The Nuremberg Justice Trial 1947: Vengeance of the Victors?

<p>Nuremberg became famous for the 13 Nuremberg Trials against the leading German officials after World War II. Following the first trial against the remaining Nazi leaders before the Allied International Military Tribunal in 1945-1946, the United States initiated 12 subsequent proceedings against leading members of all areas of Germany's society. The Justice Trial against 16 representatives of Nazi Germany's judicial system was the third of these trials and held before US Military Tribunal III in 1947. Organised and held under the aegis of the United States as one of the war's victors, the trials were seen by many as simple acts of vengeance, hidden behind a smokescreen of legality. Therefore, especially in post-war Germany, the trials were often described as victor's justice. Yet, besides investigations relating to specific aspects of this allegation, a profound analysis of this issue has not been done for the Justice Trial. This study aims to help in closing this gap. Focussing on the issue of victor's justice, the work analyses and evaluates all stages of the Justice Trial, from its legal basis, to the planning and preparation, to the proceedings and judgments, to the enforcement of the sentences after the trial. In the end, it is concluded that only two aspects, the violation of the principle of separation of powers and the restriction to initiate trials only against German nationals, can be seen as examples of victor's justice. All other aspects cannot be proved as examples of victor's justice; whether Germany's state sovereignty was violated, whether the judges were impartial, whether the ex post facto principle was violated, whether the defendants could be held individually responsible, whether the defendants received a fair trial, whether the trial was justified from a moral point of view, whether the defendants were selected for appropriate reasons, whether the Tribunal analysed and evaluated the Nazi legal system and the defendant's role therein reasonably, whether the US judges and prosecutors were qualified enough, and whether the early release of the convicted defendants in the 1950s was arbitrary. The Justice Trial and all other Nuremberg Trials, in many ways, set unique precedents for international criminal law. The legacy, therefore, is primarily a positive one. Thus, overall, it is concluded that the limited examples of victor's justice within the Justice Trial do not ultimately undermine these achievements.</p>

The Nuremberg Justice Trial 1947: Vengeance of the Victors?

<p>Nuremberg became famous for the 13 Nuremberg Trials against the leading German officials after World War II. Following the first trial against the remaining Nazi leaders before the Allied International Military Tribunal in 1945-1946, the United States initiated 12 subsequent proceedings against leading members of all areas of Germany's society. The Justice Trial against 16 representatives of Nazi Germany's judicial system was the third of these trials and held before US Military Tribunal III in 1947. Organised and held under the aegis of the United States as one of the war's victors, the trials were seen by many as simple acts of vengeance, hidden behind a smokescreen of legality. Therefore, especially in post-war Germany, the trials were often described as victor's justice. Yet, besides investigations relating to specific aspects of this allegation, a profound analysis of this issue has not been done for the Justice Trial. This study aims to help in closing this gap. Focussing on the issue of victor's justice, the work analyses and evaluates all stages of the Justice Trial, from its legal basis, to the planning and preparation, to the proceedings and judgments, to the enforcement of the sentences after the trial. In the end, it is concluded that only two aspects, the violation of the principle of separation of powers and the restriction to initiate trials only against German nationals, can be seen as examples of victor's justice. All other aspects cannot be proved as examples of victor's justice; whether Germany's state sovereignty was violated, whether the judges were impartial, whether the ex post facto principle was violated, whether the defendants could be held individually responsible, whether the defendants received a fair trial, whether the trial was justified from a moral point of view, whether the defendants were selected for appropriate reasons, whether the Tribunal analysed and evaluated the Nazi legal system and the defendant's role therein reasonably, whether the US judges and prosecutors were qualified enough, and whether the early release of the convicted defendants in the 1950s was arbitrary. The Justice Trial and all other Nuremberg Trials, in many ways, set unique precedents for international criminal law. The legacy, therefore, is primarily a positive one. Thus, overall, it is concluded that the limited examples of victor's justice within the Justice Trial do not ultimately undermine these achievements.</p>

Courtroom 600: The (Virtual) Reality of Being There

Although at least some of the concern with prosecuting aged defendants seems to lie with defendants not quite looking the part, reviews of historic Court buildings come out the other end with allusions to eminence, authenticity, tradition, history and gravitas. Exemplary is the Courtroom 600 Project, a vr experience of the Nuremberg Trials set in a virtual rendition of the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg. Courtroom 600 remains today one of the major material referents in the histories of international law, representing the symbolic birthplace of International Criminal Law. The attraction of the Court moreover is such that the building has come to offer, as we would say, a legal sightseeing point of interest. In this piece, we pick up on the Courtroom 600 Project as capitalising on the interest with visiting the place ‘where it happened’, and pushing the boundaries of experiencing ‘being there’, where it happened.

The Poet as Witness: Abraham Sutzkever in Vilna and at Nuremberg

This article juxtaposes Abraham Sutzkever’s Yiddish poems written in the Vilna Ghetto between 1941–1943 with the testimony he gave at the Nuremberg Trials on 27 February 1946. A witness, participant, and survivor of the annihilation, Sutzkever became an appropriate representative and unique spokesperson for the murdered Jewish victims. As evidence of a personal and collective tragedy, providing a double record of the destruction of a once-vibrant community through his poetry and his witness statement, Sutzkever imparts the reality of the Holocaust on the first occasion that leaders of a country were indicted before an international court for crimes against humanity. Hence, this article contributes to the understanding of the emotional trauma and fate of Jewish victims during the Holocaust. Emphasising how artistic expression may assist human beings to endure unimaginable hardship, it highlights the continuing importance of personal testimony to endorse memory and warn against recurrence.

Modern National Historiography of the Nuremberg Tribunal

The modern Russian historiography about the Nuremberg Tribunal has a large number. But, its generalization and analysis was not carried out. The purpose of this article is to systematize the publications of the last decade on the Nuremberg Trials. The author has identified nine groups of publications on this topic. Among them: works carried out in the framework of the study of international law, historical and legal processes, the history of international relations, philological research (on the activities of translators); work related to the so-called the ‘big’ Nuremberg trials, dedicated to the study of the legal regulation of biomedical research; works of a political and legal nature, calling to prevent the revision of the results of the Nuremberg process; studies reflecting the role of individuals in the organization of the tribunal, works devoted to the use of historical documents in fiction. The author came to the conclusion that the bulk of the publications are published in the anniversary years for the Nuremberg trials. This clearly indicates that there is not enough systemic research. The article also notes that most of the works were written using the same type of source base. This raises the question of a broader involvement of sources and literature in foreign languages.

To the 75th anniversary of the beginning of the Nuremberg trials and the creation of Nuremberg codex: global significance and the enduring lessons

The article reveals the significance of the Nuremberg trials for rethinking the moral foundations of medicine; the role of the Nuremberg Code in the development of voluntary informed consent in clinical practice and in clinical trials, as well as its impact on the international legal regulation of the health sector is considered. The authors focus on the importance of the lessons of Nuremberg for understanding the ethical challenges that have emerged in the 21st century as a result of the development of artificial intelligence technologies, editing of the human genome and the emergence of new forms of parenting, largely associated with the achievements of new reproductive technologies.

International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg

The Nuremberg trial of Nazi criminals, which took place from November 20, 1945 to October 1, 1946, became an important milestone in the history of world civilization. The article is devoted to consideration of the process of developing an agreement on the establishment of an International Military Tribunal and its charter, drawing up an indictment, direct preparation of the process and its progress. The main focus of the article is on the role of the USSR in the preparation and conduct of the Nuremberg trials. The work reveals the relations between the prosecutors from the USSR, the USA, Great Britain and France, their mutual assistance, the contradictions, that arose from time to time, and the course of closed sessions is highlighted.

Scatter 2

Scatter 2 identifies politics as an object of perennial difficulty for philosophy—as recalcitrant to philosophical mastery as is philosophy’s traditional adversary, poetry. That difficulty makes it an attractive area of attention for any deconstructive approach to the tradition from which we inevitably inherit our language and our concepts. Scatter 2 pursues that deconstruction, often starting, and sometimes departing, from the work of Jacques Derrida, by attending to the concepts of sovereignty on the one hand, and democracy on the other. Part I follows the fate of a line from Book II of Homer’s Iliad, where Odysseus asserts that “the rule of many is no good thing, let there be one ruler, one king,” as it is quoted and misquoted, and progressively Christianized, by authors including Aristotle, Philo Judaeus, Suetonius, the early Church Fathers, Aquinas, Dante, Ockham, Marsilius of Padua, Jean Bodin, Etienne de la Boétie, up to Carl Schmitt and Erik Peterson, and even one of the defendants at the Nuremberg Trials, before being discussed by Derrida himself. Part II begins again, as it were, with Plato and Aristotle, and tracks the concept of democracy as it regularly impacts and tends to undermine that sovereignist tradition, and, more especially in detailed readings of Hobbes and Rousseau, develops a notion of “proto-democracy” as a possible name for the scatter that underlies and drives the political as such, and that will always prevent politics from achieving its aim of bringing itself to an end.