When people think of the Holocaust, they think of Auschwitz and Dachau. Not of Russia or the Ukraine, and certainly not a town called Kharkov. But in reality, the first war crime trial against the Nazis was in this tiny Ukrainian town, which is fitting, because it is where the Holocaust actually began. Judgment Before Nuremberg is also the story of Dawson’s personal journey to this place, to the scene of the crime, and the discovery of the trial which began the tortuous process of avenging the murder of his grandparents, great-grandparents and tens of thousands of fellow Ukrainians consumed at the dawn of the Shoah, a moment and crime now largely cloaked in darkness.
The Nuremberg Trials (IMT), most notable for their aim to bring perpetrators of Nazi war crimes to justice in the wake of World War II, paved the way for global conversations about genocide, justice, and human rights that continue to this day. As Francine Hirsch reveals in this new history of the trials, a central part of the story has been ignored or forgotten: the critical role the Soviet Union played in making them happen in the first place. While there were practical reasons for this omission--until recently, critical Soviet documents about Nuremberg were buried in the former Soviet archives, and even Russian researchers had limited access--Hirsch shows that there were political reasons as well. The Soviet Union was regarded by its wartime Allies not just as a fellow victor but a rival, and it was not in the interests of the Western powers to highlight the Soviet contribution to postwar justice. Stalin's Show Trials of the 1930s had both provided a model for Nuremberg and made a mockery of it, undermining any pretense of fairness and justice. Further complicating matters was the fact that the Soviets had allied with the Nazis before being invaded by them. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 hung over the courtroom, as did the fact that the everyone knew that the Soviet prosecution had presented the court with falsified evidence about the Katyn massacre of Polish officers, attempting to pin one of their own major war crimes on the Nazis. For lead American prosecutor Robert Jackson and his colleagues, focusing too much on the Soviet role in the trials threatened the overall credibility of the IMT and possibly even the collective memory of the war. Soviet Justice at Nuremberg illuminates the ironies of Stalin's henchmen presiding in moral judgment over the Nazis. In effect, the Nazis had learned mass-suppression and mass-murder techniques from the Soviets, their former allies, and now the latter were judging them for crimes they had themselves committed. Yet the Soviets had borne the brunt of the fighting--and the losses--in World War II, and this gave them undeniable authority. Moreover, Soviet jurists were the first to conceive of a legal framework for viewing war as a crime, and without that framework the IMT would have had no basis. In short, there would be no denying their place at the tribunal, nor their determination to make the most of it. Illuminating the shifting relationships between the four countries involved (the U.S., Great Britain, France, and the U.S.S.R.) Hirsch's book shows how each was not just facing off against the Nazi defendants, but against each other and offers a new history of Nuremberg.
The Nuremberg trials brought to public attention the worst of the Nazi atrocities. Judgment at Nuremberg brings those trials to life. Abby Mann's riveting drama Judgment at Nuremberg not only brought some of the worst Nazi atrocities to public attention, but has become, along with Elie Wiesel's Night and Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl, one of the twentieth century's most important records of the Holocaust. Originally written as a 1957 television play, later made into an Academy Award winning 1961 film, and available now for the first time in print (using the text of Mann's recent Broadway adaptation), Judgment at Nuremberg is as potent and relevant as ever. To this day the Nuremberg trials stand as a model for international criminal tribunals, due in large measure to the spotlight thrown on them by Mann's dramatic interpretation of the historic events. Mann's overwhelming compassion strikes at the heart of human suffering--his achievement has been to reaffirm humanity and justice in the wake of unspeakable evil.
This is an examination of the law's response to the crimes of the Holocaust. It studies exemplary proceedings including the Nuremberg trial of the major Nazi war criminals and the Israeli trials of Adolf Eichmann and John Demjanjuk.
In the face of conflict and despair, we often console ourselves by saying that history will be the judge. Today’s oppressors may escape being held responsible for their crimes, but the future will condemn them. Those who stand up for progressive values are on the right side of history. As ideas once condemned to the dustbin of history—white supremacy, hypernationalism, even fascism—return to the world, threatening democratic institutions and values, can we still hold out hope that history will render its verdict? Joan Wallach Scott critically examines the belief that history will redeem us, revealing the implicit politics of appeals to the judgment of history. She argues that the notion of a linear, ever-improving direction of history hides the persistence of power structures and hinders the pursuit of alternative futures. This vision of necessary progress perpetuates the assumption that the nation-state is the culmination of history and the ultimate source for rectifying injustice. Scott considers the Nuremberg Tribunal and South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which claimed to carry out history’s judgment on Nazism and apartheid, and contrasts them with the movement for reparations for slavery in the United States. Advocates for reparations call into question a national history that has long ignored enslavement and its racist legacies. Only by this kind of critical questioning of the place of the nation-state as the final source of history’s judgment, this book shows, can we open up room for radically different conceptions of justice.
This book traces the history of the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial of 1946-47, through the eyes of the Austrian émigré psychiatrist Leo Alexander, whose investigations helped the US prosecution. Schmidt provides a detailed insight into the origins of human rights in medical science and into the changing role of international law, ethics and politics.
Mission at Nuremberg is Tim Townsend’s gripping story of the American Army chaplain sent to save the souls of the Nazis incarcerated at Nuremberg, a compelling and thought-provoking tale that raises questions of faith, guilt, morality, vengeance, forgiveness, salvation, and the essence of humanity. Lutheran minister Henry Gerecke was fifty years old when he enlisted as am Army chaplain during World War II. As two of his three sons faced danger and death on the battlefield, Gerecke tended to the battered bodies and souls of wounded and dying GIs outside London. At the war’s end, when other soldiers were coming home, Gerecke was recruited for the most difficult engagement of his life: ministering to the twenty-one Nazis leaders awaiting trial at Nuremburg. Based on scrupulous research and first-hand accounts, including interviews with still-living participants and featuring sixteen pages of black-and-white photos, Mission at Nuremberg takes us inside the Nuremburg Palace of Justice, into the cells of the accused and the courtroom where they faced their crimes. As the drama leading to the court’s final judgments unfolds, Tim Townsend brings to life the developing relationship between Gerecke and Hermann Georing, Albert Speer, Wilhelm Keitel, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and other imprisoned Nazis as they awaited trial. Powerful and harrowing, Mission at Nuremberg offers a fresh look at one most horrifying times in human history, probing difficult spiritual and ethical issues that continue to hold meaning, forcing us to confront the ultimate moral question: Are some men so evil they are beyond redemption?
Turkey’s bid to join the European Union has lent new urgency to the issue of the Armenian Genocide as differing interpretations of the genocide are proving to be a major reason for the delay of the its accession. This book provides vital background information and is a prime source of legal evidence and authentic Turkish eyewitness testimony of the intent and the crime of genocide against the Armenians. After a long and painstaking effort, the authors, one an Armenian, the other a Turk, generally recognized as the foremost experts on the Armenian Genocide, have prepared a new, authoritative translation and detailed analysis of the Takvim-i Vekâyi, the official Ottoman Government record of the Turkish Military Tribunals concerning the crimes committed against the Armenians during World War I. The authors have compiled the documentation of the trial proceedings for the first time in English and situated them within their historical and legal context. These documents show that Wartime Cabinet ministers, Young Turk party leaders, and a number of others inculpated in these crimes were court-martialed by the Turkish Military Tribunals in the years immediately following World War I. Most were found guilty and received sentences ranging from prison with hard labor to death. In remarkable contrast to Nuremberg, the Turkish Military Tribunals were conducted solely on the basis of existing Ottoman domestic penal codes. This substitution of a national for an international criminal court stands in history as a unique initiative of national self-condemnation. This compilation is significantly enhanced by an extensive analysis of the historical background, political nature and legal implications of the criminal prosecution of the twentieth century’s first state-sponsored crime of genocide.
By prosecuting war crimes, the Nuremberg trials sought to educate West Germans about their criminal past, provoke their total rejection of Nazism, and convert them to democracy. More than all of the other Nuremberg proceedings, the High Command Case against fourteen of Hitler's generals embraced these goals, since the charges-the murder of POWs, the terrorizing of civilians, the extermination of Jews-also implicated the 20 million ordinary Germans who had served in the military. This trial was the true test of Nuremberg's potential to inspire national reflection on Nazi crime. Its importance notwithstanding, the High Command Case has been largely neglected by historians. Valerie Hébert's study—the only book in English on the subject—draws extensively on the voluminous trial records to reconstruct these proceedings in full: prosecution and defense strategies; evidence for and against the defendants and the military in general; the intricacies of the judgment; and the complex legal issues raised, such as the defense of superior orders, military necessity, and command responsibility. Crucially, she also examines the West German reaction to the trial and the intense debate over its fairness and legitimacy, ignited by the sentencing of soldiers who were seen by the public as having honorably defended their country. Hébert argues that the High Command Trial was itself a success, producing eleven guilty verdicts along with an incontrovertible record of the German military's crimes. But, viewing the trial from beyond the courtroom, she also contends that it made no lasting imprint on the German public's consciousness. And because the United States was eager to secure West Germany as an ally in the Cold War, American officials eventually consented to parole and clemency programs for all of the convicted officers, so that by the late 1950s not one remained imprisoned. Superbly researched and impeccably told, Hitler's Generals on Trial addresses fundamental questions concerning the meaning of justice after atrocity and genocide, the moral imperative of punishment for these crimes, the link between justice and memory, and the relevance of the Nuremberg trials for transitional justice processes today. Inasmuch as these trials coined the vocabulary of modern international criminal law and set an agenda for transitional justice that remains in place today, Hébert's book marks a major contribution to military and legal history.
The 24 defendants were: Hermann Wilhelm Göring, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Robert Ley, Wilhelm Keitel, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Julius Streicher, Walter Funk, Hjalmar Schacht, Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, Karl Dönitz, Erich Raeder, Baldur von Schirach, Fritz Sauckel, Alfred Jodl, Martin Bormann, Franz von Papen, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Albert Speer, Constantin von Neurath, and Hans Fritzsche.
