Wieder aufgerollt: Der Nürnberger Prozess

Now that several decades have passed since WWII and the Nuremberg Trials and the dust has settled so to speak, it's time to take a step back, resist the urge to look at things emotionally, and examine the errors, inaccuracies and injustices that were committed during these infamous trials. If truth, justice, and righteousness were priorities for Nuremberg organizers and prosecutors, then the Soviets (who killed more than 60 million European Christians) would have also been tried and executed. Consider the following:

"You'll see. A few years from now the lawyers of the world will condemn this trial. You can't have a trial without law." -Joachim von Ribbentrop, 20 November 1945. Gilbert, Gustave M. (1995) (1947). Nuremberg Diary. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press. ISBN 978-0-306-80661-2. Page 36.

U.S. Senator Robert Taft said America's participation in the Nuremberg trial is a blot on the honor of the United States, for which Europeans will condemn us in the future. Taft criticized the Nuremberg Trials for trying National Socialist war criminals under ex post facto laws. On Oct. 6, 1946, Senator Taft said, "The trial of the vanquished by the victors cannot be impartial no matter how it is hedged about with the forms of justice." -Kennedy, John Fitzgerald; Profiles in Courage. Sorensen, Ted (1955). Page 191.

Chief U.S. prosecutor Jackson, in a letter discussing the weaknesses of the trial, in October 1945 told U.S. President Truman that the Allies themselves "have done or are doing some of the very things we are prosecuting the Germans for. The French are so violating the Geneva Convention in the treatment of prisoners of war that our command is taking back prisoners sent to them. We are prosecuting plunder and our Allies are practicing it. We say aggressive war is a crime and one of our allies asserts sovereignty over the Baltic States based on no title except conquest." Luban, David (1994). Legal Modernism: Law, Meaning, and Violence. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. ISBN 978-0-472-10380-5. Page 360-361. "The Legacy of Nuremberg". PBS Online/WGBH. 1 March 2006. Archived from the original on 29 September 2011. Retrieved 23 November 2011.

Associate Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas charged that the Allies were guilty of "substituting power for principle" at Nuremberg. "I thought at the time and still think that the Nuremberg trials were unprincipled," he wrote. "Law was created ex post facto to suit the passion and clamor of the time."'Dönitz at Nuremberg: A Reappraisal', H. K. Thompson, Jr., and Henry Strutz, (Torrance, Calif.: 1983). Page 194.

U.S. Deputy Chief Counsel Abraham Pomerantz resigned in protest at the low caliber of the judges assigned to try the industrial war criminals such as those at I.G. Farben. Ambruster, Howard Watson (1947). Treason's Peace. Beechhurst Press. Page 411.

"The statements which were admitted as evidence were obtained from men who had first been kept in solitary confinement for three, four and five months. . . . The investigators would put a black hood over the accused's head and then punch him in the face with brass knuckles, kick him and beat him with rubber hoses . . . All but two of the Germans, in the 139 cases we investigated, had been kicked in the testicles beyond repair. This was standard operating procedure with our American investigators." "Strong men were reduced to broken wrecks ready to mumble any admission demanded by their prosecutors." - Judge Edward L. Van Roden. Washington Daily News, January 9th, 1949. The Sunday Pictorial, January 23rd, 1949.

The validity of the court has been questioned on a number of grounds: The trials were conducted under their own rules of evidence. The Charter of the International Military Tribunal (IMT) permitted the use of normally inadmissible "evidence". Article 19 specified that "The Tribunal shall not be bound by technical rules of evidence ... and shall admit any evidence which it deems to have probative value". Article 21 of the IMT Charter stipulated: The Tribunal shall not require proof of facts of common knowledge but shall take judicial notice thereof. It shall also take judicial notice of official governmental documents and reports of the United (Allied) Nations, including acts and documents of the committees set up in the various allied countries for the investigation of war crimes, and the records and findings of military and other Tribunals of any of the United (Allied) Nations.

The defendants were not allowed to appeal or affect the selection of judges. A. L. Goodhart, Professor at Oxford, opposed the view that, because the judges were appointed by the victors, the Tribunal was not impartial and could not be regarded as a court in the true sense. A. L. Goodhart, "The Legality of the Nuremberg Trials", Juridical Review, Vol. 56, April, 1946. Pages 1, 5.

With a prologue at the start of the Nuremberg Trials, and an epilogue of the verdict and the hangings, this German feature tells the events from the rise of Hitler to the end of the European campaign in a prosecutorial fashion.

This is the third movie of its type I have seen in the past week. Therefore I may be suffering a surfeit. Or I may be able to appreciate the cinematic techniques better. Confronted for the third time with images of concentration camps, naked, weary skin over raw bones, it's simply too much to grasp any more. I can't bear to look at that. The sight of people explaining their participation as failures of vision, seem to me to be ridiculous.

That may have been the film maker's intention.

I thought that this was going to be a serious report about the Nuremberg trials, with some original testimonies in full length but no, already in 1958 this "documentary" (that was based on an article in newspaper/magazine "Illustrierte") had the same non-critical approach to the juristic main event of 1945/1946 as in our days. No in-depth character analyses, no interviews, just a sensation story. Overlong warsequences and the very disturbing hanging of Sudeten-SS Karl Hermann Frank in Prague in 1946 make it not recommendable.