The Nuremberg trial (1945-1946) is the crime of crimes
“Just” or “unjust”, every war is a butchery.
The winner is a good butcher.
The loser is not as good a butcher.
The winner can perhaps give the loser a lesson in butchery.
He should not administer lessons of law, justice or virtue to him.
Yet that is what the winners of 1945 did.
In 1945-1946, at the Nuremberg trial, the four victors of the recently ended war instituted themselves as judges of the vanquished, whom they found guilty, and punished.
They punished him for crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity, and they held themselves innocent of such crimes.[1]
However, before or during the war, the victors committed such crimes.
Then, after the war, they committed still others: summary executions, deportations of about twelve million Germans, gigantic thefts and looting (of gold, silver, platinum, bank holdings, artwork, scientific patents, industrial facilities), the amputation of a third of the country and splitting of the remainder into four parts, military occupation with the implementation of martial law, takeover of radio stations and newspapers imposing either Hollywood-style or Stalinist propaganda grounded in stories of wholly invented atrocities (“gas chambers”, “steam chambers”, “gas vans”, “gas carriages”, alleged mass killings by drowning, with quicklime or electricity,…) fabricating a phenomenon of mass hysteria based on repentance where the vanquished, becoming after time possessed by a fury of self-accusation, espouses the cause of his conqueror, convinces himself that he belongs to a race of born criminals, runs headlong into servitude and is taken with hatred for whoever suggests that he calm down, reflect a bit, look closely to see whether that with which he has been inculcated is true or not.
Those crimes of after the war were committed solely by the winner, as the loser for his part found himself in a state of total submission, bound hand and foot in a devastated country.
In itself, the Nuremberg trial was a crime against peace, a war crime and a crime against humanity.
– The Nuremberg trial was a crime against peace insofar as, in the very words of its main organiser, the American prosecutor Jackson, it was “a continuation of the war effort of the Allied nations”; it thus amounted to a war waged against a disarmed opponent; fifty years later, the victors have still not seen fit to sign a peace treaty with the vanquished.
– The Nuremberg trial was a war crime in that it allowed the winners to hang prisoners, and, fifty years later, this type of trial, iniquitous and one-sided, to a greater or lesser degree continues.
– The Nuremberg trial was a crime against humanity in that it allowed the winners to put an entire country beyond the pale of civilised nations, beyond the pale of humanity; fifty years after the end of the conflict, the loser still stands as a guilty party; there is no statute of limitations on his crimes against humanity. Those of the winners have not been tried and never will be. The winners’ innocence is to stand for all time.
In 1945-1946 the Nuremberg trial gave the signal for countless crimes that continue to this day with trials of alleged “Nazi war criminals”, trials of alleged “accomplices of the Nazi war criminals” and, also, trials of revisionists, who are likened to “Nazi war criminals” because they seek, precisely, a revision of the Nuremberg trial.
In its essence, the Nuremberg trial has precedents in history and everyone knows that Justice has always lain down in the winner’s bed but, by its consequences, and thanks especially to the capacities of indoctrination peculiar to our age, it has broken new ground in crime.
It will have been, and remains, the crime of crimes, ever since there have been men who kill.[2]
January 16, 1997
____________________
[1] In addition, the vanquished was punished for having committed those three crimes within the framework of a fourth crime, that of “conspiracy”.
[2] See, by Carlos Porter, the brochure Not Guilty at Nuremberg in which the author also deals with the Tokyo trial. As much an aberration in its premise as the Nuremberg trial, that of Tokyo let show less cynicism, hatred and fanaticism; the Indian judge, for his part, was able to go so far as to express and explain, in an official manner and not without a remarkably broad view of things, his disagreement with the very principle of the trial. At Nuremberg, essentially a Judeo-American trial, Jewish organisations were an interested party, and they left their distinctive stamp on proceedings.