war and peace in such varied contexts as South Africa, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Iraq.
Rather suddenly, the IMT became the point of reference and urgent precedent.2 It was even given the
Hollywood treatment in a major TV movie starring Alec Baldwin as Justice Robert Jackson.
This veneration hardly reflected its dubious origins, shaky legal foundation, controversial modus
operandi, and highly equivocal results. In the post-war decade the judicial process for which the IMT
formed the keystone was treated as something of an embarrassment. Time and effort was expended
undoing the work of the subsequent trials, exercising pardons on those who had been convicted,
reducing penal sentences, and placating West German opinion that had never accepted their validity.3
Thanks to the Cold War the narrow application of justice against Nazi war crimes perpetrators, in
particular, and the broader application of the international law developed for the IMT atrophied.4
In the light of this nemesis the British, who had never been keen on the trial of Nazi malefactors,
could have been excused a feeling of smug self-satisfaction. Writing in 1996, Lord Annan, who had
served as an officer in the Political Branch of the British element of the Control Commission, evoked
the cautious pragmatism that governed Whitehall in all matters concerning de-Nazification. While
making the ritual comment that "Die-hard Nazis, of course, should be removed, and if guilty of crimes
put on trial" he did not conceal his scorn for those who had been prepared to pay a heavy price in real
terms for the application of an abstract notion of justice. 5
The success and failure of the IMT and the larger Nuremberg process can thus be observed with
advantage through the optic of the British experience. Britain had fended off occupation during the war,
but was the host to the governments-in-exile of less fortunate countries. When it came to deliberating on
war crimes, debate in Whitehall was uncontaminated by the problems connected with defeat and
collaboration. Britain was at the heart of policy making towards the treatment of Nazi war crimes and
the Nazi elite. British jurists, notably Sir Hartley Shawcross, Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, Sir Geoffrey

1
From the extensive literature tracing the impact of the IMT see Geoffrey Robertson, Crimes Against Humanity. The
Struggle for Global Justice (London: Allen Lane, 1999), Howard Ball, Prosecuting War Crimes and Genocide. The
Twentieth Century Experience (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1999); and Phillipe Sands ed., From Nuremberg to
the Hague (Cambridge: Cambridge Univertsity Press, 2003).
2
See, for example Richard Goldstone, For Humanity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000) passim, G J Bass, Stay
the Hand of Vengeance, The Politics of War Crimes Tribunals (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002 revised edition)
and Geoffrey Robertson, Crimes Against Humanity (London: Penguin, 2002 edn), xxii-xxvi, 218-36.
3
Frank Buscher, The US War Crimes Trial Programme in Germany 1946-1955 (Westport, CONN., Greenwood:
1989). Airy Neave, Nuremberg. A Personal Record of the Trial of the Major Nazi War Criminals in 1945-6 (London:
Hodder and Stoughton, 1979), 319-330,reflects defensively on the tarnished reputation of the IMT from the point of view
of a member of the British prosecution team.
4
See Robertson Crimes Against Humanity, 236-44 for one lament. Whitney R Harris, Tyranny On Trial. The Trial of
the Major German War Criminals At the End of World War II At Nuremberg, Germany, 1945-1946 (Dallas: Southern
Methodist University Press, 1999 edn. [first published in 1954]), 571-78, expresses the early hopes, disappointment, and
ultimate triumph of an American participant in the IMT who held a candle for the creation of a permanent international
criminal court.
5
Noel Annan, Changing Enemies (London: Harper Collins, 1996), 202-12. Also, Frank Roberts, Dealing With
Dictators (London: Weidenfeld andNicolson, 1991), 155.
32 David Cesarani

Lawrence and Justice Norman Birkett played a leading part in the proceedings. The response of the
British public to the work of the IMT exemplifies its contemporary impact.
Although Britain's role in the prosecution of the major Nazi war criminals is now celebrated in
British memory of the war and its aftermath, it was never a foregone conclusion that Britain would
support such trials. From 1939 to 1942 the Foreign Office [FO] was adamantly opposed to any form of
judicial retribution against either the civil or military echelons in Germany except in the case of war
crimes, as conventionally defined, and committed only against British and Allied nationals.6
In the first half of the war, pressure for a pledge to try German war criminals came from the
governments-in-exile that were established in London. The Poles, Czechs, and French, especially, were
in regular receipt of intelligence recording depredations against their civilian populations. The victims
of Nazi occupation included Jews, although their specific experience featured only intermittently in the
reports of the exile regimes. In the course of 1942, however, the deportation and mass murder of the
Jews across Europe climbed the agenda of the governments-in-exile. Specific appeals were now also
made by the representatives of Jewish organisations in London and Washington who sought a pledge of
Allied retribution in the hope of dissuading the Nazis from following the policy of extermination.7
However, such requests met a chilly response. The FO had bad institutional memories of war crimes
trials. Officials were haunted by the farcical experience of the trials conducted by the Germans in
Leipzig after the Great War (1914-18). The failure to apprehend the fugitive Kaiser, despite assurances
given to a vengeful public who wanted him hung, added to the memory of embarrassment. In April
1940, when the Polish Government-in-Exile pressed London for a declaration in favour of trials against
Germans responsible for perpetrating atrocities in occupied Poland, Sir Alexander Cadogan, Permanent
Under Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, remarked in a withering understatement that similar
pronouncements "had led us into a certain amount of trouble after the last war."8
The Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, was wholly in agreement with his officials. During 1941, he
effectively countered those in the War Cabinet, notably Hugh Dalton, who sympathised with the
aspirations of the exiled governments. Eden had more difficulty coping with his effusive Prime
Minister. In a speech in June 1941, shortly after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Churchill
said that the Allies would bring "quislings" to justice if no one in their own countries was willing to do
so. Four months later, he publicly associated himself with a statement by Franklin D Roosevelt, the
American President, promising "retribution" for acts such as the shooting of hostages. Nevertheless,
Churchill always avoided any specific commitments. Sir Orme Sargent, Deputy Undersecretary of State
at the FO, commented in a memorandum, that the government "must at all costs avoid saying anything
which would commit us to the policy of making lists of war criminals for subsequent trial."
Consequently, the British Government declined to be a signatory to a declaration by the combined
governments-in-exile on 13 January 1942 promising legal punishment of those guilty of war crimes.9
It became harder to hold the line during 1942. In response to the inter-allied declaration, Eden
solicited a view of war crimes policy from the government's law officers. On 19 April 1942, the
Attorney General Sir Donald Somervell and the Solicitor General Sir David Maxwell Fyfe,
recommended that the UK Government should adhere to existing international law, seek the prosecution
of war crimes only, and exclusively when committed against British and Allied nationals, and use

6
Bradley F Smith, Reaching Judgment at Nuremberg (New York: Basic Books, 1977). See also, John and Ann Tusa,
The Nuremberg Trial (London: Macmillan, 1983).
7
See Priscilla Dale Jones, 'British Policy Towards German Crimes Against German Jews,' Leo Baeck Institute
Yearbook 36 (1991), reproduced in David Cesarani ed. Holocaust. Critical Concepts in Historical Studies (London:
Routledge, 2004), vol 6, 95-128, here 95-103; David Engel, In the Shadow of Auschwitz: The Polish Government-in Exile
and the Jews, 1939-1942 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); Bernard Wasserstein, Britain and
the Jews of Europe, 1939-1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979); David Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews (New
York: Pantheon, 1984).
8
Arieh Kochavi, Prelude To Nuremberg (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 8.
9
Dale Jones, 'British Policy Towards German Crimes Against German Jews,' 101; Kochavi, Prelude To Nuremberg,
10-16.
The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg: British Perspectives 33

military tribunals for the purpose. This policy would forbid consideration of acts before 1939 and,
crucially, exclude crimes perpetrated by the Germans against their own nationals and stateless
10
persons.
Yet it was precisely crimes of this nature that bulked increasingly large. When Churchill and
Roosevelt met in Washington in June 1942 they were both under pressure from the exiled governments
and public opinion in their own countries to respond to atrocities such as the Lidice massacre.
Meanwhile, information about the systematic mass murder of the Jews accumulated and by the autumn
the scepticism of British officials regarding this information was overcome. However, at this stage of
the war the British had another reason for inaction. The Germans now held many thousand British
POWs. The Foreign Office and, critically, the War Office and the army, feared that threats of retribution
would lead the Nazis to use POWs as hostages or even retaliate against them. 11
During the summer of 1942, Whitehall looked for a policy that would enable Churchill to satisfy
those calling for action. Eden favoured administrative justice against the top political and military
leadership and quick trials, in situ, of middle and lower level perpetrators. Provision for such measures
should be written into the armistice agreement with the vanquished enemy. The government's law
officers, led by Lord Simon, the Lord Chancellor, disagreed. It would be wrong, they argued, to try
those who followed orders while those who gave them were summarily treated. The War Office was
content with the punishment of war crimes, as traditionally defined, but this would exclude proceedings
against the civil echelon and would not easily cover atrocities carried out for religious, racial or political
motives. In order to appear to be doing something and in a genuine search for a device to break the
deadlock, on 6 July 1942 the War Cabinet agreed to promote a UN commission for the investigation of
war crimes. A Cabinet Committee on the Treatment of War Criminals was set up and this, in turn,
invited the governments-in-exile to appoint representatives to the UN body. 12
London provided the base for the UN war crimes commission, inaugurated on 20 October 1943. Its
initial mission was to collect information on alleged war crimes, the names of perpetrators, and to report
this data to the seventeen member states. The USSR, which felt snubbed and wanted trials during the
war, refused to participate. The United States was less than keen, either. In English eyes this was no bad
thing. According to Arieh Kochavi, "The FO viewed the establishment of the commission largely as a
means of neutralising calls for acts of retribution against the Germans and of creating the impression
that the war crimes issue was being handled." 13
Contrary to the view propounded in the 1970s by John Fox, that the Allies were responding in
earnest to the mounting evidence of crimes against the Jews, it is more likely that the creation of the
commission was merely coincidental with the evolution of the Allied statement on the extermination of
the Jews that eventuated on 17 December 1942. 14
The FO rejected all efforts by Jewish organisations to achieve recognition that the Jews were
suffering from a specific onslaught or that the Allies should empower themselves to try Germans and
their collaborators for crimes against their own nationals or crimes against stateless persons carried out
on German territory. The negative response of FO officials is sometimes attributed to actual or latent
anti-Semitism, but the demand that the Allies should try Germans for crimes committed against their
own nationals or against stateless persons on Axis territory was to seek something unprecedented and,
indeed, taboo. 15 Furthermore, it could feed Nazi paranoia about Jewish influence in the Allied capitals
and incite a reaction. This is, put charitably, what Frank Roberts, at the FO Central Department, meant
when he said that it "seems to me unnecessary to irritate him [Hitler] more than is necessary,

10
Dale Jones, 'British Policy Towards German Crimes Against German Jews,' 102.
" Kochavi, Prelude To Nuremberg, 27-8, 59-60, 71-2 and Arieh Kochavi, 'Britain and the War Crimes Question at the
Conclusion of the Second World War: The Military Dimension', Journal of Holocaust Education, 2:2 ( 1993), 123-48.
12
Kochavi, Prelude To Nuremberg, 28-54.
13
Kochavi, Prelude To Nuremberg, 59-60.
14
John Fox, 'The Jewish Factor in British War Crimes policy in 1942', English Historical Review, 92 (1977), 82-106.
15
Dale Jones, 'British Policy Towards German Crimes Against German Jews,' 104-9.
34 David Cesarani

particularly on the Jewish issue". In any case, as Kochavi maintains, "Knowledge of the massacre of
European Jews had an insignificant effect on either British or American officials who dealt with the
issue of Axis crimes."16
As often happens in international bureaucracies with a remit over a conflicted area of policy, the UN
war crimes commission experienced "mission creep". Under the guidance of Cecil Hurst, the British
delegate and Herbert Pell, from the US, it went much further than Whitehall had intended. Hurst and
Pell initiated a debate over the definition of war crimes, seeking to extend the commission's scope to
include offences committed on a religious, racial or political basis. They further innovated by coming
up with a category of "waging aggressive war". And they sought to invest the UN with jurisdiction over
such offences committed by Germans from the humblest to the highest rank.17
In the long term, this was valuable work. But in the short term it set the commission on a collision
course with both Downing Street and the White House. As far as Churchill and Roosevelt were
concerned the fate of any surviving Nazi leaders would lie in their hands and they would not be tied by
any judicial process. The Moscow Declaration of 1 November 1943, to which they and Stalin were
signatories, promised retribution against Germans responsible for "atrocities, massacres and executions'
(it is notable how restrictive the categories were: they did not include forced labour, expulsion etc). But
it specifically excluded the "major war criminals whose offences have no particular geographical
location and who will be punished by a joint decision of the Government of the Allies".18
Churchill and Roosevelt notoriously concurred that the best policy with regard to the leading Nazis
was summary execution. At the same time as the UN war crimes commission was drawing up lists of
war criminals for prosecution, Churchill was ordering his law officers to provide a roster of "outlaws"
whose culpability was held to be beyond any doubt, who would be shot by the military after a
commission of inquiry had established their identity. In fact, by June 1944 British policy had reached an
impasse. Churchill and Eden favoured quick executive action against the Nazi leadership, Like Victor
Cavendish-Bentinck, head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, they deplored the idea that men like
Hitler and Goring should be allowed to defend themselves before a court and the bar of international
public opinion in the course of a protracted legal process. However, the FO was wary of summary
justice, could not produce a list of candidates for execution, and was sensitive to what other arms of
government thought about such a proposal. The War Office [WO] and the army, for example, were
appalled at the notion that members of the German general staff might be shot like dogs once their
identity was known. As a compromise, the FO and WO suggested passing these hot potatoes to the
UN. 19
In the autumn of 1944, Churchill and Roosevelt were forced to draw back from their drastic, not to
say vengeful and savage, policy. Their volte-face is usually attributed to a combination of Stalin's rather
surprising insistence on trials and the outcry against the vindictive Morgenthau plan for post-war
Germany. However, their thinking was also influenced by the nagging fear about the fate of Allied
POWs. Thousands of additional British and US airmen were now in German captivity as a result of the
intensification of the air war in 1943-44. Goebbels routinely referred to the actions of the RAF and
USAAF as "terror bombing" and airman who bailed out over Germany were at risk of lynching until
they were taken into custody. Even then, as they showed in the treatment of the escapees from Stalug
Luft III, the Germans demonstrated a willingness to massacre Allied POWs on the flimsiest of
pretexts.20

16
Kochavi, Prelude To Nuremberg, 139-52. C. F. Roberts, Dealing With Dictators, pp. 46-8.
17
Kochavi, Prelude To Nuremberg, 92-103.
18
Michael Marrus, The Nuremberg War Crimes Trial 1945-46. A Documentary History (New York: St Martin's Press,
1997), 20-21.
" Kochavi, Prelude To Nuremberg, 73-76.
20
Priscilla Dale Jones, 'Nazi Atrocities Against Allied Airmen: Stalag Luft III and the End of British War Crimes
Trials, Historical Journal, 41 (1998), 543-65.
The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg: British Perspectives 35

By early 1945, the British did not have a comprehensive policy on the treatment of German war
criminals. Churchill and Eden had been checked. But there was no obvious alternative after the Foreign
Office had successfully undermined the UN war crimes commission. While FO officials publicly
decried the tardiness of the commission, in private, Sir William Malkin, the FO legal adviser, along
with Denis Allan of the FO, assembled a compelling armoury of reasons why the commission was over-
reaching itself. The commission had suggested an international court to try German war criminals, but
this was an objectionable form of "universal retrospective justice". It would take so long to set up and
operate such a court that the victims of Nazi persecution would resort to their own means. Which legal
system would it use, anyway? And who would it try if the major war criminals were to be excluded?
They preferred to leave the thorny matter of crimes by Germans against German nationals and stateless
persons in Germany to German courts, a notion that the Lord Chancellor could see was full of holes.
But the law officers had fared no better. Lord Simon had attempted to introduce into Parliament a War
Crimes Bill to enable the prosecution of Germans for the most narrowly defined offences, but he was
stymied by the War Cabinet which feared German retaliation. 21
Such a situation could not continue. By March 1945 it was clear that German military resistance was
collapsing. In April the first concentration camps in western Germany were overrun, leading to
publicity that generated an enormous head of steam for justice or revenge against the perpetrators. To
some extent London was saved by the advent of the Americans with the first comprehensive plan for
dealing with German war criminals. But it also implemented its own preparations for a limited war
crimes trial programme.
In November 1943, following the Moscow Declaration, the War Cabinet resolved that war crimes,
in the strict sense of the term, committed against British nationals between September 1939 and the end
of hostilities, should be tried by military courts under a Royal Warrant. On 14 June 1945, the terms of
the Royal Warrant were published. By focussing narrowly on war crimes and limiting jurisdiction to
Allied nationals, the British essentially abdicated responsibility for the nightmarish problem of holding
Germans to account for a European-wide genocide, the epicentre of which was the former territory of
Greater Germany, that involved the systematic murder of German nationals by their own government
and the deportation of persons for religious and racial reasons from Axis states to other Axis territory
for the purpose of murdering them there or abusing them. 22
Here was the crux of the problem as the British saw it. Precisely because Nazi crimes were
unprecedented there was no legal mechanism for coping with them. The traditional category of war
crimes evidently excluded crimes committed before September 1939, could not encompass acts against
German or Axis nationals, and did not fit many of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis. Never before
had a government turned on its nationals in such a fashion or inflicted mass murder on the populations
of its allies. Nor was there any accumulated experience of dealing with such crimes against vast
numbers of stateless persons. While it was conceivable to hold Germans to account on the territory of
Allied countries in the case of atrocities committed against Allied nationals, even if they were from a
third country, there was simply no means of prosecuting Germans for acts against Axis nationals or
stateless persons carried out on German soil. To encompass such acts required judicial innovation and
as good lawyers, the British Government law officers and the legal advisors in other departments were
leery of any such moves.
However, as in the conduct of so many other aspects of policy at this stage of the war and the
Anglo-American relationship, the British essentially came into line with the US perspective. At a
meeting in London with US Judge Rosenman in April 1945, Lord Simon attempted to preserve the
minimalist British position of quick trials of a small number of Nazi leaders, with the sentencing left to
governments to decide. Simon did not have authority for such a proposal and his effort was negated first

21
Kochavi, Prelude To Nuremberg, 110-37, 203-4.
22
Donald Bloxham, Genocide on Trial (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 34-5, 55-56. See also, Anthony Glees,
'The Making of British Policy on War Crimes History as Politics in the UK', Contemporary European History, 1:2 (1992),
172-79.
36 David Cesarani

by the War Cabinet and second by the death of Roosevelt. When London and Washington resumed
negotiations in the summer of 1945, the personnel on both sides had changed. Sir William Jowitt, the
new Lord Chancellor, broadly went along with the American conception of the IMT with the full
consent of the new Labour Government.23
At the London Conference in July-August 1945, held to draft the Charter of the IMT, the British
delegation was led by the new Attorney General Hartley Shawcross, also head of the British War
Crimes Executive, and his predecessor, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, as his deputy. They were supportive of
American aims, but with reservations. First, they could not comprehend the American plan to install
conspiracy at the heart of the indictment. This reservation was based on both legal grounds and a
shrewd understanding of the Third Reich. An official at the FO commented on the draft American
indictment that: "The Nazis, and Hitler in particular, were supreme opportunists and, whilst they had
almost certainly aggressive designs from the beginning, it is very probable that their aggressive plans
only gradually took the shape in which they were carried through." The FO Research Department
scorned the idea that "Mein Kampf' could be used in evidence against the defendants. It "does not
reveal the Nazi aims of conquest and domination fully and explicitly"24 Nor did the British understand
the concept of prosecuting organisations. Maxwell Fyfe worried that the trial would diverge in two
separate directions: war crimes and waging aggressive war. Above all, the British wanted to limit the
scope of the trial, the number of the defendants, and the volume of evidence. All these anxieties were
25
manifested in the draft indictment they produced, only to see it re-written by the American team.
Shawcross feared an "exceedingly long and elaborate" process that would be perceived as a show
trial or serve as a platform for the accused to defend Nazi ideology and actions. The danger was all the
greater because of the legal innovation employed by the Tribunal. It was heightened also by awareness
that the defendants were being accused of deeds that were not alien to those who were judging them.
For example, when accusing the Germans of conspiring to wage aggressive war the British could only
reflect uncomfortably on their part in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in 193 8.26 For a connected
reason, the British were always queasy about the participation of the Soviet Union but they knew there
was nothing they could do to prevent it. Indeed, Jowitt and Maxwell Fyfe spent a lot of time mediating
between the Americans and the Soviets to keep the show on the road.27
In the end, it is fair to say that the British were vindicated. The force of the IMT was dissipated by
its extraordinary duration. On 26 March 1946, Earl Birkenhead, asked in the Daily Telegraph, "why is it
dragging on month after month?" The charge of conspiracy was unprecedented, unwieldy, and hard to
prove. The evidence of crimes against humanity was diluted both by the structure imposed on the trial
by the need to demonstrate conspiracy and the salience afforded to the charge of waging aggressive
war. Jackson's insistence on bringing to bear a mass of documents as evidence slowed the proceedings
and made them intolerably dull. The journalist Rebecca West reported that the Tribunal was "boredom
on a huge, historic scale". She praised Nuremberg for documenting Nazi crimes, but "For the rest the
Nuremberg trial must be admitted as a betrayal of the hopes which it engendered".28
Tedium, however, was a trivial complaint and hardly avoidable in matters to do with the law. Many
more serious objections to the Tribunal were aired in Britain during its course and afterwards. In May
1946, Gilbert Murray, once a leading supporter of the League of Nations, attacked the Tribunal for
systematic double standards. "I doubt if these trials will produce in history that moral effect which is
claimed to be their main justification. A soldier judged and hanged by his enemies is to his own people

23
Kochavi, Prelude To Nuremberg, 163-71, 216-27.
24
Richard Overy, Interrogations (London: Allen Lane, 2001), 48-52.
25
Bradley F. Smith, Reaching Judgment at Nuremberg, 41-2, 48-49, 55-6, 62, 72. Telford Taylor, The Anatomy of the
Nuremberg Trials (London: Bloomsbury, 1993), 58-77.
26
Hartley Shawcross, Life Sentence. The Memoirs of Hartley Shawcross (London: Constable, 1995), 90-2.
27
Hartley Shawcross, Life Sentence, 103.
28
Reports for the Daily Telegraph, 1946, reprinted in Rebecca West, A Train of Powder (London: Virago, 1984), 254-5.
Shawcross, Life Sentence, p. 115.
The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg: British Perspectives 37

an object of sympathy rather than horror." 29 George Bernard Shaw wrote to the press after the verdicts
were announced to protest that, given the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan, none of the Allied
powers was in a position to hang Goring. 30 To Lord Hankey, a minister in Churchill's war cabinet in
1940-1, the IMT was a travesty of justice. War, he maintained, is an instrument of policy and not a
crime. If it was a crime, then the countries sitting in judgement were equally guilty of aggressive war at
one time or another over the previous six years. In this respect, alone, the participation of the USSR
made a mockery of the proceedings and gave them every appearance of "victors' justice". 31
Perhaps the last word, however, should be left to Lord Shawcross. Fifty years after the Tribunal he
reflected that: "For my part, while not excusing the imperfections and deficiencies of the trial, I still feel
satisfied that it has laid down the law for the future, even if that law is imperfectly applied and still
often disregarded." 32

29
The Times, 2 May 1946.
30
Letter, Daily Express, 10 September 1946.
51
The Rt Hon Lord Hankey, Politics, Trials and Errors (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1950), 10-27 59-65, 125-30.
32
Shawcross, Life Sentence, 136-7.
38 Das Internationale Militärtribunal von Nürnberg: Britische Perspektiven

David Cesarani
Das Internationale Militärtribunal von Nürnberg: Britische Perspektiven
Das Nürnberger Tribunal von 1945-46 legte einen Grundstein für den nachfolgenden Umgang mit
Kriegsverbrechen, Genozid und der Massenverletzung von Menschenrechten. Das Tribunal hatte jedoch
einen schwierigen Start und wurde für seine Arbeit weithin kritisiert.

In den 60 Jahren nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg diente das Tribunal nicht unbedingt als ein
leuchtendes Beispiel für Justiz, Politik und öffentliche Meinung. Die nähere Betrachtung der Konflikte,
die nicht nur seine Entstehung, sondern auch seine Arbeit begleitet haben, lässt es aus britischer
Perspektive deshalb geraten erscheinen, das Tribunal nicht auf einen zu hohen Sockel zu stellen.

Zu Beginn zeigten sich die Briten gegenüber Nazi-Kriegsverbrecherprozessen nicht sehr

aufgeschlossen, was nicht zuletzt in der Ergebnislosigkeit der Leipziger Kriegsverbrecherprozesse nach
dem 1. Weltkrieg wurzelte. Außerdem war die britische Regierung darauf bedacht, die nicht
unerhebliche Zahl der britischen Soldaten zu schützen, die sich in deutscher Kriegsgefangenschaft
befand. Zugleich stand sie unter erheblichem Druck seitens der Exilregierangen der von den Nazis
besetzten europäischen Staaten, die sich für eine strafrechtliche Verfolgung der Aggressoren
aussprachen.

Die Erfahrungen der Nürnberger Prozesse hatten speziell in den 1990er Jahren einen beinahe
magischen Effekt auf die heftigen Debatten, die aus der Annäherung der Politik an Fragen des Umgangs
mit Verbrechen in Krieg und Frieden mit so unterschiedlichen Konflikten wie in Südafrika, dem
früheren Jugoslawien, Ruanda und Irak entstanden.

Diese „Verehrung" reflektiert kaum noch die zweifelhafte Herkunft, die unsichere rechtliche Basis,
die umstrittene Verfahrensweise und die fragwürdigen Resultate der Prozesse in Nürnberg und die
Tatsache, dass in der Nachkriegszeit die auf den IMT basierenden juristischen Prozesse als eher lästig
und unangenehm angesehen wurden. Viel Zeit und Anstrengung waren notwendig, um die
Verurteilungen der Nachfolgeprozesse zu relativieren, jenen, die verurteilt worden waren, gänzlichen
Erlass oder Reduzierung ihrer Freiheitsstrafe zu gewähren, und die westdeutsche Bevölkerung zu
beschwichtigen, die niemals die Gültigkeit der Nürnberger Prozesse wirklich anerkannt hatte. Die
britische Intelligenzia zweifelte außerdem die Legitimität durch die eigenen ungesühnten Verbrechen
der Alliierten während des Krieges an. Dennoch sah beispielsweise der britische Chefankläger
Shawcross den Wert des Nürnberger Prozesses trotz seiner Mängel darin, dass internationales Recht für
die Zukunft geschaffen wurde.
The French Perspective 39

Hervé Ascensio
The French Perspective
There may be no such thing as one French perspective. The idea, in itself, is contradictory to the
spirit of Nuremberg, which is about the deconstruction of the State and deconstruction of the nation as
collective entities to determine the specific role individuals played in Germany's moral decay.
Individuals make history, and not the opposite: this is the lesson the promoters of the trial intended to
teach. This is also the lesson lawyers usually teach, as responsibility is a central concept for them,
unlike historians or sociologists. If one wishes to remain faithful to this spirit, it would be inappropriate
to refer to the 'perspective of France' when trying to understand the 'French perspective'. It is about
asking questions such as: What were the interests of the members of the French government? What
were the reactions of the French media of that time? What were the expectations of the French victims
of war crimes? What role played French actors during the trial? How is Nuremberg perceived today by
lawyers, by politicians, by French citizens? But as I have only limited time, I need to concentrate on
some specific themes. The first one will be the contextual creation of the tribunal, which provides a
response to the call for justice emanating from different parts of French society. The second theme
appears to me to be also the central question about the Nuremberg trial, and a very legal one indeed: the
invention of criminal responsibility in international law. The third theme will be the heritage of
Nuremberg in French law, a paradoxical heritage indeed, as it concerns mostly the crime against
humanity.

1. The Context: A Call for Justice

The interest of some French politicians for a trial comes from far away. One of the first political
reactions against the crimes committed by the Germans in the occupied countries of Europe was a
declaration by the governments in exile (Inter-Allied Declaration) on 13 January 1942, at the end of a
conference at St-James Palace. The "Comité national de la France libre", led by General de Gaulle, was
one of the signatories. Paragraph 3 of the declaration mentions that amongst the main goals of the war is
the punishment of those persons responsible for war crimes by way of organised justice. A joint allied
committee for the repression of war crimes was created to put pressure on the Three Allied Powers
(UK, USA, and USSR). In this framework, the French transmitted an oral note to the Soviet
representative in London in July 1942. On 3 October 1942, the English government proposed the
creation of a fact-finding commission to the signatories of the Saint-James Declaration. But it was a
year later that on 20 October 1943 this commission on war crimes first met with French representatives
attending. All these efforts prepared the way for the famous Moscow Declaration of 1 November 1943
signed by the Three Allied Powers.
After the liberation of the French territory, the French exile-government had, of course, a clear
interest to appear as one of the victorious nations. It is mentioned as such in the London Agreements of
8 August 1945. In a way, speaking about a "victor's justice" is not so problematic from the French
perspective, as France is thus recognized as one of the victors of World War II, despite the shaming
political episode of the Vichy regime. The official discourse, and not only just after the liberation, but at
least until the 1980's, was that France - i.e. the French spirit - was represented during the war by "La
France libre" in London. But this political motive is not the only one. It cannot be dissociated from
another motive, probably a more important one, which constitutes at the same time a legitimating factor
for the new government in France.
The high number of crimes committed on French territory explains the strong public opinion in
support of a trial against those, who were mostly responsible for them. The idea was broadly sustained
in legal doctrine. 1 The name of Oradour-sur-Glane, a French village where crimes were committed by

1
See the article published by Rey at the end of the war in the Revue générale de droit international public (reference in
the bibliography).
40 Hervé Ascensio

Nazis on 10 June 1944, became the symbol of this call for justice. During the proceedings, the French
Prosecutor, M. de Menthon, was in charge of presenting crimes committed in France, and also in the
other occupied countries of Western Europe: Belgium, Luxemburg and the Netherlands. He especially
stressed the deportation and internment of Jews as well as resistance fighters in concentration camps.
The absence of making any distinction between Jews and non-Jews was conform with the French
concepts of nation and equality based on the principles of the French revolutionary ideology, which was
rejected by the reactionary Vichy-regime. For the purpose of reaffirming these concepts, the voices of
all kinds of victims needed to be heard at once. All of them called for justice, as in the case of
Champetier de Ribes, one of the French deputy-prosecutors in Nuremberg, in his closing statement,
when he addressed very directly the judges: "C'est à vous d'entendre maintenant dans les silences de
vos délibérés, le sang des innocents qui réclame justice" (It is up to you now, in the silence of your
deliberation, to hear the blood of innocents which call for justice).
Moreover, all French actors of the trial agreed to a conception of justice stemming from the
conscience of mankind, which constitutes a rejection of rigid legal positivism. This concurred entirely
with French legal doctrine of the 1930s, especially in public law, considering law as the by-product of
social circumstances and common sense of justice. 2 Justice is conceived as an alliance between force
and ethics. On the one hand, force is always a pre-condition for the establishment of criminal justice;
thus, the establishment of the Nuremberg trial by the Allied was a logical necessity in order to
prosecute, considering the under-institutionalisation of the society of nations. On the other hand, the law
applied in Nuremberg is justified by the evolution of international law in the first part of the 20th century
and consolidated by the public indignation at the crimes committed during the war. Thus, Menthon, the
French Chief Prosecutor, affirms the existence of a "droit international commun", which means an
international jus commune (and not an international common law), constituted by minimum legal
standards common to all civilized nations and at the roots of international customary law. The French
Deputy-Prosecutor, Charles Dubost, mentions in length the conscience of mankind, and, with a
probable allusion to the Shoah, insists on the fact that the sense of good and evil cannot be ignored,
even by the Heads of States, in the name of the legal methodology and by legal methodology. Such a
theory of law is echoed in the judgement itself, when stated "often, treaties only express principles of
law already in force" (p. 231) and "the conscience of the world, far from being offended if he [the
criminal] were punished, would be shocked if he were not" (p. 233).3

2. The Central Question: Thinking on Responsibility

In writing the Statute of the Nuremberg Tribunal, French influence was probably low, as the
procedure was modelled on traditions of common law. Crimes resulted from previous efforts made by
so-called "civilised nations", including France, to develop international law. We need here to mention
especially a pact drafted in Paris in 1928 ("Kellog-Briand" Pact for the American, and "Pacte Briand-
Kellog" for the French!), which prohibited wagging an aggressive war and thus enabled the Allies to
prosecute crimes against peace at Nuremberg. But during the trial, it seems that the specific French
contribution was mostly concerned with the subject of responsibility.
Among French actors, the major character was certainly Judge Henri Donnedieu de Vabres, whose
role is sometimes underestimated or down played in English-speaking literature. In his famous book on
the Nuremberg trial, Telford Taylor describes him as hesitant and weak because among other reasons he
opposed the death penalty for some of the accused. Moreover, in the series of lectures he gave at the
The Hague Academy of International Law in 1947, Donnedieu de Vabres justified the judgments of
acquittal and also expressed doubts about Dônitz's culpability. These opinions were clearly in

2
See a.o., in the English-speaking literature, Martti KOSKENNIEMI, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations. The Rise and Fall
of International Law 1870-1960, Cambridge University Press, 2003, at 266. For the French-speaking literature, see the
bibliography.
3
We quote from the French version of the judgement (Procès des grands criminels de guerre devant le tribunal
militaire international, textes officiels en langue française, tome 1, Documents officiels, Nuremberg, 1947) (our translation).
The French Perspective 41

contradiction with the general feeling of the time: death penalty was expressly called for against all the
accused by the French Deputy-Prosecutor, Champetier de Ribes in his closing speech, and acquittals
were strongly criticized after the trials. A reappraisal of the acquittals as well - I hope! - as to the death
penalty, this would probably lead to a different result, much more incline with Donnedieu de Vabres'
view. But the real reason for the misunderstanding was the position he took against the judicial strategy
of Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson. The legal dispute was about the appraisal of individual
responsibility in the context of collective crimes, and it had a major impact on the future development
of international criminal law.
The political organization, which is necessary to commit crimes such as aggression or crime against
humanity, makes the distinction between collective and individual responsibility rather unclear. Of
course, some remarks of the French actors reveal resentment against Germany and Germans altogether.
But despite this, all of them tried to encompass crimes in the legal framework of classical criminal
responsibility. As Donnedieu de Vabres explained in his Hague's lectures, even if these crimes were
political crimes because they were committed by individuals using the political structure of the State, it
was necessary to individualize the punishment. For him, this was "new international law" 4 , an
expression by which he meant international law having individuals and not only States as subjects. That
is why he criticizes strongly the insistence of the prosecution on notions like "conspiracy" or "criminal
organisations", because they fall too short from collective responsibility 5 . They give to the Hitler
enterprise a kind of "romantic prestige" 6 , whereas, according to him, Hitler's individual responsibility
was the main one, and complicity would have been more appropriate for most of the trial accused.
What appears here seem to be two opposing concepts of criminal responsibility for crimes
committed jointly by two or more individuals. The French legal tradition of that time insisted more on
the subjective element of the crime (criminal intention), whereas the English tradition insisted on the
objective element (criminal act). Donnedieu de Vabres - not unexpectedly - preferred the French
tradition, because it concurred with modern legal doctrine, which recommend individualized
prosecution. 7 The analysis of the French prosecutor Dubost was not different, but more balanced: he
tried to demonstrate that the accused were not only accomplices but direct authors of the crimes. He
underlined the existence of a "criminal policy" as an element of the crime against peace, rather than that
of a "criminal enterprise" as a technique of responsibility.
As a result of this implicit legal debate between the different prosecutors and between the
prosecution and the judges, count n ° l , conspiracy, was completely dismissed; instead, the judgment
concentrates on the planning of the crimes. For the same reason, the crime of participating in a criminal
organization was seriously limited by way of interpretation. The International Tribunal recognized the
criminal character of some organizations, but it addressed recommendations to courts, which would
implement international criminal law in the future. The criminal intention of each individual member of
these organizations should be demonstrated at trial, as a constitutive element of the crime.
It should be noticed that this central debate still continues today before international criminal courts.
The notion of "joined criminal enterprise", used in the Milosevic case for instance, seems to be close to
conspiracy. Its extensive use is now criticised by defense counsels, and even by some of the judges in
other cases before the ICTY. It seems more appropriate to require not only complicity, but co-action in
order to determine the role of the individual in collective crimes, while giving the highest regard to
protecting the rights of the accused.

" at 526 (reference in bibliography).

5
at 528 : « Il a plu à I 'accusation de présenter l'épopée nationale-socialiste comme une entreprise dont le but immédiat
fut le déclenchement des guerres d'agression, et la conséquence indirecte la commission de crimes de guerre et de crimes
de lèse-humanité. L'acte d'accusation et les réquisitoires qui l'ont suivi sont échafaudés sur cette hypothèse ».
6
at 530 : « L'imputation d'un complot pare l'entreprise hitlérienne d'un prestige romantique qui n 'est pas sans séduire
les imaginations ».
7
Apparently, this legal thinking is no more firmly established in France, as is demonstrated by the well-known crime of
participation in a terrorist enterprise!
42 Hervé Ascensio

3. The Paradoxical Heritage: Crimes against Humanity

Crime against peace was the main count, the one which encompassed all the others. War crimes
were also important, but they were presented as a consequence of the Nazi-ideology, following the
wagging of aggressive wars. Crime against humanity came as a subsidiary count, and not as an
autonomous one. However, it was considered by the French Deputy Prosecutor Charles Dubost as the
node of the process. But the French prosecution as well as the French judge seemed reluctant towards
the use of this count. In his lectures in The Hague, Donnedieu de Vabres took position in favour of a
flexible conception of the principle nullum crimen sine lege. According to him, it would be absurd to
deny its presence in international law, but absurd as well to apply it strictly, because the international
legal order is not yet a complete one, and a strict application of the principle would result in an attack
on the principle of justice. This line of reasoning applied for the crime against peace, but not for the
crime against humanity. He thought the definition of the last one was too obviously posterior to the
facts and, then, contrary to the principle on non-retroactivity. Probably reluctant to criticize the
Nuremberg process, Donnedieu de Vabres perpetuated the idea that crime against humanity almost
vanished in the Nuremberg judgment, 8 which is almost true - it applied for German victims instead of
war crimes.
Considering the lack of concern for "crimes against humanity" in the judgement, it is all the more
surprising that this crime became the major legacy of Nuremberg in French law. Until 1 March 1994,
which was the enforcement date of the new criminal code, the Nuremberg statute was the sole legal
basis for the prosecution of crimes against humanity before French courts. In 1975, in the Touvier case,
the French Cour de cassation (last degree court in civil and criminal matters) decided that the
Nuremberg Statute was directly applicable in the French legal order. Consequently, individuals could be
prosecuted before French courts, without any definition other than the one of Nuremberg, with some
details added by French case-law (see especially Cour de cassation, criminal chamber, Barbie case, 20
December 1985). Moreover, the reference to the Nuremberg statute allowed the retroactive application
of the 1964 law for imprescriptibility of crimes against humanity. It was then possible, forty years after
the end of the war, to prosecute the SS-Hauptsturmfiihrer Klaus Barbie, but also, ten years later, French
collaborators like Touvier, Bousquet, Papon (for complicity in crime against humanity). This is the best
part of the heritage: Nuremberg evolved as a German mirror for French duality, i.e. French complicity
in crimes against humanity committed in France during World War II.
However, there are still problems with this heritage. The definition of crimes against humanity
before 1994 was strictly designed for crimes committed by the Nazis during World War II requiring a
"criminal policy", a State "ideology", and a necessary link with World War II. This last element of the
crime has disappeared with the definition adopted in the criminal code of 1992 (in force since 1994).
But the new definition is not applicable to previous acts. It is then completely impossible to use crimes
against humanity for acts committed during decolonisation; and for war crimes, there are amnesty laws
as well as statutory limitations. The new definition applies for acts committed after 1 March 1994, and
for crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia since 1991 and in Rwanda in 1994, because of specific
laws of cooperation with the ICTY and ICTR. French courts may then be seized, for instance, in the
hypothesis that some French citizens would have been accomplice in the genocide committed in
Rwanda. 9 As you see, the German mirror could be of use again.

8
at 526-527.
® Genocide is conceived in French law as the gravest form of the crime against humanity; it appears as an autonomous
crime in the new criminal code.
The French Perspective 43

Bibliography:

Louis RENAULT, « De l'application du droit pénal aux faits de guerre », Revue générale de droit international public,
1918,5;
E
Vespasien V. PELLA, La criminalité collective des Etats et le droit pénal de l'avenir, 2 ™ éd., Imprimerie de l'Etat,
Bucarest, 1926;
Henri DONNEDIEU DE VABRES, Les principes modernes du droit pénal international, Recueil Sirey, Paris, 1928 (rééd.
Editions Panthéon Assas, Paris, 2004);
REY, « Les violations du droit international commises par les Allemands en France dans la guerre de 1939 », Revue
générale de droit international public, t. XVI, 1941-1945, vol. II, 1 ;
CENTRE DE DOCUMENTATION JUIVE CONTEMPORAINE, La persécution des Juifs en France et dans les autres pays de
l'Ouest : présentée par la France à Nuremberg. Recueil de documents, publié sous la direction de Henri MONNERAY,
préface de René CASSIN, introduction d'Edgar FAURE, série « Documents » 2, Editions du Centre, Paris, 1947;
Jacques DESCHEEMAEKER, Le Tribunal militaire international des grands criminels de guerre, préface de V.-V.
PELLA, Pedone, Paris, 1947;
Henri DONNEDIEU DE VABRES, « Le jugement de Nuremberg et le principe de légalité des délits et des peines », Revue
de droit pénal et de criminologie, 1946-1947, 813;
et « Le procès de Nuremberg devant les principes modernes du droit pénal international », Recueil des cours de
l'Académie de droit international de La Haye, 1947-1, tome 70, 477;
Marcel MERLE, Le procès de Nuremberg et le châtiment des criminels de guerre, préface de H. DONNEDIEU DE
VABRES, Pedone, Paris, 1949;
Georges SCELLE, « Quelques réflexions sur l'abolition de la compétence de guerre », Revue générale de droit
international public, 1954, 5;
Claude LOMBOIS, Droit pénal international, 2È™ éd., Dalloz, Paris, 1979;
S a n d r a SZUREK, « H i s t o r i q u e d e la f o r m a t i o n d u d r o i t i n t e r n a t i o n a l p é n a l », in H . ASCENSIO, E . DECAUX ET A . PELLET
(dir.), Droit international pénal, Pedone, Paris, 2000, 7;
Jean-Paul JEAN et Denis SALAS (dir.), Barbie, Touvier, Papon. Des procès pour la mémoire. Editions autrement, Paris,
2002;
Géraud de LA PRADELLE, Imprescriptible. L'implication française dans le génocide tutsi portée devant tes tribunaux.
Les arènes, Paris, 2005.
44 Die französische Perspektive

Hervé Ascensio
Die französische Perspektive
Es ist schwierig, umfassend von einer „französischen Perspektive" auf die Nürnberger Prozesse zu
sprechen. An drei konkreten Punkten erläutert der Autor daher, welche Rolle Frankreich in der
strafrechtlichen Verfolgung von NS-Verbrechen gespielt hat.

Zunächst wirft Ascensio einen Blick auf das politische Umfeld gegen Ende des 2. Weltkriegs. „La
France libre" unter General De Gaulle war bereits 1942 an den Verhandlungen der Alliierten im St.
James Palast in London beteiligt. Nach der Befreiung des gesamten französischen Staatsgebiets von der
Nazi-Besetzung war es der Regierung besonders wichtig, zu den „Siegern" des Krieges zu gehören,
trotz der beschämenden Kollaboration der Vichy-Regierung mit dem NS-Regime. Für die französische
Öffentlichkeit war eine strafrechtliche Verfolgung der Nazi-Kriegsverbrecher wegen der in Frankreich
begangenen Grausamkeiten von herausragender Bedeutung. Ebenso wurde von den französischen
Juristen die Gerechtigkeit in den Mittelpunkt gestellt und zugleich einem rigiden Rechtspositivismus
eine Absage erteilt.

In einem zweiten Punkt diskutiert er die strafrechtliche Verantwortung. Der französische Einfluss
auf das Statut des IMT war unter der Dominanz der angloamerikanischen Juristen eher gering. Ebenso
wird der Einfluss des französischen Richters, Henri Donnedieu de Vabres, in der Rezeptionsgeschichte
des Nürnberger Prozesses vielleicht zu Unrecht heruntergespielt, da seine Kritik an den - im Übrigen
auch heute z.B. im Milosevic-Prozess vor dem Jugoslawientribunal umstrittenen - Ideen des US-
amerikanischen Chefanklägers Jackson zur Strafbarkeit wegen Verschwörung und Kriminalisierung
von Organisationen, an der restriktiven Handhabe im Nürnberger Urteil mit verantwortlich ist.

Schließlich macht Ascensio auf einen Anachronismus in der französischen Rezeption der
Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit aufmerksam. Während des Nürnberger Prozesses waren die
französischen Beteiligten eher darauf bedacht, den Tatbestand der Verbrechen gegen die
Menschlichkeit zu marginalisieren, da sie in dessen Verfolgung einen Verstoß gegen das
Rückwirkungsverbot sahen. Eine Transformation von Menschlichkeitsverbrechen in französisches
Recht gelang allerdings erst in der Strafrechtsreform von 1992, die 1994 in Kraft trat. In den bekannten
Verfahren gegen Barbie, Touvier, Bousquet oder Papon, vor Einfuhrung des neuen Strafgesetzes,
mussten die französischen Gerichte auf das Statut des IMT zurückgreifen. Die französischen
Kollaborateure konnten daher nur wegen Nürnberg und auf der gleichen rechtlichen Grundlage wie die
Nazi-Verbrecher selbst strafrechtlich verfolgt werden. Auch nach der Strafrechtsreform können
Verfolgungslücken nur durch den Rückgriff auf das Nürnberger Verfahren geschlossen werden. Das ist
vermutlich für das französische Recht das wichtigste Vermächtnis von Nürnberg.
The Role of the Soviet Union in the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg 45

Michael J. Bazyler
The Role of the Soviet Union in the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg*
I. The Soviet Role in the International Military Tribunal Trial
The nation first to announce their preference for a judicial process for the crimes of the Nazis was
the Soviet Union. This was in 1944, even before the war ended, and was in opposition to the Americans,
who at that time were favoring the plan of U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgethau Jr. The so-called
Morgenthau-Plan aimed for the total denazification of Germany and severe economic reparations to
make Germany into a weak agricultural state. As for individual criminal responsibility, "Morgenthau's
eye-for-an-eye proposal suggested summarily shooting many prominent Nazi leaders at the time of
capture and banishing others to far off corners of the world. Under Morgenthau's plan, German POWs
would be forced to rebuild Europe." 1 The British also were not keen on setting up a court to judge the
Nazis. Winston Churchill likewise favored execution by firing squad of the major Nazi war criminals.2
Of course, the Soviet understanding of the concept of judicial process was quite different than its
meaning in the West. To the Soviets, the judicial proceedings - which they wanted to hold in Berlin -
were going to be "show trials" of the kind they were quite used to under Joseph Stalin. In fact, Major
General I.T. Nikitchenko, the judge appointed by the Soviet Union to the IMT, had earlier presided over
some of the most notorious of Stalin's show trials during the purges of 1936-1938. Nikitchenko publicly
pronounced his view that all of the defendants were guilty even prior to the start of the IMT
proceedings:
"We are dealing here with the chief war criminals who have already been convicted and whose
conviction has been already announced by both the Moscow and Crimea [referring to Yalta]
declarations by the heads of the governments.... The whole idea is to secure quick and just punishment
for the crime. "3
He then famously added: "If... the judge is supposed to be impartial [at Nuremberg], it would only
lead to unnecessary delays. "4
When it came time to render judgment, Nikitchenko dissented against the three acquittals issued by
the other three judges, and also argued that Rudolf Hess, the great enemy of the Soviet Union for his
effort to create a separate peace with the British when he parachuted into England and was captured
there, should also receive a death sentence. Nikitchenko also resisted French efforts to have the
judgment against the defendants receiving a death sentence to be carried out by a firing squad -
considered the more honorable way to die - than death by hanging, reserved for common criminals. 5

* The author wishes to express his gratitude for the assistance of Natalie Saadian (05 Chapman University School of
Law).
1
Douglas Linder, "The Nuremberg Trials", http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/trialsl2.htm (author is law professor at University
of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law (accessed July 15, 2005).
2
As Linder explains, "Churchill reportedly told Stalin that he favored execution of captured Nazi leaders. Stalin
answered, 'In the Soviet Union, we never execute anyone without a trial.' Churchill agreed saying, 'Of course, of course.
We shall give them a trial first.'" Linder, Id.
3
Whitney R. Harris, Tyranny on Trial: The Evidence at Nuremberg Trials (Dallas: SMU Press, 1954), 16-17. See also
Robert E. Conot, Justice at Nuremberg (New York: Harper & Row, 1994), 18.
4
Id. Nikitchenko's views were also rooted in a different understanding of the role that a judge plays in a criminal
proceeding. The Soviet legal system was modeled on Continental Europe's view of criminal procedure. As Conot explains,
"Unlike procedure in Anglo-American law, where the prosecutor and defense counsel are adversaries, with the judge sitting
as arbiter, in continental law[,J prosecutor, defense counsel and judge are all charged with the task of arriving at the truth.
Thus, Nikitchenko did not really understand what Jackson meant when he emphasized that the judges must be independent
and impartial...." Conot, supra, 18.
5
Goering, in his suicide note, explained the importance of this distinction. "I would have had no objection to being
shot. However, I will not facilitate execution of Germany's Reichsmarshall by hanging! For the sake of Germany, I cannot
permit this." Linden, supra.
46 Michael J. Bazyler

The Soviet Union played an active role in the London Conference, in which Britain, France, the
United States, together with the U.S.S.R. in 1945 mapped out their plan to establish the IMT. The
Soviets played a major role not only in drafting the procedural rules of the tribunal,6 but also in defining
the legal theories under which the defendants would ultimately be tried.7 For example, the notions of
criminal organizations "proved a major bone of contention from the start."8 The Soviets maintained that
the IMT should focus on the leaders and members of the Nazi organizations, with the authority to rule
after each case whether the entire organization - for example, the Gestapo - constituted a criminal
enterprise. This procedural move would thereby "eliminate] the need to prove the criminality of the
organization in each subsequent case of prosecution of a member of the organization."9 In the end, the
Soviet position prevailed, and became an important prosecutorial tool during the trial.10 Additionally,
the Soviets were responsible for the clause in the London Charter stating that the IMT "may require to
be informed of the nature of any evidence before it is offered so that it may rule on the relevance
thereof."11 Moreover, the Soviets directed that the tribunal take judicial notice of facts of common
knowledge instead of requiring their proof. They also attempted to have the judges agree - not always
successfully, though - to take judicial notice of, among other things, the evidence propounded by
committees established by the allies for the investigation of war crimes (such as the Soviet
Extraordinary State Commission, discussed below).12
The Soviets and the Americans agreed that the tribunal need not be bound by the technical rules of
evidence, allowing for introduction of any evidence considered to have probative value.13 In addition,
the Soviets and Americans wholeheartedly agreed that waging an aggressive war constituted an
international crime deserving of sanctions.14 Moreover, the Soviet terminology eventually used in the
indictment, that of "crimes against peace", prevailed over the then-existing draft by the United States of
"crimes of war."15 The Soviet insistence on the aforementioned terms of the IMT was not intended to
cause conflict between the Soviets and the three other prosecuting nations, but was meant to encourage
a "court drama that would lay bare all the evilness of the Nazi system by detailing in public the criminal
career of its leading personages".16
One of the criticisms made of the IMT trial is that the accusers were also victims of the Nazis and
acted as prosecutors, judges and executioners. Therefore, the argument runs, the defendants could not
and did not obtain a fair trial. The general proposition that the victims (and here also the victors) cannot
also be the adjudicators of guilt, while superficially appealing, is not correct. As Professor A.L.
Goodheart of Oxford explained soon after the conclusion of the trials in an article entitled "The Legality
of the Nuremberg Trials",
"Attractive as this argument may sound in theory, it ignores the fact that it runs counter to the
administration of law in every country. It if were true, then no spy could be given a legal trial, because
his case is always heard by judges representing the enemy country. Yet no one has ever argued that in
such cases it was necessary to call on neutral judges. The prisoner has the right to demand that his
judges shall be fair, but not that they shall be neutral. As Lord Witt has pointed out, the same principle

6
George Ginsburgs, Moscow's Road to Nuremberg, (New York: Kluwer Law International, 1996), 97-8.
1
Id. at 98.
«Id.
9
Id.
'"Id.
"Id. at 102.
12
Id.
n
Id. at 103.
14
Id. at 104.
15
Id. at 105.
" Id. at 107. Indeed, it has also been argued that Soviet judge Nikitchenko raised objections to several American
proposals in order to display " M o s c o w ' s determination not to serve as a rubber stamp." Arie Kochavi, Prelude to
Nuremberg: Allied War Crimes Policy and the Question of Punishment (Chapel Hill and London: University of North
Carolina Press, 1998), 240.
The Role of the Soviet Union in the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg 47

is applicable to ordinary criminal law because 'a burglar cannot complain that he is being tried by a
jury of honest citizens. "17
The same argument was made by Adolf Eichmann, who argued that it would be unfair for him to be
adjudged by a Jewish judge. The three-judge Israeli court rejected the argument. As explained by
Presiding Judge Moshe Landau,
"Will the memory of the Holocaust prevent the judges from carrying out their considered intention
to conduct a fair trial? No....[W]e shall have no difficulty adhering to the guarantees given all
defendants under our criminal code, to be considered innocent until proven guilty and to be judged
solely according to evidence presented before the court.... The judge, in his capacity as adjudicator,
does not cease to be a creature of flesh and blood, with feelings and urges[J but he is required by law
to control them. We shall abide by this requirement. "18
It is clear from Nikitenko's statements quoted above that he did not abide by this proposition as a
judge at the IMT. Of course, this is not surprising, since the Soviet view of trials was not of a
proceeding before finders of fact who aim to put their prejudices aside and decide culpability solely on
the basis of facts presented to them. If the remaining three judges were also Soviet, or followed
Nikitenko's view, it is likely that today the legacy of Nuremberg would be quite poor.
The Soviet aim to make Nuremberg a "show trial" by putting forth mounds of evidence of Nazi
atrocities, especially those committed after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, ironically had the
effect of making the Nuremberg proceedings more legally effective. The chief Soviet prosecutor R. A.
Rudenko and his staff were in many ways the most prepared prosecuting team of the four Allied
prosecutorial teams. Moreover, the Soviet presentation of their case through extensive documentary
evidence played a critical role in the thorough documentation of Nazi crimes and the exposure to the
world of the brutality of the Nazi regime. Rudenko offered vast amounts of paper evidence to support
the counts of conspiracy and crimes against peace. 19 Such evidence included not only the official
documents of the defendants and their associates, but also transcripts of speeches at congresses and
Reichstag sessions, books, maps, private correspondence, diaries, and memoirs. 20 Rudenko also
presented material proof such as written depositions and statements of victims and witnesses, including
those of the Germans. 2 ' The Soviets "claimed credit for convincing their partners not to build the
proceedings around documentary evidence alone", for the offering of live evidence would produce "a
dramatic effect on the atmosphere in the court-room". 22
Much of the Soviet evidence came from the work of their "Extraordinary State Commission for
Ascertaining and Investigating Crimes Perpetrated by the German-Fascist Invaders and their
Accomplices". Created in November 1942, its task was to
" ...keep complete records of the vile crimes perpetrated by the Germans and their accomplices and
the damage inflicted by them on Soviet citizens and the socialist state; establish wherever possible the
identity of the German-Fascist criminals guilty of the organization or execution of the crimes in
occupied Soviet territories, so that they might be handed over to the courts for severe punishment;
[and] unify and coordinate the work already performed by Soviet state organs in this area. "23
Among the detailed and massive work performed by the Commission was inspection of graves and
corpses, gathering of witness accounts, forensic examinations, and interrogations of captured
Germans. 24 The records contained "the most complete description possible of the crimes committed, the
full name and place of residence of the individuals furnishing the evidence", and "all the relevant

17
A.L. Goodheart, "The Legality of the Nuremberg Trials," Juridicial Review (April 1946).
18
Haim Goury, Facing the Glass Booth: The Jerusalem Trial of Adolf Eichmann (Michael Swirsky, trans!.) (Detroit:
Wayne State U. Press, 2004), 6-7.
" Ginsburgs, supra, p. 111.
20
Id.
21
Id. at 112.
22
Id
23
Id. at 3 7 - 8 .
2
" Id. at 39.
48 Michael J. Bazyler

documents" such as minutes of the interrogations, medical expert conclusions, German documents, and
films. 25 The Commission's extraordinary efforts resulted in an impressive list of "hundreds of Germans,
from generals to humble privates", and a "specific and detailed enumeration of the crimes of which they
stood accused". 26 These records proved indispensable at the IMT.
The Soviets also had the earliest experience in trying Nazis. In Kharkov in December 1943, the
Soviets conducted the first domestic trial of Germans accused of atrocities. 27 The defendants consisted
of a military intelligence captain, an SS lieutenant, a police private, and a Russian collaborator who
chauffeured the Kharkov Gestapo. 28 The Soviet prosecution in the Kharkov trial invoked the theme of
collective complicity in that the atrocities committed by the defendants were "links in a long chain of
crimes... committed by the German invaders on the direct instructions of the German Government and
of the Supreme Command of the German Army". 29 The Kharkov indictment "sounded vaguely like a
medium for indicting a criminal gang and so anticipated the novel concept of 'criminal organization'
later consecrated in the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal". 30 The Kharkov defendants admitted that
the orders for atrocities for which they stood accused "emanated from the German government". 31 In its
closing argument, the prosecution de-legitimized the defense of superior orders and "insisted that the
accused be personally and individually held to account for their actions". 32
At the same time, the prosecution did not hesitate to take advantage of the plea of respondeat
superior in order to "tracfc] the responsibility to the men at the top of the Nazi pyramid", thus again
emphasizing the notion of collective responsibility for the German atrocities. 33 Thus, the importance of
domestic war crimes trials such as the Kharkov trial lies not only in their bringing of Nazi war criminals
to justice, but also their effect, as put by Professor George Ginsburgs, of "pointing] the way toward the
grand finale at Nuremberg". 34
Last, the Soviet evidence at the IMT did not focus only on crimes against its own citizens. In total,
the evidence presented by the Soviets
" ...recorded the systematic execution by firing squads, torture, and abuse of Soviet, Polish, French,
and English prisoners of war, the extermination and enslavement of peaceful population in "death
camps" and in Jewish ghettos, the senseless destruction of towns and villages, the plunder of both
public and private property, as well as historical and cultural treasures in Yugoslavia, Poland, Greece,
and the U.S.S.R. "35

25
Id.
26
Id. at 40.
27
Id. In addition, in July 1943, the Soviets prosecuted eleven Soviet citizens for treason and collaboration with the
German authorities in what came to be known as the Krasnodar trials. These trials, because they were based upon the
Soviet Criminal Code, were inapplicable to and thus could not serve as a judicial precedent for any subsequent proceedings
against the Gestapo or German army. Still, they reinforced the notion that "responsibility...ultimately attached to the
German government and High Command", and that the "atrocities were lengthily and convincingly depicted as an integral
part of a total and premeditated plan basic to the whole Fascist way of life". George Ginsburgs, "The Nuremberg Trial:
Background," in George Ginsburgs & V.N. Kudriavtsev, The Nuremberg Trial and International Law, 5 (Leiden,
Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1990), 19-21.
Furthermore, the Krasnodar trials, in addition to the Kharkov trials, were the "first judicial record of cases on the crimes
and criminal responsibility of the Hitlerites which served as the original introduction to the Nuremberg Trial, paving the
way for the application and effectuation of many norms and principles which later constituted the basis of Nuremberg law."
The evidence presented at the Krasnodar trials revealed that tens of thousands of peaceful Soviets were killed or tortured by
the Germans, including many children, the elderly, women, prisoners of war, and all patients in hospitals. l.A. Lediakh,
"The Application of the Nuremberg Principles by Other Military Tribunals and National Courts," in Ginsburgs &
Kudriavtsev, supra, 263—4.
28
Ginsburgs, Moscow's Road to Nuremberg, supra, 52.
29
Id
30
Id. at 53.
31
Id. at 53.
32
Id. at 54.
33
Id.
34
Id. at 56.
35
A. M. Larin, "The Trial of the Major War Criminals," in Ginsburgs & Kudriavtsev supra, 78.
The Role of the Soviet Union in the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg 49

II. Tu Quoque: The Crimes Committed by the Soviet Union During World War II Under the
IMT Charter
The criticisms made of the IMT trial that the accusers and adjudicators were also victims must be
distinguished from another criticism: that the Allied Powers judging the individual German defendants
at the dock also committed some of the same crimes for which the German defendants were being
charged.
First on the list, of course, was the Soviet Union. It seems obvious that the Soviet Union also
committed the crime of waging an aggressive war, its leaders - foremost Joseph Stalin - could be
considered conspirators in that crime, and that the Soviets during the war committed both war crimes
and crimes against humanity. At the same time, it must be remembered that the Soviets - among the
Allies - were not only the greatest perpetrators of the crimes enumerated in the IMT Charter but also
were the greatest victims of Nazi atrocities. Twenty million Soviet civilians and eight million Soviet
soldiers perished at the hands of the Nazis. 36

A. Crimes Against Peace: The German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact and Soviet Conquest of the
Baltic Republics and Eastern Poland
At the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, the official position of the U.S.S.R. was that of
neutrality. 37 Just a few weeks earlier, on August 23, 1939, the U.S.S.R. signed a treaty of non-
aggression with Germany. This pact contained a secret additional protocol 38 wherein in exchange for
agreeing not to join the future war, Germany promised the Soviets the Baltic states of Lithuania,
Estonia, and Latvia. By signing the non-aggression pact with Germany and including the secret
provisions, Stalin and his cohorts actively collaborated with the Nazis in Germany's invasion of Poland
on September 1, 1939. On September 17, 1939, despite their "neutral" status, the Soviets marched into
Eastern Poland, with the explanation of protecting the "ethnic brothers of [their] Ukrainian and White
Russian populations". 39 As Bradley Smith explains,
"[I]f the Nuremberg prosecutors were correct that there was conspiracy in the planning of
aggression against Poland in 1939, then Stalin was one of the parties to the conspiracy. "40
Indeed, the "most troublesome problem" facing the Nuremberg judges was that:
"Stalin's signature on the Nazi-Soviet Pact had left Hitler free to move against Poland. Once the
secret clauses of that pact appeared in evidence, even in summary form, it was difficult to avoid the
conclusion that Stalin, like some of the defendants in the dock, had continued to "cooperate" with
Hitler after he knew of the Nazi attack plans. If this kind of conduct would earn defendants such as
Wilhelm Frick prison sentences or death, what was the Court to say about the actions of the Soviet
Union?"4'
As put by another author, if the participants at Nuremberg believed the "rape of Poland' to be an
international crime 'then there follows an irrefutable implication that Soviet Russia and its officials
were participes crimines. "AI

36
During the course of the IMT trial, the Soviets failed to recognize that the largest proportion of those murdered by the
Nazis in their territory were Jews. Rather, these Jewish murders were noted by the Soviet prosecutors as murders of Soviet
citizens.
37
Ginsburgs, supra, 129.
38
Id.
39
Ginsburgs, supra, 142.
40
Bradley Smith, Reaching Judgment at Nuremberg (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 105.
41
Id. at 147.
42
William Bosch, Judgment on Nuremberg: American Attitudes Toward the Major German War-Crime Trials
(Durham, N.C: University of North Carolina Press, 1970) p.44. Alfred Seidl, attorney for Rudolf Hess, was most insistent
in raising this argument during the course of the IMT proceedings. As Conot explains, "By revealing to the world that
Germany and the Soviet Union had agreed to divide Eastern Europe between them in 1939, Seidl aimed to blow Count
One, the Conspiracy to Wage Aggressive War, right out of the trial: For if there had been a conspiracy, then one of the
conspirators, the Soviet Union, was in violation of all legal standards, participating in the prosecution and the judging of the
50 Michael J. Bazyler

B. War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity: The Katyn Massacre

One of the most embarrassing events at the IMT was the attempt by the Soviets to pin the massacre
of 15,000 Polish officers, a proportion of whose bodies were discovered by the Germans in 1942 at the
Katyn Forest near Smolensk, upon Germany. In the course of the IMT proceedings, Soviet assistant
prosecutor Y.V.Porkovsky brazenly asserted,
"[0]ne of the most important criminal acts for which the major war criminals are responsible was
the mass execution of Polish prisoners of war shot in the Katyn forest near Smolensk by the German
fascist invaders. "43
The United States and the United Kingdom refused to support the charge, and Justice Jackson, the
American prosecutor, tried, but was unsuccessful, in convincing the Soviets to drop the Katyn matter.
Unable to dissuade the Soviet prosecutors, the Soviets were given the opportunity to to go forward and
prove German culpability. This proved to be a disaster for the Soviets. German defense lawyers had a
field day with this accusation by mounting an effective defense. As Conot explains, "Katyn
consequently had become an albatross hung around their own neck by the Russians...." 44 After much
embarrassment, the Soviet prosecutors eventually agreed to drop the Katyn incident from the
proceedings, and there is no mention of Katyn in the Nuremberg final judgments.
In 1990, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev acknowledged that the Soviets were indeed the ones
who carried out the massacre, under the direct orders of Stalin.45 While one scholar commented that,
technically, "the killing of Polish officers... at Katyn and elsewhere on Soviet soil would not qualify as
a war crime or even a crime against humanity on the Nuremberg model," he admits that the massacre
would "still leave the Stalin regime guilty of...the common crime of mass murder, notwithstanding
today's preference...for calling the case a war crime".46 Thus, although the Katyn episode "raised few
side questions" at Nuremberg, it succeeded in demonstrating that the "Nazis might not have a monopoly
• * ,,47
on atrocities.

III. The Legal and Moral Implications of the Soviet Role as Prosecutors at Nuremberg
The culpability of the Soviet Union in committing similar offenses, and worse, its complicity in the
commission of some of the crimes charged, arguably de-legitimizes the authority of the IMT to "judge
and condemn their fellow criminals and accomplices."48
From a purely legal point of view, however, any accusations of crimes committed by the Allies
during World War II could not be adjudged by the IMT tribunal. The London Charter, issued on August
8, 1945, specifically pronounced that the proceedings were restricted to the "trial and punishment of the
major war criminals of the European Axis countries." If Stalin was a major war criminal, Nuremberg
was not the place where his crimes would be adjudged. As Linder explains,
"The indictments against the defendants would prohibit defenses based on superior orders, as well
as tu quoque (the "so-did-you ") defense. Delegates [to the London Conference] were determined not to
let the defendants and their German lawyers turn the trial into one that would expose questionable war
conduct by Allied forces. "49

case. If, on the other hand, the Moscow Pact had not constituted a conspiracy, then the Germans could be no more guilty
than the Soviets." Conot, supra, 350-1.
43
IMT Proceedings, v. VII.
44
Conot, supra, 452.
45
To Poland's great displeasure, an official Russian commission examining events at Katyn decided that the massacre
was not a crime against humanity or a war crime, but an ordinary criminal act. The Russian government also refused to
open their archives on the matter to a Polish commission of inquiry. For this reason, 65 years after the event, the Katyn
massacre remains a sore point in Polish-Russian relations.
46
Ginsburgs, supra, 128, fn. 3
47
Smith, supra, 104.
48
Bosch, supra, 18.
49
Linder, supra.
The Role of the Soviet Union in the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg 51

When the German defense attorneys attempted during the course of the IMT trial to introduce the
behavior of the Soviet Union as a defense to their clients' actions, Soviet prosecutor Rudenko correctly
objected: "We are examining the matter of the crimes of the major German war criminals. We are not
investigating the foreign policies of other states." 50 Moreover, in any trial the adjudicators need not be
completely innocent to be able to fairly judge the accused. William Shakespeare, in his play Measure
for Measure, pointed out this reality: "The jury, passing on the prisoner's life, /May in the sworn twelve
have a thief or two/ Guiltier than him they try."51
Benjamin Ferencz, the chief prosecutor in the Einzatzgruppen trial at the subsequent Nuremberg
zonal trials, similarly countered this argument in a Court TV interview on the Nuremberg Trials, by
noting that the individuals defendants were on trial for the acts they themselves committed, and their
"You too" or "You also" argument bears no relevance on their individual guilt or innocence for such
acts.52 From a moral or ethical point of view, the Tu Quoque [You Also/You Too] argument is also not
recognized as a valid excuse. As the Encyclopedia of Fallacies explains,
"[Tu Quoque] is a fallacy regardless of whether you really did it or not. . . .For example, when one
is arguing "Jack is a murderer ", Jack's defendant says "You 're a murderer too ". The response is only
blaming the claimer for the same thing he/she did as well. This doesn't refute the fact that Jack is a
murderer, but only draws away the attention by involving another person. "53
As with children, therefore, the cry of "Everyone else is doing it," should have no consequence.

IV. Conclusion
The Soviet Union's suitability to play prosecutor and judge at Nuremberg understandably diminishes
the legacy of the IMT. The secret collaborations with Germany makes the Soviets appear more as
accomplices to some of Germany's crimes than the neutral bystanders or pure victims they held
themselves out to be. In addition, the Soviets themselves were guilty of direct perpetration of atrocities
not only against their "enemies", but also against their own people.
Nevertheless, the Soviets did not play a passive role in the development of the trials. Because of the
enormity of the atrocities committed on Soviet soil by the Germans, the Soviets had a legitimate stake
in the outcome of the trial of the perpetrators, and in that sense, were no different from the other
prosecuting teams who were also directly impacted by the war. Indeed, Soviet contributions to the trials
were numerous; from their scrupulous gathering of evidence, to the precedents set by their domestic
trials of war criminals, to their substantial hand in the drafting of the London Charter, and to their
presentation of the records of massive Nazi atrocities on Soviet and foreign soil alike. Such
contributions cannot be underestimated and lends credence to the legitimacy of the trials as a whole.

50
Conot, supra, 421.
51
William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, Act II, Scene 1.
52
Interview of Benjamin Ferencz by Terry Moran, Court TV Program "The Nuremberg Trials," November 13, 1995.
53
<http:wiki.coth.net/index.php/Tu_quoque> (accessed July 15, 2005).
52 Die Rolle der Sowjetunion vor dem Internationalen Militärtribunal in Nürnberg

Michael J. Bazyler
Die Rolle der Sowjetunion vor dem Internationalen Militärtribunal in Nürnberg
Dieser Beitrag setzt sich mit der Rolle der Sowjetunion im Rahmen des Verfahrens vor dem
Internationalen Militärtribunal in Nürnberg (IMT) auseinander. Stalin stand von vorneherein der Idee
eines Strafverfahrens gegen die Hauptkriegsverbrecher recht aufgeschlossen gegenüber. Ihm lag
allerdings weniger an einem ergebnisoffenen, rechtsstaatlichen Strafverfahren als an einer formalen
Scheinerlaubnis für eine Massenexekution. Während der Statuts-Verhandlungen in London war die
sowjetische Verhandlungsdelegation unter Führung des späteren IMT-Richters Nikitchenko nicht ohne
Einfluss auf die Ausgestaltung des IMT; so setzte sich beispielsweise die sowjetische Stellung zur Frage
der kriminellen Organisation durch. Auch der Begriff „crime against peace" stammt von der
sowjetischen Delegation. Schließlich konnte auch während des Prozesses der sowjetische Ankläger
Rudenko erhebliches Beweismaterial zur Verurteilung beisteuern.

Allerdings bereitete das völkerrechtliche Prinzip des „tu quoque" während des Prozesses
Schwierigkeiten. So wurde gerade der sowjetischen Seite immer wieder entgegengehalten, Stalin habe
seinerseits sowohl den Angriffskrieg als auch Verbrechen gegen die Menschlichkeit zu verantworten.
So machte sich Stalin durch die Unterzeichnung des geheimen Zusatzprotokolls zum Nichtsangriffspakt
mit Hitler am 23. August 1939 der Verschwörung gegen den Frieden schuldig, indem er dem Angriff
auf Polen zustimmte. Das im Nürnberger Prozess angesprochene, schließlich wegen erheblicher Zweifel
an der Verantwortlichkeit der Deutschen nicht weiter verfolgte Massaker von Katyn war - wie der
spätere Präsident der U.d.S.S.R. Michael Gorbatschow 1990 offenlegte - eine von Stalin befohlene
Hinrichtung polnischer Offiziere.

Trotz dieser von den Sowjets begangenen Völkerstraftaten schwindet die Legitimität des IMT
insgesamt nicht, wenn auch die moralische Autorität des IMT darunter leidet. Das Verfahren gegen die
deutschen Hauptkriegsverbrecher ist rechtlich weder der Ort noch der Zeitpunkt, um gleichartige
Verbrechen der Gegenseite vorzutragen oder gar die Angeklagten zu entlasten.
Das Internationale Militärtribunal aus deutscher Perspektive 53

Albin Eser
Das Internationale Militärtribunal von Nürnberg aus deutscher Perspektive*
Lassen Sie mich mit einem Bekenntnis beginnen: Ich sitze hier mit sehr gemischten Gefühlen. Auf
der einen Seite bewegen mich Ehre und Dankbarkeit, an einer Erinnerungsveranstaltung von einem
Tisch aus mitwirken zu dürfen, der als Richtertisch für das Nürnberger Internationale Militärtribunal
diente. Zwar hat er historisch seinerzeit auf der linken, damals verhüllten, Fensterfront gestanden,
während diese Stelle hier für die Dolmetscher reserviert war. Gleichwohl sitzen wir hier gleichsam
symbolisch an dem Richtertisch, von dem aus Urteile gesprochen wurden, die für die Entwicklung des
Internationalen Strafrechts von ganz besonderer Bedeutung geworden sind. Aufgrund meiner
derzeitigen Tätigkeit als Richter am Internationalen Strafgerichtshof für das ehemalige Jugoslawien in
Den Haag kann ich Ihnen versichern, dass eigentlich fast kein Tag vergeht, an dem man nicht - wenn
auch nicht wörtlich, so doch gedanklich - auf Prinzipien und Rechtsfiguren zurückgreifen würde, die in
den hier gefällten Urteilen ausgesprochen wurden, seit damals lebendig geblieben sind und weiterhin
die Entwicklung des Völkerstrafrechts bestimmen.
Andererseits drückt mich aber auch eine Bürde, nämlich auf diesem Panel neben den Vertretern von
Ländern, von denen damals hier jeweils ein Richter fungierte, ein einzelnes Land und dabei jenes Land
vertreten zu sollen, von dem die schlimmsten Verbrechen des letzten Jahrhunderts ausgegangen sind.
Diese Verantwortung muss unser Land auch dann übernehmen, wenn in diesem Saal der berühmt
gewordene Satz gesprochen worden ist, dass „international crimes are not committed by states but by
individuals". Auch wenn damit die individuelle Verantwortlichkeit bestimmter Einzelpersonen
konstatiert wurde, vermag dies nichts daran zu ändern, dass dabei auch das Volk, auf dessen
Territorium jene Verbrechen begangen wurden und ohne dessen Tolerierung nicht hätten begangen
werden können, mitverantwortlich bleibt. Deshalb bin ich sehr dankbar dafür, dass sowohl Herr
Oberlandesgerichtspräsident Dr. Franke wie auch Herr Dekan Rohe von der Juristischen Fakultät der
Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg den Gedanken dauerhafter Verantwortlichkeit Deutschlands und des
deutschen Volkes und nicht zuletzt auch seines Rechts betont und an unsere besondere Verpflichtung
erinnert haben, mit allen Mitteln zu verhindern, dass Ähnliches auf deutschem Boden oder von diesem
aus wieder geschieht.
Ein weiteres Gefühl ist das der Erleichterung, hatte ich doch befürchtet, hier als Einzelner gegen
eine Front von „Alliierten" zu sitzen und eine bestimmte Position verteidigen zu müssen, die von
anderen nicht geteilt wird. Wie sich jedoch herausgestellt hat, ist auch die Sicht der Vertreter der
damaligen Richterstaaten eine sehr unterschiedliche, indem die Nürnberger Verfahren sowohl
Bestätigung gefunden haben, aber auch immer wieder Kritik laut geworden ist, damit ähnlich
unterschiedlich wie auch aus deutscher Sicht. Somit ist international gesehen die Einstellung gegenüber
den Nürnberger Urteilen keineswegs einseitig homogen im Sinne von Ablehnung oder Zustimmung,
sondern durchaus differenziert. In diesem Sinne möchte ich nachfolgend einige Aspekte dieser
differenzierten Sicht aus deutscher Perspektive aufzeigen, wobei dies in drei Frageschritten geschehen
soll:

Erstens: Nürnberg als Rechtsfrage? Kritischer Rückblick aus juristischer Sicht.

Zweitens: Nürnberg als eine nicht nur rechtliche, sondern auch politische Frage? Unterschiedliche
Einstellungen zu den Nürnberger Urteilen.
Drittens: Nürnberg als rechtspolitische und moralische Frage? Einige Schlussgedanken.

Für seine Mitarbeit bei Sammlung und Sondierung des diesem Vortrag zugrundeliegenden Materials bin ich Herrn
Referendar Christoph Burchard zu besonderem Dank verpflichtet.
54 Albin Eser

I. Nürnberg als Rechtsfrage. Diese Frage findet sich vor allem aus zwei Blickwinkeln gestellt:

1) Da ist zum einen die Frage, inwieweit es sich beim Nürnberger Militärtribunal um bloße
„Siegerjustiz" gehandelt hat oder darin nicht doch vielleicht ein Triumph internationaler Strafjustiz im
Sinne einer humanitären, in die Zukunft gerichteten Gerechtigkeit zu erblicken wäre. Um die deutsche
Position verstehen zu können, empfiehlt es sich, kurz einige der Stichworte zu nennen, die mit
Nürnberg als „Siegeijustiz" verbunden werden.
a) Am häufigsten findet sich moniert, dass hier ausschließlich Richter aus den Reihen der alliierten
Siegermächte England, Frankreich, Russland und der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika saßen.
Demgegenüber wird gefragt, ob man nicht schon damals hätte überlegen können, warum nicht auch
Richter aus neutralen Staaten - wie etwa der Schweiz oder aus Lateinamerika, wenn nicht schon Richter
aus Deutschland - auf der Richterbank hätten sitzen können. Wenn man etwa heute miterleben muss,
wie beispielsweise von amerikanischer Seite gegen den Internationalen Strafgerichtshof unter anderem
auch damit argumentiert wird, dass amerikanische Staatsbürger Gefahr liefen, „not to be judged by their
own peers", mag die Frage erlaubt sein, warum man nicht schon vor 60 Jahren auf diese Idee
gekommen ist oder sie besser auch heute nicht ins Feld fuhren sollte.
b) Des Weiteren stört man sich als Anzeichen von „Siegeijustiz" daran, dass das Nürnberger
Gerichtsstatut zum Teil von Juristen entworfen worden war, die später als Ankläger (wie insbesondere
Robert H. Jackson) oder gar als Richter (wie der sowjetische Generalmajor Nikitchenko) fungierten.
Diese Überlappung von Rechtsschöpfung und Rechtsanwendung fand sich beispielsweise kritisiert
durch ein „Joint Defence Motion", als es feststellte: „all in one: creator of the Statute of the tribunal and
of the rules of law, prosecutor and judge". Dadurch sah man nicht nur das Prinzip der Gewaltenteilung
missachtet, sondern auch die Gefahr einer vorurteilsbehafteten Führung des Prozesses. Angesichts einer
solchen Dominanz der Siegermächte konnte es nicht ausbleiben, dass das Internationale Militärtribunal
weniger als eine wahrhaft supranationale Instanz internationaler Gerechtigkeit, sondern mehr als ein
Besatzungsgericht siegreicher Mächte erscheinen konnte und das hehre Bild unbefangener
internationaler Strafgerechtigkeit durch das Zerrbild vermeintlich voreingenommener Siegeijustiz
verstellt wurde.
Ohne mir diese Einwände ohne weiteres zu eigen machen zu wollen, wurde der Eindruck von
Einseitigkeit der Nürnberger Prozesse noch durch weitere Faktoren verschärft, wobei hier lediglich drei
kurz erwähnt seien:
c) Ein erster Vorwurf rügt die mangelnde Waffengleichheit zwischen Anklage und Verteidigung,
weil letztere von der Anklage vorgelegte Urkundenbeweise nicht angreifen durfte. Wenn ich das etwa
mit den heutigen Möglichkeiten der Defence vor dem Internationalen Strafgerichtshof für das
ehemalige Jugoslawien vergleiche, so kann man nur positiv beeindruckt sein von den verschiedenen
disclosure rules, nach denen die Prosecution schon Monate vor Prozessbeginn ihre exhibits offenlegen
muss, um der Defence eine entsprechende Vorbereitung zu ermöglichen. Aus heutigem Blickwinkel
wird man daher in der Tat bezweifeln können, ob seinerzeit wirklich schon eine Waffengleichheit
zwischen Anklage und Verteidigung gewährleistet war. Umso mehr mag es überraschen, dass damals
der Prozess vor dem Nürnberger Tribunal von deutschen Verteidigern als durchaus „fair" bezeichnet
wurde.
d) Ein zweiter Vorwurf rügt die Nicht-Erwähnung der deutschen Opfer des NS-Regimes in der
Anklage beziehungsweise im Urteil von Nürnberg. Dieser Vorwurf beruht auf der engen Auslegung der
„crimes against humanity" durch das IMT, derzufolge - unter anderem - nicht über innerdeutsche
Verfolgungen, denen Opfer vor Kriegsbeginn ausgesetzt waren, zu befinden war. Damit stellte sich
schon damals das Problem, dass sich der Gerichtshof - wie heute auch das Jugoslawien- und das
Ruanda-Tribunal und nicht zuletzt auch der künftige Internationale Strafgerichtshof- nur mit zeitlich
und örtlich begrenzten Teilausschnitten von Völkerrechtsverbrechen befassen dürfen und solche
zeitlichen Schnitte für jene Opfer schmerzhaft sein müssen, die nicht die Genugtuung irgendeiner Art
von Gerechtigkeit erfahren dürfen.
e) Ein dritter Vorwurf rügt die Nichtzulassung des tu quoque-Einwands, von dem bereits Herr
Kollege Bazyler gesprochen hat - der Einwand also, dass die gegnerische Seite ja bereits ähnliche
Das Internationale Militärtribunal aus deutscher Perspektive 55

Verbrechen begangen habe und man deshalb gleichsam „quitt" sei. Obwohl dies auf den ersten Blick
eine menschlich verständliche Reaktion sein mag, kann ich mich gerade aus meiner Erfahrung als
Richter am Jugoslawien-Tribunal darin bestätigt sehen, dass es in vielen Fällen das Ende internationaler
Strafjustiz bedeuten müsste, wenn man den tu quoque-Einwand zuließe. Wenn man etwa an die - wie
ich, solange kein Urteil gesprochen ist, vorsorglich sagen muss: angeblichen - Greueltaten auf dem
Balkan denkt, wo sich die Serben auf Übergriffe von Moslems und diese wiederum auf vorangegangene
Übeltaten von Serben berufen, so könnte man rückwärts ad infinitum immer wieder einen Grund finden,
mit dem man seine eigenen Untaten meint rechtfertigen zu können. Dem bleibt entgegenzuhalten, dass
Morden der einen Seite keine Rechtfertigung für das Morden auf der anderen Seite sein kann. Sicherlich
muss die Justiz immer bestrebt sein, beiden Seiten gerecht zu werden: dies jedoch nicht im Sinne von
Nichtverfolgung, sondern vielmehr im Sinne des Bemühens um Strafverfolgung beider Seiten!
2) Lassen Sie mich zum zweiten Rechtsaspekt kommen, der auf den ersten Blick ebenfalls als
„nürnbergkritisch" erscheint, in einem Weitblick jedoch auch als zukunftsweisend gewürdigt werden
kann. Ich meine den häufig geäußerten Vorwurf, dass mangels einer zum Zeitpunkt der angeklagten
Verbrechen fehlenden formellen Strafandrohung der Grundsatz von „nullum crimen sine lege" verletzt
worden sei. Teils meinte man dieses Problem schon damit erledigen zu können, dass es sich bei den
Nürnberger Angeklagten um Mitglieder des nationalsozialistischen Regimes gehandelt habe, das den
„Gesetzlichkeitsgrundsatz" aus dem Strafgesetzbuch hatte streichen lassen, und dass demzufolge diese
angeklagten Parteigenossen ihr Recht verwirkten, eine ex post-Sanktionierung zu rügen. Dem wird in
der deutschen Debatte regelmäßig entgegengehalten, dass es eine Verwirkung nicht gebe, dass sich
vielmehr jeder Verbrecher auf das „nullum crimen sine lege"-Prinzip berufen dürfe. Gleichwohl wird
noch zu fragen sein, ob diesem Einwand nicht besser durch Rückbesinnung auf die Funktion von
„nullum crimen sine lege" als Respektierung „legitimen Vertrauens" beizukommen wäre.
In der Sache selbst ist Folgendes im Auge zu behalten: Soweit man den „nullum crimen sine lege"-
Grundsatz überhaupt als tangiert ansehen konnte, galt das keineswegs für alle Anklagepunkte, vielmehr
war folgendermaßen zu unterscheiden:
a) Soweit es um „crimes against humanity" geht, finden sich zur Vereinbarkeit mit dem „nullum
crimen sine lege"-Prinzip zwei unterschiedliche Begründungsstränge: Zum einen - vielleicht für
manche überraschend - bei Carl Schmitt, wonach die Außerordentlichkeit dieser Verbrechen den
„nullum crimen"-Einwand abschneide. Zum anderen das von meinem Amtsvorgänger am Max-Planck-
Institut für ausländisches und internationales Strafrecht Hans-Heinrich Jescheck vorgetragene
Argument, dass diese Verbrechen nichts anderes als politisch motivierte und systematisch begangene
„normale" Straftaten seien, wie sie sich bereits in den nationalen Strafgesetzbüchern als inkriminiert
finden.
b) Weitaus kontroverser war jedoch die Vereinbarkeit des Straftatbestandes von Verbrechen gegen
den Frieden mit dem „nullum crime sine lege"-Prinzip. Dazu wurden folgende Fragen gestellt: Soweit
es um die grundsätzliche Ächtung des Krieges schon vor dem Zweiten Weltkrieg ging, bestand breiter
Konsens, dass bereits der Kellogg-Briand-Pakt zu einer Kriegsächtung gefuhrt hatte. Ob sich aber
daraus auch eine schon vor dem Zweiten Weltkrieg vorfindbare individuelle Strafbarkeit für das Führen
eines Angriffskriegs begründen lasse, wurde unterschiedlich gesehen: Auch wenn auf
zwischenstaatlicher Ebene das Führen eines Angriffkrieges völkerrechtswidrig sei, lasse sich daraus
noch keine individuelle Strafbarkeit für das Führen eines rechtswidrigen Krieges ableiten. Auch die
weitere Frage, ob dann nicht die Verletzung des „nullum crimen"-Grundsatzes wenigstens
ausnahmsweise hingenommen werden dürfe, wurde unterschiedlich beantwortet: meist negativ mit dem
Argument, dass die Schutzgewähr des „nullum crimen"-Grundsatzes nicht durch normative
Erwägungen ausgehöhlt werden dürfe, andererseits aber auch positiv, weil der Schutz der menschlichen
Zivilisation ausnahmsweise Vorrang gegenüber dem Formalprinzip des „nullum crimen"-Grundsatzes
haben müsse. Dieser neue zukunftsweisende, auf den Vorrang höherer Gerechtigkeit hinweisende
Gedanke hätte kaum besser als durch die Worte des Britsh Chief Prosecutor zum Ausdruck gebracht
werden können:
56 Albin Eser

„If this be an Innovation, it is an Innovation long overdue - a desirable and beneficent innovation
fully consistent with justice, fully consistent with common sense and with the abiding purposes of the
law of nations. "
Dass diese Sicht heute selbst von Rechtskoliegen vertreten wird, die dem Nürnberger Prozess
ansonsten eher kritisch gegenüber stehen, mag durch die Einschätzung von Reinhard Merkel (1996)
belegt sein:
„Am Ende des furchtbarsten Krieges der Menschheitsgeschichte war die Zeit reif für die
Feststellung, dass es zur Kriminalisierung seiner Urheber (und der aller künftigen Kriege) keine
moralische, keine rechtliche und keine politische Alternative mehr gab. Auch in diesem Fall wäre eine
notstandsähnliche Abwägung zwischen den Prinzipien des Rückwirkungsverbots einerseits und des
strafrechtlichen Schutzes für die Fundamente der Zivilisation andererseits notwendig und entscheidbar
gewesen: zugunsten des letzteren. "
Kurzum: Selbst wenn die Nürnberger Prozesse aus „Siegeijustiz" hervorgegangen sein mögen,
führten sie schließlich doch zu einem Triumph internationaler Strafgerichtsbarkeit.

II. Bisher ging es um rein juristische Einschätzungen. Aber war Nürnberg wirklich nur eine
Rechtsfrage? Oder haben dabei auch politische Einstellungen eine Rolle gespielt? Das ist in der Tat
nicht zu übersehen, wobei vor allem zwei Zeiträume zu unterscheiden sind, und zwar die Zeit bis Ende
der 40er und ab Beginn der 50er Jahre.

1) Bis in die späten 40er Jahre wurde es offenbar nicht für opportun angesehen, mit Kritik an den
Nürnberger Prozessen hervorzutreten, so dass sich auch kaum Auseinandersetzungen dazu finden
lassen. Dies könnte folgende Gründe gehabt haben:
a) Soweit es etwa die alliierte Zusammensetzung des Tribunals und die Rechtsnatur des Gerichts
betraf, hat man darin offenbar eine akademische Frage gesehen, deren Beantwortung kein praktischer
Nutzen zukam.
b) Soweit eine Verletzung des „nullum crimen sine lege"-Grundsatzes diskutiert wurde, wurde darin
eine primär völkerrechtliche Fragen erblickt, deren Bedeutung für die deutschen Völkerrechtler nur von
sekundärem Interesse war, weil das Hauptaugenmerk auf dem völkerrechtlichen Status des besetzten
Deutschland lag. Auch in den Augen der allgemeinen Bevölkerung scheinen die Nürnberger Prozesse
keine besondere Rolle gespielt zu haben. Was meine eigenen Erfahrungen betrifft, so war ich im Jahre
1945 gerade zehn Jahre alt, und obwohl ich danach in einer Internatsschule aufgewachsen bin, die als
politisch durchaus aufgeschlossen angesehen werden konnte, kann ich mich nicht erinnern, dass die
Nürnberger Prozesse als ein deutsches Problem diskutiert worden wären: Das war offenbar Sache der
Alliierten.
2) Ein deutlicher Umschwung zeigte sich zu Beginn der 50er Jahre. Plötzlich gewannen
Rechtsfragen eine praktische Bedeutung.
a) So zum einen hinsichtlich der Rechtsnatur der Kriegsverbrecherprozesse, soweit sie als
Nachfolgeprozesse in der US-Besatzungszone stattfanden. Da das Kontrollratsgesetz Nr. 10 kein
Berufungsrecht der Angeklagten vorsah, wollten sich diese ein solches mit dem Argument erstreiten,
dass die Nachfolgeprozesse gleichsam vor nationalen US-Gerichten stattfänden, sodass man eine
Nachprüfung vor US-Bundesgerichten durch so genannte habeas corpus motions erreichen könnte. Eine
solche Zuflucht bei der Verfassung der USA wurde jedoch schon damals mit ähnlichen
Extraterritorialitätserwägungen abgelehnt, wie sie heute wiederum im Zusammenhang mit
Rechtsbehelfen der in Guantanamo festgehaltenen Gefangenen vorgebracht werden.
b) Zum anderen wurde plötzlich auch für die deutsche Justiz das Nürnberger Statut bedeutsam,
nachdem diese ebenfalls zur Verfolgung von NS-Verbrechen nach dem Kontrollratsgesetz Nr. 10
berufen war. Auf dieser Ebene schlugen dann unter anderem auch die Bedenken hinsichtlich einer
Verletzung des „nullum crimen sine lege"-Grundsatzes durch, wobei die deutsche Strafverfolgung mit
Beginn der 1950er Jahre fast vollständig zum Erliegen kam.
c) Zudem machte sich auch allgemeinpolitisch eine Änderung des Klimas bemerkbar, nachdem
inzwischen eine zunehmende Entnazifizierungsmüdigkeit eingetreten war: Man wollte von den NS-
Das Internationale Militärtribunal aus deutscher Perspektive 57

Greueltaten nichts mehr wissen. Diese Verdrängung der eigenen NS-Vergangenheit und die
Verweigerung einer echten Vergangenheitsbewältigung wurden von meinem ehemaligen Tübinger
Strafrechtskollegen Jürgen Baumann, der sich als einer von wenigen der deutschen Vergangenheit
gestellt hat, in seinem Buch „Der Aufstand des schlechten Gewissens" (1965) folgendermaßen
charakterisiert:
„Jahrelang haben die meisten Bürger der Bundesrepublik keine Anstrengung gescheut zu
vergessen, was in zwölf unseligen Jahren geschehen ist. Sie haben ihre Gedächtnislückenhaftigkeit zum
System und die Handhabung dieser wohltätigen Lückenhaftigkeit zur Perfektion entwickelt... Nur
grässliche Nestbeschmutzer waren einsame Rufer in einer Zeit, die vornehmlich gegenwärtigem und
zukünftigem Wohlstand zustrebte und endlich vom Ballast der Vergangenheit befreit sein wollte. "
Diese Klimaveränderung schlug sich auch in empirischen Umfragen über die gesellschaftliche
Wahrnehmung des Internationalen Militärtribunals in Deutschland nieder: Während unmittelbar nach
dem Nürnberger Prozess ermittelt worden war, dass 80 % der Befragten den Prozess für fair erachteten,
eine Mehrheit, die Hauptkriegsverbrecher für schuldig hielten, nur 9 % die Urteile als zu hart ansahen
und sich lediglich 6 % kritisch äußerten, sehen zu Beginn der Fünfziger Jahre die Vergleichszahlen
ganz anders aus: Nun erachteten 30 % der Befragten den Prozess für unfair, 40 % sahen das Urteil als
zu hart an und 50 % lehnten es ab, wie die Alliierten das Problem der deutschen Kriegsverbrecher
gelöst hatten. Über die Gründe für diese Meinungsänderung lässt sich spekulieren. Auf jeden Fall dürfte
dabei eine Rolle gespielt haben, dass man in Deutschland hoffte, es würden nicht nur Kriegsverbrechen,
die auf deutscher Seite begangen wurden, gerichtlich aufgearbeitet, sondern auch Verbrechen, die von
Seiten anderer Länder begangen worden sein könnten.

III. Mit dem letztgenannten Aspekt ist bereits meine dritte Hauptfrage angesprochen, nämlich
„Nürnberg als rechtspolitische und moralische Frage", wobei es um einige Aspekte geht, die über die
deutsche Rechtsdiskussion hinaus eine weithin noch zu bewältigende Herausforderung darstellen.

1) Das betrifft zum einen das Problem, das sich im Grunde bei jedem Wechsel von einem Unrechts-
zu einem rechtsstaatlichen System stellt, nämlich wie mit der unterschiedlichen Viktimisierung
umzugehen ist, und wer dabei die eigentlichen Opfer oder die Unterdrücker waren. Wenn etwa moniert
wird, dass in den Nürnberger Prozessen deutsche Opfer des NS-Regimes nicht ausreichend
berücksichtigt worden seien, drängt sich die Frage auf, inwieweit es sich dabei lediglich um die (echte)
Viktimisierung von deutschen Minderheiten oder nicht eher um (erschlichene) Selbst-Viktimisierung
der deutschen Mehrheit handelt. Auf der einen Seite kann natürlich in der Nichterwähnung der von den
Nazis verfolgten Minderheiten in den Nürnberg-Urteilen in der Tat eine erneute Viktimisierung dieser
damaligen Opfer gesehen werden. Soweit jedoch diese „Opferrhetorik" von Nichtbetroffenen betrieben
wird, muss man sich fragen, ob dies wirklich aus Fürsorge für die tatsächlich durch die Nazis verfolgten
deutschen Minderheiten geschieht oder ob nicht eher eine Art von Selbst-Viktimisierung dahintersteht.
Bemerkenswerterweise ist ja der Sieg der Alliierten nicht von Anfang an als eine „Befreiung"
empfunden worden, sondern erst als man eine Dichotomie zwischen Siegern und Verlierern
herzustellen begann und zu den „Siegern" gewissermaßen auch die deutsche Bevölkerung gezählt
wurde, während „Verlierer" nur die Unterdrücker gewesen seien. Auf diesem Wege war es dann auch
leichter, die vielen deutschen Gehilfen aus der allgemeinen Bevölkerung, ohne deren Ausführung der
Befehle von oben ja auch die Konzentrationslager nicht hätten betrieben werden können, ihrerseits zu
„Opfern" der Unterdrücker gemacht hat. Eine weitere unbeabsichtigte Nebenwirkung, die durch die
Individualisierung von Humanitätsverbrechen ausgelöst werden kann, ist darin zu sehen, dass im Wege
einer „Schuldabladung" alle Verantwortlichkeit auf die Angeklagten verlagert wird. Auch damit wird es
leichter, sich von irgendeiner Mitverantwortung freizuzeichnen.
Was man daraus lernen könnte - und das ist auch eine Erfahrung in Den Haag - ist das Bedürfnis
nach einer stärkeren Einbeziehung der tatsächlichen Opfer. Das „adversatorische" Prozesssystem, wie
es gegenwärtig in den internationalen Strafverfahren vorherrscht, hat - neben manch anderem - auch
den großen Nachteil, dass das Opfer praktisch keine Rolle spielt oder allenfalls sich durch den
Prosecutor vertreten sehen kann, mit der Folge, dass sich im Grunde nur der Staat und der Angeklagte
58 Albin Eser

gegenüberstehen, während das Opfer allenfalls eine Zeugenrolle spielt. Das wird von nicht wenigen
Opferzeugen als schmerzlich und enttäuschend empfunden, wenn sie sich lediglich als Beweismittel
gefragt sehen und im Grunde gar nicht das zum Ausdruck bringen können, was sie im Innersten bewegt.
In solchen Fällen muss das Gericht dann auch einmal die Möglichkeit einräumen können, nach
Abschluss der Beweisaufnahme dem Zeugen Gelegenheit zu geben, alle Opfer zu nennen, deren man
sich in der Öffentlichkeit erinnern sollte. Ich muss gestehen, dass es für mich immer zu den
bewegendsten Augenblicken gehört, wenn Menschen auf diese Weise zum Ausdruck bringen dürfen,
was für sie Gerechtigkeit bedeuten könnte. In dieser Hinsicht wäre nicht zuletzt in der internationalen
Strafjustiz noch manches nachzuholen.
2) Schließlich wäre noch auf einen Punkt aufmerksam zu machen, bei dem sich kontinentale
Sichtweisen und common law-Perspektiven offenbar nicht decken, weswegen es zu unterschiedlichen
Einschätzungen kommen kann. Das betrifft vor allem das Verständnis des Grundsatzes „nullum crimen
sine lege", der schon sprachlich im Englischen anders zum Ausdruck gebracht wird als in anderen
Sprachen - wie insbesondere der deutschen. Während man im Deutschen von „keine Strafe ohne
Gesetz" spricht, heißt es im Englischen „no crime without law", nicht aber „no crime without Statute",
sodass man dementsprechend nicht von „nullum crimen sine lege", sondern von „nullum crimen sine
iure" sprechen müsste. Während also in der deutschen Sprache zwischen Recht und Gesetz
unterschieden wird, steht im Englischen - jedenfalls im Zusammenhang mit dem „nullum crimen sine
lege"-Grundsatz für beides „law". Deshalb ist es für den common law approach viel leichter, auch
ungeschriebenes customary law als Strafrechtsgrundlage zu akzeptieren, während der kontinentale
Jurist eine gesetzliche Grundlage erwartet und sich daher auch im Völkerstrafrecht mit
ungeschriebenem customary law schwer tut.
Die damit vebundenen Verständigungsschwierigkeiten werden noch größer, wenn man auch noch
unterschiedliche Funktionen des „nullum crimen sine lege"-Grundsatzes mitbedenkt.
a) Versteht man diesen - von der Französischen Revolution herkommend - vornehmlich als einen
Schutz vor Willkür - zunächst gegenüber dem König, dann gegenüber jeder staatlichen Macht - so
wäre im Hinblick auf die Nürnberger Prozesse lediglich zu prüfen, ob es sich dabei um einen Akt der
Willkür gehandelt hat - was man angesichts der Ungeheuerlichkeit der NS-Verbrechen wird leicht
verneinen können.
b) Sieht man in „nullum crimen sine lege" hingegen einen Vertrauensgrundsatz (im Sinne von
Feuerbach), wonach der Bürger darauf soll vertrauen dürfen, dass sein Verhalten nicht im Nachhinein
für strafbar erklärt wird, so könnten sich die NS-Verbrecher in der Tat sichergefühlt haben, für ihre
Untaten nicht zur Verantwortung gezogen zu werden. Da es jedoch wohl nicht um den Schutz von
Vertrauen jedweder Art und Herkunft, sondern lediglich um den Schutz „legitimen Vertrauens" gehen
kann, wird man den NS-Verbrechern die Legitimität ihres Vertrauens auf offensichtliches Unrecht
absprechen können.

IV. So wie ich mit gemischten Gefühlen begonnen habe, muss ich mit solchen auch zum Schluss
kommen. Vieles Wichtige musste ungesagt bleiben und manches kritisch Gesagte könnte als
Abwertung der Nürnberger Strafjustiz missverstanden werden. Das Gegenteil ist der Fall. Meines
Erachtens ist die zukunftsweisende Rolle der Nürnberger Prozesse in der Entwicklung der
internationalen Strafjustiz gar nicht hoch genug zu veranschlagen. In diesem Sinne einer kritischen
Hochschätzung ergeht es mir wie dem bereits genannten Reinhard Merkel, dessen Einschätzung der
moralischen Wirkung des Nürnberger Prozesses ich mir - trotz aller vorgenannten Einwände - zu eigen
machen darf:
„Nürnberg hat jene Revolution im Völkerrecht, die 1919 noch gescheitert war, in einem
exemplarischen Akt vollzogen. Keine gegenläufige, spurenverwischende Praxis der Staaten in der
nachfolgenden Ära des Kalten Krieges hat die Grundidee des Prozesses zerstören können: dass die
Selbstlegitimation aller staatlichen Macht ihre Grenze findet in einem Recht der Menschheit; und dass
der Täter, der diese Grenze missachtet, als einzelner zur Verantwortung gezogen wird, vor der ihn
keine staatliche Deckung seiner Taten schützen kann. Nürnberg war der weltgeschichtlich erste
Versuch, auf ungekannte Exzesse der Macht gleichwohl in den Formen des Rechts zu antworten. "
The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg from a German Perspective 59

Albin Eser
The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg from a German Perspective
Delivering the German perspective of the Nuremberg trials at this conference carries a special
burden due to the fact that this country caused the most heinous crimes of the last century. It is our
responsibility to ensure that never again similar atrocities happen on German soil or originate from
Germany. I'm relieved to know that I'm not standing alone against an "Allied" front; but instead next to
me on the panel are critical voices with regard to Nuremberg just as in Germany.

At first I want to address legal issues. The International Military Tribunal (IMT) has been criticised
for being a piece of "victors' justice". There are several reasons for this argument: First, there have been
only allied judges on the bench and no German ones, second, the same people have created the Statute
and then served as prosecutors (as did Robert Jackson) or even as judges (as did Nikitschenko), third,
there has been no equity of arms between prosecutor and defence, and finally, the "victors" had
committed war crimes just the same. Likewise German victims were not mentioned at the trial due to a
restrictive interpretation of crimes against humanity. It is often heard that the IMT violated the principle
nullum crimen sine lege. While such a violation can be denied as regards crimes against humanity and
war crimes, the argument is more difficult to counter as regards the crime of aggression; however, the
purely formalistic view on the nullum criVwew-principle is receding.

Nuremberg is also a political issue. In the immediate aftermath of the IMT-trial there was hardly any
discussion on these subjects, which were mentioned above. This changed in the 1950s, when the
German judicial system took over the responsibility to prosecute former Nazis. There was also a change
in the political climate: While at first 80 % of the German population thought that the IMT-trial was fair
and the accused deserved the sentences, and only 9 % stated that the sentences were too harsh and
merely 6 % raised general criticism, this changed in the 1950s. Now, 30 % thought the trial was unfair,
40 % said the judgments were too harsh and 50 % criticised the way, the Allies dealt with the Nazi
criminals, in principal. Germans at this time wanted to forget about the past and set aside the horrible
crimes.

Nuremberg implies also moral questions. The fact that German victims were left out of the IMT-
trial, made it possible for certain victim rhetoric to come about in Germany. The real minority of
victims was absorbed by a general (hypocritical) sentiment of victimisation of the German majority, by
which helpers and abettors in Nazi-crimes called themselves victims of the suppressive system.

Despite all these critical points it has to be emphasized that Nuremberg is the blatant sign, that it is
possible to answer with the rule of law to incredible state-ordered atrocities.
 II. Different Perspectives on the Nuremberg Trials/
Die Nürnberger Prozesse aus verschiedenen Perspektiven
A Jewish Lobby at Nuremberg: Jacob Robinson and the Institute of Jewish Affairs, 1945-46 63

Michael R. Marrus
A Jewish Lobby at Nuremberg: Jacob Robinson and the Institute of Jewish Affairs,
1945-46
"[W]e have been working in this field for four and a half years," insisted Dr. Jacob Robinson in
June 1945, referring to the Holocaust and speaking authoritatively to United States Supreme Court
Justice Robert H. Jackson, the newly appointed American Chief Prosecutor for the Nuremberg War
Crimes Tribunal.' This article takes up the disputed question of how the Holocaust was perceived in the
immediate wake of the Second World War from the vantage point of a Jewish lobby at the Trial of the
Major War Criminals at Nuremberg - the New York based Institute of Jewish Affairs (IJA), directed by
Robinson, a committed researcher and lobbyist as well as a learned international lawyer. It explores the
Institute's case made to Jackson and his team, looking at how Jewish professionals, consumed by
evidence of the destruction of the European Jews, understood the Jewish calamity and tried to relay
their concerns to a wider public.
Historians continue to debate how the Holocaust appeared at this most famous of the postwar trials
of Nazi leaders. I have myself argued that, notwithstanding the centrality of other issues in the
American trial plan, the varied objectives of the Allied powers and the eventual outcome of the
proceeding, Nuremberg was a major landmark in the presentation of the dreadful fate of the Jewish
people at the hands of the Nazis. 2 Although the Holocaust was not, to be sure, described at Nuremberg
quite as we would today, the trial provided the first validation, before an international body, of the death
toll of six million; it provided major elements of the history of the Holocaust such as the role of Adolf
Hitler and his immediate entourage, especially the SS; prewar persecutions; the mass shootings of the
Einsatzgruppen; the Wannsee Conference of 1942; ghettoization; the death camps of the East,
especially Auschwitz; the uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto; the Hungarian Jewish deportations, and so
on. Others have focused on the trial's shortcomings: how the emphasis on conspiracy tilted Nuremberg
in the direction of an overly "intentionalist" interpretation of the Holocaust; how the American
obsession with crimes against peace distracted attention from the assault on European Jewry; how the
trial's privileging of documentary evidence meant that Jewish voices were scarcely heard before the
tribunal; and how the framing of the case meant inattention to prewar crimes and, more importantly,
prevented the presentation of the Holocaust as a distinctive element of Nazi criminality. In what
follows, I revisit this debate from the perspective of those with "four and a half years" of painful
accumulation of information, frustration, and appeals on behalf of the Jewish victims of the Nazi
onslaught.
The Institute of Jewish Affairs was not, to be sure, the only Jewish presence in the lobbying on
behalf of a trial of major German war criminals or the only organized effort to bring the destruction of
European Jewry to the attention of those who scrambled, at the end of the war, to organize an
international proceeding. In England, among others, the great Cambridge University authority on
international law, Professor Hersch Lauterpacht, made the case for a war crimes trial and he may have
been the first to recommend applying to the Holocaust the category of "crimes against humanity". In the
United States, drawing on his understanding of the slaughter, which included that of his own family,
Raphael Lemkin lobbied single-mindedly for the recognition of a new crime of genocide, a term that he
coined in his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. And, in the American Office of Strategic
Services (OSS), the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency, a junior official in the Research and
Analysis Section named Charles Irving Dwork, with a Ph.D. in Judaic Studies from the University of
Southern California, was for a time responsible for gathering information on the Holocaust with a view

1
Minutes, meeting of the World Jewish C o n g r e s s with Robert H. Jackson in N e w York City, June 12, 1945, Records of
the World Jewish Congress, J a c o b Radler Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, (hereinafter W J C Archives),
T r u m a n Presidential M u s e u m & Library (hereinafte T P M L ) , http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/
nuremberg/index.php?action=docs#1945. Retrieved, September 6, 2005.
2
Michael R. Marrus, ' T h e Holocaust at Nuremberg', 26 YAD VASHEM STUDIES 4-45 (1998).
64 Michael R. Marrus

to assisting American prosecutors. 3

But so far as I have found there was only one explicitly Jewish lobby - constituting what we would
now call a Non-Governmental Organization or NGO - organized to concern itself specifically with the
Jewish issue and which made its case insistently to the American prosecution team. 4 Founded in New
York in 1941 as a joint project of the American Jewish Congress and the World Jewish Congress, the
Institute grouped together specialists on Jewish matters committed to documenting and exploring what
one might call the "big picture" for World Jewry: the course and direction of Jewish life in the modern
period, Jewish minority rights, the Jewish fate at the hands of Nazism, and the fortification of Jewish
rights in the postwar period.
Robinson was unquestionably the key figure. A distinguished jurist born in 1889 in the Lithuanian
town of Seirijai (pronounced "Saray"), Robinson was a tireless crusader who brought a broad European
perspective to the task. After his legal training at the University of Warsaw, Robinson had a double
career in Lithuania, both as a Jewish educator and founder of a Hebrew Gymnasium in Virbalis, and as a
Zionist legislator, representing the Jewish faction in the Lithuanian parliament and later serving the
Lithuanian government both a legal advisor and its representative at the International Court in The
Hague. Fleeing to the United States in 1940, he lectured at Columbia University as well as heading the
Institute when it was formed in 1941. Widely acknowledged for his expertise in international law, and
working closely with his brother Nehemiah, Robinson continued to formulate Jewish positions on such
matters as Nazi war crimes and Nazi reparations. Fifteen years later he assisted the Israeli prosecution
in formulating its case against Adolf Eichmann. Robinson is perhaps most widely remembered today
for his detailed polemic against Hannah Arendt's reportage of that trial, When the Crooked Shall Be
Made Straight.

The Jewish Perspective and the American Trial Plan

In Robinson's first encounter with Justice Jackson he conveyed the substance of the Jewish case for
the prospective Nuremberg trial. Accompanied by New York state Judge Nathan Perlman and Dr.
Alexander Kohanski, Robinson met Jackson at the Federal Court House in New York for an hour and a
half on June 12, 1945, just over a month after the latter's appointment by President Harry Truman, to
head the United States prosecution team.
At their meeting on the 12th, understood as strictly confidential, Robinson made a wide-ranging
claim for a hearing to the powerful architect of the American case, and indeed of the Charter of the
Nuremberg Trial, to be negotiated by the Allied powers in the succeeding weeks. Robinson praised
Jackson's report to Truman (released on the 7th), with its public outline of the American trial plan,
calling it a "historic document" and noting that "it meets some of our aspirations in this matter." 5 From
the report Robinson knew that the centre piece of the American case would be "the establishment of a
well-documented history of what we are convinced was a grand, concerted pattern to incite and commit

3
Shlomo Aronson, 'Preparations for the Nuremberg Trial: The O.S.S., Charles Dwork, and the Holocaust', 12
HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE STUDIES 2 5 7 - 8 1 ( 1 9 9 8 ) .
4
According to Robinson himself, "the matter of war crimes is one of the very few in which our group is the only Jewish
group that made a contribution and remained active in to the end (sic)." Minutes, meeting of the World Jewish Congress
with Robert H. Jackson in New York City, June 12, 1945, Records of the World Jewish Congress, Jacob Radler Marcus
Center of the American Jewish Archives, (hereinafter WJC Archives), Truman Presidential Museum & Library (hereinafter
TPML), http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/nuremberg/index.php?action=docs# 1945. Retrieved,
September 6, 2005. Robinson's English was imperfect, leading to formulations such as this and an occasional
corresponding lack of clarity.
5
Minutes, meeting of the World Jewish Congress with Robert H. Jackson in New York City, June 12, 1945, WJC
Archives,TPML http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistIestop/study_collections/nuremberg/index.php?action=docs#1945. Re-
trieved, September 6, 2005. First among the documents submitted to Jackson on the 18th were the minutes of their meeting
of the 12th, from which we draw the account in this paper. See List of Documents, Evidence, Jacob Robinson to Robert H.
Jackson, June 18, 1945. WJC Archives, TPML, http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/nuremberg/
index.php?action=docs#1945. Retrieved, September 6, 2005.
A Jewish Lobby at Nuremberg: Jacob Robinson and the Institute of Jewish Affairs, 1945-46 65

the aggressions and barbarities which have shocked the world." 6 Without additional fanfare, Robinson
came quickly to the point, asserting a central Jewish interest in the forthcoming trial. "The Jewish
people is the greatest sufferer of this war," he said, "if not in absolute number of its casualties ... [then]
certainly in relative numbers (the ration of surviving Jews in Europe to their pre-war total in the same
areas. It therefore has a case of its own against the master Nazi criminals and their accomplices."
Robinson embraced the idea of a Nazi "master plan" - a conspiracy that embraced both the Nazi leaders
and their organizations. And, lest the point was lost, Robinson insisted that it was the Jewish people
which was at issue - not just Jews who happened to be the victims. "The Jewish casualties ... are not a
pure incident of the war or its preparatory stage, but the result of a well-conceived, deliberately plotted
and meticulously carried out conspiracy." This conspiracy, moreover, "was directed not only against the
Jews under their control, but also against those beyond their reach." 7
Robinson took pains to emphasize that the anti-Jewish objectives of the Hitlerian regime were at the
very core of the conspiracy. Referring to the "motives of the Nazi plot," he argued that attacking Jews
was "dynamite to explode democratic society." Even after the German defeat, Europe remained infested
"...with anti-Jewish feeling." Pressing his case, Robinson felt that "a specific indictment for the crime
committed against our people will clear the atmosphere in Europe and make it easier for the survivors to
reestablish themselves there." "Jewish survivors [were] entitled to have someone represent them at the
trials," Robinson said. There should, he argued, be some amicus curiae presence of Jewish survivors
that would "bring to the fore more clearly the moral implications of punishing the conspirators against
an entire people." Jackson, for his part, listened intently to Robinson's presentation, asking at several
points for supportive documentation - in particular on the numbers of Jewish victims and the original
sources for incriminating Nazi statements. Gently, he pushed back on the matter of a specific charge of
anti-Jewish activity and specific Jewish representation. Jackson "explained that it is intended to have
one military trial embracing the whole conspiracy of the Nazis against the world, in which the Jewish
count should have its place." As to more general Jewish representation, "the international military
tribunal might not be well disposed towards such an idea," he said. "[OJther groups might also ask for
the same consideration, which would complicate matters."
The minutes of the June 12th meeting suggest that the matter of Jewish representation was not
definitively settled, and indeed the issue was discussed within Jewish circles in the weeks and months
that followed. Jackson was not opposed in principle, although he had reservations. In London, in
August, possibly through the good offices of Lauterpacht, he proposed to call Chaim Weizmann, the
revered president of the World Zionist Organization, to testify as "an authority on the total picture of the
Holocaust," as Robinson later put it.8 The British opposed the idea, fearing that the testimony would
fuel support for the Jewish case in Palestine. 9 For their own reasons, Robinson and his staff were
ambivalent. On the one hand, they recognized the "unique opportunity of pronouncing an earth-shaking
j'accuse" on the crimes against world Jewry, as an internal memorandum put it. This would be a
"historic occasion," not unlike Weizmann's appearance before the Peel Commission ten years before,
appealing "to the emotions and reason of mankind." 10 On the other hand, "We have to expect a severe
cross-examination," and the result could be to focus guilt not on the Nazi accused, but on the

6
Report o f Robert H. Jackson, United States Representative to the International Conference on Miliatary Trials, London
1945 (Washington, D.C.: Department o f State, 1949), 4 6 - 5 0 .
7
Minutes, meeting o f the World Jewish Congress with Robert H. Jackson in N e w York City, June 12, 1945, WJC
Archives, TPML http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/nuremberg/index.php?action=docs#1945.
Retrieved, September 6, 2005.
8
Jacob Robinson, "The International Military Tribunal and the Holocaust: S o m e Legal Reflections," 7 ISRAEL LAW
REVIEW 3 ( 1 9 7 2 ) .
9
Leonard Stein to Chaim Weizmann, August 28, 1945. Rehovot, Israel: Weizmann Archives, Weizmann Papers, File
2600; Robinson, 'International Military Tribunal and the Holocaust', 3.
10
Report, " S o m e Basic Ideas with Regard to the Appearance o f a Jewish Witness at the International Military
Tribunal", September 5, 1945. WJC Archives, TPML. http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/
nuremberg/index.php?action=docs#1945. Retrieved, September 6, 2 0 0 5 .
66 Michael R. Marrus

bystanding nations. Weizmann, his close associates knew, was in frail health and might not be up to the
challenge. "[U]nless skillfully handled," an IJA memorandum put it, "... the whole appearance [might]
boomerang."
Israeli political scientist Shlomo Aronson is probably right to observe that given the conceptions of
the day, Robinson's accent on the crimes against the "Jewish people" "may have grated on Jackson's
ear," observing that throughout the trial the American prosecutor referred to the Jews as a "race" -
"albeit in a culturally neutral sense."11 In 1945, the Jewish collectivity was far from clearly defined in
ethno-cultural terms as it is today. Non-Jews in particular were sometimes reluctant to think of the Jews
in collective terms at all, except as a religion, arguing that doing so implicitly cast some sort of
aspersion on them, or even involved playing the game of anti-Semites and Hitler. Important as this issue
is to us, however, what is apparent from the presentation of the Jewish case to Jackson, at this early
point in the preparation of the Nuremberg Trial, is the degree to which he and Robinson agreed on the
essentials and were set to cooperate. Robinson understood the importance of fitting the Jewish case
within the wider American project for Nuremberg. And Jackson, for his part, knew he needed help, and
that Robinson and his team were well placed to provide it.

Jewish Assistance in the Preparation of the American Case

Toward the end of their meeting on June 12th, Robinson and Jackson discussed how they would
work together: Robinson wanted Jackson to appoint someone on his team to deal with the Jewish issue;
Jackson seemed more inclined to rely on the IJA for documentary assistance, both for legal and other
matters. As the Institute's minutes noted, "Justice Jackson expressed interest in receiving from us all
pertinent material we may be able to submit." Helpfully, Jackson noted that "he does not expect
perfection in the preparation of such material, as he realizes the need for speedy action."12 A week later
Robinson appeared in Washington to hand deliver his first installment - about a dozen studies,
including a paper on the "Armenian Massacres," surveys of anti-Jewish laws, statistical analyses, legal
briefs on particular topics, and so on.13
Robinson's involvement continued throughout the summer of 1945, as the Americans prepared their
case, and as Jackson negotiated with Allied representatives in London on the shape of the Nuremberg
proceedings. As requested, the Jewish researchers worked on both legal and substantive matters. In
July, for example, Robinson wrote to Jackson directly, recommending that one important defendant be
added to the list - "SS Obersturmfuehrer Adolf Aichman ... sometimes spelled Eichmann," referred to
as "a man who is probably more directly responsible for the destruction of the Jews than any other
single Nazi" (sic).1 Material in the archives of the Institute shows that the Jewish team also worked on
German legal theory, problems associated with defining aggressive war, and so on.15
Jackson's Office of Chief Counsel expanded to include several hundred people, with a shifting
organizational structure that included extensive involvement in Jewish matters, both in a Section IV,
Crimes Against Humanity, but also elsewhere. Robinson had a stream of communications with this
office and with Dwork, both of whose abilities to deal with the material he came to question. Dwork

'' Aronson, 'Preparations for the Nuremberg Trial', 265.

12
Minutes, meeting of the World Jewish Congress with Robert H. Jackson in New York City, June 12, 1945, WJC
Archives, TPML http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistIestop/study_collections/nuremberg/index.php?action=docs#1945.
Retrieved, September 6, 2005.
13
List of Documents, Evidence, Jacob Robinson to Robert H. Jackson, June 18, 1945. WJC Archives,TPML,
http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/nuremberg/index.php?action=docs#1945. Retrieved, Septem-
ber 6, 2005.
14
Robinson to Jackson, July 27, 1945. WJC Archives, TPML, http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/
study_collections/nuremberg/documents/index.php?documentdate= 1945-07-27&documentid=C 106-16-2&studycollec-
tionid=&pagenumber=l Retrieved, September 6, 2005.
" Draft of Letter, World Jewish Congress to Robert H. Jackson, July 1945. WJC Archives, TPML,
http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/nuremberg/documents/index.php?documentdate=1945-07-00
&documentid=C106-16-4&studycollectionid=&pagenumber=l Retrieved, September 6, 2005.
A Jewish Lobby at Nuremberg: Jacob Robinson and the Institute of Jewish Affairs, 1945-46 67

never left Washington to join the prosecutors in Europe, and his OSS unit seems to have dropped out of
involvement in the trial's preparation. Robinson later described Section IV in particular as "a group of
men of good will but who lack competence in Jewish affairs." "The deeper reasons for this state of
affairs," he concluded, were three-fold: "(1) American unpreparedness; (2) the assumption that a
military man (and a lawyer, to boot) must know everything, especially how to execute any orders she
may receive; (3) over-simplification of the whole Jewish matter." 16
While maintaining their role as lobbyists, Robinson and the IJA never felt frozen out. In his succinct
view, "we, those who are competent, are on the outside, and those who are on the inside are
incompetent. The solution was either to bring the outsiders in, or to educate the insiders. The former
was deemed more expedient, and that's what was done." 17 Bringing the outsiders in meant continued
involvement as the American prosecution took shape. Robinson flew to London in late August -
apparently to help prepare the then expected testimony at the trial of Chaim Weizmann, but he remained
in active contact with Jackson's Office. In London during the preparation of the indictment, he was
summoned to Nuremberg in the autumn - at first, in order to give evidence to support the allegation, in
the indictment, of 5.7 million Jewish victims, and later to assist the American prosecutors, both with
respect to the presentation of the Jewish case by Major William F. Walsh, the use of captured German
films of Jewish ghettos, and in the interrogation of at least one of the German witnesses, SS Captain and
Eichmann deputy Dieter Wisliceny, conducted by Lieutenant Colonel Smith W. Brookhart. 18

Robinson's Evaluation of the Presentation of the Holocaust at Nuremberg

How did Robinson and his colleagues at the IJA evaluate the presentation of the Holocaust at
Nuremberg? While by no means fully satisfied, and with reservations that perhaps grew in significance
as the years passed, the Jewish lobby that is at the centre of this paper understood the momentous
significance of the trial and the Jewish contribution to it. Nuremberg, Robinson was already stating in
December 1945, created a revolution in legal thinking on war crimes, and the Jewish contribution had
been "instrumental" in the resulting transformation. 19
Strikingly, given his own European background and international experience, Robinson's
perspective was utterly American. Like many of the American participants in the trial, Robinson
ascribed important shortcomings to the exigencies of international cooperation. He attributed the
insufficient attention or focus on Jewish matters in the indictment of the accused to "the system of
division of labor among the four governments, resulting in four different styles which are not strongly
unified." In what turned out to be a momentous decision, the clarification of the four-power Charter of
the Nuremberg Trial in the Protocol of October 6, 1945 resulted in a restrictive interpretation of "crimes
against humanity," rendering these "accompanying" or "accessory" crimes by requiring them to have
been committed in connection with or in execution of war crimes or crimes against peace. As a result,
Robinson noted, crimes against the Jews before the war did not fall within what constituted crimes
against humanity at Nuremberg; and perhaps even more damagingly, the Holocaust was never
highlighted as a distinct crime as Jewish lobbyists hoped it would be when they began work in the
summer of 1945. In Robinson's own phrase, describing the International Military Tribunal's deductions

16
General Report to the Combined Staffs of the Office by Dr. Jacob Robinson on the Nuremberg War Criminals Trial,
Thursday, December 6, 1945. WJC Archives, TPML, http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/
nuremberg/documents/index.php?documentdate= 1945-12-06&documentid=C 14-16-1 &studycollectionid=&pagenumber= 1
Retrieved, September 6, 2005.
17
Ibid.
18
"Col. Brookart (sic), a good American criminal lawyer, is conducting Wisliczeny's (sic) interrogation: It was
impossible for me, a civilian without status, to get the permit necessary to interrogate him. So the following procedure was
adopted: I would prepare the questions, Col. Brookart would go to see Wisliczeny and put these questions to him, get his
replies, and bring them to me. I would write these answers up and Brookart would take them back to Wisliczeny for his
approval, etc." Ibid.
19
Ibid.
68 Michael R. Marrus

from this formulation, the Holocaust did not emerge "as a unit in fact and in law."20
In a key passage in Robinson's confidential report to Jewish leaders in New York in December
1945, he balanced these shortcomings with effusive appreciation of the American role in formulating
the Jewish case. "If there is any group that took the Jewish case seriously," he said, "it is only the
Americans" (sic). It was the United States which drove home the case for "Crimes against Humanity,"
he contended. Neither the British, nor the French nor the Soviets provided a framework for the
integration of Jewish concerns into the prosecution's case. "It is the self assertion of American
leadership in world affairs on the moral plane which has proved of tremendous importance. The others
missed the bus." Robinson was unreserved in his praise of Jackson, particularly for the latter's opening
speech for the American prosecution. Robinson reminded his listeners of how Jackson described the
goal of the Holocaust: "It is my purpose to show a plan and design, to which all Nazis were fanatically
committed, to annihilate all Jewish people ... . The persecution of the Jews was a continuous and
deliberate policy." "[H]ow could it have been better said than that?" Robinson asked his Jewish
audience rhetorically, then making a point of how this impacted on the trial. "At this point the
defendants were at their lowest ebb, completely crushed. This situation gave rise to a certain
competition among the four prosecutors in their desire to speak on the Jewish case ... ."2I
What Robinson appreciated about Jackson's presentation was the authoritative acknowledgement,
from the highest perch of prosecutorial authority, of the comprehensive, murderous anti-Jewish
objective at the core of Nazi criminality - a theme to which all four prosecuting powers were, in the
end, formally committed. Documenting the existence of a policy of deliberate, comprehensive mass
murder was considered a major achievement. "[T]he ultimate goal of Nazi-German policies with regard
to the Jewish people was nothing short of complete physical annihilation," was one typical IJA
formulation, among many similar observations in 1945.22 Assessing the judgment of the court the
following year, Robinson wrote that it was "important to emphasize that time and again the Court
underlines the connection between the initial stage of persecution and the so-called 'final solution.'" 23
Over and over again, in memoranda describing the prosecution, the IJA took note whenever there
was "prominent place" devoted to describing the murder of the Jews and whenever there was clear
evidence of the Nazis' murderous objectives. Tracking how this was done was one of the few
discussions in which IJA material ventured outside an American perimeter: "The case presented by the
British Prosecutors also made frequent references to the Jews as victims of Nazi oppression," noted one
report. "The French and the Russians, dealing with war crimes in the narrower sense of the word, also
dealt with the crimes against the Jews." 24 Were the Jewish lobbyists of 1945 gratified by too little?
Fully to appreciate Jewish perceptions of how their wartime ordeal was treated in 1945-46 one must
imagine a time before "Holocaust" was an established category, before Raphael Lemkin's "genocide"
was an established term which could be applied to the Nazis' assault on Jews or anyone else, and when
anti-Semitism not only maintained a place in respectable opinion but was even resurgent in many parts
of liberated Europe. As the evidence accumulated - with reference to what are for us indelible
landmarks such as Wannsee, the Einsatzgruppen, ghettos, Auschwitz, the Warsaw Ghetto, Robinson

20
Robinson, International Military Tribunal and the Holocaust7.
21
General Report to the C o m b i n e d Staffs of the O f f i c e by Dr. J a c o b Robinson on the N u r e m b e r g W a r Criminals Trial,
Thursday, D e c e m b e r 6, 1945. W J C Archives, T P M L , http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/nurem-
berg/documents/index.php?documentdate= 1 9 4 5 - 1 2 - 0 6 & d o c u m e n t i d = C 14-16-1 & s t u d y c o l l e c t i o n i d = & p a g e n u m b e r = 1 Re-
trieved, S e p t e m b e r 6, 2005.
22
Report, "Criminal Conspiracy Against the Jews, Part T w o : Successive Stages o f the Crimes C o m m i t t e d Against the
Jewish People," n.d., W J C Archives, T P M L , http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/nuremberg/
documents/index.php?documentdate=1945-00-00&documentid=C192-2-3&studycollectionid=&pagenumber=l Retrieved,
September 7, 2005.
23
J a c o b Robinson, 'The Nuremberg Judgment', CONGRESS WEEKLY: A REVIEW OF JEWISH INTERESTS, O c t o b e r 25,
1946,8.
24
Report, " T h e Legal Problems of the C r i m e s Against H u m a n i t y with Special Consideration of the Anti-Jewish
Crimes", n.d. http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/nuremberg/documents/index.php7documentdate
= 1 9 4 5 - 0 0 - 0 0 & d o c u m e n t i d = C 107-9-1 & s t u d y c o l l e c t i o n i d = & p a g e n u m b e r = 1 Retrieved, September 7, 2005.
A Jewish Lobby at Nuremberg: Jacob Robinson and the Institute of Jewish Affairs, 1945-46 69

must have felt that his essential goals were achieved. "The evidence submitted to the IMT in the Jewish
case was overwhelming," he wrote a dozen years later, "more than eight hundred Nazi self-accusing
documents (in whole or in part) were presented and thirty-three witnesses were heard in addition to all
the defendants present." 25
Did the failure of the Jewish lobby to get a separate Jewish presence at Nuremberg as an amicus
curiae rank as a shortcoming in Robinson's evaluation? Definitely not. Speaking confidentially in
December 1945, Robinson told his Jewish listeners that in the context of the actual conduct of the trial,
and in particular the arrangement of the courtroom, this demand did not make sense. "Far away from
Nuremberg, the idea of our 'representation' or 'observers' being officially admitted to the trials sounded
like a good idea. But the fact is that there are no 'representatives' at Nuremberg at all. The court
consists of the floor and the gallery. The 'representatives' of the countries not represented on the bench
are in the gallery, and so is everybody else, and there is no place for 'observers.'" Fifteen governments
that adhered to the Four Power Agreement for the trial were accommodated there with great difficulty,
but in practical terms there was no real point in being there. Not only was it difficult to see from the
gallery, the proceedings themselves were tedious - Robinson was not the first to have noticed it - and
consisted mainly in the reading aloud of documents that could be easily read elsewhere. 26

Conclusions
Remarkably I think, given the responsibilities American Jewish leaders assumed in making the case
for a shattered people, their perspective and that of the Institute of Jewish Affairs were resolutely
internationalist and sought energetically to expand the scope of international criminal jurisdiction.
Responding to Justice Jackson's Report to President Truman of June 1945, Rabbi Stephen Wise,
speaking as president of the World Jewish Congress, heaped praise upon the American Chief Prosecutor
for having "gone to the root of the war crimes problem." Jackson's approach, Wise said, was
"undeterred by 'sterile legalisms,'" but sought to find a solution "in conformity with the highest
traditions of justice, the laws of humanity and the ideals for which this war has been fought." 27
Following suit, the director of the Institute of Jewish Affairs, an international lawyer who had served at
the International Court at the Hague and who was fully at home with the idioms of international
humanitarian law, saw his role as seeking "an extension in time and space of the orthodox definition of
28
war crimes."
To these Jewish campaigners, crimes against humanity were always at the centre of their attention,
and while many crimes against Jews fell within the definition of war crimes the lobbyists devoted most
of their legal analysis to the former, seeing in them a means to punish anti-Jewish activity for which
there were otherwise no legal remedies. Outlined in Article 6(c) of the Nuremberg Charter, Robinson
later noted, these charges "had gone a long way from some traditional taboos of public international
law." 29 By this he meant three things: first, that accused persons could be convicted of crimes against
the Jews "whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated"; second,
that prosecution could be for crimes against "any civilian population," meaning subjects of Germany

25
Robinson, 'International Military Tribunal and the Holocaust', 6.
26
General Report to the Combined Staffs of the Office by Dr. Jacob Robinson on the Nuremberg War Criminals Trial,
Thursday, December 6, 1945. WJC Archives, TPML, http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/nurem-
berg/documents/index.php?documentdate= 1945-12-06&documentid=C 14-16-1 &studycollectionid=&pagenumber= I Re-
trieved, September 6, 2005.
27
Press Release, Statement from Stephen S. Wise, World Jewilsh Congress, June 9, 1945. WJC Archives, TPML,
http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study collections/nuremberg/documents/index.php?documentdate=l 945-06-
09&documentid=C106-15-4&studycollectionid=&pagenumber=l Retrieved, September 8, 2005.
28
General Report to the Combined Staffs of the Office by Dr. Jacob Robinson on the Nuremberg War Criminals Trial,
Thursday, December 6, 1945. WJC Archives, TPML, http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/nurem-
berg/documents/index.php?documentdate= 1945-12-06&documentid=C 14-16-1 &studycol lectionid=&pagenumber= 1
Retrieved, September 6, 2005.
29
Robinson, "International Military Tribunal and the Holocaust," 4.
70 Michael R. Marrus

and its satellites; and third, that prosecution could be for crimes committed "before or during the war" -
all three cases, to be sure, being subject important limitations we will come to in a moment.
Of course, Robinson knew well that with the introduction of crimes against humanity the walls of
national sovereignty had not come crashing down. But Nuremberg, he seemed to be saying to a Jewish
audience, took a commendable step forward in the development of international law: "The theory of
humanitarian intervention, the protection of minorities, the recently established duty of the United
Nations to promote human rights and fundamental freedoms notwithstanding, sovereignty is still
generally understood as absolute freedom in treating its own nationals. The Tribunal did not discuss this
problem, but the answer is certainly clear that crimes committed by Germans against German nationals
are within the general scope of crimes against humanity." 30
Robinson and his colleagues were acutely aware of the limitations placed upon the newly defined
crimes against humanity and the resulting scope of the judgment that was announced by the Nuremberg
court in October 1946. He identified two problems, from the Jewish point of view. First, having had to
accept that crimes against humanity were to be "in execution of or in connection with" war crimes or
cries against peace, the Jewish lobby had to bow to the court's view that the persecution of the Jews
before the war were not so connected and thus did not constitute crimes against humanity. Second, since
the Tribunal did not find in favor of the existence of a "common plan or conspiracy" to commit war
crimes or crimes against humanity, there was an additional reason not to extend criminal culpability
backwards in time to cover acts against German Jews in the prewar period. Crimes against humanity
were therefore by no means a generous category of criminality that would satisfy all of the Jewish
concerns about Holocaust prosecutions in the 1945. Robinson and his colleagues knew, particularly
after the restrictive interpretations agreed to by the Allies in October 1945, that they had to work with
imperfect legal instruments.
Accepting these restrictions and having embraced the American trial plan, Robinson expended much
effort to impress upon the American prosecutors, and thus the Nuremberg court, that the crimes against
the Jews flowed from a coherently articulated plan - the kind of conspiracy so favored by the American
conception of Nazi criminality. "According to our theory," he told his Jewish listeners in 1945, "these
killings must be tied up with previous stages of the crime, constituting the last link in a chain of
criminal acts of the conspiracy to destroy the Jewish people." 31 In addition to providing an explanation
for the Holocaust and a strategy congenial to the Americans, this approach to understanding what had
transpired made it more likely, Robinson felt, that the Holocaust would be considered "a unit in fact and
in law" - a standing, he undoubtedly felt, that was in keeping with the unprecedented scale and nature
of the massacre of European Jewry. 2 Robinson was, of course, disappointed in the finding of the court
in this regard - and it is interesting to observe, in response to the charges that Nuremberg encouraged a
conspiratorial understanding of the Holocaust, that in this case the court's judgment sought precisely to
do the reverse. 33
Was Robinson unhappy about the scarcity of Jewish witnesses, the relative absence of survivor
testimony? This is doubtful. Certainly he said not a word about this - neither in his confidential briefing
of Jewish leaders in New York in December 1945, nor in the articles he wrote at the time of the trial,
nor even in his overview in an Israeli law journal in 1972, a decade after the Eichmann trial in which he
had actively participated and in which survivor testimony was a cornerstone of the prosecution's case.

30
Robinson, 'The Nuremberg Judgment', 7.
31
General Report to the Combined Staffs of the Office by Dr. Jacob Robinson on the Nuremberg War Criminals Trial,
Thursday, December 6, 1945. WJC Archives, TPML, http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study collections/nurem-
berg/documents/index.php?documentdate= 1945-12-06&documentid=C 14-16-1 &studycollectionid=&pagenumber= 1
Retrieved, September 6, 2005.
32
See Robinson, "International Military Tribunal and the Holocaust," 7.
33
On the links between Nuremberg and the "intentionalist" line of Holocaust interpretation, see Michael R. Marrus, THE
HOLOCAUST IN HISTORY 36 (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1987) and Donald Bloxham,
GENOCIDE ON TRIAL: W A R CRIMES TRIALS AND THE FORMATION OF HOLOCAUST MEMORY 2 0 4 - 5 ( O x f o r d : O x f o r d
University Press, 2001).
A Jewish Lobby at Nuremberg: Jacob Robinson and the Institute of Jewish Affairs, 1945-46 71

And the explanation is simple: Not only did the legal culture of the day not privilege victims' testimony
in the manner that is so favored today, but Robinson and the IJA seem to have agreed unspokenly with
the determination of Robert Jackson and his colleagues to anchor their case against the Nazis in the
latter's own words, recorded in the avalanche of paper that was submitted to the court, and which
Robinson and his colleagues had so painstakingly and professionally assembled on the persecution and
murder of the Jews. "[M]ore than eight hundred Nazi self-accusing documents" Robinson reminded his
readers. A seasoned lawyer himself, and like many Jews preoccupied with defining an as yet ill-
understood and unprecedented catastrophe, this was what he considered the surest way to do so.
Finally, and to put this sometimes detailed assessment into broader perspective, my sense is that
Robinson and the IJA came away from Nuremberg gratified by the achievement of what was to them a
core objective: formal recognition, by an internationally authorized body, of the modern catastrophe of
the Jewish people. Disappointing as were the shortcomings in crimes against humanity and the legal
ramifications of the judgment, the essential was otherwise - what Robinson referred to in December
1945 as "our struggle in securing the recognition for the Jewish people as the victim of the Nazi fury"
(emphasis in original). 34 At the heart of it all was the campaign in a relatively unfamiliar non-Jewish
environment for the notion of a grievously victimized Jewish collectivity - a new idea, for many, in
1945-46. Years after the trial, Robinson praised the "valiant effort to lead the IMT towards a proper
definition of the crime committed by the Nazis against the Jewish people" by Robert Jackson and his
associate, Major Walsh. And despite the findings of the tribunal, as we have already noted, Robinson
felt that the evidence presented in support of this case was "overwhelming," the more so for its having
been assembled in documentary form. "A careful analysis of this documentation leads inexorably to the
conclusion of the existence of a conspiracy to destroy the Jewish people and its ruthless
implementation, resulting in the death of some six million Jews, which constituted 75% of the Jewish
population in Europe" (sic). To its conclusion, the Nuremberg Trial highlighted the inescapable facts of
the disaster that had befallen world Jewry. In sentencing, Robinson noted, practically all of those who
had been actively involved in committing crimes against humanity received the death penalty. This
illustrated how the Nuremberg court "was consistently aware of the Jewish element in the trial." To us,
this is a banal observation, for we would expect nothing less. But to many Jews at the time, and to their
spokesmen at Nuremberg, hungry as they were for the sort of recognition the American prosecutors
offered them, this was an achievement that they had worked for years with almost frantic, if highly
professional, determination.

34
General Report to the Combined Staffs of the Office by Dr. Jacob Robinson on the Nuremberg War Criminals Trial,
Thursday, December 6, 1945. WJC Archives, TPML, http://www.trumanlibrary.org/whistlestop/study_collections/nurein-
berg/documents/index.php?documentdate=l 945-12-06&documentid=C 14-16-1 &studycollectionid=&pagenumber= 1
Retrieved, September 6, 2005.
72 Eine jüdische Interessenvertretung in Nürnberg

Michael R. Marrus
Eine jüdische Interessenvertretung in Nürnberg: Jacob Robinson und das Institut
für jüdischen Angelegenheiten, 1945-46
Welche Relevanz wurde dem Holocaust bei den Hauptkriegsverbrecherprozessen des
Internationalen Militärtribunals in Nürnberg eingeräumt? Mit der Beantwortung dieser Frage setzen
sich Historiker bis zum heutigen Tage auseinander. Bei Betrachtung dieser Debatte aus der Perspektive
jener, die während der Kriegsjahre durch ihre Anteilnahme an den jüdischen Opfern der Nazi-
Schlächterei schmerzvolle Erfahrungen machten, hat Michael Marrus die Umstände der Nürnberger
Prozesse und des Holocaust porträtiert. Wenn man die „Jüdische Lobby" jener Zeit betrachtet, tritt
besonders eine Organisation, genannt „Institut für Jüdische Angelegenheiten", unter der Leitung ihres
Direktors Dr. Jacob Robinson hervor. Gegründet in New York im Jahr 1941 als ein
Gemeinschaftsprojekt des American Jewish Congress und des World Jewish Congress, brachte das
Institut für Jüdische Angelegenheiten seinen Fall beharrlich dem amerikanischen Anklägerteam zur
Kenntnis.

In seinem ersten Treffen mit Richter Jackson, dem von Präsident Harry Truman ernannten Leiter
des Anklägerteams, übermittelte Robinson diesem die jüdische Sicht auf die bevorstehenden
Nürnberger Prozesse und betonte ausdrücklich das zentrale jüdische Interesse an einer Thematisierung
der anti-jüdischen Exzesse und an einer speziellen jüdischen Vertretung. Jackson war trotz gewisser
Vorbehalte nicht grundsätzlich gegen diese Forderung. Es gab schließlich noch andere zentrale Fragen
im amerikanischen Anklageplan zu berücksichtigen, einschließlich der unterschiedlichen Ziele der
alliierten Mächte. Als Konsequenz konnte Robinson seinen Wunsch nach einer separaten Vertretung bei
den Nürnberger Prozessen nicht durchsetzen. Trotzdem war Nürnberg ein wichtiger Markstein in der
Darstellung des schrecklichen Schicksals, das Menschen jüdischen Glaubens durch die Nazis zugefugt
worden war.

Nach Ansicht von Michael Marrus wurde der Holocaust in Nürnberg sicherlich nicht in derselben
Weise dargestellt, wie das heutzutage geschehen würde. Immerhin erfolgte hier erstmalig eine
Erklärung zu der Ermordung von sechs Millionen Menschen, die vor einem internationalen Gremium
öffentlich abgegeben wurde. Dazu zählten bereits die Hauptelemente des Holocaust wie die
Vorkriegsverfolgungen, die Massenerschießungen durch die Einsatzgruppen, die Wannseekonferenz
von 1942, der Aufstand im Warschauer Ghetto, die Deportation ungarischer Juden und, schlussendlich,
die Todeslager Auschwitz, Buchenwald und viele andere.

Unter Historikern gab es kontroverse Meinungen über die Behauptung, der Holocaust habe nicht die
angemessene Aufmerksamkeit erhalten oder - noch schlimmer - die Nürnberger Prozesse hätten in
schwerwiegender Weise die geschichtlichen Tatsachen verdreht. Die Kritik bezog sich auf die
Unzulänglichkeit der Prozesse. So beispielsweise, dass die Betonung der Verschwörung oder die
amerikanische Besessenheit im Hinblick auf Verbrechen gegen den Frieden die Aufmerksamkeit von
dem Angriff auf die Juden Europas ablenkte; ebenso, dass als Folge des Privilegs der dokumentarischen
Beweise jüdische Stimmen kaum vor dem Tribunal zu hören waren und nicht zuletzt die
Rahmenbedingungen des Falles eine Vernachlässigung der Vorkriegsverbrechen verursachten und -
noch bedeutender - die Präsentation des Holocaust als ein spezifisches Element der Nazi-Kriminalität
verhinderten.
Genocide on Trial: Law and Collective Memory 73

Donald Bloxham
Genocide on Trial: Law and Collective Memory
Introduction: (Mis-)Remembering Nuremberg
Assessing the impact of the Nuremberg trials on something as amorphous as 'collective memory'
will inevitably be a subjective exercise, coloured strongly by the indicators one selects. While the trial
records themselves provide an indelible record of what was said at Nuremberg, and thus a fixed point
for the historian of the trials per se, ideas of what 'Nuremberg' as a whole meant and means are far
from fixed. At the most basic level, there is confusion as to what is meant by 'the Nuremberg trials',
since some use that formula to refer exclusively to the quadripartite International Military Tribunal
(IMT) 'trial of the major war criminals' of 1945-6, and some more inclusively to refer to both the IMT
trial and the twelve subsequent Nuremberg trials conducted under solely American auspices. The
distinction between these categories is not just academic: while the subsequent trials went into much
greater detail than the IMT proceedings on specific aspects of Nazi criminality, they were
simultaneously much less significant in the process of popular memory-formation in the 1940s and
1950s. General comprehension has not been aided by the single most important popular representation
of 'Nuremberg', Abby Mann's Judgment at Nuremberg. This Hollywood production spliced together
with considerable artistic license episodes from both the IMT trial and some of the subsequent
proceedings.
Perceptions of 'Nuremberg' continue to change to this day. The introductory notes to this panel in
the present conference programme, for instance, tell us that the trials 'aimed to restore justice both to
the defendants and to the history and memory of the Holocaust.' This is strongly reminiscent of a
conference held at the Benjamin B. Cardozo Law School in New York in March 2005, 'The Nuremberg
Trials: A Reappraisal and their Legacy'. There, the introductory sessions were filled with depictions of
the Nuremberg confrontation with perpetrators of genocide, disregarding the fact that the primary thrust
of the trials, from the dominant American perspective at least, was the aggressive war making of the
Nazi regime. We were told in that conference programme that the gathering sought 'to recall and
reaffirm the lessons - the legacy - of Nuremberg that underlay the trials' deliberations: that the Nazi
regime almost succeeded because of the pathologies of hate and evil, as well as the crimes of
indifference and silence.' It is almost as if these pronouncements too were influenced by Judgment at
Nuremberg, which was, in relation to the proceedings it purported to represent, disproportionately
concerned with crimes against humanity as opposed to the crime of aggressive war. Such genocide-
centric conceptions of 'Nuremberg' may tell us much about the way that we in a most Holocaust-
conscious world would like to think the trials were conducted; they tell us less about the priorities of the
Allied law-makers and trial participants, or about the balance of everyday practice and discussion in
courtroom 600 in 1945-6.
At Nuremberg addressing crimes against humanity as a whole was an important but ultimately
subsidiary end to the primary goal of tackling 'crimes against peace'; addressing what we now know as
the Holocaust was subsidiary even to that subsidiary end. For the most part, when they were considered
at the IMT trial, crimes against Jews qua Jews tended to be subsumed within the larger whole of Nazi
atrocity, left ill-defined within the mass of murder, enslavement and war-related destruction affecting
other groups in Europe. It is possible to argue, by piecing together disparate pieces of evidence
marshalled in the Nuremberg courtroom, that the IMT trial presented a more-or-less representative if
rudimentary outline of the 'final solution of the Jewish question'. This, however is a far different matter
to attributing a conscious plan for such an outcome to the Allied prosecutors (left to his own devices US
chief prosecutor Robert Jackson would not have had Einsatzgruppe leader Otto Ohlendorf testify at
Nuremberg, while the other witness who did something to animate the 'final solution', former
Auschwitz commandant Rudolf HóB, was actually brought to the stand by the defence rather then the
prosecution). It is also a world away from proving anything at all about the effect of such a
74 Donald Bloxham

representation on audiences then or latterly. More importantly, it is probably to fall into the trap of
finding what one wants to find in the historical record.1
Writing about the exaggeration in some recent scholarship on the British Empire of the impact that
the imperial experience had on domestic British society, Bernard Porter has observed that it is
imperative to look at the empire's impact on British society in context; to survey ... the whole site. It
will not do simply to look for 'imperial' evidence without being aware of what lies around it; or even,
perhaps, to look for imperial evidence at all. People who look for things sometimes find them when
they are not there; especially - in this case - if they are looking through distorting lenses. Even when
you can avoid that, there is still the temptation to exaggerate the significance of what you have found.
There is a lot of genuinely 'imperialist' material from this period, which if corralled together looks
impressive, and even overwhelming, but which really needs to be viewed in situ and against the
background of other kinds of evidence if its real importance and meaning are to be adjudged.2 If we
were to substitute 'the Holocaust' for 'the Empire' in the first sentence, and likewise 'the trial of the
major war criminals' for 'British society', and read the rest of the paragraph around those two new
referents, we have the basis for a trenchant critique of the idea that the trial of the major war criminals
did 'justice' to the Holocaust or any other Nazi genocide.
For present purposes, any discussion of the relationship between collective memory and the trials
must recognise that the very fact and the shape of the trials, as well as the profile of the tried, were at
least as significant as was the actual substance of the trials in terms of the day-to-day proceedings and
the evidence adduced there. This may even be truer in the IMT case than in other instances, owing on
one hand to the contentious, ex post facto nature of the laws applied and, on the other hand to the dry,
tedious documentary approach favoured by the dominant US prosecution team, OCCPAC (Office,
Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality). The crux of my argument hereafter is that
whatever hugely significant things they achieved as a precedent for trying leaders of state for
international crimes, in creating a huge documentary database for future historians of Nazism, and
tempering vengeance with a measure of justice, the Nuremberg trials did little by way of influencing a
collective memory of Nazi criminality. Other instructional media and propaganda forms were more
significant than the courtroom. Moreover, the victim groups of the war era that most preoccupied most
countries either conducting or on the receiving end of trials tended not to be the main target-groups of
Nazi genocide, but instead whichever groups best served national agendas. Already by the 1950s, in
those places where there was still the remotest interest in 'Nuremberg', for which we can read primarily
Germany, these more powerful influences had successfully occluded what the trials had endeavoured to
transmit. Subsequent 'rediscoveries' of Nuremberg, and reassessments of its 'true' lessons and legacies
have had as much to do with the values of the time of the reassessments as with what 'Nuremberg' itself
actually was.

National agendas and international crimes

Martin Conway has observed that the shape and character of the various purges and prosecutions
provide an excellent means of analyzing the dynamics of European societies in the immediate post-war

1
Donald Bloxham, Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), chs. 1, 2 and 3; contrary views about the effectiveness of the Nuremberg trial in
informing about the Holocaust are held in Michael Marrus, 'The Holocaust at Nuremberg', Yad Vashem Studies, vol. 26
(1998), 5-41; Jürgen Wilke et al, Holocaust und NS-Prozesse (Cologne: Bühlau, 1995); Jürgen Wilke, "Ein früher Beginn
der 'Vergangenheitsbewältigung': der Nürnberger Prozess und wie darüber berichtet wurde", Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung 15 November 1995; and, with much more nuance, and a different focus, Lawrence Douglas, The Memory of
Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), part
one. For analysis of the idea of 'crimes against peace' as the supreme crime, see Jonathan A Bush, ' " T h e Supreme ...
Crime' and its Origins: The Lost Legislative History of the Crime of Aggressive War", Columbia Law Review, vol. 12, no.
8 (December 2002), 2324-2423. On the testimony of the Nazi perpetrators mentioned, see Bloxham, Genocide on Trial, pp.
61-2, 105-6.
2
Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 13.
Genocide on Trial: Law and Collective Memory 75

years. The devising and implementation of the structures of justice constituted a highly politicised arena
in which mass pressures and elite concerns were focused with a rare intensity. 3 In other words, the trials
of the post-war years provide an insight into the societies bringing trial as much as into the actions of
the accused. In the post-war era, the trial programmes of the victorious Allies and the liberated
Europeans reveal a series of concerns related primarily to the reformation of national communities of
identity and the writing of 'usable' historical records. 4 These tendencies were all influenced, if often
simply reinforced, by the developing cold war environment.
By far the greatest concentration of prosecutions of war and Nazi occupation-related offences
occurred in the five years following the end of the war. In that time the British authorities in Europe
tried more than a thousand Axis nationals, primarily Germans, for war crimes, and the USA tried more
than 1,800. Neither would convict another war criminal until the London trial of the Belorussian
collaborator-murderer Anthony Sawoniuk in 1999. Soviet figures are imprecise but we know that in
May 1950, Soviet camps held 13,532 inmates convicted of war-related offences. In the same five-year
period, in the Soviet zone of Germany, later the DDR, there were 12,177 convictions for Nazi- and war-
related crimes; thereafter, there were only 630 such convictions up to 1964, and thence only 54
convictions to 1978. The French authorities in occupied Germany and in French military courts tried
more than 2,000 individuals for war crimes and crimes against humanity from 1945-54, the majority in
the first half of the period; the gauntlet was only picked-up again in 1987, with the trial of the Gestapo
officer Klaus Barbie in Lyons. In Austria, 1945-55 saw 13,607 convictions, to be followed in the
succeeding 17 years by only a further 18.
It is entirely natural that the immediate aftermath of war should have seen such a reckoning, as
passions for retribution ran high and suspects were more easily identified. But what precisely were these
suspects tried for? As Adalbert Ruckerl observes, where figures are available, they indicate that the
scale of trials for collaborators is of a different order to that of trials of war criminals proper. 5 In Poland,
the ratio was approximately 2:1; in Western Europe, collaboration trials accounted for thousands and
tens of thousands rather than tens or hundreds as was the case with war criminals. The countries that
had been under occupation by Germany seemed more interested in purging themselves of fascists and
collaborators - or at least in some cases merely giving the appearance of a purge - then they were with
charting substantive war crimes. 6 In the immediate aftermath of the liberation of the Netherlands, for
instance, a staggering 450,000 Dutch citizens were arrested. And 'the purification' - 'l'épuration' - of
collaborators in France was much more important symbolically to the French people than the trials of
German war criminals, quantitatively much more significant, and touched the lives of many more
people. Before the establishment of the post-liberation French government after August 1944, some
9,000 French citizens were executed summarily or after 'kangaroo' trials. From 1945 onwards properly-
constituted French courts passed another 1,500 death sentences, and 40,000 prison sentences. 7
There was a fundamental dissonance between the national cleavage of the various trial programmes
in existence and the international nature of Nazi criminality in terms of both the locus of the crimes and
the profile of the victims. This particularly affected the confrontation with crimes against Europe's
Romanies and Jews. As diaspora communities, who was to take up the cause of Jewish and Romany
suffering in a world in which the emphasis was on the restoration of state boundaries and sovereignty,
and on, to put it colloquially, sorting out one's own backyard? (This question still remains to be
answered in the case of the Romanies, for neither at Nuremberg nor any national legal forum was that

5
Martin Conway in Istvan Deak, Jan T. Gross and Tony Judt (eds.), The Politics of Retribution in Europe: World War
II and its Aftermath (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 134.
4
On the notion of a 'usable past', see Robert G. Moeller, War Stories: the Search for a Usable Past in the Federal
Republic of Germany (Berkeley, C a l i f : University of California Press, 2001).
5
Adalbert Rückerl, NS-Verbrechen vor Gericht (Heidelberg: CF Müller, 1982), pp. 102-4.
6
Deak, Gross and Judt (eds.), The Politics of Retibution in Europe.
7
Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1991); Michael Fabreguet, "Frankreichs Historiker und der Völkermord an den Juden 1945-1993", in
Rolf Steininger (ed.), Der Umgang mit der Holocaust: Europa - USA - Israel (Cologne: Bühlau, 1994), 317-28.
76 Donald Bloxham

case of genocide addressed either in the post-war years or since, illustrating again the influence of
prevailing national and cultural norms - in this case, clearly chauvinist norms - in shaping the legal
confrontation with the past.) Further, in states that had colluded by omission or commission in the 'final
solution of the Jewish question', proper confrontation with that crime was a victim of the logic of state
re-formation based on the myth of opposition to Nazism and its crimes. The latter imperative would
only be reinforced as, approximately from mid-1947, the cold war began to descend on Europe, as we
shall see shortly.
Aspects of the IMT trial itself were marked by the national and ideological agendas of each of the
'big four' Allied powers. In a sense, despite its eponymous aspiration to be an 'international' forum, it
remained in significant ways quadripartite. This was certainly how it was regarded by many of the
governments and former governments-in-exile that had been involved in the United Nations War
Crimes Commission and that pressed in vain in 1945 for separate national representation at the trial,
feeling that their interests could only be represented in such an environment by their own delegates. The
same went for those Jewish organisations that petitioned the USA and the UK for a representative
presence on the prosecution. Let us briefly consider as illustration of the influence of national agendas
some aspects of the Soviet and French presentations at the IMT trial.
In the official Marxist-Leninist Soviet comprehension of Nazism, Auschwitz, like the Majdanek
concentration camp, was promoted as a symbol of the 'martyrdom' of the international 'victims of
fascism' rather than any particular ethnic group. In evidence at the trial a Soviet extraordinary state
commission report concluded that the camp had consumed 'four million [sic] citizens of the USSR,
Poland, France, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Holland, Belgium and other
countries'. The failure to mention Jews as victims was duplicated in the Soviet prosecution's courtroom
references to Treblinka and, uniquely in the Allied presentations, Chelmno.8
Characteristic of a post-war regime that sought to locate all of the blame for the chequered French
war record on the Nazis, and exaggerated the part of the French resistance, heroes of the resistance were
prominent on the French section of the IMT bench and amongst the French prosecutors.9 In the French
prosecution case on war crimes and crimes against humanity in Western Europe, Jews were for the most
part notable by their absence, most starkly so in the closing address of the French chief prosecutor
François de Menthon.10 Even the one French witness who shed as much light at Nuremberg as any
victim on the fate of the Jews at the largest Nazi extermination centre was representationally
problematic. Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier had been transported from Ravensbrtick to Auschwitz,
there to witness the selection process for the gas chambers. The memory of this formidable witness
proved accurate in every respect except those on which she could only speculate.11 But in addition to
her strength of character and memory, Vaillant-Couturier had one quality as a witness that made her
attractive to the French, so much so that the French authorities used her in other contexts beyond the
trial.12 She had been deported to Auschwitz as a member of the resistance.
The case of Britain was slightly different. Britain had been a classic 'bystander' state to genocide,
but, uniquely in Europe, had neither been militarily occupied or defeated. Nevertheless, Britain
followed the rest of Europe in being heavily concerned in its war crimes trial programme with crimes
committed against British servicemen. Like the other powers occupying Germany, it also acquired a
responsibility for reckoning with offences committed within its zone of occupation. This zone

8
Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, 42 vols. (Nuremberg: IMT, 1947)
(hereafter ' I M T ' ) , vol. 8, p. 322. Emphasis added. See Alexander Victor Prusin, '"Fascist Criminals to the Gallows!": The
Holocaust and Soviet War Crimes Trials, December 1945-February 1946', Holocaust and Genocide Studies, vol. 17, no. 1
(2003), 1-30, on the way that crimes against Jews were represented in Soviet courts.
9
Robert H. Jackson papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., container 191, 'Justice Jackson's Story', fols.
1345-7. On French attitudes, see the literature cited in note 7 above.
10
IMT, vol. 5, pp. 368-426.
" IMT, vol. 6, pp. 203-27.
12
On the uses of Vaillant-Couturier, Annette Wiewiorka, "La construction de la mémoire du génocide en France", Le
Monde Juif, no. 149 (1993), pp. 24-6.
Genocide on Trial: Law and Collective Memory 77

effectively became part of Britain's 'backyard', and the trials of various concentration, labour and
prison camps constituted the other major component of the British trial programme. 13
British perceptions of Nazi criminality were shaped, and remained so for decades, by the institutions
that British troops encountered as they occupied German territory. In much the same way that
Buchenwald and Dachau were to colour American perceptions, the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp
came to symbolise German perfidy. However the Belsen that the British media described to the
domestic audience was not the same as that remembered today, primarily because of the silence
surrounding the preponderance of Jewish inmates; a silence stemming, it seems, from the prevailing
British institutional determination not to be seen to be fighting a war on behalf of the Jews. 14 Moreover,
Belsen was clearly not representative of the extremes of Nazi population policy in that it was not the
same as the Polish extermination centres of the 'final solution'. The rather partial picture of Nazi
criminality presented by the western concentration camps liberated by the western Allies was also
widely disseminated in Germany through occupation films, newspapers, newsreels and inmate memoirs
licensed for publication, and through forcing the German public to visit the camps. 15
If Britain effectively domesticated a German institution of atrocity for its own war memory,
Germany itself remained entirely insular in its preoccupations. Given the extent of German criminality
in WWII it is perhaps understandable that many latter-day historians have seen in German self-pity only
a cynical diversionary tactic. However, not only did the concern with the national fate mirror such
concerns elsewhere, the sheer dimensions of German suffering at the close of the war and the rather
sudden onset of such suffering within national boundaries were inevitably to colour any German
perception. The influx of millions of 'Volksdeutsche' refugees and expellees from eastern- and
southern-central Europe, the experience of increasingly massive area bombing, and the loss of further
millions of menfolk either on the battlefield or to Soviet POW camps, combined with the effect of
military defeat and occupation had a traumatic effect that was not diminished in German eyes by the
objective fact that its cause lay in the Nazi campaigns of aggression. 16 As for the Nuremberg and other
trials, these were seen by many Germans - however perversely - as another form of victimisation, a
simple extension of the punitive occupation of the country.
The other popular German reaction to the trial of the major war criminals - besides ignorance and
nigh ubiquitous boredom - was to place all of the blame for Germany's misfortunes on the men in the
dock, and thus to exculpate the German masses and, indeed, anyone below the very highest rank of
perpetrators. There was a particular enthusiasm in this connection to protest against any indictment of
German servicemen. Ultimately the concept of the serviceman was extended not just to all of the
military and indeed paramilitary forces of the Third Reich, but also to the majority of state functionaries
- hence the enduring popularity of the flawed defence that Germans were only obeying senior orders.
Moreover, Germans were not slow to point out that the German concentration camps that the Allies
were so keen to highlight contained many Germans targeted by the Nazi regime, thus providing another
spurious defence concerning the distance between the Nazi leadership and the people. 17 The
commonality between these varying responses was that in none of them were Germans really interested
in courtroom information about Nazi atrocities, but simply in distancing themselves from such deeds
either by focusing upon the perceived inequities of the trial medium - as ex post facto justice, or
'victor's justice', or whatever - or by averring that the trials and their subject-matter had nothing to do
with them anyway.

13
Donald Bloxham, "British War Crimes Trial Policy in Germany, 1945-1957: Implementation and Collapse", Journal
of British Studies, vol. 42, no. 1 (2003), 91-118.
H
Tony Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination: a Social and Cultural History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).
15
Bloxham, Genocide on Trial, pp. 80-90.
16
Moeller, War Stories; Norbert Frei, Vergangenheitspolitik: Die Anfänge der Bundesrepublik und die NS-
Vergangenheit (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1996).; Neil Gregor, '"Is he still alive, or long since dead?: Loss, Absence and
Remembrance in Nuremberg, 1945-1956', German History, vol. 21, no. 2 (2003), 183-203; Michael L. Hughes, '"Through
No Fault of Our O w n ' : West Germans Remember Their War Losses", German History, vol. 18, no. 2 (2000), 193-213.
17
On German responses to the IMT trial and the occupation, see Bloxham, Genocide on Trial, pp. 80-88, 137-53.
78 Donald Bloxham

There is one clear exception to the generalisation about narrow national interest amongst all parties.
The American agenda at Nuremberg, as opposed to the US Dachau trial programme, and irrespective of
any inconsistencies of problems that we might identify with it, was quite consciously intended as a
universalistic exercise with genuinely international ramifications and aspirations for the regulation of
international affairs in future. One suspects that it was easier for American representatives to take a
broader view at this time since of all the big four powers the USA had been by far the least affected by
the hardships of war, and therefore was least concerned with a 'national' reckoning; at the same time,
the 'big idea' of Nuremberg was consistent with certain traditions of American optimism about the
regulatory role that law might play in international affairs as in domestic, constitution-bound life.
Whatever the precise combination of reasons, the American approach to Nuremberg stands in sharp
contrast, for example, to the initial British refusal to engage with the idea of an international court for
international crimes, and indeed the legal conservatism of the British in everything they did outside of
their association with the USA at Nuremberg.18 Moreover, the American commitment to the goals of the
IMT prosecution was strong enough to ensure the single-handed extension of the effort through the
subsequent proceedings programme.
Paradoxically, it was the very universalism of American intentions that prevented a more extensive
focus on the 'final solution' in the US prosecution effort. The 'final solution' and contingent parts
thereof were to be used simply as illustrations of the crimes emerging from the 'supreme crime' of
aggressive war; indeed, they would be used more-or-less interchangeably with what were in US Chief
Prosecutor Robert Jackson's lexicon called 'representative examples' of atrocity selected from across
the full spectrum of Nazi criminality.19 This notion of 'representative examples' actually provided
leeway for the use by France and the USSR of instances favourable to their own agendas, while the
Anglo-Saxons continued as a rule to prefer evidence from German concentration camps rather than
eastern extermination centres. More than this, some of the (Anglo-)American ambivalences evinced in
responses to the 'final solution' during the war were also manifest in an apparent reluctance to give the
Jewish fate in its specificity too great a proportion of attention at the trial.
When confronted with Jewish organisations requesting representation on the prosecution this was
refused by Jackson, but not on the grounds given in reply to a similar request by the Polish Government,
namely that it was logistically impossible to give time and space to all interested parties.20 Rather, as
Jackson recalled, he had wished to 'get away from the racial aspects of the situation': 'we didn't want to
exaggerate racial tensions'. 'The only thing to do about that was to avoid making [Nuremberg] a
vengeance trial',21 he claimed, thus playing unfortunately into the stereotype of the vengeful Jew.
Jackson was prepared to admit Chaim Weizmann as an expert witness for the prosecution on the murder
of the Jews, but only on the condition of prior presentation of a statement carefully prepared in advance;
Weizmann demurred. (The British remained faithful to their perennial line in insisting that it would be
preferable to have non-Jews testify.)22 Colonel Murray Bernays, the inventor of the 'conspiracy -
criminal organisation plan' had earlier gone a little further still, and suggested that it would give 'added
authority' to the American case if 'the Jewish problem [was] assigned to a group of high churchmen'
for presentation in court.23
Tied into knots by his strategic-cum-ideological dilemma, Jackson was happy to have Jewish
lawyers on his team, as long as they were not involved in presenting the Jewish case. As he said, "we

ls
Priscilla Dale Jones, "British Policy towards German Crimes against German Jews, 1939-45", Leo Baeck Institute
Yearbook, vol. 36 (1991), 339-66.
19
Bloxham, Genocide on Trial, pp. 62-3.
20
Ann Tusa and John Tusa, The Nuremburg Trial (London: Atheneum, 1983), pp. 103-4.
21
'Justice Jackson's story', fols. 1075-7.
22
Ibid, fols. 1076-7; Jacob Robinson, 'The International Military Tribunal and the Holocaust: Some Legal Reflections',
in Michael R. Marrus (ed.), The Nazi Holocaust, 9 parts (London: Meckler, 1989), part 9, p. 610; Marrus, "The Holocaust
at Nuremberg", p. 13.
23
Jackson Papers, container 107, "Office files, US Chief-of-Counsel: pre-trial planning", Bernays to Jackson, 3 July
1945.
Genocide on Trial: Law and Collective Memory 79

thought it would be just as bad not to let any appear as it would be to let too many appear." 24 Likewise,
both Jackson and the British were prepared to seek information pertaining to the Holocaust from Jewish
sources, provided, as the British put it, they were 'reliable' conduits (which presumably implied them
not being stridently Zionist). 25 But Jews could not be allowed to be seen to describe the fate of their kin
either as prosecutors or witnesses; this was the task of 'objective' Nazi documentation on the one hand,
and the voice of 'universal' opinion - personified in US Supreme Court Justice Jackson - on the other.
By the same token, no individual crime against a specific group, however vast, could be allowed to
supplant the quasi-universalist focus on prosecuting the waging of aggressive warfare. But irrespective
of the precise balance of representation in the IMT's proceedings, the key point to bear in mind in terms
of collective memory-formation is that for aforementioned reasons the courtroom discussions fell
largely on deaf ears.
The subsequent Nuremberg trials continued the titanic American effort, and their main thrust was to
try to reinforce what had only tentatively been established by the IMT about the scope of German
military and industrial responsibility for the Nazi campaigns of aggressive war. Nevertheless, other
criminal complexes were also examined, including some of the primary agencies of the 'final solution'
(if the most obviously relevant case, that of Ohlendorf and other Einsatzgruppen leaders, was only
brought, despite it being a relatively lowly priority, because the surviving Nazi documentation promised
a swift, open-and-shut case) 26 . Yet it is a sad truth that public attention and media coverage dwindled
almost in inverse relation to the degree to which the detail and extent of Nazi criminality was being laid
bare in court. Most of the subsequent trials were conducted amid virtual press silence, and when the
trials were made the focus of public discourse this was to criticise the trial medium rather than the
message.
In a more unambiguous fashion than in 1945-6 with the IMT trial, the subsequent Nuremberg trials
became the focus of a revisionist nationalism whose concerns were re-establishing German sovereignty
and removing the taint on the German name that war crimes trials represented. In October 1950, the
reactions analysis staff of the US High Commission encountered the greatest shift in German societal
attitudes ever recorded to that time. Only thirty-eight percent of a sample of 2,000 people regarded the
IMT trial as having been conducted fairly, compared to the seventy-eight percent registered four years
earlier.27
The increasingly strident West German rejection of the Allied trial programmes was, like the
German attitude to the wartime atrocities themselves, not as exceptional as it might at first glance
appear. If each country had its own concerns to highlight or downplay in the post-war years, the
development of these national agendas was, equally, bound together in a series of temporal waves.
'Mastering the past' - 'Vergangenheitsbewaltigung' - was everywhere aided by the cold war.

The rhythms of the 'post-war decade'

Across the European board, among the countries liberated from Nazi rule in the period, the years
1944-5 saw the aforementioned purges, where rough justice and political solutions frequently preceded

24
Justice Jackson's story, fol. 1077.
25
Public Record Office, Kew, London (hereafter, ' P R O ' ) , WO 311/39, British War Crimes Executive to Foreign Office,
8 April 1946, requesting details of estimated numbers of Jewish dead, to be used in the cross-examination of Julius
Streicher. The statistics were to be provided by the Board of Deputies of British Jews or "other reliable Jewish
organisations." For further comments as to the relative merits of different Jewish organisations, see PRO, FO 371/ 57561,
Henderson to FO, 10 January 1946. Herein, the author favours representation at the IMT trial of the Board of Deputies over
that of "the more extreme bodies such as the [World Jewish] Congress".
26
Bloxham, Genocide on Trial, pp. 72-3.
27
Anna J. Merritt and Richard L. Merritt (eds.), Public Opinion in Semisovereign Germany: the H1COG Surveys, 1949-
1955 (Chicago, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1980), p. 101, HiCOG report no.57. Indeed, in August 1949, a cross
section of West German university students - the potential leaders of that nation - rejected in the ratio of seven to one the
right of the Allies to judge war criminals; George Gallup (ed.), The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1935-1971, vol.1, 1935-
1948 (New York, NY: Random House, 1972), p. 842.
80 Donald Bloxham

any formal legal reckoning. Thereafter for perhaps another year - the period that Jeffrey Herf labels the
'Nuremberg interregnum', but which might better be characterised by the epithet the last year of the
'antifascist consensus' 28 - the determination for a reckoning with the past was clearly still evident,
despite early signs of a rift between Western and Eastern Allies. The IMT trial, the high watermark of
judicial process at a point shortly succeeding the open bloodletting, therefore also occurred within this
time-frame.
In Germany, the years 1945-6 were the harshest occupation years, with non-fraternization
regulations strictly enforced in the spirit of the earlier demand for unconditional surrender, and
denazification in full force. While British and American domestic constituencies were rapidly losing
interest in issues of trial and occupation, and starting to address the needs of demobilisation and
reconstruction, so much so that midway through the IMT trial the British chief prosecutor Hartley
Shawcross had to plead with the press magnate Lord Beaverbrook to devote more column inches to the
case in his newspapers, and that the BBC had withdrawn its reporter by the beginning of 1946,29 the
Allied 're-education' programmes continued to focus on the issues of complicity in Nazism, and the
aforementioned concentration camp imagery was used extensively both to shame the populace and ram
home the justification for occupation.
The decline and fall of the anti-fascist consensus was also the beginning of the cold war proper. The
year 1947 brought with it serious schisms in the council of foreign ministers of the 'big four' powers;
the announcement of the Truman Doctrine; intensified Stalinization in eastern Germany and throughout
the Soviet sphere; and the eviction of socialists from a number of coalition governments in the west.
Even earlier than this, during the course of 1946, the British government had decided for good
realpolitik reasons that there was no utility in proceeding with a mooted second quadripartite trial of
major war criminals, and was accordingly instrumental in scuppering French and Soviet plans for the
trial.30 In the changed international environment of 1947, purges and war crimes trials programmes
everywhere were being wound down, their focuses ever more narrowly brought to bear on matters of
solely national interest before they were closed down altogether in the succeeding months and, at most,
very few years. States in the west were now 'allowed', if not encouraged, to put aside awkward wartime
memories while emphasizing their anticommunist credentials; states in the communist east were
encouraged to overplay wartime antifascism and resistance. On both sides many state functionaries
compromised in the war years were kept in post, illustrating the limits of denazification across the
board.31
As the cold war set in, so too did an increasingly explicit tendency on either side of the iron curtain
to use and abuse for political ends the record of Nazi atrocity. Whereas in 1945-6 there had been a
certain plurality of victim voices in both East and West Germany, these were rendered increasingly
uniform thereafter. Thus, for instance, we see the promotion in the Soviet-controlled media of the East
German zone of individuals like Walter Battel, the former head of Buchenwald's International
Resistance Committee, a communist with distinctly anti-western leanings.32 Owing to the leftist-
dominated prisoner rising in Buchenwald, that camp became a particular focus of eastern German
remembrance, but at Sachsenhausen too political prisoners were prioritised in memory by the large
memorial obelisk bedecked with a red triangle alone, while the ruins of the crematoria mentioned only
the Soviet POWs murdered there (in an interesting inversion of the pattern of memory in the west,
where the massive tragedy of millions of POW deaths has long been ignored). Corresponding to the

28
Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: the Nazi Past in the Two Germanies (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press,
1997), cf. Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: the History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000 (New York, NY: Oxford
University Press, 2002).
29
Bloxham, Genocide on Trial, p. 147.
30
Donald Bloxham, ' " T h e Trial That Never W a s ' : Why there was no Second International Trial of Major War
Criminals at Nuremberg?", History, vol. 87, no. 285 (2002), 41-60.
31
Deak, Gross and Judt (eds.), The Politics of Retribution; Frei, Vergangenheitspolitik.
32
Christoph Classen, Faschismus und Antifaschismus. Die nationalsozialistische Vergangenheit im ostdeutschen
Hörfunk (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2004), pp. 228-9.
Genocide on Trial: Law and Collective Memory 81

grossly disproportional emphasis on the resistance movements within these camps and within the Soviet
sphere as a whole, there was little emphasis on other camp inmates, be they homosexuals, Romanies or
Jews"
The symbolic significance of individual survivor-witnesses and institutions was not lost on the
British and the American occupiers either. Indeed, contrary to stock generalisations about the
difficulties the Allies had in getting to grips with the scale and complexity of Nazi criminality, the
Allied authorities in Germany showed themselves aware about and adept at selecting from the range of
Nazi crimes. A report produced in April 1945 by the influential Psychological Warfare Department
(PWD) of the joint Allied supreme command SHAEF34 on the making of a documentary on the
concentration camps aimed to 'promote German acceptance of the justice of the Allied occupiers by
reminding Germans of their past acquiescence' and therefore, their 'responsibility'. However it also
aimed to show specific crimes committed in the German name to rouse the populace against the Nazis.
The latter was to be accomplished specifically by focusing upon German victims of atrocities, and if
possible, personalising them by establishing their individual identities.35
Finding iconic 'good' Germans who had been mistreated by the Nazis was naturally an important
part of leading the country towards democracy in illustrating by example the existence of political
alternatives and moral choice. Yet the straightforward message could and would be subverted, notably
in the case of the military 'resistance' in Germany, whose most ostentatious act was the bomb plot on
their leader's life on 20 July 1944. Their actions, as recorded in 1946 in SchlabrendorfFs Offiziere
gegen Hitler and in 1947-8 in Allen Dulles's Germany's Underground 36 and Hans Bernd Gisevius's
Bis zum bitteren Ende1 provided apparent testimony to both Germany and the west38 to the rift between
the established order and Nazism, and 20 July remains a touchstone of all those wishing to mitigate
German guilt, regardless of the true and often tainted motives and characters of the resistors.39
Once again, the institutions in which iconic Germans such as some of the aforementioned, and the
likes of the prominent Christian Martin Niemoller, had been incarcerated were orthodox concentration
camps. PWD consciously deployed these camps in its metamorphosing propaganda campaign, as for
instance in its sponsorship of the writing of a treatise on the camp system by the survivor of
Buchenwald (and another prominent Christian) Eugen Kogon. Interestingly, the final chapters of the
second (German) edition of Kogon's Der SS-Slaat and the first edition in English translation, The
Theory and Practice of Hell (1948), are given over to a comparative examination of the use of prison
camps in the USSR under Stalin. This nourished the parallel Allied trend towards using the
concentration camps as generic symbols of totalitarian domination rather than specific manifestations of
Nazism - an approach adopted in British information policy in May 1948 when it was decided for anti-
communist reasons to broadcast information on Soviet camps and Stalinist deportations.40 There was
certainly no place now for the depiction of Soviet citizens as victims of Germany.

33
Mary Fulbrook, German National Identity after the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), pp. 28-35. See also
Peter Reichel, Politik mit der Erinnerung. Gedächtnisorte im Streit um die nationalsozialistische Vergangenheit (Munich:
Hanser, 1995).
34
On the PWD, Kurt Koszyk, Pressepolitik für Deutsche 1945-49. Geschichte der deutschen Presse Teil IV (Berlin:
Colloquium, 1986), pp. 21-3.
"University of Warwick, Modern Records Centre, Crossman papers, MSS.I54/3/PW/1/I-211. SHAEF P W D report, 25
April 1945.
36
New York, 1947.
37
Vols. 1 and 2, Darmstadt, 1947/8.
38
Thomas Alan Schwartz, America's Germany (Cambridge, Mass, 1991), p. 158, on the influence of Dulles's (highly
propagandist) work on moderating western opinion; Helmut Peitsch, 'Deutsche Gedächtnis an seine dunkelste Zeit'. Zur
Funktion der Autobiographik in den Westzonen Deutschlands und den Westsektoren von Berlin 1945 bis 1949 (Berlin:
edition Sigma, 1990), pp. 48-9 on Gisevius's work.
39
David Clay Large, "A Beacon in the German Darkness: The Anti-Nazi Resistance Legacy in West German Politics,"
Journal of Modem History, vol. 164 (1992), supplement, 173-86.
40
Koszyk, Pressepolitik fur Deutsche, 233.
82 Donald Bloxham

While 'western' atrocity propaganda policies never went as far as its 'eastern' counterpart in
suggesting that the legacy of Nazism had been fully dealt with, the 'western' focus on German icons of
suffering and its increasing anticommunism was ever less well equipped to counteract the German
nationalist propaganda of the time. One thing, though, is for certain: despite their differences in focus,
one hugely significant commonality in both propaganda approaches was the substantial omission of
reference to Jews, the 'final solution', and the eastern extermination centres.
Again, the major exception to these generalisations about the cold war and changing depictions of
Nazi criminality is the subsequent Nuremberg trials. That the American trial structures survived into
1950 despite significant political and (thus) budgetary pressure from within Congress, and despite the
1947 shift in US occupation policy from 're-education' to the milder 're-orientation', is testament to the
huge commitment of Telford Taylor and his liberal, Harvard Law School-oriented staff, and of the US
zonal military governor, Lucius Clay. As I have argued elsewhere, however, had Clay had less
autonomy in his sphere and been subject to the same sort of close control by the State Department as the
British representatives in Germany had been by the Foreign Office, it is not at all clear that the
subsequent proceedings venture would long have survived 1947.41 Less hypothetically, the wider
changes in US occupation policy meant that the subsequent proceedings were left increasingly exposed
to German nationalist - and right-wing American - attack as an 'unnecessary' vestige of early
occupation policy. Once again, whatever was said in the courtrooms of the subsequent proceedings was
drowned-out in the wave of nationalist rhetoric that was primarily concerned with German interests and
victimhood.42
The swift disintegration of the Nuremberg edifice from the early 1950s on the watch of High
Commissioner John J. McCloy and in the succeeding years was all the more spectacular for the
surprising length of time that it had survived in the late 1940s. This collapse was, in the eyes of political
contemporaries (if not their legal counterparts, who could still point to the legal record as history and as
precedent), complete by 1958. By that point, all of the convicted war criminals incarcerated in the
American zone jail at Landsberg - including prominent Einsatzgruppen leaders and leading members of
the concentration camp administration - had been released, and many of them well before the
exhaustion of their original sentences, as the result of a series of politically-related measures of
clemency and sentence review designed to appease German nationalist sentiment in a cold war context
of prospective German rearmament.43 The British jails at Werl and Wittlich were emptied a year earlier.
The timetable of releases brought the hitherto exceptional American trial venture back into
synchronisation with other national trial and purge programmes as what Tony Judt has called the 'post-
war decade' of approximately 1945-56 drew to a close.44 The only prisoners not to benefit from this
chronic bout of leniency were those major war criminals still serving sentences passed down by the
IMT: under quadripartite control in Spandau jail, they could not be released without gaining a near-
impossible four power consensus.
The context of remilitarisation in the 1950s explains why McCloy was at pains to point out that the
honour of the German army had not been brought into question by the earlier American prosecution of a
number of its most prominent soldiers.45 On the back of the manipulation of national memory by the
Adenauer government, and the prevalent focus on German wartime and post-war suffering, this reversal
of American priorities and the undermining of Telford Taylor's work 4 served simply to reinforce the

41
Bloxham, Genocide on Trial, pp. 54-5.
42
Frank Buscher, The US War Crimes Trial Programme in Germany, 1946-1955 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,
1989).
43
Ibid; Thomas Alan Schwartz, "Die Begnadigung deutscher Kriegsverbrecher: John J. McCloy und die Häftlinge von
Landsberg", Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte, vol. 38 (1990), 375-414; Peter Maguire, Law and War: An American
Story (New York, N Y : Columbia University Press, 2001).
44
See Judt's preface to Judt, Deak and Gross (eds.), The Politics of Retribution in Europe, p. ix.
45
PRO, LCO 2/4428, HiCoG Public Relations Division A P O 757-A, p. 6.
46
Telford Taylor, "The Nazis go Free", Nation, 24 February 1951, pp. 170-172.
Genocide on Trial: Law and Collective Memory 83

popular west German wisdom that the Nuremberg trials could be disposed of as merely a form of
victor's justice.

Aftermaths
Much has changed since the 1950s in German attitudes towards Nuremberg and the crimes
addressed - at least in part - there. Germany today has some of the most enthusiastic proponents of the
International Criminal Court and of the international prosecution of the perpetrators not just of war
crimes and of crimes against humanity but also of aggressive war. It would, however, be a mistake to
infer from these self-evident facts that the Nuremberg trials were somehow ultimately responsible for
such shifts in opinion. This would be to confuse cause and effect. Rather, the re-evaluation of
'Nuremberg' has been a mere function of the changing German attitudes towards the Nazi past as a
whole.
In the 1960s and 1970s the Nuremberg trials served in West Germany as a dual-faceted symbol of
guilt and the imposition of punishment by alien powers. They also became a stick with which to beat
other states in way that was partly founded on legitimate criticism but was also partly an extension of
the tu quoque charge. During the Vietnam War, evidence of American atrocities and the suspicion of
imperialist ends elicited criticism of the American hypocrisy in the conduct of international affairs and a
comparison of American guilt with that of the Nazis. Manifestly symbolic also was the inauguration by
the German Greens of a 'war crimes' tribunal in Nuremberg at the height of the arms race, designed to
draw attention to American nuclear strategy. 47 A less defensive engagement with the trials gradually
developed in relation to a growing acquaintance with the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes in the final
decades of the Federal Republic. This was primarily an outcome of a generational shift in values and
perspectives.
Germany's present confrontation with its past is more extensive and intensive than any equivalent
commitment by a former perpetrator state anywhere in the world. This is testament to the success of
educational initiatives in an atmosphere of strong civic responsibility. Of the key moments in the
development of 'Holocaust-awareness', however, the Nuremberg trials are notable by their absence.
The popularisation of the story of Anne Frank was vital,48 though it was surpassed by the screening in
1979 on national television of the American mini-series Holocaust; 49 but these in turn would not have
had such an impact had not the ground been prepared by the student movement of the late 1960s, in
which the 'guilt of the fathers' was brought to the fore by a German youth that implicitly felt itself to be
innocent. And since Germans born in the decades after the war could clearly have no personal
responsibility for Germany's crimes of aggression and murder, they also saw less need than their
'fathers' and 'mothers' to reject the accusations of criminality launched at the latter in Nuremberg.
In other words, cultural changes have influenced as a by-product the way the legal event is viewed
in Germany (and elsewhere); the legal event did not shape the cultural change. This observation is of
contemporary importance, since, alongside the popular but unproven and probably unprovable assertion
of the deterrent effect of war crimes trials, they are also commonly promoted as re-educational media, a
contention that the experience of the Nuremberg trials does not support. The other relevant part of a
burgeoning 'Nuremberg hagiography' is the notion, addressed at the outset of this paper, that the IMT
trial had as one of its primary foci the Nazi genocide of the Jews and its perpetrators. It may well be that
this is simply how collective memory works, that in a Holocaust-conscious world we will see the
Holocaust where we wish to see it, and where better than at Nuremberg, in that now-idealised forum of

47
Dan Diner, Verkehrte Welten: Antiamerikanismus in Deutschland: Eine historischer Essay (Frankfurt am Main: Eich-
horn, 1993), pp. 141-2, 147-8; Werner Jochmann, Gesellschaftskrise und Judenfeindschaft in Deutschland 1870-1945
(Hamburg: Hans Christians Verlag, 1988), p. 337.
48
Werner Bergmann, "Die Reaktion auf den Holocaust in Westdeutschland von 1945 bis 1989",Geschichte in Wissen-
schaft und Unterricht, 4 3 ( 1 9 9 2 ) , 3 2 7 - 5 0 , here pp. 329, 332, 350.
49
Henryk M.Broder, Volk und Wahn (Hamburg: Spiegel Buchverlag, 1996), 2 1 5 - 1 6 .
84 Donald Bloxham

American-inspired reckoning with N a z i s m ? 5 0 A n d better still that this H o l o c a u s t - c o n s c i o u s re-

presentation o f the past ties in with current agendas for 'humanitarian intervention' in genocidal states.
Y e t a b o v e all others, scholars o f the H o l o c a u s t should be aware o f the perils o f a l l o w i n g the historical
record to be distorted b y e x post facto considerations, h o w e v e r these m a y support our d e s i g n s to
regulate the affairs o f today's turbulent world.

50
The recent rise of a much less critical overall approach to the Nuremberg trial - less critical, that is, than approaches
that pointed out firstly technical, legal and procedural problems with the trial, secondly the issues of Anglo-French-
American collaboration with prosecutors from a genocidal regime (in the USSR), and thirdly the elision of such issues as
area bombing that would have been susceptible to the tu quoque charge - is presumably in part a function of the end of the
Cold War. With the end of overarching bi-polar superpower politics and the pure geopolitical 'realism' that accompanied
foreign policy decision-making on both sides in that era, it has become possible again to pay lip-service to the rule of law in
international affairs and the principle of universal jurisdiction that Nuremberg did so much too establish - always allowing,
of course, that the current world hegemon, the USA, reserves the right not to play by the rules it is happy to insist on
selectively elsewhere, as illustrated by its recent illegal invasion of Iraq and opposition to the Rome Treaty for the
International Criminal Court. (On which, see Michael P. Scharf, "The ICC's Jurisdiction over the Nationals of Non-Party
States: a Critique of the US Position", Law and Contemporary Problems, vol. 64, no. 1 (2001), 67-117.).
Völkermord vor Gericht: Recht und kollektives Gedächtnis 85

Donald Bloxham
Völkermord vor Gericht: Recht und kollektives Gedächtnis
Dieser Beitrag befasst sich mit dem Einfluss der Hauptkriegsverbrecherprozesse und anderer Fälle
auf die Entstehung einer kollektiven Erinnerung an Nazi-Verbrechen. Es werden die Nachkriegsjahre in
Europa insgesamt untersucht, bevor sich der Fokus auf Westdeutschland richtet, den eigentlichen
Mittelpunkt der alliierten „Umerziehungs"-Anstrengungen, bei denen die Nürnberger Prozesse einen
essentiellen Bestandteil bildeten. Das Ergebnis der Untersuchung ist, dass die Prozesse wenig zur
Entwicklung eines kollektiven Verstehens oder Bewusstseins im Hinblick auf den Holocaust oder
andere NS-Völkermorde beigetragen haben. Im Prozess gegen die Hauptkriegsverbrecher spielte die
„Endlösung" eine relativ geringe Rolle, zumal die Aufmerksamkeit in jedem europäischen Land,
Deutschland eingeschlossen, zu diesem Zeitpunkt auf die eigenen Sorgen und auf die Bildung einer
Mythologie gerichtet war, um die Wiederherstellung der jeweils eigenen nationalen Identität zu
unterstützen. Der sich entwickelnde Kalte Krieg verstärkte noch die Tendenz, die Verbrechen des
Zweiten Weltkrieges zu ignorieren und sich den „Lektionen" von Nürnberg zu entziehen. Die positivere
deutsche Haltung gegenüber den Nürnberger Prozessen in jüngerer Zeit ist hingegen das Resultat einer
mit dem Generationenwechsel verbundenen vertieften Auseinandersetzung mit der NS-Vergangenheit
ganz allgemein. Die Umerziehungseffekte der Prozesse an sich waren unwesentlich.
86 Sam Garkawe

Sam Garkawe
The Role and Rights of Victims at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal

I. Introduction
One of the least analysed and discussed aspect of the Nuremberg IMT is the relatively small
emphasis that was placed on role and rights of the victims1 and survivors2 of Nazi policies during the
Tribunal's proceedings. This may come as a surprise to many people, given that one of the main
perceived purposes of the trial was to provide a sense of justice and vindication for the millions of
victims of Nazi policies. However, the American and British prosecutors failed to call any survivors to
testify. Although French and Soviet prosecutors did call a number of survivors to provide evidence
during the trial,3 the reality was that these survivor witnesses were peripheral to the proceedings given
that the trial was very much dominated by the American prosecution case and approach. The overall
conclusion that one draws in examining the trial from the perspective of victims and survivors is that it
was a disappointment. This was not just because the American (and British) prosecutors failed to call
any survivors to testify, thus largely excluding survivors from the proceedings,4 but was also due to the
founding Statute of the IMT making no mention of the words 'victim' or 'survivor'. This meant that the
IMT did not foresee that survivors might testify or otherwise have some role in proceedings, and would
thus need to have rights to protection and support before, during and after their testimony. Furthermore,
the possibility of victims and survivors receiving or being awarded some form of reparations was never
discussed before or during the IMT proceedings.
This situation should be compared and contrasted to recent international criminal courts, where I
would argue that the trend towards enhanced victim awareness, support, protection, reparation and
participation has been one of the greatest innovations of modern international criminal justice. After a
considerable hiatus in the formation of international criminal courts during the Cold War period, the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (the 'ICTY') was established by the UN
Security Council in 1993.5 The Statute of the ICTY introduced a number of innovative and progressive
measures to assist and protect victims that represented a great advance for the rights and concerns of
victims internationally. These measures were largely replicated by the Statute of the International
Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (the 'ICTR') formed in the following year.6 These measures included,

1
Defining the word 'victim' is often fraught with difficulties and in many cases will depend on the context in which it
is used. For the purposes of this article, a 'victim' will be broadly defined as someone who had been killed, injured,
imprisoned, denied their liberty or otherwise suffered harm as a direct result of Nazi racial and other repressive policies.
These victims of the Nazis or their allies included a wide variety of minorities, the most prominent being Jews, Gypsies,
disabled persons, gays and lesbians, Slavs, other religious minorities, and people of colour. The definition includes people
whom, although not direct victims of Nazi policies in the above sense, nevertheless were in a close relationship with
someone who suffered from any of these types of harms.
2
A 'survivor' in the sense used in this article will be someone, who lived through imprisonment or other forms of
denial of liberty, torture, or other forms of harm as a direct result of Nazi racial policies or policies of repression. Thus for
the purposes of this article all survivors were also victims.
3
For example, evidence of the conditions at Auschwitz was provided by a French survivor Marie Vaillant-Couturier,
and by a Soviet survivor Severina Shmaglerskaya. See Conot R, Justice at Nuremberg, Harper & Row Publishers, 1983, at
300 and 304 respectively. The Russians also called Abram Suzkever (testified on the liquidation of the Vilna ghetto) and
Samuel Rajzman (testified on Treblinka). Lawrence Douglas makes the interesting point that the three Russian witnesses
were presented in a way to the IMT that seemed to obscure the fact that they were Jewish. See Douglas L, The Memory of
Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust, Yale University Press, 2001, at 7 8-79.
4
It is true that a number of American Jewish organisations attempted to influence the American government in their
approach to the Tribunal. However, such organisations did not generally represent survivors (who were principally the
remnants of European Jewry), and the influence of these organisations did not appear to have been great anyway.
5
See Resolution 827, which was passed by the Security Council on the 25 May 1993. It is significant that the Security
Council acted under Part VII of the UN Charter as this means that all member States of the UN are bound to cooperate with
the ICTY.
6
The ICTR was established by Security Council Resolution 955, passed in November 1994.
The Role and Rights of Victims at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal 87

first, the establishment of Victims and Witness Units or Sections 7 to assist and support victims in their
dealings with the respective Tribunals. 8 Secondly, the Tribunals were given the power to develop
special procedural rules or measures of protection for victims and witnesses. 9 Thirdly, special
'vulnerable' victims, particularly women and children, were given special consideration in the rules
developed by the ICTY and ICTR. 10 The final feature of the ICTY was that for the first time an
international criminal court made an attempt to facilitate victim reparation or compensation." The
Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) agreed to at Rome in 1998 not only replicates these
measures, but also introduces a number of further innovations in favour of victims. For the first time in
international criminal justice the ICC Statute allows for the possibility of victims having their own legal
representation, and thus playing an active part in the proceedings. 12 This is very much in line with the
Continental European criminal justice model. 13 The ICC Statute also provides for a much more serious
attempt to ensure victims receive reparation. This includes the ability of the ICC to make orders for
'appropriate' reparations directly against convicted offenders in favour of victims, 14 and the
establishment of a victims' Trust Fund that can also be utilised to satisfy any orders for victim
reparations. 15
In a previous article I set out what I perceived to be the main reasons why there has been this large
turnaround in concern for and in the rights of victims and survivors in modern international criminal
courts as compared to the IMT. 1 6 1 do not wish to repeat what I said there, but what I intend to do in this
article is to first make the argument in Part II as to why more survivors should have testified and
generally have been more involved in the proceedings of the IMT. Part III will then examine the reasons
why victims played such a relatively small role in the IMT. It will be seen that many of these reasons
were genuine ones. However, it will be the major contention of this article that none of these reasons
should have precluded more survivors from testifying and being involved in the IMT proceedings.
Consequently, each of these reasons for the lack of survivor involvement will be analysed in Part IV in
order to see how the genuine concerns against survivor testimony could have been overcome or at least

7
The ICTY's Unit has been described as "the first of its kind in any international context". See Rydberg A, 'The
Protection of the Interests of Witnesses - The ICTY in Comparison to the Future ICC' (1999) 12 Leiden Journal of
International Law 455 at 462
8
This includes administrative, financial and other practical arrangements to bring a witness from their country' to The
Hague or Arusha, and providing basic information to witnesses regarding the work of the Tribunals and trial procedures.
The Units also offer emotional support and counselling and arranges medical and psychological care where needed, as well
as provides protection to witnesses during their stay at The Hague or Arusha. Another important task of the Units is to
make recommendations to the Tribunals regarding what special protection measures for witnesses might be needed. See
Rydberg A, ibid.
9
See Article 22 of the ICTY Statute ('The International Tribunal shall provide in its rules of procedure and evidence for
the protection of victims and witnesses '). See also Garkawe S, 'Victims and the International Criminal Court: Three
major issues' (2003) 3 International Criminal Law Review 345 at 353-354 for a list of the special measures that were
developed by the ICTY.
10
For example, Rule 96 of the ICTY's Rules of Procedure and Evidence specifies, inter alia, that in cases of sexual
assault no corroboration of the victim's testimony shall be required, the defence of consent is to be limited, and that a
victim's prior sexual history shall not be admitted in evidence.
" See Rules 98(B), 105 and 106 of the ICTY's Rules of Procedure and Evidence. These are considered to be weak
provisions and unlikely 'to produce concrete results' as they require the ICTY to refer their judgment for an award of
compensation to the offender's national legal system, and it is unlikely that victims will find satisfaction in this legal
system. See van Boven T, 'The Position of the Victim in the Statute of the International Criminal Court', in von Hebel J,
Lammers G & Schukking J (eds), Reflections on the International Criminal Court: Essays in Honour of Adriaan Bos,
T.M.C. Asser Press, The Hague, 1999, 77-89 at 81-82.
12
See article 68(3) of the ICC Statute. The appointment and participation of victims' legal representatives is at the
discretion of the ICC. See Garkawe, note 9, at 359-362.
13
See Joutsen M, 'Listening to the Victim: The Victim's Role in European Criminal Justice Systems' (1987) 34 (1)
Wayne Law Review 95
14
Article 75(2) of the ICC Statute.
15
Article 79 of the ICC Statute.
" See Garkawe, note 9, at 349-351.
88 Sam Garkawe

minimised. It will thus be shown that survivors and victims could have played a much greater role in the
IMT and this would not only have enhanced the proceedings, but also provided a greater sense of justice
to the most effected victim communities of the Nazi regime.

II. The arguments in favour of greater survivor involvement and testimony during the IMT
proceedings
In this part I want to suggest four important reasons why survivors should have had more of a role
and more involvement with the IMT proceedings. The first reason is that this would have highlighted
the aspect of the trial that dealt with what many now view as the essential feature of World War II and
the IMT itself - namely the Holocaust and the Nazi's crimes against other minorities. It may seem
surprising to many that the IMT was not primarily about this. The American prosecution case (which, as
stated above, dominated the proceedings) focused mainly on the waging of, and conspiring to, wage
aggressive war. These were seen as the major crimes of the Nuremberg defendants,17 and not the
Holocaust and the Nazi crimes against other minorities.
Evidence for this is found in the dramatic screening by the American prosecution of the
documentary film entitled 'Nazi Concentration Camps'. Given the lack of survivor testimony during the
American (and British) prosecution case, this happened to be one of the very few times that victims'
suffering was actually shown during the course of the trial. However, even this film was problematic
from the perspective of victims and survivors. In an important article Lawrence Douglas points out that
not only was the word 'Jew' mentioned only one time during the film, but what the film was really
about was
"... political terror and the excesses of war. It documents a barbaric campaign to exterminate
political enemies of a brutal regime. ... It does so, however, in a manner that understands extermination
in terms of the perverted logic of political control and military conquest. The film understands the
crimes to be the consequences of aggressive militarism rather than genocide. "'8
A second major and related reason why survivor evidence would have enhanced the IMT was that it
would have injected real life experiences and stories into the proceedings, thereby making the trial
much more dramatic and memorable. It seems incongruous to suggest that while many (including this
writer) regard the IMT as the most important criminal trial in history, the reality of the trial was
anything but dramatic and memorable. Apart from some moments of particular interest and drama, the
trial was actually quite a lacklustre one for the majority of the time. 9 This was because most of the
duration of the IMT proceedings was spent on rather technical and routine arguments concerning the
voluminous and detailed documentary evidence that the Nazis themselves had compiled, particularly
the issues of whether this evidence was admissible, and if so, the significance of such evidence. This
documentary evidence was the main thrust of the proof of the Nazi crimes that the prosecution

17
Count One of the indictment referred to conspiracy, whereas Count Two referred to 'crimes against the peace', the
then equivalent to the modern crime of aggression. Robert Jackson, the Chief American Prosecutor, stated in his opening
address on November 21, 1945: 'My emphasis will not be on individual barbarities and perversions which may have
occurred independently of any central plan.' Quoted in Marrus M, The Nuremberg War Crimes Trial ¡945-46: A
Documentary History, Bedford Books, 1997, at 83. Jackson's assistant, Sidney Alderman, addressed the Tribunal two days
later in the following terms: 'After all, everything else in this case, however dramatic, however sordid, however shocking
and revolting to the common instincts of civilized peoples, is incidental to, or subordinate to, the aggressive war aspect of
the case. All the dramatic story of what went on in Germany ... even the concentration camps and the Crimes against
Humanity, the persecutions, tortures, and murders committed - all these things would have little juridical international
significance except for the fact that they were the preparation for the commission of aggression against a peaceful
neighbouring peoples'. Quoted in Marrus, op cit, at 123-124.
18
See Douglas L, 'Film as witness: Screening Nazi Concentration Camps before the Nuremberg Tribunal' (1995) 105
(2) Yale Law Journal 449 at 477.
19
Bloxham remarks that '[i]t took considerable pressure from several [prosecution] staff, as well as from a body of
journalists bored by the relentless documentary barrage which the prosecution case had become, to persuade Jackson to put
on the stand even the few witnesses [the prosecution] did call'. See Bloxham D, Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and
the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory, Oxford University Press, 2001, at 61-62.
The Role and Rights of Victims at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal 89

provided20, although of course they also relied upon the defendants' own admissions and evidence from
their own key witnesses, such as Dieter Wisliceny,21 Otto Ohlendorf 22 , Rudolf Hoss23 and Erich von
dem Bach-Zelewsky.24 The exceptions to the otherwise technical proceedings occurred during the
screening of 'Nazi Concentration Camps', and perhaps most dramatically, the examination, cross-
examination and final statements of the defendants themselves. Given this history, it is submitted that
having more actual survivors of Nazi persecution testify and be involved in proceedings (as the Statute
of the ICC now contemplates) would have added an extra dimension and drama to the proceedings. This
would have also had the effect of improving the IMT's legitimacy in front of the world community and
particularly in front of a sceptical German public. It would further have personalised the crimes of the
Nazis and their allies, thus not making their crimes seem like an endless list of gruesome statistics
contained within voluminous, bureaucratic and seemingly repetitive documentation.
The third reason for greater victim and survivor involvement was that testifying would have been a
cathartic experience for survivors themselves. While this might have not been well-known at the time,
there is much evidence today from psychologists and others that there is therapeutic value for survivors
of traumatic events being able to tell their story in a publicly recognised process. For example, Brendon
Hamber, a psychologist who did a lot of work with victims and survivors during the South African
Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings stated:
"Providing space for victims to tell their stories, particularly in public forums, has been of use to
many. It is indisputable that many survivors and relatives of victims have found the public hearing
process psychologically beneficial. "2S
The need for the survivors of Nazi oppression to be able to tell their side of the story was shown by
the overwhelming desire of many survivors to give evidence some 15 years after the IMT proceedings
in the Eichmann trial.26 It was during this trial in Israel that survivors were strongly encouraged to
testify- History shows that many took this opportunity to pour their heart out in describing what
happened to them. In a sense, the Eichmann trial became the counter-balance for the lack of survivor
testimony during the IMT proceedings,27 and clearly showed the possible benefits for survivors in
having the chance to tell of their experiences and to thus feel listened to in a publicly sanctioned
process.
The final reason in favour of greater survivor testimony and involvement is that it is a matter of
justice. Survivors were the actual people harmed by the crimes of the Nazis and their allies, and yet did
not seem to have the opportunity to testify or otherwise become involved in the IMT proceedings. This
stands in direct contrast to the fact that all the defendants were able to testify and make final statements.
While I am not suggesting that every survivor who wanted to testify should have been allowed to do so
(see later), it is clear that denying the right of all survivors to testify was unjust.

20
Robert Jackson stated in his opening address of November 21, 1945 that 'We will not ask you to convict these men
on the testimony of their foes. There is no count in the Indictment that cannot be proved by books and records. The
Germans were meticulous record keepers ...' Quoted in Marrus, note 17, at 82.
21
Eichmann's deputy, whose testimony accounted for the murder of about 5,200,000 Jews in the East.
22
He led mobile SS killing squad, Einsatzgruppe D, and his evidence included the admission that about 90,000 Jews
were killed under his command.
23
The commandant of Auschwitz, who was able to testify to 3,000,000 people dying at Auschwitz.
Chief of the anti-partisan forces, whose evidence affirmed the indiscriminate extermination of innocent civilians
during anti-partisan operations or reprisals.
25
Hamber B, 'The Burdens of Truth: An Evaluation of the Psychological Support Services and Initiatives Undertaken
by the South African [TRC]' (1998) 55(1) American Image 9 at 18.
26
Attorney-General of the Government of Israel v Adolf Eichmann (1961) 36 I.L.R. 5.
27
Douglas states that 'survivor testimony enjoyed pride of place at the Eichmann trial ...; at Nuremberg, by contrast,
testimony of the final solution was most importantly provided by non-Jews.' Douglas, note 3, at 78. Douglas also provides
a critical analysis of the issue of non-Jews speaking for Jews at Nuremberg. While this is an important issue, it is beyond
the scope of this article.
90 Sam Garkawe

III. The reasons why victims and survivors played a relatively small role during the IMT
proceedings
Having established that there are strong reasons as to why survivors should have played a greater
role in the American and British prosecution cases, in this part I want to examine the main reasons why
survivors played such a small role. These reasons are numerous and inter-related, and as stated above,
most of them were genuine.
The first reason for the lack of victim testimony and involvement was that as the IMT was designed
to deal only with defendants, who were at the highest levels of the Nazi establishment. It would have
been unlikely for a survivor to have specific information about the criminal culpability of these
defendants, such as copies or proof of the orders they gave or the policies they promulgated. Their
experiences were more likely to have been with perpetrators who were much lower down the chain of
command. These were generally not those indicted at the IMT.
Very much related to this reason was a second reason - the Allies already had in their possession
voluminous and detailed documentary evidence that the Nazis themselves had compiled.28 This self-
incriminating evidence, combined with the confessions of the defendants themselves and the
information provided by important other prosecution witnesses,29 made survivor testimony largely
unnecessary for convictions to be achieved. 0 In relation to the possibility of some survivors testifying
(as occurred with the French and Soviet prosecutions), there was also no need to specifically provide for
protection for victims in the IMT Charter because the Nazi regime no longer posed any threat to
witnesses as it had been comprehensively defeated. This can be compared to the situation that, for
example, confronted the ICTY where the warring parties in the former Yugoslavia still retained much
power and thus the ability to exact revenge and intimidate prosecution witnesses. This thus required
specific and concrete measures of protection and support in order to encourage witnesses (including
victims and survivors) to come to The Hague to give evidence.
A third reason for the lack of victim involvement and testimony was that at the time of the IMT
there was a general lack of awareness and/or disbelief of the full extent of the Nazi crimes, including
the Holocaust and other atrocities. It took some time before the international community was able to
fully comprehend the extent of the criminal culpability of the Nazi regime.
A fourth and important reason for the lack of survivor testimony was the perception that they were
psychologically unable to be useful as witnesses due to the terrible experiences they had endured.
Directly following the Holocaust and World War II there was a sense that the horrors experienced by
victims and survivors was so great that little could be done to help them, and clearly this did not bode
well for them being perceived to be useful witnesses during the IMT. It was really only until well after
the IMT, with much more research of the psychological effects of war and living through the horror of
concentration and extermination camps becoming known31, that the assumption that survivors were
psychologically unable to provide testimony might be questioned.
A related fifth reason was the common perception that survivors would make very biased witnesses
given the extreme nature of the persecution they had endured.32 Thus, even if they could have been able
psychologically to testify, they were still perceived as being too emotional and thus not capable of
providing objective and factual evidence. It is submitted that this would have led to prosecution
concerns that such witnesses would end up being counter-productive for the prosecution case.

28
Bloxham states: 'The treasure trove of documents preserved for the prosecution had convinced the trial planners, and
Jackson in particular, that everything they needed to illuminate the darkest comers of the Nazi era was in printed form'.
Bloxham, note 19, at 60. Another way of putting this is that the documentary approach 'favored paper over people'.
Douglas, note 3, at 78.
29
See the witnesses referred to above in notes 21 to 24.
30
Robert Jackson takes this position in his opening statement to the IMT. See note 20.
31
See, for example, Danieli Y et al (eds), International Responses to Traumatic Stress, New York: Bayward, 1996.
32
Bloxham makes the point that 'with regard to the potential use of four witnesses, who had been involved to varying
degrees with resistance movements in the Third Reich', the American Chief Prosecutor, Robert Jackson, objected to putting
them on the witness stand on the basis that 'they had a strong bias against the Hitler regime[!]'. Bloxham, note 19 at 61.
The Role and Rights of Victims at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal 91

There is a related sixth reason for excluding survivors from giving testimony that is in addition to
the above perceptions concerning the possible lack of reliability and objectivity of their evidence. It
seems likely that prosecutors would have held a genuine fear that having survivors testify would leave
them liable to cross-examination from defence counsels, and this might further traumatise them and
delay the possibility of their psychological recovery.
A very significant seventh reason for the lack of victim involvement related to the domination of
proceedings by the American prosecutors. This has a number of dimensions. One of these related to the
adversarial nature of American criminal trials in the Anglo-American common law tradition, where
victims are excluded from being parties to the proceedings and thus lack any substantive rights. It is
submitted that it is no coincidence that the two civil law allies, the French and the Soviet Union, did
allow some victims to testify, whereas the two common law allies, America and Great Britain, did not.
In civil law jurisdictions victims generally do have the right to be a party to criminal proceedings. 33 The
other dimension of the domination of proceedings by the American prosecutors has already been
referred to above. This was the emphasis placed by the Americans on the concept of conspiracy,
particularly in relation to the Nazi decisions to wage aggressive war. The IMT in its judgment decided
to confine the charge of conspiracy to crimes against the peace; it did not extend these to the war crimes
or crimes against humanity charges. This meant that the first two charges, conspiracy and crimes
against the peace, dominated the American prosecution case at the expense of the last two charges much
more directly relevant to victims and survivors, namely, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The final reason for the American and British prosecution cases not allowing survivors to testify or
be involved in the proceedings was that the prosecution came under pressure of time and resources. The
trial was already scheduled to last a long time due to the fact that there would be four different
prosecuting powers 34 , a massive indictment against a very large number of individual and
organisational 35 defendants, and multiple and complex charges. 6 Furthermore, the trial concerned an
unprecedented level, volume and scope of wrongdoing to be prosecuted in the one criminal trial. Such a
vast and complex prosecution had previously never been attempted before in the history of criminal
law.37 Finally, the volume of the massive documentary evidence and their tabling and argument all took
an enormous amount of time. It was thus not surprising that some months into the trial the prosecution
found themselves under a large amount of pressure by Allied governments to wind up their case. In
these circumstances where there was already more than sufficient evidence for convictions without any
survivor testimony it was not unexpected that survivor evidence was not sought, and the prosecution did
not seek to involve survivors and victims more in the trial. These matters were not priorities at the time.

IV. Some conclusions - what might have taken place during the IMT
It is now very easy to be critical of the American prosecutors when examining the Nuremberg IMT
from a victim perspective. Hindsight is of course a wonderful thing when we are in the luxurious
position of being able to look back at history. At the time of the IMT, the prosecutors were facing
enormous pressures and conflicting duties towards international law, the historical record, their own

33
See Joutsen, note 13.
34
The conduct of the trial and its procedures had to be decided by agreement between the four powers, and often this
was not easy as each country's legal system had its own norms and culture. Although the Americans generally got their
way on most issues, some concessions to the inquisitorial type criminal justice systems of France and to a lessor extent, the
Soviet Union, were granted. For example, the trial did not have a jury, defendants could be tried in absentia, and perhaps to
a lesser extent judges were able to play a more interventionist role than what was customary in common law adversarial
criminal trials.
35
Along with the 22 individuals indicted by the IMT, seven organisations were also placed on trial.
36
The charges were set out in Article 6 of the Charter. Most of these charges were also quite novel to criminal law at
the time, such as the 'crimes against the peace' charge and the 'crimes against humanity' charge.
37
Robert Jackson in his opening address of November 21, 1945 said that 'Never before in legal history has an effort
been made to bring within the scope of a single litigation the developments of a decade, covering a whole continent, and
involving a score of nations, countless individuals, and innumerable events'. Quoted in Marrus, note 17, at 80.
92 Sam Garkawe

governments, a sceptical German public, their own legal systems, and from the other prosecuting
nations. So I want to make clear and stress that this article is not intended to be a critique of prosecution
approaches towards victims and survivors. In fact, many of the reasons for not involving victims and
survivors in the IMT and not having more survivors testify, as set out in Part III, were very genuine and
logical ones.
However, keeping these above considerations in mind, I still feel that more could and should have
been done to involve victims and survivors in the IMT's proceedings. The analysis in Part II of this
article did show that there were very good reasons why more survivors should have been able to testify.
These included that it would have improved the IMT's proceedings and made them more personal,
interesting and relevant, it would also have been a cathartic and beneficial experience for victims
themselves, and finally, it was a simple matter of justice.
On the other hand, the analysis in Part III suggests that there were many genuine reasons for the
relative lack of survivor testimony. I shall now examine each of these reasons in turn as they each may
provide us with some lessons on what could have been done to encourage greater survivor testimony
and involvement.
The first reason was that it was unlikely for a survivor to have specific information about the
culpability of the indicted defendants at the IMT. The lesson to be learnt here is that any survivor
chosen to provide evidence should have been carefully selected, so that they would have some useful
knowledge and information for the IMT. While this may have precluded most survivors, I strongly
believe some could have been found that would have provided relevant and useful testimony. A good
example might have been Alfred Weczler and Rudolf Vrba, two Slovakian Jews who had escaped from
Auschwitz on April 17, 1944, and found their way back to Bratislava. Robert Conot commences his
landmark book on the IMT, Justice at Nuremberg,38 with a brief mention of their story. The Jewish
community in Slovakia at first doubted them, but after they had provided a large amount of detail they
came to be believed, and the Rabbi of the community, Rabbi Weissmandel, wrote a Report based on
their description of what they had been through. This Report, known as the Weczler/Vrba Report,
became very influential and Conot points out that it was a significant factor in the eventual move
towards a criminal trial that finally resulted in the IMT. 39 I am not sure what happened to these two
individuals, but they did not give testimony during the IMT trial.40 It seems to the writer that they would
have been ideal witnesses as their evidence was the first eye witness account of the extermination
camps made available to the Western world. Their testimony, even though it might not have been
directly relevant to the culpability of any particular defendant, certainly would have added to the
proceedings and the prosecution case in respect of the charge of crimes against humanity.
The second reason for the relative lack of survivor testimony was that it was largely unnecessary for
convictions to be won. While this was an understandable and valid reason, I do not think it should have
precluded such testimony. A simular conclusion can be drawn in respect of the third reason provided -
that there was a general lack of awareness and/or disbelief of the full extent of the Nazi's crimes. Again,
while this might have been understandable on some levels, by the time of the IMT proceedings there
was knowledge of the extermination camps and the terrible persecution and extermination of minorities
by the Nazis and their allies.
The fourth reason for the relative lack of survivor testimony was the perception that victims were
psychologically unable to be useful as witnesses. This was also related to the fifth reason, namely, their
alleged bias given their experiences, and the consequential perception that they would have been too
emotional and thus incapable of providing objective and factual evidence. The sixth reason is also
relevant here - the fear that having survivors testify would leave them liable to cross-examination from
defence counsel, and this might further traumatise them. All these reasons have validity, but collectively

38
Conot, note 3.
39
Conot, note 3, at 3.
40
The main evidence I have for this is after Conot's initial description of their story at the very start of his book, their
names are no longer mentioned anywhere in his detailed descriptions of the IMT proceedings.
The Role and Rights of Victims at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal 93

they can be countered by reiterating again that any survivors chosen to give evidence should have been
carefully selected. Furthermore, most importantly, each survivor giving evidence should have been
provided with the best of psychological and physical support and assistance before, during and after
their testimony. The trial procedures should have been explained to them beforehand, as well as the
possibility of cross-examination and how they needed to handle this. Overall, I believe that these
genuine concerns embodied in these three reasons should not have precluded survivors from testifying,
provided the above safeguards were put in place.
The seventh reason for the lack of survivor involvement and testimony, the dominance of the
American prosecution case, is not a genuine one that should have precluded survivors and victims from
testifying or otherwise being involved in proceedings.
The final reason for the American and British prosecutors not allowing survivors to testify was the
issue of the pressure of time and resources. Again, while this reason does provide an explanation for the
relative lack of survivor involvement in the trial, time and resources should not have been an excuse to
exclude the involvement and testimony of survivors. The requirement of fundamental justice often
means that time and resources must be expended in order for fairness to be achieved, and this is a good
example.
In conclusion, while the IMT proceedings can be seen as largely a 'victim free' trial, it is hoped this
article has shown that there are some good reasons why this should not necessarily have been the case.
The article has also shown that there were some genuine reasons as to why survivors had so little input
into the trial, but at the same time it has outlined some concrete ways in which more survivors could
have given evidence and been more involved in proceedings. Given that the scene has been set for far
greater victim involvement in future international criminal courts, the lessons to be learnt from the
Nuremberg IMT, arguably the most important criminal trial in history, should not be lost.
94 Rolle und Rechte der Opfer vor dem Nürnberger Internationalen Militärtribunal

Sam Garkawe
Rolle und Rechte der Opfer vor dem Nürnberger Internationalen Militärtribunal

Der Beitrag beschäftigt sich mit der Stellung der Opfer im Verfahren vor dem IMT in Nürnberg.
Schon ein oberflächlicher Blick lässt erkennen, dass die Opfer eine untergeordnete Rolle gespielt haben.
Das mag überraschen, war es doch Ziel des internationalen Strafverfahrens, gerade den Millionen von
Opfern Gerechtigkeit zu Teil werden zu lassen.

Es wäre für den Prozess gegen die Hauptkriegsverbrecher aber aus mehreren Gründen
erstrebenswert gewesen, Opfer als Zeugen anzuhören: Zum einen wäre das tatsächliche Leid der
Verfolgten sichtbarer geworden. Die Aussage von Überlebenden im Gerichtssaal hätte außerdem das
Verfahren dramatischer und damit einprägsamer gestaltet. Die wenigen zugelassenen Zeugenaussagen,
wie die Otto von Ohlendorfs oder Rudolf Höss', bestätigen dies. Ansonsten basierte die
Verfahrensführung neben Urkundsbeweis auf der Einvernahme der Angeklagten. Eine verstärkte
Einbeziehung von Überlebenden hätte sicherlich die Legitimität des Verfahrens für die
Weltöffentlichkeit, aber vor allem auch für die deutsche Bevölkerung erheblich gesteigert. Zum anderen
hätte die Aussage von Überlebenden im Verfahren auch eine kathartische Wirkung für die Opfer
gehabt. Diese moderne psychologische Erkenntnis war zwar zur Zeit des IMT noch nicht weit
verbreitet, der Drang der überlebenden Opfer, ihr Leid zu bezeugen, zeigt sich indes eindrücklich in der
Aussagebereitschaft von Zeugen im Eichmann-Verfahren in den 1960er Jahren in Israel. Schließlich ist
es auch eine Frage der Gerechtigkeit, Opfer am Strafverfahren gegen die Täter zu beteiligen.

Der Grund für die restriktive Haltung hinsichtlich der Einbeziehung der Opfer lag aber vor allem in
dem Bestreben der US-amerikanischen und britischen Ankläger begründet, eine Verurteilung auf der
Basis von reichlich vorhandenem „hartem" Urkundenbeweis zu erreichen. Abgesehen davon war es
unwahrscheinlich, dass die Opfer im Verfahren gegen die höchsten politischen und militärischen NS-
Machthaber Substantielles hätten beitragen können, zumal der amerikanischen Ankläger intendierte,
den Prozess auf „Verbrechen gegen den Frieden" zu konzentrieren. Außerdem war zum damaligen
Zeitpunkt das wirkliche Ausmaß des Holocaust noch nicht überschaubar. Fraglich war schließlich die
psychische Belastbarkeit der Opfer als Zeugen und die Wirkung der Aussage auf diese.

Im Nachhinein ist es einfach, das Vorgehen der Ankläger zu kritisieren. Bei genauerer Betrachtung
gab es allerdings, wie hier gezeigt wird, gute Gründe, die Opfer nicht extensiv als Zeugen in den
Prozess einzubeziehen. Für zukünftige internationale Strafverfahren sollten allerdings die Lehren aus
Nürnberg gezogen und Opfer am Strafverfahren beteiligt werden, was sowohl bei den UN-Tribunalen
als auch beim Internationalen Strafgerichtshof in den jeweiligen Statuten zugleich mit intensiver
Vorsorge für die psychologische Betreuung der Opfer vorgesehen ist.
History and Memory in the Courtroom: Reflections on Perpetrator Trials 95

Lawrence Douglas
History and Memory in the Courtroom: Reflections on Perpetrator Trials
That the atrocities of perpetrators should describe legally recognized crimes, and that perpetrators
should have to answer for their conduct in courts of criminal law are hardly controversial claims.
Granted: one might argue about form, venue, and procedure - about whether, for example, domestic
institutions are to be preferred over international tribunals; about whether it is proper to impose capital
punishment upon those who grossly violate international humanitarian law; about whether Continental
or Anglo-American norms of procedure better develop the aims of the trial; or about whether it is wise
or fair to try an individual for crimes committed half a century before. One might even argue about the
wisdom of trying perpetrators in light of specific conditions "on the ground" - whether, for example,
the interests of transitional democracy or negotiated settlement counsel in favor of reliance on a South
African style "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" over a perpetrator trial 1 - still, the deeper logic
and normative appeal of trying perpetrators is generally accepted as self-evident.
At its most basic, the perpetrator trial is seen as a fundamental requirement of justice itself. The
concept of justice, in turn, might be said to include at the very least: the idea that impunity is a wrong,
both in itself - as a violation of the fundamental moral norm that no one should benefit from his or her
wrongdoing - and instrumentally, inasmuch as unpunished crimes serve to destabilize the ever-
precarious balance of domestic and international power. This latter idea often finds expression in the
notion that criminal trials, as impersonal acts of state- or internationally-sanctioned retribution, serve to
break the cycles of revenge that often erupt in spasms of mass atrocity. This notion, in turn, is related to
the idea of reconciliation - the idea that criminal trials, by providing victims with a venue for
expressing their pain, and by conferring public recognition upon the suppressed history of their
victimization, serve to reconcile an afflicted people to the sufficiency of legal response to their woes. 2
This idea is closely related to the pedagogic aim of the trial, the idea that perpetrator proceedings can
serve as tools of historical instruction. For example, Robert Kempner, a leading war crimes prosecutor,
described the Nuremberg trials as "the greatest history seminar ever held." 3 The Eichmann, Barbie and
Papon trials likewise aimed to use the courtroom both to clarify the historical record and to teach
history lessons.
Broadly speaking, we can describe these multiple purposes of the high-level perpetrator trial as
sharing a common feature: they are all didactic in nature; they push the trial in the direction of serving
as a tool of instruction. In a sense, all criminal trials are didactic in two critical ways. First, they strive to
demonstrate the truth of the charges brought against the accused. Second, they all seek to demonstrate
the legitimacy of the process by which the first goal is pursued. The shibboleth, "justice must be seen to
be done," captures this basic insight. All criminal trials, in this regard, can be seen as normative
demonstrations of the efficacy and legitimacy of the rule of law.

' The literature on this subject is large. For a helpful overview, see Ruth Teitel, Transitional Justice (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000).
2
Reconciliation is mentioned as a declared purpose of both the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former
Yugoslavia, and for the International Criminal Court. To understand how the trial can further the end of reconciliation, it is
important, I believe, to distinguish two possible meanings of the concept. First, "to reconcile" has a transitive meaning as
captured in the expression, "the neighbors reconciled their differences." Here the idea is that two feuding or antagonistic
parties have learned to put aside their past problems. This, I would argue, is the meaning of the term as it applies to the
South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. But "to reconcile" also has a second, call it intransitive, meaning, as
in the phrase, "He became reconciled to his fate." It is this second, intransitive meaning that is at work in perpetrator trials.
In this regard, such trials play a legally insular or even self-legitimating function: they serve to reconcile a people to the
adequacy or sufficiency of a legal response to their sufferings.
3
Quoted in Ian Buruma, The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan (New York, 1994), 142.
Kempner was referring to both the trial of the major war criminals and the subsequent trials of Nazi criminals before
American courts.
96 Lawrence Douglas

That said, I want to insist that the "perpetrator trial" defines its own specialized sub-breed of the
criminal trial. Here the didactic function or quality of the trial is not an incidental feature of the
inevitable process of proving charges or of upholding well-accepted and largely uncontested social
norms. Instead, the didactic purpose of the trial lies at the veiy heart of the proceeding. Given that such
trials invariably follow in the wake of episodes of mass atrocity, political upheaval, and horrific social
dislocation, courts are invariably thrust in the position both of looking into the larger sweep of history
and of making visible the efficacy of the law as a tool of such inquiry. If all trials are meant publicly to
project the sober norms of the rule of law, perpetrator trials are burdened with the task of actively re-
imposing such norms into spaces in which rule-based legality has been either radically evacuated or
perverted. In part because of their explicitly didactic nature, in part because of the circumstances
surrounding their staging, high-level perpetrator trials are by their very terms anomalous, unusual legal
events, and as such, will invariably invite challenges to their legitimacy. They are, then, trials, which,
by their very nature, place law -as a tool of deterrence, reconciliation, pedagogy and justice- on trial. If
such a trial were staged in an international court, it may invite the charge of serving the ends of victor's
justice or of having been orchestrated at the behest of a select group of powerful nations (such as
NATO), or, alternatively, of being hopelessly removed from the region in which the crimes occurred. If
a domestic national court was to conducted the trial, it may be attacked as a partisan tool, insufficiently
removed from the crimes it is asked to judge.
Compounding these problems of legitimation is the fact that the multiple purposes of the didactic
trial often pull courts in different directions. For example, the clarification of the historical record and
the teaching of history lessons are obviously related, though importantly distinct: the former is largely
descriptive and explanatory, while the latter is ineluctably normative. The distinction is important
inasmuch as collective memory may have little to do with historical accuracy. The bombing of
Hiroshima is remembered in the United States as a life-saving act born of military necessity, though the
consensus among historians challenges this view. President Bush recently memorialized the victims of
United Airlines Flight 93, recalling their heroic act of crashing their hijacked aircraft into a
Pennsylvania field in order to save 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue - this notwithstanding the conclusion of
the 9-11 Commission that the hijackers crashed the plane after the passengers mutinied. Trials, too,
particularly those burdened with the legacy of traumatic history, often succeed at shaping the terms of
collective memory precisely by demonstrating - intentionally or not - a relaxed fidelity to the historical
record. By this, I do not mean to suggest that falsehoods are inserted into the historical narrative told at
trial, though this, of course, may occur. Rather, the point is one of interpretation, nuance, emphasis,
sympathetic imagination. Victims become, in the hagiography of the prosecution, exemplars of an
unsustainable innocence, while perpetrators come to embody evil of mythic proportions. Over time,
trials may find themselves subject to the very forces that they once contributed to. The Nuremberg trial,
currently celebrating its sixtieth anniversary, has been hailed in many tributes as a path breaking
proceeding about the Holocaust, notwithstanding the fact that the Nazis' crimes against the Jews of
Europe played a largely ancillary role in the trial before the International Military Tribunal.
Or to take another example, the desire to make visible the workings of the rule of law may pull a
court in a very different direction from, say, the impulse to teach history and to honor the memory of
victims and survivors. The former impulse, I would argue, pushes the Court in the direction of sobriety,
while the latter gestures toward spectacle. Writing about the Nuremberg trial, which she attended as a
journalist, Rebecca West famously described the proceeding as a "citadel of boredom."4 The Croatian
journalist Slavenka Drakulic recently described the ICTY in similar terms - "painstakingly slow and
boring."5 Yet in a certain respect the very dullness of these proceedings can be seen as an achievement.
If one of the purposes of the perpetrator trial is to reintroduce norms of legality into a radically lawless
space, the very dryness of the proceeding can be construed as a triumph of legal sobriety over lawless

4
Rebecca West, A Train of Powder (New York: Viking Press, 1955), 3.
5
Slavenka Drakulic, They Would Never Hurt a Fly: War Criminals on Trial in The Hague (New York: Viking Press,
2004), 22.
History and Memory in the Courtroom: Reflections on Perpetrator Trials 97

chaos. Granted, the Nuremberg trial might have been characterized by a supererogatory dullness. Justice
Robert Jackson, the chief Allied prosecutor, considered it essential for the Tribunal to establish an
unassailable factual record of Nazi atrocities, and so the prosecution tactically limited the use of "soft
evidence" - eyewitness testimony - in favor of "hard evidence": trial by document. By privileging
historical document over personal testimony, Jackson aimed to "establish incredible events by credible
evidence"; these written documents, however, had to be read into the record at trial, slowing the trial
terribly.6 Even Sir Norman Birkett, the British alternate judge on the Tribunal, bemoaned the "shocking
waste of time."7 In other respects, however, the dullness of the Nuremberg trial can be viewed as
structural rather than idiosyncratic. Perpetrator trials - involving the adjudication of international crimes
- will almost invariably have a multi-lingual complexion. The odd time-lags as faceless interpreters
recast questions into another tongue and then retrieve and translate the answers; the stumbling to find
proper equivalent terms; the mistimed interventions by judges and lawyers - these qualities cannot be
viewed as passing or contingent qualities of perpetrator trials. On the contrary, they must be seen as
structural elements of a proceeding characterized by its own peculiar and signature lugubrious tempo.
But if such trials raise novel topics for theoreticians of law - is it possible to speak of a
jurisprudence of boredom?8 - they also refocus attention on the meaning of the spectacle in law. If
certain legal actors, principally judges, aspire to sobriety, others, in particular prosecutors, often push
proceedings in the direction of drama. The prosecution at the Eichmann trial structured the State's case
around survivor testimony in a conscious effort to rectify the missteps of Nuremberg and to inject
drama into the proceeding. Thus the decision to rely on the voice and demeanor of the survivor witness
was not, in the first instance, born out of an evidentiary strategy - Attorney General Hausner later
openly acknowledged that the prosecution could easily have presented its case relying exclusively on
written documents - but of a didactic ambition: to capture the imagination and conscience of a domestic
Israeli and a world audience. That the trial took place in a municipal theater hastily retrofitted to serve
as a courtroom perhaps only underscores the complex ways in which an explicitly didactic logic
informed the trial's staging.
These tensions - between the teaching of history and the teaching of history lessons; between the
longing for sobriety and the dramatic impulse - have led some to insist that the just didactic trial is
something of an oxymoron. Hannah Arendt argued in her famous critique of the Eichmann trial that the
"purpose of a trial is to render justice, and nothing else."9 We must be wary, Arendt insisted, of
subjecting the perpetrator trial to so-called "extra-legal" pressures, lest these pressures distort the
solemn dictates of justice, and turn the trial into a legal sham, a show-trial in the old Stalinist sense.
Clearly this concern is important, yet in my mind it is overstated. No one, I believe, would deny that the
core responsibility of a criminal trial is to resolve the question of guilt in a procedurally fair manner. To
insist, however, as Arendt does, that the sole purpose of a trial is to render justice, and nothing else,
defends a crabbed and unnecessarily restrictive vision of the trial form. Especially in high-profile
perpetrator trials - which by their very nature - will attract intense media attention, it is unrealistic to
expect and silly to demand that the trial be conducted as an ordinary exercise of the criminal law. The
question, then, is not whether the trial should be used for these larger ends, but how to do so
responsibly.
This claim leads us to consider the arguments of other scholars, such as Martha Minow, Michael
Marrus and Mark Osiel, who have leveled a critique that is the obverse of Arendt's.10 Here the argument

6
Robert Jackson, The Nürnberg Case (New York, 1947), 10.
1
Quoted in Michael Marrus, The Nuremberg War Crimes Trial 1945-46: A Documentary History (Boston: Bedford
Books, 1997), 117.
8
For an insightful discussion, see Ravit Reichman, "Committed to Memory: Rebecca West's Nuremberg," in: A. Sarat,
L. Douglas and M. Umphrey eds., Law and Catastrophe (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2006).
9
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York, 1963), 254.
10
Michael Marrus, "History and the Holocaust in the Courtroom," in: F. Brayard, ed., Le Génocide des Juifs entre
procès et histoire (Paris, 2000), Mark Osiel, Mass Atrocity, Collective Memory and the Law (New Brunswick, 1997). See
98 Lawrence Douglas

is not that didactic trials fail to do justice to the accused. Rather, it is that didactic trials fail to do justice
to history. The law, it is argued, fails to lead to a productive engagement with the most disturbing and
foundational issues raised by traumatic history, issues more satisfactorily explored through discourses
of history, philosophy, literature, theology, or psychoanalysis - or through alternative fora, such as truth
commissions. This is a claim I find more pressing, and I am chiefly concerned with it in my own on-
going studies of perpetrator trials." Yet at the same time that I am painfully aware of the limits of law, I
also find myself appreciative of the creative labors of the legal imagination to master the problems of
representation and judgment posed by episodes of mass atrocity and genocide. Let me briefly consider
some of the structural constraints that scholars often say limit the usefulness of the didactic trial as a
tool for exploring traumatic history. The first are procedural or evidentiary. Here it is argued that the
formal procedures that constrain the production of knowledge in a criminal trial render this instrument a
flawed tool for clarifying and comprehending traumatic history. Certainly I would agree that the rules of
evidence and trial procedure limit the utility of the trial as a tool of historical representation. And the
Nuremberg and Eichmann trials provide important examples of criminal proceedings that were
governed by unusual rules of evidence designed to permit the use of hearsay and to embrace a more
capacious notion of relevance. These unorthodoxies permitted survivor testimonies to assume a more
fluid narrative form, quite different from the fractured, tutored testimony produced at standard
adversarial trials. Did such an approach compromise the fairness of these trials? I would say no. These
trials protected rights of confrontation of witnesses and other core procedures foundational to a concept
of trial fairness. Bars against hearsay and rules controlling relevance, by contrast, can be seen as devices
tailored for a jury system, and thus relaxing their application may serve the trial's didactic ends without
eroding principles of fairness. In this regard, these trials came to look more like hybrid tribunals,
combining elements of Anglo-American and Continental jurisprudence, anticipating some of the
procedural arrangements that govern the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia
(ICTY) and the International Criminal Court (ICC).
This is not to deny that history and law are governed by differing epistemological and evidentiary
conventions; still, it is easy to over-exaggerate the differences. After all, history and law remain deeply
committed to the notion of reliable proof, even if what counts as reliable proof differs across the
disciplines. Many historians, it should be noted, remain indebted to law's power as a fact-finding tool.12
For example, many of the path-breaking early histories of the Holocaust, most notably Raul Hilberg's
magisterial The Destruction of the European Jews, could not have been written without the astonishing
documentary archive gathered at Nuremberg. More recently, Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing
Executioners and Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men drew largely on depositions and other
documents assembled through the labor of German prosecutors.
A second argument insists that didactic trials distort history inasmuch as a complex and refractory
historical record must be encapsulated to fit legal categories. Thus one prominent historian has
observed, "the shape of the stories told in trials ... follows the definition of the crimes with which the
accused are charged, rather than an impartial assessment of the events themselves."13 The famous trial
of the Auschwitz guards that began in Frankfurt in 1963 provided a particularly vivid, if not egregious,
example of this problem, as the atrocities committed by the defendants at Auschwitz had to be
pigeonholed into the legal concept of simple "murder", the most serious criminal offense that the guards
could be charged with under available German law at the time.14 (Although the Federal Republic of

also, Donald Bloxham, Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory
(Oxford, 2001).
11
Lawrence Douglas, The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust (New Haven,
2001).
12
See Carlo Ginzburg, The Judge and the Historian: Marginal Notes on a Late-Twentieth-Century Miscarriage of
Justice Anthony Shugaar, trans. (London, 1999).
13
Marrus, "History and the Holocaust in the Courtroom," in: F. Brayard, ed., Le Génocide des Juifs entre procès et
histoire, 48.
14
Adalbert Rückerl, NS-Verbrechen vor Gericht: Versuch einer Vergangenheitsbewältigung (Heidelberg, 1984).
History and Memory in the Courtroom: Reflections on Perpetrator Trials 99

Germany had criminalized genocide in the early fifties, the application of the genocide law to Nazi
crimes was held to run afoul of ex post facto prohibitions.)
The law of murder, however, was restrictively defined in German law - limited to killings born of
"thirst of blood (Mordlust), satisfaction of. ..sexual desires, avarice or other base motives in a malicious
or brutal manner." Inasmuch as German prosecutors had to prove that individual defendants had been
motivated by such special factors as "Mordlust", this requirement had the regrettable consequence of
transforming the everyday horrors and killings of Auschwitz into the "normal" against which the
particularly malicious or brutal conduct of certain guards or functionaries could be measured. 15 But if
the trial of the Auschwitz guards offers a particularly troubling example of law shoe-horning complex
history to fit restrictive legal categories, other trials remind us of law's bold attempts to shape concepts
of criminal wrongdoing adequate to the task of naming and condemning radical transgressions. In this
regard, two critical legal innovations stand out, the concept of genocide and the concept of the crime
against humanity. It is not within the scope of the present essay to review the evolution of the idea of
genocide 16 and of crimes against humanity; nor do I mean to ignore the serious problems with the idea
as it was first adumbrated in the Charter of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. 17 These
critical problems notwithstanding, the idea of genocide and the concept of crimes against humanity
must be seen as attempts on the part of the law to shape novel concepts adequate to the task of naming
and condemning unprecedented atrocities. These concepts have demonstrated their importance not
simply as legal terms of art that have made possible the advent of the perpetrator trial; they have also
proved their value as terms of cultural meaning. Admittedly, the clash between legal and cultural usages
of these terms may make for confusion. For example, the refusal of the United Nations Commission of
Inquiry to characterize the atrocities in the Darfur region of Sudan as genocide aroused considerable
outrage among many commentators. Part of the problem, however, can be traced to the different
registers of meaning of the concept of genocide. The term genocide has entered popular parlance as a
powerful vehicle for expressing profound outrage at horrific atrocities. That such atrocities have been
perpetrated in Darfur cannot be denied. The UN Commission of Inquiry, however, was concerned with
the investigation of crimes, not with the expression of outrage; "genocide", for the Commission,
referred to acts that satisfy the definition framed in the Genocide Convention of 1948, acts that could
form the basis of international trials. This is not to suggest that the Commission was correct in
withholding the designation; the Darfur controversy does, however, remind us of the power of legal
terms to filter into popular consciousness. Thus, far from static or insular, we find legal discourse
supplying a needed vernacular by which we may name and condemn horrific crimes. It is law that has
delivered the terms and concepts that have helped fill the conceptual and representational vacuum left
by acts of extreme atrocity.
Moreover, the concepts produced by law must be seen as highly plastic, adaptable, an observation
that challenges a third common criticism of the didactic trial. A number of scholars argue that we
should eschew justice as pedagogy, inasmuch as the picture of the past that emerges from a didactic trial
threatens to become the Official History, fixed, refractory to the movement of historiography. 18 These
scholars argue that "while judgments of courts are fixed, ... historiography moves." 19 By way of
response, one should first note that the sense of fixedness - the closure of the trial - describes one of

15
See Rebecca Wittmann, Beyond Justice: The Auschwitz Trial (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).
16
For a useful discussion, see Samantha Power "A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide (New York:
Basic Books, 2002).
17
Suffice it to say that genocide was mentioned only fleetingly in the indictment, and then as a kind of war crime; and
crimes against humanity was deemed justiciable only if committed by the Nazis in furtherance of their war aims. See
Douglas, Memory of Judgment, 38-64.
" In addition to the important arguments of Marrus, also of interest are Martha Minow, Between Vengeance and
Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence (Boston, 1998); and Tzvetan Todorov, "Letter from Paris:
The Papon Trial", in: Richard Golsan, ed., The Papon Affair: Memory and Justice on Trial (New York, 2000).
19
Marrus, "History and the Holocaust in the Courtroom," in: F. Brayard, ed., Le Génocide des Juifs entre procès et
histoire, 45.
100 Lawrence Douglas

the most profound attractions for using the trial as a response to traumatic history. Trials are riveting
cultural dramas because stories receive resolution in judgment and narratives find emphatic closure in
juridically-sanctioned violence - an advantage that trials arguably hold over truth commissions. 20 The
dramatic closure offered by trials thus frames and adds meaning to shared narrative, a process that was
clearly at work in the Eichmann trial, where many witnesses testified that they were sustained by the
hope that their bleak tale of survival might someday serve as legally probative evidence.
That said, it does not follow that the picture of history presented in any specific trial is fixed by the
fact that a trial court must render an unequivocal verdict. On the most obvious level, legal judgment can
be set aside by appeal, thus changing our understanding of the past enshrined at trial.21 On a deeper and
more interesting level, legal judgment can be revised through a complex process of renegotiation.
Particularly in the case of traumatic or sensational history, it seems the law often only reaches a
satisfactory result and understanding through a processing of revisiting or re-trying the contested
events.22 At times, civil trials may offer a more satisfactory treatment and resolution of matters
incompletely or badly handled in criminal trials; in the United States, the Bernard Goetz and O.J.
Simpson supply examples of this renegotiation of history in a civil proceeding. Indeed, when we speak
of the didactic trial, the individual trial, as a discrete legal event, is perhaps the wrong frame of
reference. Instead, attention must be paid to ways in which specific trials revisit and revise their
juridical precursors, and in so doing, participate in, and contribute to, an evolving juridical
understanding of traumatic history. In this regard, we can understand the Eichmann trial as a revision of
Nuremberg. By placing the Holocaust at the legal fore of the trial, and by satisfying the testimonial need
of survivor-witnesses, the Eichmann trial offered a far more comprehensive and, from the perspective of
the survivors, more satisfying treatment of the traumatic history presented in incomplete fashion at
Nuremberg. The French experience is also instructive, inasmuch as the very definition of crimes against
humanity - and the role that the Vichy state played in the perpetration of these crimes - importantly
changed from the Barbie trial to the Touvier trial to the Papon trial.23 Trials before International
Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, such as the Foca case, have similarly led to a redefinition
of the meaning of crimes against humanity, expanding them to now include the crime of rape. And with
the expansion of the legal category, comes a broadening of the historical narrative that can be told
through the law.
A fourth set of criticisms directed at the didactic trial focuses on what we may describe as the
essential subject matter of these trials. Here it is claimed that criminal trials, by necessity, occupy
themselves with the specific actions of a discreet defendant or group of defendants. In so doing, trials
necessarily exaggerate the roles of individuals in events of greater historical sweep and compass. By
focusing on the actions of individuals, the law overlooks and mischaracterizes the larger forces -
political, ideological, military, bureaucracy - that inform the dark logic of genocide. Didactic trials thus
allegedly create an odd disconnect between the magnitude of the crimes adjudicated and the solitary
individual in the dock - a disconnect - that can only be overcome by demonizing the defendant. This,

20
This, of course, is not to declaim the superiority of trials over truth commissions as tools for "calling to account";
indeed, it would be foolish to do so. In certain cases, trials may be more appropriate; in other cases, not. Context is all. Nor
should we see trials and truth commissions as mutually exclusive alternatives; the two may work in tandem, with one
supplementing the work of the other.
21
Perhaps the best example of this in the context of Holocaust trials was the Israeli Supreme Court's decision to throw
out Ivan Demjanjuk's 1987 conviction. Demjanjuk had been extradited t