The Nuremberg Trial

The 75th anniversary of The Nuremberg Trial was celebrated with a three part programme on Channel 5 in the week.

It relied more on footage of the trial  than a narrator.

Philippe Sands, a human rights barrister who wrote an excellent book on one of the main jurists present Eli Lauterpacht called East West, was one of the main contributors.

I was disappointed that little attention was paid to the genesis of the trial.

It was a colossal achievement that the four Allied powers constituted a tribunal in the first place.

Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin were opposed but American secretary of war Henry Stimson in favour.

The Americans provided a legal team of 500 and funded the initative. Besides constituting the tribunal there was another major legal problem namely that the defence could argue they committed no offence under German law.

To get round this the Prosecution had to develop a new concept of genocide. Philippe Sands explains this well in his book.

The first stages of the trial did not go well for the Prosecution.

Herman Goering delivered lengthy addresses from the witness stand and  the American chief prosecutor Robert Jackson, an appellate lawyer inexperienced in cross examination, faltered.

It was a British lawyer David Maxwell Fyfe, later to become Home Secretary, that “did “ Goering.

The 22 defendants persistently argued they were not aware of the atrocities but the Nazis kept meticulous records and with due diligence the evidence of their implication could be found.

Moreover the searing footage of the camps and personal testimony of one survivor (beautifully portrayed by all people Judy Garland in the film Judgment at Nuremberg) were  so horrific that any decent person, let alone the presiding judges, would do their utmost to convict which in all but four cases they did.

Nuremberg should have gone on to be an earlier version of the Court of Human Rights but Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech in Fulton Missouri disenfranchised the Russians who would not participate in a second trial.

Nonetheless it was one of the greatest legal achievements of the twentieth century as this programme attested.