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Volume 19, Fall 2006
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Nuremberg Trials 60th Anniversary
Contemporary Reflections
on the Importance of the Nuremberg Trials
The following scholars have reflected on the question,
Why are the Nuremberg Trials important?
Despite their flaws and shortcomings, the Nuremberg trials were crucial in establishing the precedent that individual leaders and administrators, not only states, could be held accountable by the international community for actions that violated widely accepted, even universal, standards of conduct. The International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg and later American trials in occupied Germany also established legal principals and procedures that could serve as models for the future. In other words, the vast unregulated grey areas in international affairs and human rights between what was permissible and what was not were made less grey by the proceedings at Nuremberg. A corner had been turned. - Michael Hayse, Associate Professor of History, The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey.
Michael Hayse |
There is much about international human rights law today that we take for granted: tribunals for places such as the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone; terms like genocide and crimes against humanity; even the idea of two of the greatest tyrants of the late twentieth century, Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein, stood trial at the same time. It is difficult to conceive that a little over 60 years ago none of this would have been possible. The Nuremberg Trials created the precedents that have so dramatically revolutionized the international legal landscape. At the procedural level, the Nuremberg tribunals were the first international courts established to try crimes against international law, and they firmly established the responsibility of individuals, at whatever level they participate in atrocities, as well as denying immunity to political leaders. And substantively, crimes against humanity—meaning atrocities on a large scale—was articulated for the first time as a criminal offence, to be joined not long after by genocide as the most egregious offences in the international legal lexicon. Although the Nuremberg precedent lay largely dormant for over four decades, since 1993 a remarkable momentum has developed, making the world a distinctly small and uncomfortable place for tyrants and would-be tyrants.- Harry Reicher, Professor of Law, University of Pennsylvania.
Harry Reicher |
“The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated.” --Justice Robert Jackson, Chief Prosecutor Nuremberg Trials
And yet the second half of the 20th century brought “ethnic cleansing” in the former Yugoslavia, genocide by machete in Rwanda, and the realization that the public punishments ordered by the Nuremberg court would not deter the horrific catastrophes of the future.
What, then, are the lessons of Nuremberg?
First, the trials created the concept of individual responsibility for genocidal acts committed in the name of a nation. Second, they initiated an international consensus that Crimes against Humanity are intolerable, and should be punished by the international community.
More significant even than the lessons may be the legacies of the Nuremberg trials. Perhaps most importantly, they created an historical record of an evil so extensive that it might seem unimaginable, but for the sworn evidence of the trial proceedings, now preserved for all time. Finally, the trials are, in retrospect, a memorial to those who died on the streets, in the ghettos, and in the camps of the nations which had been their home for centuries. - Mary Maudsley, Esq., Richard Stockton College of New Jersey.
Mary Maudsley |
In popular history, the Nuremberg trials arguably provide a sense of some closure to World War II. Crimes were punished. The allied victors in the war and the Nazi victims can accept that some kind of justice was done to the Nazi leadership responsible for a wide variety of war atrocities, central among which towers the carnage of the Holocaust. That justice was, of course, incomplete. Thousands upon thousands of “lesser” war criminals went unpunished because documentation was lost, victims were dead or because it was deemed politically inexpedient to mete out justice across the board (that is how many Nazi collaborators in occupied territories escaped a just fate). The wheels of justice did not cut as wide a swathe as one may have hoped.
The Nuremberg Trials (and its Far Eastern equivalent, the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal) fell rather short of bringing justice, but they were an important precedent in three different ways:
- The international discussion on what constitutes war crimes was jump started by the trials, and the delineation of war crimes subsequently entered international law.
- The new principle that individuals and not just states carry responsibilities for the conduct of their government and their troops in time of war was firmly established. No one, not even a head of state, is any longer “immune”.
- War crime tribunals have become a legitimate tool in the battle against genocidal events.
Nuremberg eventually led to the International Crime Tribunal for Rwanda and the UN War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague that deals with former Yugoslavia. There is, since 2003, an International Criminal Court although the United States has refused to ratify it.
Let us be clear how war crime trials fit into the picture. Post-genocidal trials do not prevent genocide: only early, robust military action can do that large scale humanitarian intervention through the barrel of the gun. But the legacy of Nuremberg and the utility of other tribunals since then should be that, armed with the knowledge of what happened then we know how to conduct ourselves today.
We are, again, a nation at war. In light thereof, one may hope that citizens reflecting on Nuremberg demand that our political and military leadership (and not only some ill-trained prison guards) conduct themselves in a way that the war is fought without war crimes.- G. Jan Colijn Dean of General Studies The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey.
G. Jan Colijn |
Military historians refer to the American Civil War as “the first modern war.”
The chief characteristic of “modern war” is the fact that civilian casualties far out-number the losses of those in uniform. By the time of the Second World War, the safest place to be was in uniform.
The major significance of the Nuremberg Trials was the fact that the prosecution took the time and effort to hold them and to follow the formalities of a legitimate trial: lawyers for the accusation and lawyers for the accused. Stalin wanted the Nazi leaders strung up at the nearest telephone pole, and the French took a walk. Only the Americans, with quiet support from the British, insisted on due process of law. - Franklin H. Littell, Distinguished Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Richard Stockton College of New Jersey.
Franklin H. Littell |
I think that the teaching of the Nuremberg Trials should be a required course in every high school and in every college in the country, not only for the sake of learning about Nuremberg and about the war but for what we learned as we listen to that testimony and read the record about the standards of good and evil.
I mean that I happen to believe that there are clear definite standards of good and evil in the world. If you read Nuremberg, if you listen to the voices of the Nazis, the testimonies of the Nazis there, and if you read the criticisms of the Nuremberg Trials, you cannot escape the conclusion that unless the world at least honors the idea of objective good and objective evil, we are lost in that murky world of relativism where we can always find some justification for doing what somebody also did but putting a spin on it so that it makes us feel more comfortable doing it than others did. So, I really do think that the teaching of Nuremberg, what we learned at Nuremberg, should be a required part of high school and college education. - Bill Moyers from "Interview with Bill Moyers," Facing History News (1986). - Bill Moyers Broadcast Journalist, Public Official, Baptist Minister.
Bill Moyers
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