Nuremberg Trials Research Articles

Why Prosecute? Critics of Punishment for Mass Atrocity

International debate now rages over how new democratic regimes ought best to redress the wrongs of their predecessors, especially the massive human rights violations perpetrated by government officials.' This article offers nutshell summary of the major objections often raised to criminal prosecution, with view to sharpening the terms of debate over the strengths and weakness of that approach to the problem. The harm wrought by state sponsors of mass atrocity is so colossal that even skeptics of the criminal law's coherence and defensibility find themselves longing for their doubts to be allayed, at least for perpetrators such as these. In the face of such monstrous wickedness, retributive impulses emerge powerfully even in those most critical of our practices of punishment and their underlying assumptions. If ever there were an easy case (in the moral sense, at least) for criminal punishment, surely this is it. Or so one would suppose. Yet in the few instances where conviction has been obtained for large-scale, state-sponsored massacres, it has been secured only at the apparent price of troubling departures from settled law and principles. Hence, for instance, Judith Shklar's observation that the Nuremberg trial of major war criminals represented a genuine moral crisis . . . for persons of

Radical Evil on Trial

Radical Evil on Trial takes its name from Immanuel Kant’s work, defining those crimes against human rights that are so grand that no punishment can suffice. These crimes, often committed by governments, call for action. The book is a personal testament of Carlos Santiago Nino, a scholar who was a major participant in Argentina’s program of retroactive justice following the ouster of the military regime and its “dirty war.” In many ways, this is a very personal document, partly autobiographical: it tells of his involvement in the democratization process and in battling for human rights, detailing his work with President Raúl Alfonsín in creating a basis for trying and punishing perpetrators of state-sponsored terrorism. Yet the book is more. Nino places the Argentine experience against a backdrop of history, relating it to the Nuremberg trials and to the efforts to define crimes against humanity in the former Yugoslavia. In the final part of the book, the author goes into the legal, political, and philosophical problems of meting out justice in cases of human rights abuses. This is a book well worth reading and debating.The author, a professor of law in Buenos Aires, left the manuscript with friends from Yale, where he often taught. Shortly thereafter, he died in Bolivia, where he was consulting on its new constitution. As a result, the book was posthumously edited and published. Nino was a passionate crusader for human rights, searching for the legal avenues to justice, avenues that limit passion but are necessary to prevent the crusade from becoming a new form of repression. The book shows the great difficulty, even for dedicated elected officials, of prosecuting and punishing human rights crimes committed by authoritarian regimes. Often laws or amnesties established by such governments limit the ability to punish those responsible for atrocities. Sometimes difficult choices have to be made if punishment may threaten new democratic governments.Judicial procedure is important, for democracy is government by the majority, and the majority may value the repression of minorities. Paradoxically, courts based on law and insulated from popular opinion are the final guarantors of democracy. Nino advocates judicial proceedings as a means of cultural learning and advance, the “educative effect” of trials. He is strongly nation based, trying to find out how postauthoritarian governments can consolidate democracy following military regimes. Such an approach assumes the primacy of national sovereignty.This position seems a weakness in the analysis, given the growing body of international institutions of justice that proscribe national governments and declare that no nation, authoritarian or democratic, has a right to abuse its citizens, and if it does, the international community has a responsibility to intervene. There are times when national governments cannot bring criminals to justice.A reviewer could pick apart the book: some weaknesses in editing, several layers of themes, various biases. But these are irrelevant. This is an intensely moral book by a man committed to justice and the end of human rights abuses. It should be in every library. It would be an excellent text for a seminar on politics and morality. The book has a place in courses in Latin American history, in politics, in philosophy, and in law. It is both an important record of the Alfonsín government’s efforts to bring justice and a significant discussion of the inherent problems of justice itself.

Interpretation at the Nuremberg Trial

It is often argued that the first War Crimes Trial (Nuremberg Trial) could not have been possible without simultaneous interpretation. This notwithstanding, Nuremberg interpreters have been consistently ignored in the historical record. This paper seeks to do justice to the language personnel of the Nuremberg Trial, by presenting the people who brought interpretation to the Trial, the court interpreters themselves, and the effect that interpretation was perceived to have on the proceedings. For this paper I draw on historical official and unofficial documents of the Nuremberg Trial deposited in major national archives, as well as on personal communication with 12 interpreters who worked at the Trial in Nuremberg between 1945 and 1946.

Interpreters are Made not Born

Conference interpreter (CI) training since the Nuremberg Trials, where simultaneous interpretation was successfully used on a wide scale for the first time, is discussed. The establishment of interpreting schools and development of the CI curriculum and training paradigm are followed through to the present day. Curriculum models are identified and the content of training programmes discussed. The role played by AIIC in establishing the CI training paradigm via symposia, workshops and publications is presented. The increasing importance of theory in CI teaching is considered and doctoral programmes in CI studies are mentioned. The training of CI trainers is identified as a recent development and existing training possibilities reviewed. The paper goes on to discuss courses organised to meet special needs (e.g. new languages in the European Union) and the European Masters programme in CI being developed jointly by the European Union and a consortium of European Universities. It concludes with a brief indication of important issues in CI training for the future.

At the Dawn of Simultaneous Interpretation in Russia

This is a brief outline of the early history of simultaneous interpretation in Russia from its first use at the 6th Comintern Congress (1928). The highlights of the early postwar period included the active participation of Soviet interpreters in the Nuremberg Trial and the Tokyo Trial of major Japanese war criminals. The real baptism of fire for a large group of Russian conference interpreters was the International Economic Conference held in Moscow in 1952. Since the 19th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, simultaneous translation has been more and more widely used on such occasions. The technique and hardware of simultaneous interpretation, at first somewhat crude and primitive, were gradually upgraded approaching international standards.

Inside the Nuremberg Trial: a prosecutor's comprehensive account

Inside the Nuremberg Trial is a two volume set that provides the most comprehensive and accessible representation of the trial of the major German war criminals before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, Germany following World War II. The author discusses the evidence, the arguments of counsel for both the Prosecution and the Defense, and the judgment of the International Military Tribunal. He covers each stage of the trial from early preparation to the judgment, and concludes with a summary of the legacy of the trial in recent history. Separate parts of the book deal with the presentation of the American, British, French, and Soviet delegations of the Prosecution, and separate chapters discuss the defense of each of the twenty-two defendants and each of the seven accused organizations. In addition, the author deals with the evidence of the persecution of the Jews before World War II through the evidence of the persecution and murder of Jews, Gypsies and others during the war. Separate chapters focus on the murders by the Einsatzgruppen (Special Task Force Group) and the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto.

Nuremberg Misremembered

Nuremberg Misremembered Jeremy Rabkin (bio) More than fifty years after they ended, the Nuremberg Trials have been much in the news over the past year. A short piece in the New York Times magazine, published in early January of this year, perfectly captured the appeal of such reminiscences: “The war crimes tribunals for Bosnia and Rwanda, the newborn international criminal court and a Spanish judge’s indictment of Gen. Augusto Pinochet of Chile are expressions of the idea that how a nation treats its own citizens is everybody’s business. That principle was established 50 years ago at the Nuremberg trials.” 1 In fact, the International Criminal Court remains quite controversial in this country, at least under the terms concluded at a United Nations Conference in Rome in July 1998. 2 The Clinton administration has refused to support the resulting treaty text, for fear that it might expose U.S. military personnel to international prosecutions. So too, there is much controversy about whether General Pinochet should have been seized while on an official diplomatic mission to Britain last summer and held for extradition to Spain. While the European Parliament expressed strong support for trying Pinochet in Europe—for tortures and killings of Chileans, on Chilean soil, while Pinochet was head of state in Chile—the U.S. State Department has pointedly refrained from endorsing such a trial. Yet there are many advocates in this country (including human rights activists, international law scholars, and enthusiasts for global cooperation) who urge the United States to endorse the International Criminal Court and to support such ventures as a European prosecution of Pinochet. Such advocates now summon [End Page 81] the Nuremberg precedent to show that ventures of this kind are, after all, in our own national tradition. As law professor Diane Orentlicher flatly declared in the Los Angeles Times last December, we have “derived from Nuremberg,” the principle “that the law of humanity can be enforced by any state....For justice will likely elude victims of mass atrocities unless bystander states take up their claims.” 3 Before Nuremberg becomes, in this way, an unquestioned axiom for arguments on vexing contemporary issues, we should recall with more precision what actually was done there. The actual record of Nuremberg is different, in many ways, from the iconic image now invoked by contemporary advocates for “international justice.” The Nuremberg Trials were more flawed than we like to remember, but also less truly international. If we are going to draw lessons from that experience, we might profitably attend to the self-protectiveness of the states that organized the trials—and their understanding of the responsibility of great powers. “Crimes Against Humanity” Were Peripheral The International Military Tribunal (IMT) for the trial of Nazi leaders was established at a conference of delegates from the Big Four Allied Powers, that met in London in July 1945—at the same time as the Big Four Conference at Potsdam was making wider decisions about the Allied occupation of Germany. After very hasty trial preparations, the IMT convened in Nuremberg in November of 1945 for the joint trials of twenty-four defendants. Almost a full year later, the tribunal handed down its verdicts, which included eleven death sentences and three acquittals. Apart from the contemporaneous trial of Japanese war criminals by an international tribunal in Tokyo, there has been nothing quite like it to this day. One of the reasons for the absence of such international tribunals is that, at the time, the Nuremberg Trials were enveloped in considerable controversy. Many Americans, including some very distinguished jurists, regarded the proceedings at Nuremberg as political “show trials.” Harlan Fiske Stone, the chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, refused to take part in a swearing-in ceremony for the U.S.-appointed judges to the IMT. Stone characterized the whole undertaking (in private) as “a high-grade [End Page 82] lynching party.” 4 Only a few years later, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas protested—in print—that the leading Nazis had been tried under “an ex post facto law” and “their guilt did not justify us in substituting power for principle.” By the mid-1950s, Senator John F. Kennedy thought it...

Henry Knowles Beecher and the development of informed consent in anesthesia research.

Henry Knowles Beecher and the development of informed consent in anesthesia research.

Prelude to Nuremberg: Allied war crimes policy and the question of punishment

Between November 1945 and October 1946, the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg tried some of the most notorious political and military figures of Nazi Germany. Most histories of the prosecution of war criminals from World War II focus on these trials and the punishment meted out to the leaders of the Axis powers. But as Arieh Kochavi notes, the issue of punishing war criminals was widely discussed by the leaders of the Allied nations well before the end of the war. In this book, Kochavi demonstrates that the policies finally adopted, including the institution of the Nuremberg trials, represented the culmination of a complicated process rooted in the domestic and international politics of the war years. Drawing on extensive research in both US and British archives, Kochavi reconstructs the deliberations that went on in Washington and London at a time when the Germans were perpetrating their worst crimes. He also examines the roles of the Polish and Czech governments-in-exile, the Soviets and the United Nations War Crimes Commission in the formulation of a joint policy on war crimes, as well as the neutral governments' stand on the question of asylum for war criminals. This account seeks to shed light on an important and perhaps least understood aspects of World War II.

Diritti umani e bioetica

Esiste un legame tra la riflessione sulla bioetica e quella sui diritti umani?
 Lo scritto muove da questo interrogativo per giungere dopo un’articolata analisi alla conclusione che il limpido e chiaro riconoscimento della dignità e del conseguente diritto alla vita di ogni essere umano a partire dalla fecondazione costituisce terreno e presupposto comune delle due discipline e, allo stesso tempo, è ciò che consente loro di non navigare verso le derive individualistiche dell’utilitarismo e del relativismo etico.
 L’analisi del rapporto fra diritti umani e bioetica parte da un dato storico e cioè dalla svolta che il processo di Norimberga e la Dichiarazione Universale dei diritti dell’uomo hanno impresso nel cammino dell’umanità. Questa nuova tappa accompagna gli albori del “filone giuridico-normativo della bioetica” che nel corso degli anni assumerà sempre maggior consistenza, tanto da sfociare in un autonomo campo di riflessione noto sotto il nome di “biodiritto” o “biogiuridica”. A riguardo l’articolo presenta una disamina ricognitiva (non esente da osservazioni di tipo valutativo) dei principali documenti giuridici nazionali e internazionali che si occupano di “questioni di bioetica”. Dal ricco affresco di questi emerge da un lato la constatazione di un rapporto che esprime la necessità di un’integrazione fra diritti umani e bioetica, dall’altro l’urgenza di dare un solido ed autentico fondamento agli uni e all’altra. È questa una problematica di cruciale importanza, perché sia i diritti umani che la bioetica risentono di una crisi metafisica tanto più evidente e acuta quanto più ci si avvicina ai momenti di maggiore precarietà e debolezza dell’esistenza umana, nei quali la vita umana “è”, semplicemente “è”. In questo senso, l’embrione umano è l’emblema di ogni povertà ed emarginazione. La via d’uscita dalla “crisi” e dunque la ricerca del fondamento - sia per i diritti umani che per la bioetica - va trovata all luce della dignità umana, sempre presente con la stessa forza e intensità in tutti e in ciascuno, da rispettare e promuovere in primo luogo nel rispetto e nella promozione del diritto ad esistere che della dignità è la prima manifestazione, la più immediata concretizzazione.

Placebo-controlled studies in rheumatoid arthritis: ethical issues

1Such a study design balances known and unknown factors that may affect response in the study groups, and also quantifies the placebo response. This design allows the efficacy, or lack of efficacy, of a treatment to be measured directly relative to the placebo response, which may vary in different studies. The double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomised clinical trial—though not without limitations in the applicability of its findings to clinical practice 2,3 —is a powerful scientific tool that has become almost a prerequisite for demonstrating the efficacy of a new therapy, both to clinicians and to drug regulatory authorities. Various ethical guidelines have been proposed to govern the performance of clinical trials. The Declaration of Helsinki, drafted after the Nuremberg trials and subsequently updated, 4

Neo-fascist legal theory on trial : an interpretation of Carl Schmitt's defence at Nuremberg from the perspective of Franz Neumann's critical theory of law

This article addresses, from a Frankfurt School perspective on law identified with Franz Neumann and more recently Habermas, the attack upon the principles of war criminality formulated at the Nuremberg trials by the increasingly influential legal and political theory of Carl Schmitt. It also considers the contradictions within certain of the defence arguments that Schmitt himself resorted to when interrogated as a possible war crimes defendant at Nuremberg. The overall argument is that a distinctly internal, or “immanent”, form of critique is required of Schmitt's position, in which its is found wanting even on its own terms. In principle, the application of this dialectical mode of critique can allow a genuine debate to emerge between those seeking to continue both the Schmittian and critical theory traditions, whilst safeguarding the latter from the dangers of formulating polemical interventions that are, in effect, counterproductive to their own intentions.

Justice, Peace and Dominicans 1216–1999 IV — Francisco Vitoria: The Rights of Enemies and Strangers

Under the heading ‘Vitoria, Founder of International Law’ Blackfriars of October 1946 devoted a whole issue to the Spanish Dominican who had died 400 years earlier. The timing could not have been more appropriate: what one might call the ‘legal audit’ of the Second World War was in full swing. Uppermost in the minds of the contributors were the Nuremberg Trials (verdicts delivered that month). Article 6 of the Tribunal Charter defined crimes against ‘humanity’ (the contemporary, secularized version of natural law) in terms that would have been recognizable to Vitoria, and indeed—via 400 years of development—owed much to his original concept of the law of nations. Then there were the atomic bombs used the previous year. The end of the world war had left a legacy of guilt about the practice of destroying whole cities by strategic bombing, culminating at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This put the principle of non-combatant immunity—fully integrated with just war theory for the first time by Vitoria—at the centre of the arguments for and against the new weapons. Further, the revival of international law in the first half of the twentieth century had issued the previous October in the United Nations Charter and would lead in 1948 (just 50 years ago last month) to the signing of the Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide Convention; and three years later, in 1949, there was to be the first of the Geneva Conventions on the limitation of warfare.

Population Statistics, the Holocaust, and the Nuremberg Trials

THIS ARTICLE PRESENTS the findings of my recent research on the role of population statistics and related data systems, methods, and personnel in planning and carrying out the Holocaust. Specific attention is given to events in Germany, Poland, France, the Netherlands, and Norway. In addition, the article examines how population data were used in the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials following the conclusion of World War II.' This research was based on an extensive review of contemporaneous and secondary sources that deal with the Holocaust and the Nuremberg trials, the relevant national data systems, and the activities of a number of the statisticians and demographers involved. No attempt was made, however, to develop new estimates of Holocaust mortality, nor was any evidence found to call into question the mortality approximations made over 50 years ago. In many respects, examining the use of statistics and statistical systems in the service of genocide is a more productive undertaking than trying to fine-tune the estimates of Holocaust victims or, indeed, the mortality caused by any genocide. Such figures are often clouded in both secrecy and uncertainty, so that beyond a certain point, efforts at refining estimates of genocide mortality have little purpose or prospect of success. This is a conclusion on which many Holocaust scholars, prosecutors, and statisticians seem to agree (Fein 1981; Hilberg 1985: 1202; Spirer and Spirer 1993: 3). On the other hand, the largely unrecognized role that statistics and statistical systems played in the Holocaust has implications for the investigation and criminal prosecution of genocide more generally as well as for fostering standards of ethical behavior among those working as statisticians and demographers. I also hope that knowledge of this historical experience may contribute to the development of more prudent national statistical policies now and in the future. This article thus addresses an understudied borderland between demography, statistical policy, human rights defense, and Holocaust scholar

The Shrunken Head of Buchenwald: Icons of Atrocity at Nuremberg

OVERLOOKED IN THE CELEBRATIONS OF the fiftieth anniversary of the Nuremberg Trial, the most significant criminal action in history, was the proceeding's great tedium. Rebecca West, who reported on the trial for the JNew iorker, described the courtroom as citadel of boredom.' The trial was long eleven months would pass from the reading of the indictment on 21 November 1945 until the tribunal pronounced judgment on 1 October 1946 though perhaps not inordinately so: the O.J. Simpson murder trial took nearly as long as the entire Nuremberg Trial, with its twenty-one defendants and complex indictment enumerating crimes committed over the course of a decade and the space of a continent. The savage impatience that the trial aroused in its spectators was less a function of duration than of how the prosecution chose to present its evidence. Following the strategy of the chief counsel for the United States, Robert H.Jackson (on leave from his position as associate justice of the Supreme Court), the prosecution structured its case around captured documentary evidence, material considered harder and more reliable than eyewitness testimony.4 As a result, much of the Nuremberg Trial was devoted to the numbing recitation of thousands of documents, a process less suited to highlighting the malignancy of the defendants than the ingenuity of IBM, whose translation machine, specially designed for the Nuremberg courtroom, permitted the four-way simultaneous interpretation of material read into the court's record. And so, a trial many had feared would devolve into sensationalism came to assume all the drama of antitrust litigation. But Nuremberg was not without its moments of spectacle. One of these came on 13 December 1945, near the end of the proceeding's first month. Thomas J. Dodd, an assistant prosecutor (and future U.S. Senator) who had spent much of the afternoon reading affidavits about the deplorable conditions in the concentration camps, brought the court's attention to an unusual exhibit: We do not wish to dwell on this pathological phase of the Nazi culture, he announced, but we do feel compelled to offer one additional exhibit, which we offer as Exhibit Number

Preparations for the Nuremberg Trial: The O.S.S., Charles Dwork, and the Holocaust

Preparations for the Nuremberg Trial: The O.S.S., Charles Dwork, and the Holocaust

Marble Columns and Jupiter Lights: Theatrical and Cinematic Modeling of Soviet Show Trials in the 1920s

disguising their theatrical nature. Yet if we examine the precursors of these legal melodramas from the earlier decade, we see that the institution of the show trial evolved as part of the overall theatricalization of public life during the 1920s. Like other experiments in Revolutionary theatricality, pokazatel'nye protsessy put to use the dramatic means of representation available in Soviet society at the time, i.e., the theater and cinema. Tracing the evolution of public legal spectacles reveals that the illegitimacy of Stalinist show trials arose not merely from their theatricality, a feature shared by public trials as dissimilar as the O.J. Simpson trial, the Nuremberg trials, and the Scopes Monkey trial. Rather, the injustice of the purges arose from the severe imbalance in access to the dramatic means of representation which figured as an essential part of the Soviet show trial

Coming to Terms with the Past in Germany after 1945 and 1989: Public Judgments on Procedures and Justice

Germany presents the unique case of a society that has been forced to come to terms with its past twice within a fifty‐year period. This double experience can contribute to our understanding of the legal processes of lustration. This paper examines a largely neglected dimension of this phenomenon: justice judgments by the general population. Justice judgments about the Nuremberg Trials and denazification after 1945 are compared to analogous procedures that took place in post‐communist East Germany after 1989. The study uses two theoretical models in its comparative approach: the Leventhal model, and the “group value” model of procedural justice set forth by Lind and Tyler. The analysis is based on survey data collected by the Office of the Military Government of the U.S. (OMGUS) from 1945 to 1949, and survey data taken in East Germany from 1989 to 1994. The results lend support to the “group value” model for the specific situation of social transition. During both periods justice judgments developed according to analogous patterns. The German experience yields some important lessons for legal policies of lustration.

The experience of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda

The ancient dream of international criminal jurisdiction is gradually becoming a reality. Article 227 of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles provided that German Emperor Wilhelm II should be tried by an international court to answer charges of “flagrant offences against international morality and the sacred authority of treaties”. But since the Netherlands refused to give up the accused, the trial never took place, and Wilhelm II died in exile in Holland in 1941. Articles 228 and 229 of the Treaty providing for the prosecution of war criminals were applied in a disappointing way in the Leipzig trial. The Nuremberg and Tokyo trials after the Second World War undeniably represented progress towards the creation of a body with truly international criminal jurisdiction, but they were greatly influenced by their origins and in effect applied the law and justice of the victors rather than those of the universal community of States.

The International Court of Justice, Nuclear Weapons and the Law

International law as it applies to armed conflict necessarily treads a fine line between irrelevance to and complicity in its subject matter. The emergence of this body of law has been slow and painful, its foundational irony being that the treaty establishing the basis of modern international humanitarian law – the Nuremberg trials – was signed by the Allies on the same day that the United States dropped its second atomic bomb on Japan. This uncertain beginning, combined with the central role that nuclear weapons came to play in Cold War foreign policy, render it hardly surprising that the legal status of this most devastating class of weapons remained unclear for over half a century and is likely to remain so for some time to come.