Howard Schickler Fine Art

Yevgeny Khaldei at Nuremberg
Introduction	Essay	Images	Catalogue

Essay

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. 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 has ever paid to Reason.

- from the Opening Statement of Chief Prosecutor, Robert Jackson

Much of Europe lay ruined and smoldering at the end of World War Two. 61 million soldiers and civilians were dead, including the 6 million victims of the Holocaust. So much damage had been done that an attempt to bring about some form of healing could only have been symbolic. Clearly no single act or even series of acts could possibly have made things "alright." The punitive Treaty of Versailles that came at the close of World War One had bankrupted Germany, causing in part the social unrest that led to the rise of Adolf Hitler's National Socialist party. To avoid this, the International Military Tribunal brought four charges against 22 Nazi defendants at Nuremberg. Known as the Nuremberg Trial, this event sought to bring closure to the turmoil of World War Two. By punishing the main Nazi perpetrators of the outrages and atrocities that made World War Two the most terrible war in human history, instead of the entire German nation, the allies hoped to provide for a more positive social climate in which to reconstruct Europe and Germany in particular.

The trial existed, in large part, due to the efforts of the U.S. Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, who had pushed for it in Washington, D.C. The leaders of France, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union, nations that had suffered more greatly during the war, espoused a much harsher form of justice. Winston Churchill, in particular, was in favor of hunting down Nazi war criminals and shooting them on the spot. It was decided that any idea of justice, in the case of the Nazi war criminals, would be political, rather than actual; the crimes were so terrible and ubiquitous that there was no possibility of just retribution. The International Military Tribunal was chartered at an assembly in London in August of 1945. It was given the assignment of trying the defendants using a combination of anglo-american and continental law. This differed from American law in several different ways, the most important being the suspension of the right to trial by jury of one's peers, and the right to appeal. The unique nature of the trial is well described in the following passage from the closing remarks of the International Military Tribunal's Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson:

In interpreting the Charter, however, we should not overlook the unique and emergent character of this body as an International Military Tribunal. It is no part of the constitutional mechanism of internal justice of any of the signatory nations. Germany has unconditionally surrendered, but no peace treaty has been signed or agreed upon. The Allies are still technically in a state of war with Germany, although the enemy's political and military institutions have collapsed. As a military tribunal, this Tribunal is a continuation of the war effort of the Allied nations. As an International Tribunal, it is not bound by the procedural and substantive refinements of our respective judicial or constitutional systems, nor will its rulings introduce precedents into any country's- internal system of civil justice. As an International Military Tribunal, it rises above the provincial and transient and seeks guidance not only from international law but also from the basic principles of jurisprudence which are assumptions of civilization and which long have found embodiment in the codes of all nations.

The Nuremberg Trial (so called because it took place in Nuremberg, Germany) began on November 20th, 1945 and lasted through October of 1946. Of the twenty-two defendants, only twenty-one were physically present in the dock. The twenty-second, Martin Bormann, was tried in absentia. They ranged from Hermann Göring, the infamous Nazi Air Marshall, to Hjalmar Schacht, the Minister of Economics, who was acquitted. Admittedly, the selection of these particular defendants was relatively arbitrary, depending quite a lot on who was available to be tried. While some of the more offensive Nazi leaders were present, others had managed to escape justice. Adolf Eichmann and Klaus Barbie, the "Butcher of Lyons," managed to escape, but were subsequently caught and tried in 1961 and 1983 respectively. To this day there are Nazi war criminals scattered across the world living under assumed names. The image of the now bucolic, yet mysterious, Nazi war criminal living a humdrum life in the American suburbs continues to persist.

The indictment consisted of four charges brought against the defendants. The first charge was "conspiracy to wage aggressive war," which was meant to punish defendants' actions that may have led to the war. The second, "waging aggressive war," covered the war itself; particularly such aggressive and unprovoked actions as the invasion of Poland. The third, "committing war crimes," covered the Nazi execution of downed fighter pilots, the use of slave labor, the bombing of civilian populations, and other infractions of the Hague and Geneva War Conventions. The fourth and final charge was for, "crimes against humanity," which included the concentration camps and genocide. All four charges were brought against each of the defendants, and their relative guilt was judged by each in turn.

The Nazi defense - each defendant had been granted the right to an attorney - centered around three main points. First, that each defendant had merely been following orders - shifting the responsibility up the hierarchy. This defense, however, was weak. Many of the defendants were very close to the top of the hierarchy, and had answered directly to Adolf Hitler; who was conveniently dead. The second line of defense was the legal questioning of the International Military Tribunal's jurisdiction. At that time, international law was written so that only entire nations were prosecutable. It was presumed that an individual fell solely under the legal purview of his or her own government. If it was true at the time, the Nuremberg Trial certainly created a new precedent for doing just that. The third line of defense was the lack of evidence for certain charges. The first charge of "Conspiracy to wage aggressive war," in particular, was very difficult prove. While Nazi Germany's actions were self-evident, finding evidence to bind each defendant to them required exhaustive investigation.

In the end, three of the defendants were acquitted, eight were sentenced to long prison terms, and the remainder were sentenced to hang. Among these only Hermann Göring escaped his execution by swallowing a cyanide capsule two hours before he and the other nine were to be hanged, on the morning of October 15th, 1946.

The Nuremberg Trial was important for a number of reasons. It established a model for international cooperation, later to be exemplified in the establishment of the United Nations, the International Criminal Tribunal, and other pan-national institutions. But most of all, it set a new standard of how to deal with a nation which had viciously initiated a world war, and then lost it 61 million casualties later. The trial itself was conducted in French, English, German and Russian - the languages of the prosecutors and the defendants. Therefore, much of the proceeding was conveyed by translators through spindly headphones. It may have been one of the first such assemblies, in any case the resulting photographs - principle players listening to headphones - represents the will for nations separated by culture and language to overcome these obstacles for the sake of international cooperation.