Nuremberg: A Fair Trial? A Dangerous Precedent (1946) | Hacker News Reader

Nuremberg: A Fair Trial? A Dangerous Precedent (1946)

theatlantic.com

49 pointsvezzy-fnord31 comments

That was a great article. This paragraph in particular struck me as relevant now just a short time after the reopening of the youth camp on Utøya:

========== If the Nuremberg trial of the leading Nazis should never have been undertaken, it does not follow that we should not have punished these men. It would have been consistent with our philosophy and our law to have disposed of such of the defendants as were in the ordinary sense murderers by individual, routine, undramatic, military trials. This was the course proposed in the speeches of the Archbishop of York, Viscount Cecil, Lord Wright, and others in the great debate of March 20, 1945, in the House of Lords. In such trials the evidence and the legal issues would have a stark simplicity and the lesson would be inescapable. ==========

This exactly what Norway did to Breivik, he was treated as the common murderer that he is. No new law, no new tribunal, no grandstanding by the accused or the accusers.

Great comment. I feel this principle should be applied to all ‘terrorists’. Try them under existing criminal law; no need to make new terrorist laws which only help promote their standing as ‘terrorists’ and, by extension, the causes they seek to promote.

The whole terrorism thing is essentially a ‘game’ between the authorities and the self-perceived cause-warriors, with the general public being pulled in as collateral damage (both as direct victims and, more broadly, as the losers of individual and social freedoms). The people, acting in their own self-interest, should refuse to let this sick, manufactured drama continue and that means refusing both sides their roles (as ‘terrorists’ or ‘defenders from terrorism’).

Like recently with the morrocan guy and the french train. It could be that he just wanted to the "good-ole" robbery.... Like the big train robbery... It was never considered a terrorist act.

Maybe OT: I'm impressed by this piece of content! Impressed, because as a millennial, not paying-for-content content-consumer, I barely can find such in-depth texts, being sophisticated in finding the truth of the matter* and presenting it to the public. The author basically seems to have been given the space of todays cover-stories and the freedom of a columnist using it to swim against the current in a nation-wide publicized high-profile medium.

This piece might have been scanned to be archived, but to be read and understood by modern consumers, it might have been better to convert it into a BuzzFeed-Style Top-10-List :-(

* not implying that he's correct, but he's seems to be honest

Most media don't carry articles like this anymore even if you do pay. The Atlantic is one of the few exceptions. Up to the 1970s even the gutter press in the UK would print long articles, not generally as temperate as this one of course, but still expecting the reader to spend more than thirty seconds reading it. Now it's mostly either soundbites or recycled (in some case within the same article) with no editing, not even a grammar check. But guess which media outlet gets the most page views, it's not The Atlantic of course but the UK Daily Mail.

Anyone interested in this story might also be interested in Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem (famous for its "banality of evil" thesis). She regarded his trial as nothing more than a show, a kangaroo court, meant to act as catharsis for the Jewish people and a world looking for a figurehead to blame.

Nuremberg was important because it provided a symbolic mechanism for Axis to get a clean slate by sacrificing a few leaders. It was nothing more than theatre, and was intended as such. It was also extremely effective.

Nuremberg, even if was fair, is a bit of sleight of hand in terms of who wasn't in the dock. Firebombing Dresden? No charge. The Red Army raping its way to Berlin? Scot free. Japanese civilians incinerated in firebombing of cities and then two nuclear bombs for pure intimidation AFTER they made overtures to quit and with NO military target? Not even mentioned.

> Japanese civilians incinerated...AFTER they made overtures to quit

That's nonsense. The fascist Japanese government hoped for a cessation of hostilities because it was their only chance to stay in power and perhaps to fight again. That's not "stopping" in a permanent sense. They had attacked the US unprovoked[1], and there was no rational basis to believe they wouldn't do so again in the future. The US didn't want to win the war, demobilize, and do it all again in a few more decades; they required a permanent peace.

[1] Some will claim the US was provocative in its trade actions, but refusing to sell oil to fuel the continuing rape of China is not a reasonable definition of provocation.

>That's nonsense. The fascist Japanese government hoped for a cessation of hostilities because it was their only chance to stay in power and perhaps to fight again.

If that's what you're taught in US school, maybe invest in some history books. Preferably European ones, so they don't spread patriotic BS.

An ad-homenium attack on me? Wow.

Are you seriously going to claim that Wikipedia is "patriotic BS"?

"Although the directing powers, and the government as well, are convinced that our war strength still can deliver considerable blows to the enemy, we are unable to feel absolutely secure peace of mind ... Please bear particularly in mind, however, that we are not seeking the Russians' mediation for anything like an unconditional surrender." -- Tōgō 1945 July 17 [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan

>An ad-homenium attack on me? Wow.

No, a lament for the state of historical education in the US. To which I agree with people like Howard Zinn etc.

>Wikipedia is "patriotic BS"?

Wikipedia is whoever writes it. If you consider Wikipedia a scholarly source, then we don't have much to discuss.

Second, It's well known that Japan didn't want an "unconditional surrender". It was a surrender nonetheless, of an exhausted nation, with some provisions mainly to have the emperor save face.

Instead the US burn alive 200.000+ men, women and children, in order to test their new toys and send a message to Japan.

(Note that even if any kind of surrender was off the table, using a nuclear bomb on a war, and on civilian targets nonetheless, is still Nazi-level war criminality).

Please explain yourself instead of just insulting people's education. What you're doing here is useless if you want to actually inform people.

You mean so they spread European BS instead?

I mean so that they are from an impartial source to the US/Japan sides.

(Coming from a greater scholarly tradition when it comes to history wouldn't hurt either).

Many European countries were involved in that conflict. The UK, France, and Netherlands all had substantial territory conquered by the Japanese. Germany and Italy were allied with the Japanese. The Soviets attacked Japan. Even countries not directly involved with Japan probably still have strong opinions if they were involved with Germany, what with the alliance. So that leaves, what, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland for potential sources of impartiality there?

Things are hardly that simple. There are strong arguments that US officials believed Japan was close to surrender before the bombs, and that the US decision was made as much for its message to the USSR as to guarantee there'd be no need for a ground invasion of Japan.

It's been a long time since I looked at it closely but various documentary evidence for such arguments is collected at the museums in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Whether one finds it all conclusive is up for debate but it's not a cut-and-dried matter.

While they may be related by the subject of WW-II, the eastern portion of WW-II does not belong within this threading; the cultures, circumstances, and interactions are different. There are many things that our ancestors; on either side of that conflict, did which we can find moral fault in.

Likely multiple rich threads of discussion are required to fully explore the special circumstances of that particular set of actions in their historical context; but this article is not the place for such a discussion.

You don't get prosecuted for war crimes if you actually win the war. That's like war crimes 101. So, if you are going to commit war crimes, you better be sure you win the war. Then you don't get prosecuted, and you get to write all the history books! Not that I am defending Germany here, just saying, that's how it always worked, since before the Roman times.

"History is written by the winners" _unknown_

Not prosecuting your own side after the end of the war is a good policy since you're trying to maximize your psychological potential of success at winning the war in the first place. The cloud hanging over your head at thinking you might get prosecuted for some necessary maneuver at a later date would be pretty discouraging. The distinction between necessary and unnecessary would be meaningless since it would be out of your hands. Basically, if you start a war of aggression, you have created a giant mess you can't control, so expect your people to be bombed and raped with no consequences to the victors. Winning is the most important thing in a war because it is literally us or them. There is no shared humanity to appeal to, that already went out the window. Being bombed or raped is the cost of engaging in aggressive war.

> Being bombed or raped is the cost of engaging in aggressive war.

I could make the argument that the people being bombed and raped aren't generally the people who decided to start the war, but here's the better one: "They started it" is no excuse for inhuman behavior. We're supposed to be the good guys.

I'm not arguing it's moral, I'm arguing that you should only as a policy prosecute people on your own side of a war if such a policy wouldn't make your chances of winning worse. Because if you lose, your morals are worth nothing. I'm talking about total war like world war 2 here, not something like gulf war 1 where the USA completely outclassed Iraq and the goal was to push Iraq back into its own borders. Conflicts where if you don't win you're dead, there's no point in going back and punishing individuals for what happened in chaos. The goal should be preventing wars in the first place, knowing that wars enable terrible, uncontrollable circumstances.

You argument is a common one. (So I upvoted you)

The response I have against it is it suffers from the fallacy of gray. War is horrible and it sucks. Sucks for the old lady cooked to death in a air raid shelter in Dresden, sucks for the GI machine gunned down on the beach at Normandy. Sucks for the Merchantman drowning in the Atlantic. Sucks for the little girl accidentally run over by a jeep North of France.

What ties these together is, none of these people are under the protection of the hostile forces. (And the little girl is an accident)

The difference between what the US army did, or the Soviet Army soldiers did. Was the German Army and police killed people who were supposed to be under their protection. And they did so via policy. That's the difference and that's the body law Nuremberg trials created, that creating such policies was illegal and punishable.

Personally as to the article, that a very fine reasoning about legislative law. But the Nuremberg trials are really about common law. Common law is older, fuzzier, and currently out of fashion, but here we are. The fundamental thing about common law it's it's based not on legislation but in previous rulings. The act comes first, then judgment is passed based on previous rulings and cultural mores.

Fundamentally I think the based on the then current rules of war, the people who were tried under Nuremberg, their lives were already forfeit. The victors had the right to dispose of them anyway they saw fit. Frankly in my view is that the idea that what those people did somehow fell under ordinary criminality is facetious.

I recall someone (Hitchens?) pointing out that it was considered a valid defense at Nuremberg if the accused could produce evidence that the Allies had engaged in the same behavior he had.

The comment was meant as an indictment - that the proceedings were mere victor's justice - but in light of this article, it seems to argue strongly for the author's point about legal vs. political proceedings. If guilt is held to be a foregone conclusion and all that remains is to confirm the details and hand out punishments, the argument that it would be better to skip the pretense and trappings of a legal proceeding seems persuasive indeed.

While I agree that Nuremberg was a dose of victor's justice, there's a more nuanced point lurking in here. Some of the men brought to trial beat the charges by pleading, essentially, "you did it too." Dönitz, for example, was convicted of waging unrestricted submarine warfare but this wasn't taken into account during sentencing. Goering received a death sentence for his involvement in slave labor, mass murder and a host of , but not for bombing London.

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