On November 19th, 1945, the tribunal for the Nuremberg Trials was called to order; and on November 20th, 1945, 24 of the most important Nazi war criminals went on trial for their crimes.
The last surviving prosecutor from the Nuremberg Trials, now over 100 years old, remembers them.
Eleven of the accused were sentenced to death. Ten of them were executed on 16th October, 1946. Hermann Goering cheated the gallows by taking poison the night before.
Sadly, a great many more fanatical politicians have taken over the mantle of mass murderer since the Nuremberg Trials. Their lessons have not been heeded.
Peter
9 comments:
The Nazis were small time in comparison to the Soviets under Stalin, or East Asia under Mao.
And proportionate to the population, the Khymer Rouge was far deadlier.
And so are many African tribes.
The Nazis just got the bad publicity.
Not that I don't disagree with Nuremburg. Just wish we hadn't supported Stalin and Mao and so many African tribes (through the State Department and so many NGOs.)
The Germans' major crime was to lose a war. (The Soviets did far worse than the Germans ever contemplated.)
We should have never held trials, just summarily executed them.
Good thing the Allies won, or we would have been the recipients of similar legal treatment. Massed bombing of German and Japanese cities? That didn't accomplish any significant results in reducing their fighting ability. That was driven by the British.
I'm ambivalent. I read the Wikipedia entry for him, and he's pretty amazing.
His personal courage cannot be questioned, and his zeal in prosecuting the mass murderers is exemplary.
However, his insistence that all responses to aggression and depraved acts of force MUST be dealt with in the courts is something I just can't agree with. If we were to try to implement that, I believe we would end up with all power vested in a judicial structure, with zero accountability to anything else.
How massive would such a judicial structure have to be, in order to accommodate prosecuting everything from the genocidal actions cited by previous comments, down to small actions he deems to be illegal, such as the capture and execution of Osama Bin Laden, and the drone assassination of Qassem Soleimani?
Does he wish to prosecute the ISIS personnel who fired the artillery that wounded the US Marine? Or, does he wish to prosecute the wounded Marine? Both?
He knows he's right. But, he acknowledges no basis for that belief, apart from his own conviction.
Peace be on your household.
Interesting comment by Ferencz about Truman and the bomb. Yet there is a difference between eradicating a people because of their religious beliefs and ending a war with a new weapon. Truman didn't do it because the enemy was Japanese, but because they were the enemy who attacked us. Ferencz was quite a guy as was the team who prosecuted the war criminals.
Good post.
I watched the entire documentary called Adolf Hitler, The Greatest Story Never Told. The fact of the matter is that we were lied to about this regime to some degree. Stalin, the Poles, Churchill, the French and Hitler all contributed to the atrocity of WWII, but it's notable that the history books never mention that Hitler made peace offerings to the Poles and the British. I really question whether the Russian should have become allies. Maybe Hitler should have won given the mess Europe has become. Not a popular viewpoint, but it's odd Hitler is this monster but was trying to pull Germany from a communist revolution. Too bad Patton did not get to retake Eastern Europe from the Russians when there was a chance to do so.
Hitler made peace offerings to the British more than once.
The question is if he would have honored them.
He made a peace deal with Russia as well, only to betray them, not to mention the earlier 'deal' with Chamberlin.
hen someone tells you they want to do something bad, believe them. But when someone offers you a deal if you let them get away with something, you have to verify, and if they have violated similar deals in the past, it's not "trust but verify", it's "hope and verify, and don't give up too much up front"
@Unknown:
Germany invaded the Soviet Union about a week before the Soviets would have invaded and destroyed Germany. The best defense is a good offense. As history showed, it ultimately didn't work. Mostly because of US aid to the Soviets.
Source: Icebreaker by V. Suvorov. Confirmed by examination of the Soviet archives back in the 1990's.
One interesting thing is an SS unit from the Baltic served as guards for German prisoners. I recently saw a short YouTube video on it by Mark Felton. I recommend it.
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