New York Newsday

October 7, 1992

Nuremberg: Judgment By Law, Not by Revenge

Review of The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir, by Telford Taylor. Knopf, 703 pp., $35.

There are two widespread misconceptions concerning the tribunal set up in Nuremberg to consider and punish the atrocities inflicted by the Third Reich. The first is that it was concerned mainly with the "Final Solution." The second is that it was an exercise in "victor's justice." In point of fact, the prosecutors at Nuremberg set out to prove a more grave and complicated charge of conspiracy to wage aggressive war, establishing this as the context in which "war crimes" were committed. And they also (particularly the United States representative, Robert Jackson) bound themselves and their nations to be held to the same standard of conduct by which they were judging the Germans. As Jackson put it in a very fine opening statement:
           "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."
           The fixing of this benchmark very nearly did not take place. Churchill, for one, was violently in favor of shooting the Nazi leadership out of hand and declaring it "executive action." Reading this towering memoir by Telford Taylor, former chief counsel at Nuremberg, makes one aware of what a frightful mistake that would have been.
           The archive established by the trials made it impossible for any German, or any later revisionist, to disavow the evidence of fascism. It also made it impossible for any manufactured grievance about kangaroo courts to arise; some of the leading conspirators were spared the gallows and some of the junior ones were actually acquitted for want of evidence. Men like Hermann Goering, who had started off the trial by smirking and cracking jokes from the dock, had the grins wiped from their faces by meticulous cross-examiners like Sir Hartley Shawcross, and by the showing of obviously authentic film of mass murder and degradation.
           Witnesses and affidavits were produced which it was impossible to refute. Taylor reproduces most of a statement made by a German construction manager named Hermann Friedrich Graebe, giving an eyewitness report of an extermination of Ukranian Jews, which the defense lawyers did not contest. He also reports the admission made by the repellent Hans Frank, Nazi governor of Poland, that indeed he had taken part in genocide and that: "A thousand years will pass and still this guilt of Germany will not have been erased." Tough reading though it makes, the indisputable proof of every kind of barbarism, including the collection of Jewish Communist skulls for the purpose of pseudo-scientific experiment, is a record of infamy which needed to be established "objectively."
           Not that the objectivity was without flaw. The subject of serial bombardment of civilians, for example, was one which had to be circumnavigated with some hypocrisy and nervousness after Dresden. And the Soviet lawyers and judges managed to have the Nazis blamed for a crime — the Katyn forest massacre in Poland — which Stalin himself had ordered. There were all kinds of squabbles and jealousies within and among delegations of the "victors." However, according to Taylor, these were usually subordinated to the consciousness of the scale and intensity of the task at hand.
           By the time they met the hangman, or in some cases by the time they killed themselves in their cells, the Nazi leaders had confessed, or persisted in bombastic and unbelievable denials, or fought publicly among themselves, or proclaimed fanatical allegiance to a dead Führer. In one way or another, that is to say, they had been fully and completely disgraced before the world and before the German people they had oppressed and misled for so long. This must be reckoned a real and lasting achievement.
           In his closing pages, Telford Taylor takes up Robert Jackson's promise to uphold the Nuremberg standard as an international and consistent one, and refers to later trials such as those of Klaus Barbie and William Calley. He believes that there should be a tribunal, established on a neutral basis such as the UN, and given jurisdiction to hear charges against the soldiers of any nation. "The laws of war do not apply only to the suspected criminals of vanquished nations. There is no moral or legal basis for immunizing victorious nations from scrutiny. The laws of war are not a one-way street." This conclusion, and this knowledge, was dearly bought, as these imperishable pages demonstrate.