List of double standards and injustice of Nuremberg Trial

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Panzermahn
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#61

Post by Panzermahn » 02 Aug 2004, 09:40

Hi David,

thanks for your thoughtful and "thought-provoking' replies
i don’t know how it works where you live, but in Anglo-American law the prosecuting charges are brought by the executive branch of government, and the judicial branch decides whether they have been proven. Your comment “that additional charges could influence much in the defendents fate” is also wide of the mark – no individual IMT defendant was charged with responsibility for the Katyn Forest massacre, and the fact that the charge was bogus probably helped the defendants, since that would tend to make the judges skeptical of the remaining charges.
A more logical analogy from me. Let's said a person was being accused of manslaughter and was found guilty..and then he was later added with the charges of murder and was found guilty too. So wouldn't it be possible that the punishment handed down to the defendent would be heavier with the additional charges of murder inclusive of the manslaughter penalties? Yes, in my country, the executive branch of the government are responsible for prosecuting and the judicial branchg are responsible for determining whether the accused are guilty or not.
The IMT didn’t convict anyone of a war crime based on an unrestricted submarine warfare theory.
Then why was Donitz were convicted out of Count 3 (War Crimes) and Count 4 (Crimes Against Humanity)? Yes, according the Irving, Donitz was allowed the defense of tu quoque, but yet he was still charged

That’s why three of the defendants were acquitted by the IMT judges.


Because those three are anti-Nazis and even the world knew that to hang them would made the IMT a NKVD show trial which the Allied governments are keen to hide the fact. What about the sentencing of

a) Rudolf Hess (flew to Britain and was imprisoned because he wanted to negotiate peace and himself did not ordered or signed illegal orders but yet was charged on all counts?)

b) Konstantin von Neurath (sentenced because he was the Reich's foreign minister before the war and only did what he was supposed to do in the diplomatic field?)

c) Julius Streicher (sentenced to hang because he is the author of hate and pornographic magazine, Der Sturmer?)

d) Alfred Rosenborg (sentenced to hang because he was a philosopher who wrote silly and cranky pseudo anthropology?)

My statement refers to the motion picture footage of the trials of the 20 July 1944 conspirators before the People’s Court. In that footage you will not see “German trial procedures . . . conducted with the primary objective of ascertaining truth, and all parties had united with that aim – the judges conducting the principal examination of witnesses, the opposing counsel being there to underline aspects that favoured the defence or prosecution.”
Irving meant that traditional German kriegsgericht under the supervision of the Wehrmacht as such pointed out by Dr Alfred Maurice de Zayas as was renown for its integrity, not the freak volksgericht by Roland Freisler


Irving says de Zayas was talking about the IMT trial. Since the IMT acquitted the OKW, the issue is, what is meant by the claim of de Zayas that "the verdict on many of the points charged against the High Command(O.K.W.) would probably have been very different"? Here are the possibilities:

(a) Irving is aware of the IMT verdict of acquittal against the OKW, and he has written the passage in a way which deliberately misleads the reader into the false conclusion that the verdict against the OKW was adverse, and caused by withholding evidence;

(b) Irving's paraphrasal of de Zayas is accurate, and both men are ignorant and unaware that the IMT had acquitted the OKW of being a criminal organization;

(c) Irving's paraphrasal is inaccurate, and de Zayas wasn't refering to the IMT proceedings at all. In that case, Irving is ignorant and unaware that the IMT had acquitted the OKW of being a criminal organization, and Irving’s use of the de Zayas quote in the context of the IMT proceedings is fraudulent because de Zayas wasn’t talking about the IMT proceedings; or

(d) You have misquoted Irving.
Sorry to disappoint you, but what de Zayas and i believe Irving meant is that the OKW would not even brought to the charges under IMT if the defence counsel were allowed the records of the Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau. At the end, when the IMT judges Biddle, Parker, Falco, Nikitchenko etc deliberated and stated that the OKW was too loose a structure to be defined as an organization. The acquittal of OKW was not because it was guilty or not guilty but it is because the technicality referring to the definition of the OKW. Yes, OKW was acquitted, but the point is do they need to bring charges to the OKW in the Nuremberg trial if the defense counsel had been allowed access to the records of the Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau?

Panzermahn
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#62

Post by Panzermahn » 02 Aug 2004, 09:53

List of injustices and double standards from David Irving's Nuremberg The Last Battle (Part Three)


29) WHILE THE prosecution had hidden assets like secret sources of Intelligence,
the defence was denied even the right to call every witness it wanted. Although twenty-one lives were at stake, the Tribunal’s view was that the hearing of too many defence witnesses would consume too much time. The witness application lists were rigorously pruned. Jodl applied for nineteen, and was permitted four. In an international trial complicated by the involvement of a dozen European countries,
only one non-German witness, the Swede Birger Dahlerus, was permitted
to the defence. The Dahlerus memoirs, which had undergone the usual editorial treatment to make them suitable for publication in the climate of post-war Europe, were introduced as evidence. But for many years after the war the British government kept secret its entire contemporary file on the negotiations that Göring had conducted
through Dahlerus to preserve the peace – releasing the file only years
after the rest of its contemporary documents; the file revealed that in
1943 the British government had tried to blackmail Dahlerus into silence. [613]

Page 278

[613] See the FO dossier, ‘Translation of Report of Negotiations between
Great Britain and Germany,’ Nov 16, 1942–Apr 16, 1943 (PRO
file FO.371/34482).


30) Despite their overt show of impartiality, the members of the Tribunal were only human. They were the representatives of the conquering powers, come together to pass judgement on the defeated enemy; and all their black gowns, their gold braid, their impassive demeanour, and their legal prose could not alter that. They had arrived in the same planes as the prosecutors; they dined in the same hotels; they could not, as the German saying has it, jump over their own shadows. They were identified wholly with the prosecution – indeed, the president of the Tribunal, Lord Justice Lawrence, habitually and without aforethought used the letterhead of the British prosecuting team for his own correspondence.[622] As German naval judge advocate Otto Kranzbühler would later recall, ‘The attitude of the judges toward their duties ranged all the way from the utmost striving for objectivity down to a barely concealed servility toward the prosecution.’[623]

Page 279-280

[622] Ibid.
[623] E.g. on the letter which Lord Justice Lawrence wrote to R H
Jackson, Jul 26, 1946: the printed heading was ‘British War Crimes
Executive (ES)’, which was also used by Sir David Maxwell Fyfe and
Sir Hartley Shawcross (University of Chicago Law School, R H Jackson
collection).



31) After Andrei Vyshinsky, who had prosecuted at the infamous pre-war Soviet purge trials – Jackson called him merely ‘famous’ – had arrived in Nuremberg, he was wined and dined at the Grand Hotel, not only by Jackson and the American prosecution team that Monday, November 26, but by the Russians on the following Friday and by the British on the Sunday after that.[625] Lord Justice Lawrence and the other judges joined the guests at the Jackson junket. No properly constituted British (or German) court would have tolerated the display of such partiality.

Page 280-281

[625] The Americans held a dinner for Vyshinsky at the Grand Hotel
that Monday, the Russians on the following Friday, Nov 30, and the
British on Saturday after that, Dec 1, 1945; undated letter of R H
Jackson, ‘Thursday’ [Nov 22, 1945] (Library of Congress, Manuscript
Division, R H Jackson papers).


32) THESE AND similar exchanges show how unreliable, if not downright
deceitful, the published transcripts of the Nuremberg trials are. The
only true record is the original wire recording, which was subsequently
processed onto 2011 sound discs. The 17,077 -page mimeographed
transcript, which was of course the only record available to the judges
in reaching their conclusions, is erratic, erroneous, and incomplete; it
has moreover been doctored, in some cases quite blatantly, to the disadvantage of the defence. Thus the foregoing exchange, which is now
available in the National Archives on Nuremberg Trials disc 1440 B,
recorded from the original wire recording, was omitted from page 5661
of the mimeographed daily transcript. It was restored to the (bluebound)
printed volumes only after Milch, checking the transcripts,
protested. This happened more than once. When Robert Jackson asked Milch, ‘Did you know that Speer turned over to the United States all his
personal papers and lists including the minutes of the Central Planning Committee?’, Milch replied, ‘That is a matter of indifference to me.’ Jackson answered menacingly: ‘That will not be indifferent to you.’
This exchange vanished from the published transcript.[665] Asked by
Jackson whether he was an American prisoner, the field marshal retorted
that he was a British prisoner, who had subsequently been declared
an ‘internee’ by the Americans in violation of international law.[666]
Challenged about the lacunæ in his memory he explained to the court
that this had suffered from the severe manhandling he had received
from the British commandos after his capture ‘when I was beaten about
the head’ (by Brigadier Derek Mills-Roberts.)[667]

Page 308-309

[665] Ibid., pages 54–5; Milch diary, Jul 11, 1948.
[666] IMT, vol. ix, page 125 (NA disc 1430B).
[667] Ibid., page 88 (NA disc 1437B).


33) On this, the British lawyer agreed. ‘We must tell the Court that we
are dealing with an experienced politician. He will make the proceedings
ridiculous unless the Tribunal co-operates. The result will be that
the trial is a disaster.’ He recommended that they unofficially convey
this warning to ‘our own judges,’ adding: ‘The Allied Control Council,
for instance, is apprehensive lest Göring’s examination-in-chief do
a great deal of harm in restoring Nazi prestige.’ (Of course such passages from the secret stenographic record go a long way toward documenting how far the Tribunal was a political instrument, and how little store was to be set by its impartiality.) ‘This,’ Jackson agreed, ‘is a critical point of the trial as far as achieving its objective is concerned.’ ‘Göring,’ he stated in a further outburst to his colleagues, ‘is permitted to become a hero of the Nazis because he dares to talk back to the United States. This wins him admiration from all the Nazis who remain in Germany, and he will influence the other defendants to do likewise. I almost felt this afternoon that it would have been wiser to have shot these men out of hand.’[679]

Page 315-316

[679] Ibid.


33) THE JEWISH organisations in New York had suggested to Robert
Jackson in June 1945 that he adopt the figure of six million
victims of the Nazis. After months of reviewing the evidence he noted in April 1946: ‘The Nürnberg trial involves the murder of between four and five million people according to some estimates, and as high as six million according to others. These are apart from any persons killed in combat and apart from the persons who died as
the result of tortures in concentration camps, with the exception of
the extermination camps. For example, at Dachau 268000 were
killed.’[742] These figures were however still far short of being generally
proven.*




Page 340-341

* * This estimate was wrong. Around 75,000 prisoners were in the camp when liberated, including 43401 political prisoners and 22100 Jews. Most of these were innocent of any crime. Health and sanitation conditions in these camps were appalling. The German government now computes the overall total of deaths at Dachau 1933–45 at 31951, two-thirds of them during the uncontrollable typhus plague of the last seven months; of this total, 2226 died in one month after the Americans assumed control of the camp.


[742] Unsigned memo, Apr 20 1946 (Library of Congress, Manuscript
Division, R H Jackson papers, box 103, ‘misc.’).

34) THE JUDGES began deliberations on their final opinion behind
closed doors on June 27, 1946. Coupled with their
confidential discussions on the verdicts and appropriate penalties
for each defendant, these deliberations developed into a rather
longer task than they had anticipated. They were now settled in however
and rather enjoyed the life here after all. The intention was that these deliberations should remain for ever secret – that the outside world should never discover what reasons led to the acquittal of these men, and the hanging of those. Among the private papers of the American judge, Francis Biddle, are however his
daily notes taken during their deliberations. It is astonishing, even rather
horrifying, to see from them how far the judges were undecided; how
much they disagreed on the very simplest issues; how they wavered and vacillated up to the last moment; and how, despite the weeks and months of hearings, they continued to nurse misconceptions for which there was no evidence at all. Their discussions reveal an almost unreal atmosphere, an unworldly detachment from the harsh realities of war and peace: at one stage the British judge, of all people, felt that a defendant needed punishing for having called for the bombing of a town
in England. Politics often overrode the requirements of law. Sentences
had to be harsh. The Tribunal was too important, said one judge, to
award light sentences.

Page 357-358


35) Francis Biddle, the American judge, felt uneasy that the opinion followed too closely the prosecution’s evidence, and tended to ignore the evidence assembled by the defence. The French judge Donnedieu de Vabres also felt the opinion was too
long. Several of the judges were unhappy about the charge of conspiracy
to wage war, since it was not known to international law and would
arguably therefore be ex post facto.

Page 358-359


36) Since Donnedieu had moved to strike out the whole count of conspiracy,
the American, Biddle, asked him for his reasons in writing. De
Vabres explained that such a charge was unknown to both European
and international law – that under international law there was sometimes
every justification for waging an aggressive war. Quite apart from
that, said de Vabres, the prosecution had not provided any proof that
the ‘common plan and purpose’ essential in any conspiracy was present
in Hitler’s operations: even the Hossbach Protocol, of November 5,
1937, which came the closest to providing such proof, showed nothing
more than Hitler convening his commanders-in-chief and ministers
and informing them of his plans for the conquest of Europe. The rest
had just clicked their heels. To talk about a conspiracy, involving many
brains, on the one hand, was to negate the whole concept of the Führer
Principle.

Page 359
37) ‘It would of course eliminate many difficulties,’ he observed, commenting
on the French viewpoint in a secret letter to Herbert Wechsler
in New York asking for advice, ‘and get rid of all the trash and looseness
gathered in the indictment’ – for which he implicitly blamed
Jackson. [779]

Page 60

[779] Francis Biddle to Herbert Wechsler, Nuremberg, Jul 10, 1946
(ibid.).


38) As for Hitler’s
attack on Greece in 1941, John Parker felt that, even though Britain
had actually got her troops into Greece first, the Tribunal could still
claim that Hitler’s attack was a war of aggression. Biddle disagreed,
arguing: ‘This is dangerous and academic and bad international law.’[781]

Page 361

[781] [Biddle:] Third Conference on Opinion, Jul 17, 1946 (ibid.).


39) Arguing on a more philosophical level Donnedieu came to the same
conclusion. He pointed out that the London Charter listed only three
crimes – against peace, war crimes, and against humanity; the conspiracy
charge had popped up in the indictment, ‘one great conspiracy,’
as he described it, ‘to commit at the same time three crimes that are
not even defined.’ The Germans had always been warned that they
would eventually be punished for substantive crimes, ‘but not for mere
conspiracy.’

Page 365

40) Lawrence summed up, finding little common ground with
Donnedieu. They were, quite simply, bound by the London Charter.
True, as drawn, it might be regarded as retroactive. ‘If it says conspiracy
is a crime, we must follow it,’ he argued. ‘We can’t take a false
view of the facts to help the situation. Ex post facto is a view of justice.’
They were occupation powers, and they could enforce whatever Charter
they wanted. Thus Judge Biddle recorded Lawrence’s arguments, adding
his own terse though probably unspoken comment in parenthesis:
‘British at their worst.’[787]

Page 365

[787] [Biddle:] Session on Opinion – Conspiracy, Aug 14, 1946 (ibid.).



41) WHEN THEY reconvened the next day Nikitchenko took the argument
in favour of retaining a conspiracy charge further; he did so at great
length, speaking for two hours. He illustrated it with the example of
the radio journalist Hans Fritzsche, one of the defendants. ‘It is no
crime to speak over the radio,’ argued the Russian. ‘But as long as he’s
a member of the conspiracy he’s guilty of the other crimes.’ As for the
objections about introducing ex post facto legislation, the Russian asked:
‘Why do we object to this innovation? The Tribunal is not an institution
to protect old law and to shield old principles from violation.’

Page 366


42) The judges all wanted to hang Julius Streicher for something, but
disagreed strongly about what. Falco, Donnedieu, Parker, Biddle,
Birkett, Lawrence, and the Russians scattered their choice between
Counts One, Three, and Four seemingly at random. In a diary note
which reveals both the mood at these sentencing sessions and the
superficial reasoning which decided between life and death, Biddle
recorded,

The Russians, Falco, and even the British, are talking of holding defendants guilty on account of the positions they held. ‘Streicher,’ Volchkov says, ‘for instance, was personally connected with Hitler.’ I blurt out that I think it’s preposterous to hold a little Jew-baiter as a conspirator because he was a friend of Hitler, or a Gauleiter, or a Nazi. Lawrence bridles and says I have bad manners. Parker pours oil on the water, and says we must limit the theory of conspiracy, and that Streicher had nothing to do with planning or conspiring.

Page 371-372

41) ON THE following day, September 3, they considered their interim verdict
on the indicted organisations. The Americans argued that the
Charter gave the Tribunal wide powers of discretion; the Russians disagreed, stating that the Tribunal was bound to make a finding on each
organisation. ‘We can only say whether an organisation is criminal or
not.’ Lawrence was worried that any finding by the Tribunal would be
used to pass summary judgements on possibly totally innocent members
of the organisations it found to be criminal. Judge Biddle thought
the whole thing stank, and noted: ‘I suggest to throw them all out. A
shocking thing, this group crime.’[795]

Page 372

[795] [Biddle:] Meeting on Organisations, Sep 3, 1946(ibid.).





42) This, wrote Biddle, was intended to be an impartial trial, and yet
clearly it was not. Until Dönitz succeeded Raeder in January 1943, he
had taken no part in preparing any wars of aggression; from 1943 onward
Germany was however ‘fighting a purely defensive war,’ Biddle
pointed out. Therefore it was impossible, argued Biddle, to find Dönitz
guilty under Counts One and Two of the indictment. (The Tribunal
reached the opposite conclusion, stating in its verdict that Hitler ‘almost
always’ consulted with Dönitz in the earlier years;[804] a claim for
which even now, half a century later, there has not been found a tithe
of supporting evidence.)

Page 385

[804] IMT, vol. i, page 351


43) All of the appeals were rejected by the Allied Control Council in
Berlin. In effect, there was no appeal. The Russian and British governments had ordered their representatives, the military governors, not to reduce the sentences. The British military governor, Air Chief-Marshal Sir Sholto Douglas, later revealed that after the sentences were
announced Ernest Bevin, the British foreign secretary, had sent him a
top-secret cable instructing him to confirm the sentences and to ignore
any appeals. The archives broadly confirm this: Fearing that the
Control Council might actually reduce the sentences, the Labour cabinet,
meeting in London on October 7, decided to send a telegram
instructing Douglas that ‘from a political point of view it would be an
advantage if there were no alterations of the sentence.’[854] This was the
ultimate injustice of Nuremberg, the final interference of the legislature
with the judiciary.


The Control Council’s records show that the appeals came before it
on October 9 and 10: after a short discussion the four wise men decided
not to hear any of the German defence counsel, and to confirm
the execution date for the sixteenth. All the petitions, whether for clemency
or the firing squad, were denied, though not before there had
been some discussion on the petition of General Jodl in particular,
since there was a degree of consensus that he had been a brave and
upright soldier and as such was entitled to stand before a firing squad.
With his instructions from London firmly in mind, Sir Sholto Douglas
argued that since the general had neither protested against Hitler’s
criminal orders nor resigned, the gallows was more appropriate. ‘In
my examination of the evidence,’ he claimed in an early version of his
memoirs, ‘ I had discovered that Jodl had been instructed by Hitler to
sign the order for the execution of the 50 RAF prisoners after the mass
escape from Stalag Luft III. He had protested to Hitler that this was illegal, but he had then done as he was told and signed the order. In doing that, so far as I was concerned, he had signed his own death warrant.’[855] He later denied that he was motivated by a sense of personal revenge. There is in fact no evidence to substantiate Douglas’ claim that it was Jodl who had signed the warrant, nor was any introduced
before the Tribunal.
Page 410-411

[854] British Cabinet to Sir Sholto Douglas, Oct 7, 1946 (PRO file PREM.8/392).
[855] Sholto Douglas, memoirs as serialised in Sunday Express, Sep 19,
1965. This author challenged him in The Times to produce the ‘evidence’
of which he had written. He did not reply, but his subsequently
published volume of memoirs omitted the whole passage.


44) At denazification proceedings in Munich in 1953 a German court
effectively cleared the late General Jodl of the Nuremberg charges and
rehabilitated him posthumously, basing its decision in part on the fact
that four years earlier the eminent and universally respected French member of the Nuremberg Tribunal, Professor Donnedieu de Vabres, had stated that in his view the conviction of Jodl had been without merit and a miscarriage of justice.[853]

Page 412-413

[859] Prof. Dr Erich Schwinger, ‘Declaration,’ Marburg, Jun 15, 1951,
reporting what Donnedieu had told him (Luise Jodl papers; copy in
IfZ, Irving Collection).

Please refer to the quote in bold

THis end the list of the injustices and double standards of Nuremberg Trial, a so called tribunal to convict war criminal and to establish justice but in effect, it was no different with a NKVD show trial. Thanks to David Irving, most of the people were finally exposed to the hypocrisy of the Allies in WW2. It would have been much better that if the Allies take the defendants and executed them summarily than to try them under laws which were created specifically to condemn the defendants which perverted the name of the justice to make it a victors' law


David Thompson
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#63

Post by David Thompson » 02 Aug 2004, 18:05

Joachim -- You said:
“what Dr de Zayas meant is although the OKW (or the German General Staff or the OKH) was acquitted of being a criminal organization, some of its members are not acquitted. Good example of the Hamburg british court martial of Field Marshal von Manstein in 1947. Although the british accepted the evidence from von Manstein on russian brutality in Feodosia, 1942 (German hospital was attacked in violation of Geneva Convention and wounded was murdered), yet he was sentenced to 18 years of imprisonment but was released in 1952 on the account of his bad health”
I pointed out:
Irving is clearly quoting de Zayas in the context of the IMT trial. Irving specifically says: "de Zayas has expressed the view that the verdict on many of the points charged against the High Command (O.K.W.) would probably have been very different" (my emphasis - DT) The only trial in which the OKW was ever a defendant was the IMT Nuernberg trial. Presumably that’s why you included the quote in your “List of injustices and double standards from David Irving's Nuremberg The Last Battle (Part Two)” -- because the quote refers to the IMT trial. There's no mistake here. Irving says de Zayas was talking about the IMT trial. Since the IMT acquitted the OKW, the issue is, what is meant by the claim of de Zayas that "the verdict on many of the points charged against the High Command(O.K.W.) would probably have been very different"? Here are the possibilities I see:

(a) Irving is aware of the IMT verdict of acquittal against the OKW, and he has written the passage in a way which withholds that fact and deliberately misleads the reader to falsely conclude that the OKW was convicted of some kind of crime or crimes in the IMT proceedings. Irving then adorns this intentionally false impression by suggesting that it was a miscarriage of justice caused by the withholding of evidence;

(b) Irving's paraphrasal of de Zayas is accurate. Both men are ignorant and unaware that the IMT had acquitted the OKW of being a criminal organization;

(c) Irving's paraphrasal is inaccurate, and de Zayas wasn't refering to the IMT proceedings at all. In that case, Irving is ignorant and unaware that the IMT had acquitted the OKW of being a criminal organization, and Irving’s use of the de Zayas quote in the context of the IMT proceedings is fraudulent because de Zayas wasn’t talking about the IMT proceedings; or

(d) You have misquoted Irving.
You replied:
Sorry to disappoint you, but what de Zayas and i believe Irving meant is that the OKW would not even brought to the charges under IMT if the defence counsel were allowed the records of the Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau.
If that's true, why did Irving write: "the verdict on many of the points charged against the High Command(O.K.W.) would probably have been very different"? A criminal charge and a verdict are two completely different things, rendered by two completely different entities. Irving understands this clearly because in his sentence he distinguishes between the verdict and the points charged.

You asked:
Then why was Donitz were convicted out of Count 3 (War Crimes) and Count 4 (Crimes Against Humanity)?
Doenitz wasn’t convicted of crimes against humanity. As for his conviction for war crimes, based on the Commando Order and use of slave labor in shipyards, see:

The IMT Judgment against Karl Doenitz
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=25074

In regard to point 12, you said:
Let me enquire something, would an American court of law accept inconclusive evidence as the basis of prosecuting the defendents? That is what the IMT did..Accepting inconclusive facts as evidence against the defendets without making any painstaking research to ascertained the truthfulness of the "facts" which made this an injustice in the trial.


I replied:
Again, in Anglo-American law the prosecuting charges are brought by the executive branch of government, and the judicial branch decides whether they have been proven. American courts and juries frequently find that the evidence to prove a charge is inconclusive. That’s how people get acquitted. That’s why three of the defendants were acquitted by the IMT judges.
You then changed the subject to the IMT convictions of Hess, von Neurath, Streicher and Rosenberg, which you severely mischaracterized as being based on various trivial matters. The actual reasons given in the IMT judgments for their guilt can be seen at:

The crimes of Rudolf Hess
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=27191
Hess: His crimes and sentence
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=23861

IMT Judgment against Konstantin von Neurath
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... ht=neurath

Julius Streicher
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=27013

IMT judgment against Alfred Rosenberg
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=29522

Finally, you asked this hypothetical about the IMT trials:
A more logical analogy from me. Let's said a person was being accused of manslaughter and was found guilty..and then he was later added with the charges of murder and was found guilty too. So wouldn't it be possible that the punishment handed down to the defendent would be heavier with the additional charges of murder inclusive of the manslaughter penalties?
In the United States, that result is forbidden by the 5th Amendment and 14th Amendments to the national constitution. Do you have an example related to the IMT proceedings?

xcalibur
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#64

Post by xcalibur » 02 Aug 2004, 18:26

It would have been much better that if the Allies take the defendants and executed them summarily
Curious conclusion to reach for someone who has talked about "injustice" throughout this thread.

One wonders that if that had in fact happened just how much bitching you'd be doing about the "injustice" of the executions. Probably plenty.

David Thompson
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Re: List of double standards and injustice of Nuremberg Trial

#65

Post by David Thompson » 21 Jan 2009, 23:37

An off-topic political opinion post from BAMAVADER was deleted by this moderator pursuant to the forum and section rules -- DT.

H&WC Section Rules
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=53962

john h
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Re: Historical Accuracy & the IMT Aggressive War Judgment

#66

Post by john h » 26 Jun 2012, 00:55

In conducting the IMT the Allied governments themselves violated international law For one thing their treatment of the German defendents and the military prisoners who testified violated articles 56 58 and others of the Geneva convention of July 1929 source Werner Maser Nuremburg a nation on trial 1979 pp 69 302 [ n 23 ] also James Mcmillan Five men at nuremburg London 1985 pp 412-413

Justice-as opposed to vengence-is a standard that is applied impartially At Nuremburg though standards of justice applied only to the vanquised The four powers that sat in judgement were themselves guilty of many of the very crimes they accused the German leaders of committing source Ulrich Stern ed Die wahren Schuldigen am zweiten Weltkrieg Munich 1990

Chief U S prosecutor Robert Jackson privately acknowledged in a letter to President Truman that the allies have done some of the things we are prosecuting the Germans for The French are so violating the Geneva Convention in the treatment of German prisoners of war that our command is taking back prisoners sent to them [For forced labour in France] We are prosecuting plunder and our Allies are practising 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 source Jackson letter to Truman oct 12 1945 State Department files Quoted in R Conot Justice at Nuremburg 1983 p 68

In violation of the first Nuremburg count of planning preparation initiating or waging a war of aggression the Soviet Union attacked Finland in December 1939 and was expelled from the League of Nations as a result A few months later the Red Army invaded Lithuania Latvia and Estonia and ruthlessly incorporated them into the Soviet Union The postwar French government violated international law and the Nuremburg charge of maltreatment of prisoners of war by employing large numbers of German prisoners of war as forced labourers in France In 1945 the United States britain and the Soviet Union jointly agreed to the brutal deportation of more than ten million Germans from their homes in eastern and central Europe a violation of the Nuremburg count of deportation and other inhumane acts committed against any civillian population source Constantine Fitzgibbon Denazification New York W W Norton 1969 pp 71-72

While Allied prosecutors charged the defendents with a crime against peace in planning the German invasion of Norway in 1940 the British government eventually had to admit that Britain and France were themselves guilty of the same crime in preparing a military invasion of Norway code-named Stratford before the German move And in August 1941 Britain and the Soviet Union jointly invaded and occupied Iran a neutral nation source Behind the scenes at Nuremburg Daily Telegraph London jan 1977 p 19

Given this record it is hardly surprising that the four governments that organized the Nuremburg trial of 1945-46 included no definition of [aggression] in the Tribunals Charter source Richard H Minear Victors Justice 1984 p 57

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Re: List of double standards and injustice of Nuremberg Tria

#67

Post by David Thompson » 26 Jun 2012, 02:29

john h -- Your post looks a great deal like it was lifted from Mark Weber, The Nuremberg Trials and the Holocaust: Do the 'war crimes' trials prove extermination?, written for the Institute for Historical Review and online at http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v12/v12p167_Webera.html
A double standard

In conducting the Nuremberg trials, the Allied governments themselves violated international law. For one thing, their treatment of the German defendants and the military prisoners who testified violated articles 56, 58 and others of the Geneva convention of July 1929. (note 23)

Justice -- as opposed to vengeance -- is a standard that is applied impartially. At Nuremberg, though, standards of "justice" applied only to the vanquished. The four powers that sat in judgment were themselves guilty of many of the very crimes they accused the German leaders of committing. (note 24) Chief US prosecutor Robert Jackson privately acknowledged in a letter to President Truman that the Allies (note 25)

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 [German] prisoners of war that our command is taking back prisoners sent to them [for forced labor in France]. 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.

In violation of the first Nuremberg count of "planning, preparation, initiating or waging a war of aggression," the Soviet Union attacked Finland in December 1939 (and was expelled from the League of Nations as a result). A few months later the Red Army invaded Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, and ruthlessly incorporated them into the Soviet Union. The postwar French government violated international law and the Nuremberg charge of "maltreatment of prisoners of war" by employing large numbers of German prisoners of war as forced laborers in France. In 1945 the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union jointly agreed to the brutal deportation of more than ten million Germans from their ancient homes in eastern and central Europe, a violation of the Nuremberg count of "deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population." (note 26)

While Allied prosecutors charged the defendants with a "crime against peace" in planning the German invasion of Norway in 1940, the British government eventually had to admit that Britain and France were themselves guilty of the same "crime" in preparing a military invasion of Norway, code-named "Stratford," before the German move. And in August 1941, Britain and the Soviet Union jointly invaded and occupied Iran, a neutral nation. (note 27)

Given this record, it is hardly surprising that the four governments that organized the Nuremberg trial of 1945-1946 included no definition of "aggression" in the Tribunal's Charter. (note 28)
In fact, this isn't time you've "borrowed" from that article by Mr. Weber. In your post at http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 7#p1700087 you wrote:
Re: Fair or Unfair in Nuremberg Trial
by john h on Wed May 16, 2012 9:44 pm

The Nuremberg Trial was unfair because of its double standards none of the four powers that participated in the Tribunal ever made the slightest effort to apply the principles so solemnly and self-righteously proclaimed at Nuremburg either to their own leaders or to those of any other country

No Soviet leader was executed for the Soviet military interventions in Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968
No British leader was put on trial for the British invasion of Egypt in october 1956
President Eisenhower was not tried for his invasion of Lebanon in 1958
President Kennedy was not hanged for his ill fated 1962 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba
President Johnson was never called to judical account for his conduct of the war in Vietnam or his invasion of the Dominican Republic
President Nixon was not brought before a tribunal for his armed incursion into Cambodia

When North Vietnamese officials threatened to put captured U S airmen on trial in 1966 U S Senator Everett Dirksen remarked that the Nuremburg trials may have been a ghastly mistake

Source W Bosch Judgement on Nuremburg 1970 page 189
while Mr. Weber's article has this passage:
As it happened, none of the four powers that participated in the Tribunal ever made the slightest effort to apply the principles so solemnly and self-righteously proclaimed at Nuremberg either to their own leaders or to those of any other country.

No Soviet leader was executed for the Soviet military interventions in Hungary in 1956 or Czechoslovakia in 1968. No British leader was put on trial for the British invasion of Egypt in October 1956. President Eisenhower was not tried for his invasion of Lebanon in 1958. President Kennedy was not hanged for his ill-fated 1962 "Bay of Pigs" invasion of Cuba. President Johnson was never called to judicial account for his conduct of the war in Vietnam or his invasion of the Dominican Republic. President Nixon was not brought before a tribunal for his armed "incursion" into Cambodia.

When (North) Vietnamese officials threatened to put captured US airmen on trial in 1966, US Senator Everett Dirksen was moved to remark that the Nuremberg trials "may have been a ghastly mistake." (note 22)
http://loveforlife.com.au/content/08/05 ... mark-weber

And in another of your posts at http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 0#p1700290 you wrote:
U S Supreme Court Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone remarked Chief U S prosecuter Jackson is away conducting his high grade lynching party in Nuremburg i dont mind what he does to the Nazis but i hate to see the pretense that he is running a court and proceeding according to common law This is a little too sanctimonious a fraud to meet my old fashioned ideas In a private letter he wrote I wonder how some of those who preside at the trials would justify some of the acts of their own Governments if they were placed in the status of the accused
source Alpheus T Mason Harlan Fiske Stone Pillar of the law [new york] Viking 1956 page 716

In Congress US Representative Lawrence H Smith of Wisconsin declared The Nuremburg trials are so repungent to the Anglo Saxon principles of justice that we must forever be ashamed of that page in our history The Nuremburg farce represents a revenge policy at its worst
source Congressional record -Appendix Vol 95 Sec 14 [june 15 1949] page 374

Another Congressman John Rankin of Mississippi stated As a representative of the American people i desire to say that what is taking place in Nuremburg Germany is a disgrace to the United States
source Congressional Record-House Vol 93 Sec 9 [nov 28 1947] page 10938 also quoted in W Bosch Judgement on Nuremburg 1970 page 83

Probably the most condemming was by U S Senator Robert A Taftwidely regarded as the conscience of the Republican party At considerable risk to his political career he denounced the Nuremburg enterprise in an October 1946 speech The trial of the vanquished by the victors cannot be impartial no matter how it is hedged about with the forms of justice Taft said About this whole judgement there is the spirit of vengence and vengence is seldom justice The hanging of the eleven men convicted will be a blot on the American record which we will long regret In these trials we have accepted the Russian idea of the purpose of trials-government policy and not justice-with little relation to Anglo Saxon heritage By clothing policy in the forms of legal proceedure we many discredit the whole idea of justice in Europe for years to come
source Kenyon College Ohio october 5 1946 vital speeches of the day page 47 text also published in Jay W Baird From Nuremburg to MY LAI [lexington Mass D C Heath 1972] pages 107-113

U S Supreme Court Justice William O Douglas wrote I thought at the time and still think that the Nuremburg trials were unprincipled Law was created ex post facto to suit the passion and clamor of the time
source H K Thompson and H Strutz eds Donitz at Nuremburg A Reappraisal [IHR 1983 ] page 196

U S Rear Admiral H Lamont Pugh former Navy Surgeon General and Commanding Officer of the National Naval Medical Centre wrote I thought the trials in general bordered upon international lunacy i thought it particularly unfortunate inappropriate ill-concieved and dupably injudicious that the United States should have been cast in the leading role as prosecutors and implementators of the trials of German participants or principals
source H K Thompson and H Strutz Donitz at Nuremberg 1983 pages 194-195
Compare this with the text from Mr. Weber's article:
US Supreme Court Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone remarked with irritation: "[Chief US prosecutor] Jackson is away conducting his high-grade lynching party in Nuremberg. I don't mind what he does to the Nazis, but I hate to see the pretense that he is running a court and proceeding according to common law. This is a little too sanctimonious a fraud to meet my old-fashioned ideas." In a private letter he wrote: "... I wonder how some of those who preside at the trials would justify some of the acts of their own governments if they were placed in the status of the accused." On another occasion Stone specifically wondered "whether, under this new [Nuremberg] doctrine of international law, if we had been defeated, the victors could plausibly assert that our supplying Britain with fifty destroyers [in 1940] was an act of aggression ..." (note 13)

In Congress, US Representative Lawrence H. Smith of Wisconsin declared: "The Nuremberg trials are so repugnant to the Anglo-Saxon principles of justice that we must forever be ashamed of that page in our history ... The Nuremberg farce represents a revenge policy at its worst." (note 14) Another Congressman, John Rankin of Mississippi, stated: "As a representative of the American people I desire to say that what is taking place in Nuremberg, Germany, is a disgrace to the United States... A racial minority, two and a half years after the war closed, are in Nuremberg not only hanging German soldiers but trying German businessmen in the name of the United States." (note 15)

Probably the most courageous condemnation was by US Senator Robert A. Taft, widely regarded as the "conscience of the Republican party." At considerable risk to his political career, he denounced the Nuremberg enterprise in an October 1946 speech. "The trial of the vanquished by the victors cannot be impartial no matter how it is hedged about with the forms of justice," he said. Taft went on: (note 16)

About this whole judgment there is the spirit of vengeance, and vengeance is seldom justice. The hanging of the eleven men convicted will be a blot on the American record which we will long regret. In these trials we have accepted the Russian idea of the purpose of trials -- government policy and not justice -- with little relation to Anglo-Saxon heritage. By clothing policy in the forms of legal procedure, we many discredit the whole idea of justice in Europe for years to come.

Milton R. Konvitz, a Jewish specialist of law and public administration who taught at New York University, warned at the time that the Nuremberg Tribunal "defies many of the most basic assumptions of the judicial process." He went on: "Our policy with respect to the Nazis is consistent with neither international law nor our own State Department's policy... The Nuremberg trial constitutes a real threat to the basic conceptions of justice which it has taken mankind thousands of years to establish." (note 17)

In the years since, distinguished figures in both the United States and other countries have expressed similar views. US Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas wrote: "I thought at the time and still think that the Nuremberg trials were unprincipled. Law was created ex post facto to suit the passion and clamor of the time." (note 18)

US Rear Admiral H. Lamont Pugh, former Navy Surgeon General and Commanding Officer of the National Naval Medical Center, wrote: "I thought the trials in general bordered upon international lunacy. I thought it particularly unfortunate, inappropriate, ill-conceived and dupably injudicious that the United States should have been cast in the leading role as prosecutors and implementators of the trials of German participants or principals." (note 19)
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v12/v12p167_Webera.html

Do you remember at the beginning of the month when I wrote (at http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 9#p1704379), in response to your post at http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic. ... 7#p1704377:
john h -- Please give your sources and put them in quotes when you are copying from someone else's webpage -- in this case, http://ww2db.com/battle_spec.php?battle_id=162 Our forum rules require it, and it will keep folks from thinking you're a plagiarist.
When quoting from a book or site, please provide info on the source (and a link if it is a website)
http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?p=5#5
Well, I meant it.

P.S. -- It's hard to take a moralistic argument seriously when it's been stolen from somebody else.

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Re: List of double standards and injustice of Nuremberg Tria

#68

Post by BillHermann » 26 Jun 2012, 06:41

"List of double standards and injustice of Nuremberg Trial" wow that's some statement.

First we are looking at this in from a subjective standpoint in 2012 not looking at it objectively from a standpoint of 6 years of war, exhaustion and the dynamics of post war Europe and the allies.

Second we could use an argument that if the Nazis had one they would have been no better or much worse. Look at trial after trial from the 1930s till the end o the war. Roland Freisler and his posse sure knew hat to run kangaroo courts.

Speaking objectively and considering the culture and social diffrences of the 1940s along with the logistics of cleaning up such a major event with such horrific crimes it is quite possible to say that Nuremberg could have been better but what it was sufficient for the times.

Could it have been done better? possibly. Did it do the job? somewhat was there a better solution? Probably not.

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Re: List of double standards and injustice of Nuremberg Tria

#69

Post by Kilgore Trout » 26 Jun 2012, 08:36

For Bill:
OF COURSE Freisler et al. would run crooked trials. They learned from the master - Vishinsky of the S.U. But that argument serves as insipid justification for OUR disregard for fundamental justice & the rule of law. It means that we have become the one we warned us of. If you are no better than the other guy, you have no right to sit on the high horse and act superior because, morally, all are in the same dung-heap.
We all need look no further than the massive number of travesties of justice in our own countries to conclude that there are many serious ills in the justice system. These pre-date the Nurnberg Show Trials by centuries, but still exist today. This shows that we are incapble of, or unwilling, to learn. The primary law of justice is its adversarial approach. That is not conducive to finding the correct answer, as the scientific method is. It too often leaves the issue to who has the best lawyer. That, too often, depends on who has the deepest wallet. Of course, the government (prosecution) always has the deepest wallet - they use the wallets of the people, including the wallet of the defendant.
Could the system have been better? OBVIOUSLY. In arguing that we must consider from the view of those who had just been through 6 years of war, you are saying we must accept that these people had no inclination to be fair & impartial. The entire concept of distributive justice was omitted from the process. One glaring proof of this is the utter lack of any trials for the crimes committed by the side that won. E.g.; no one ever spoke for the nearly 22,000 Polish officers murdered by the S.U. (As a couple of those unfortunate souls may have been relatives of mine, I'd like to know that SOMEONE had to answer for that hideous cruelty.)

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Re: List of double standards and injustice of Nuremberg Tria

#70

Post by BillHermann » 26 Jun 2012, 09:23

fair & impartial? During and after a major global war. Not likely. You can dream about the possibilities but it would have never happend. To be fair & impartial is more often not to be human.

We still see this in courts today.

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Re: List of double standards and injustice of Nuremberg Tria

#71

Post by Kilgore Trout » 26 Jun 2012, 16:53

Precisely my point. If our own governments are unable or unwilling to be fair & impartial to the citizens of our own countries, which they are in fact obliged to do under the constitutions of every country that I have examined, then they are in violation of the very purpose for the process. Wherever & whenever abuse of process or travesties occur, they must be rectified with all due haste, including compensation to the aggrieved party. It is NOT too much to ask. We do not live in the age of Henry VIII. It would be far better for humanity if those who perpetrated the gross sham of justice of the Nurnberg Show Trials would simply admit that it was all about vengeance & cease the breast beating & false moralising.

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Re: List of double standards and injustice of Nuremberg Tria

#72

Post by David Thompson » 26 Jun 2012, 17:41

Kilgore Trout -- You wrote:
It would be far better for humanity if those who perpetrated the gross sham of justice of the Nurnberg Show Trials would simply admit that it was all about vengeance & cease the breast beating & false moralising.
Let's start with AHF. Please spare us the agitprop. If you have sourced information on the subject we'd be glad to discuss it, but we're not very interested in fact-free opinionizing in the research sections of the forum.

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Re: List of double standards and injustice of Nuremberg Tria

#73

Post by LWD » 26 Jun 2012, 17:44

Kilgore Trout wrote:... It would be far better for humanity if those who perpetrated the gross sham of justice of the Nurnberg Show Trials would simply admit that it was all about vengeance & cease the breast beating & false moralising.
We'd first need more than your opinion that it was "all about vengeance". Certainly the exoneration of some of the defendents puts that claim into the dubious catagory.

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Re: List of double standards and injustice of Nuremberg Tria

#74

Post by Boby » 26 Jun 2012, 21:16

LWD wrote:
Kilgore Trout wrote:... It would be far better for humanity if those who perpetrated the gross sham of justice of the Nurnberg Show Trials would simply admit that it was all about vengeance & cease the breast beating & false moralising.
We'd first need more than your opinion that it was "all about vengeance". Certainly the exoneration of some of the defendents puts that claim into the dubious catagory.
3 out of 21. Schacht, Papen and Fritzsche were hardly implicated in areas IMT was more interested.

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Re: List of double standards and injustice of Nuremberg Tria

#75

Post by Terry Duncan » 26 Jun 2012, 21:54

During and after a major global war. Not likely. You can dream about the possibilities but it would have never happend. To be fair & impartial is more often not to be human.
These is always a chance institutions or people are biased, and that some events may colour people's impressions rather more than others. Rather more to the point is the question 'Was the IMT as impartial and unbiased as could be expected from any court of the time?' and I would say that it was - a shortage of visitors from another planet able to be truely impartial did mean that anyone from this planet would have had some form of preconceptions about events.
3 out of 21. Schacht, Papen and Fritzsche were hardly implicated in areas IMT was more interested.
Fritzsche was certainly rather out of place amongst the other defendants, and was rightly cleared. A case could be made against Schacht and Papen when you take into account their titles and duties as they appeared to the allied personnel at the time, Schacht was certainly a slippery customer that was far from straightforward. Papen was very high ranked, even if he held no power, so people outside Germany can be forgiven for thinking he might have been more involved than he was. Both were cleared though, which does tend to support the claims that the IMT was not simply constructed for vengeance or was operating unfairly.

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