Judgment At Nuremberg Quotes

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.

In January 1951, high commissioner of occupied Germany John McCloy announced that only five of the 15 death sentences from the Nuremberg judgments would be carried out. He then reduced the sentences of 64 out of the remaining 74 war criminals. One third of these were to be released immediately. He also reduced the sentences of all remaining convicted doctors who had experimented on concentration camp inmates. McCloy had sat in Adolf Hitler's box at the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin.

When the English prosecuting attorney observes that “from Mein Kampf the road led straight to the gas chambers at Maidenek,” he touches on the real subject of the trial, that of the historic responsibilities of Western nihilism and the only one which, nevertheless, was not really discussed at Nuremberg, for reasons only too evident. A trial cannot be conducted by announcing the general culpability of a civilization. Only the actual deeds which, at least, stank in the nostrils of the entire world were brought to judgment.

There is a crucial omission. The front page should display the words of the Nuremberg judgment of prominent Nazis—words that must be repeated until they penetrate general consciousness: Aggression is “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” And alongside these words there should be the admonition of the chief prosecutor for the United States, Robert Jackson: “The record on which we judge these defendants is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well.

Ever since the judgment at Nuremberg, it has been undeniable that aggressive war is not a national right but an international crime.

A Jewish-Christian lawyer once wrote to me that, as he considered the serious meaning of the Nuremberg war-crimes trials, “I knew then that no moral law was written on a blade of grass, in a drop of water, or even in the stars. I realized the necessity of the Divine Immutable Law as set forth in the Sacred Torah, consisting of definite commandments, statutes, ordinances and judgments.

In answer to the 64,000-ruble question—“What went wrong?”—Bukovsky cites the failure to render judgment on the Soviet system on its dissolution: “We were given a chance to win in 1991. To do it we needed a Nuremberg trial, but not a trial of people. In a country like the Soviet Union, if you tried to find all the guilty, you would end up with 19 million people, and who needs another Gulag? This isn’t about punishing individuals. It’s about judging the system.