Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today

It was 1945.

The war was over.

Slowly, painfully,

life came back to the ruins of Europe.

The war was over, but there was no peace.

Despair crouched over the continent.

Hopelessness circled Europe like a bird of prey.

Why?

What were the forces?

What were the issues in a war that turned nations

into rubble heaps and populations into beggars.

The people wanted the answers.

They wanted to know what happened and why.

In the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg,

the people of the world came together,

for there sat the international military tribunal

to judge the chief Nazi war criminals.

Justice Robert H. Jackson, the chief American prosecutor

makes the opening statement for the prosecution.

The privilege of opening

the first trial in history.

The privilege of opening the first trial

in history for crimes against the peace of the world

imposes a grave responsibility.

The wrongs, which we seek to condemn and punish

have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating

that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored,

because it cannot survive their being repeated.

That four great nations, flushed with victory

and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance

and voluntarily submit their captive enemies

to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant

tributes that power has ever paid to reason.

This inquest represents the practical effort

of four of the most mighty of nations with the support

of 15 more to utilize international law to meet

the greatest menace of our times, aggressive war.

The common sense of mankind demands that law shall not stop

with the punishment of petty crimes by little people.

It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power

and who make deliberate and concerted use of it

to set in motion evils, which leave no home

in the world untouched.

In the prisoner's dock sit 20 odd broken men,

reproached by the humiliation of those they have led,

almost as bitterly as by the desolation

of those they have attacked.

Their personal capacity for evil is forever past.

Merely as individuals, their fate

is of little consequence to the world.

What makes this inquest significant is that these prisoners

represent sinister influences that will lurk in the world

long after their bodies have returned to dust.

They are living symbols of the arrogance and cruelty

of power, of racial hatreds, of terrorism and violence.

They are symbols of fierce nationalisms,

and of militarism, of intrigue

and war-making, which have embroiled Europe

generation after generation, crushing its manhood,

destroying its homes and impoverishing its lives.

They have so identified themselves

with the philosophies they conceived

and with the forces they directed that any tenderness

to them is a victory and an encouragement to all the evils

which are attached to their names.

What these men stand for we will patiently

and temperately disclose.

We will give you undeniable proof of incredible events.

The catalog of crimes will omit nothing.

It may be that these men of troubled conscience

do not regard a trial as a favor,

but they do have a fair opportunity to defend themselves,

a favor which they rarely extended

to their fellow countrymen.

We will not ask you to convict these men

on the testimony of their foes.

There is no count of the indictment

that cannot be proved by books and records.

And we will show you the defendants' own films.

You will see their own conduct and hear their own voices,

as they re-enact for you, from the screen,

some of the events in the course of the conspiracy.

The acts of the defendants have bathed the world in blood.

And set civilization back a century.

They have subjected their European neighbors

to every spoliation and depravation.

They have brought the German people

to the lowest ebb of wretchedness.

They have stirred hatreds and incited

domestic violence on every continent.

These are the things that stand in the dock,

shoulder to shoulder with these prisoners.

The real complaining party at your bar is civilization.

The United States of America

present count one of the indictment;

that all the defendants participated as organizers

or accomplices in a common plan or conspiracy

to commit crimes against peace, war crimes

and crimes against humanity.

The aims of this conspiracy were open and notorious.

The aims of this conspiracy

were open and notorious.

It was far different from any other conspiracy

ever unfolded before a court of justice.

Its history is the history of the Nazi party,

which grew from the brawling streets of Munich in the 20s.

And from the beginning, Adolf Hitler and his followers

were committed to the use of any means,

whether or not they were legal or honorable.

Their aim was the highest degree of control

over the German community.

Their intentions were blatantly put forth

in Mein Kampf and the party program.

And they preached their favorite doctrine

up and down the land.

They said that persons of a so-called German blood

were a master race entitled to subjugate

or even exterminate other races.

They said that the German should be ruled

under the Fuhrer Principle or leadership principle

by which each sub-leader owed unconditional obedience

to his superior and so on right up to Adolf Hitler.

They said that war was a noble

and necessary activity of Germans.

And they said that the Nazi Party alone

had the right to rule Germany and the right

to destroy the party's enemies.

Their rise to power was based on fraud,

deceit, intimidation and coercion,

culminating finally in terror and flame.

Into that flame went the Democratic constitution

of the Weimar Republic and the freedom of the German people.

For the fire set by the Nazis

extended to the very Reichstag.

Hans Gisevius, a witness who formerly held a high position

in the Berlin Police Administration,

tells of his investigation of the Reichstag fire.

To speak briefly and to state the facts.

First of all, we ascertain that quite generally,

Hitler had stated the wish

for a large scale propaganda campaign.

Goebbels took on the job of making the necessary proposals

and it was Goebbels who first thought

of setting the Reichstag on fire.

A group of 10 reliable S.A. men was made ready

and now Goering was informed about every detail of the plan.

It was expected from Goering and he gave his assurances

that he would do so, that the police would be instructed,

while still suffering from shock, to take up a false trail.

Using the Reichstag fire

as a pretext for seizing power,

the Nazi conspirators lost no time in tearing

Germany away from a policy of peace.

Late in 1933, they led their nation

out of the Disarmament Conference,

quit the League of Nations and embarked

on a course of secret rearmament.

By 1934, the new armaments program, designed by defendants

Goering, Schacht and Funk, was going full blast.

German industry was again turning out the tools of war.

The plants hummed and one year later Goering could announce:

From the strong foundation

of the National Socialist Ideology today rises once again

the German Armed Forces.

A few days later, General von Blomberg

announced the new law for compulsory military service.

The law was signed by defendants Goering, Hess, Frank,

Frick, Schacht and Von Neurath.

The training began.

Finally, in the spring of 1936, the Nazis

sent their new troops marching into the Rhineland.

Mein Fuhrer, on March 7th, 1936,

soldiers of the army, which was created

by order of the Fuhrer, crossed the sacred river

of German history and occupied their former garrisons.

They pledged the Fuhrer, whatever decisions he may make,

unbreakable faith and obedience and they vow

to follow him and to prove their sincerity,

by their never ending love for Germany.

The columns grew longer.

The sound of boots grew louder on the streets of Nuremberg.

But Hitler said:

The German people is not a people,

which welcomes a war today,

tomorrow or the day after tomorrow.

That is not in the character of the Germans.

He is by nature not only peaceful and peace loving,

but above all conciliatory.

He wants to work.

In our country are millions of peasants,

they want to till their fields.

They want to bring in their harvests.

There are millions of workers,

they want to perform their work.

But the Nazi conspirators,

in the name of Lebensraum, continued to plot

new aggressions against peace.

In November 1937, Hitler called a special meeting

with defendants Goering, Von Neurath and Raeder

and Generals von Blomberg and von Frick.