Those Who Hanged at Nuremburg Part 1

The first Nuremburg Trial (there were others later for lawyers, doctors, concentration camp guards etc) was an International Military Tribunal established to prosecute the leading members of the recently defunct Third Reich Government of Germany. It had been established primarily at the behest of the Americans who wanted to see Nazism indicted before the world. Winston Churchill had been in favour of the summary execution of the the remaining Nazi leadership while Josef Stalin, never one to blanche at such an arbitrary solution to a problem, had wanted any executions to incorporate all of the senior civil service, legal establishment, and German general staff, upwards of a 100,000 people. The Americans won the argument, however. The Nazi’s would be tried before a Court of Law, and be seen to be given the fair trial they had denied to so many others.

The indicted Nazi’s would stand trial accused on three charges 1) Waging aggressive war 2) Crimes against humanity 3) Violation of the customs of war (war crimes). The prevailing problem with this indictment (and it remains controversial to this day) is that the first two charges did not exist at the time the crimes were committed. This may appear a technicality and few people would deny the horrific nature of the things they did, their culpability, or indeed the punishments meted out to them, but where do we stand if the law can be changed to convict us of things we have done in the past? If the law can be viewed as arbitrary, and can be changed on the hoof merely to suit the purpose of those who are in power at any given time, then its role as the bedrock upon which the security of society is based is undermined. This is not just my view but was one expressed at the time. The Chief Justice of the United States Harlan Fiske Stone referred to the Nuremburg Trial as a lynching party. Whilst Supreme Court Justice William Douglas, stated that the , “Law was created ex post facto to suit the passion and clamour of the time.” This is not intended, however, to be a forensic examination of the minutiae of the legality that underpinned the trial or indeed the story of the legal proceedings themselves, but rather a series of pencil sketches of the accused. In no particular order.