CONTENTS Introduction I. Origins and General Nature of War Crimes Trials. III. Control Council Law No. 10: Nuremberg Military Tri- bunals and the Office, Chief of Counsel for War London Charter, 8 August 1945 (excerpt) THE NUREMBERG WAR CRIMES TRIALS BY TELFORD TAYLOR Brigadier General, U.S.A. Chief of Counsel for War Crimes INTRODUCTION ON 14 April 1949 judgment was rendered in the last of the Nuremberg war crimes trials. Far from being of concern solely to jurists, this trial and the judgment are of especial interest to diplomats and students of international affairs. Among the twenty-one defendants were six officials of the German Foreign Office, including the well-known diplomat Ernst von Weiszaecker; and the prisoners' dock also included such highly placed Reich officials as Schwerin von Krosigk (Minister of Finance from 1933 to 1945 and Foreign Minister in the "Doenitz cabinet"), Lammers (Reich Minister and Chief of the Reich Chancellery), and Darre (Minister for Food and Agriculture and Reich Peasant Leader), who in the early years of the Third Reich outshadowed even Goebbels and Rosenberg as an expositor of Nazi ideology and "geopolitics." This trial, commonly known as the "Ministries" or "Wilhelmstrasse" case, is not only the last at Nuremberg, but also the last trial of major German war criminals under international authority. Except for the prosecution of Field Marshal von Manstein, tried by the British authorities at Hamburg, it is probably the last major World War II war crimes trial of any description.a It is timely, therefore, to cast a retrospective glance at the entire series of Nuremberg trials to scan and sum up what was done there, and to consider what the meaning and value of Nuremberg may be today and in time to come. a Since writing the above, Otto Abetz, former German Ambassador to the Vichy Government, was tried and convicted for war crimes in July 1949 before a tribunal sitting in Paris. ORIGINS AND GENERAL NATURE OF WAR CRIMES TRIALS SINCE the close of the second World War, trials of individuals charged with the commission of "war crimes" have been held on a scale quite without precedent in recorded history. The boundless havoc wrought by the war, the incredible mass atrocities which accompanied its waging, and, finally, the growing realization that another war might well put an end to modern civilization-these and other factors aroused a world-wide demand for the trial and punishment of those guilty of launching the war and committing the atrocities. This demand did not spring up suddenly in the first flush of victory. Official protests against crimes committed by the Germans in the course of the occupations of Poland and Czechoslovakia were issued by the British, Czechoslovak, French, and Polish governments in 1940. President Franklin D. Roosevelt publicly condemned the German practice of executing scores of "innocent hostages" in October 1941, and the British Government indorsed President Roosevelt's views in a declaration by Mr. Churchill. In November 1941, and again in January 1942, the Soviet Union circulated diplomatic notes accusing the German Government of "criminal, systematic and deliberate violation of international law" by brutalities and outrages against Russian prisoners, looting and devastation, and atrocities against the civilian population. The first step toward the formulation of a systematic program for the handling of war criminals was taken in January 1942, at a London conference of representatives of the nine European countries (Belgium, Czechoslovakia, France, Greece, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, and Yugoslavia) then occupied by Germany. This meeting culminated in the wellknown "St. James Declaration" of 13 January 1942, which pointed out that— international solidarity is necessary in order to avoid the repression of these acts of violence simply by acts of vengeance on the part of the general public, and in order to satisfy the sense of justice of the civilized world, and in which the nine powers place among their principal war aims the punishment, through the channel of organised justice, of those guilty of or responsible for these crimes, whether they have ordered them, perpetrated them or participated in them, [and] resolve to see to it in a spirit of international solidarity, that (a) those guilty or responsible, whatever their nationality, are sought out, handed over to justice and judged, (b) that the sentences pronounced are carried out.1 Since the war, it has often been urged by critics of Nuremberg-particularly those who deny that the trials had any valid basis in law-that the leading German war criminals should have been executed without trial as a "political measure." No such idea occurred to the representatives of the European nations that suffered most at the hands of the Nazis, at the very time that their countries lay prostrate under the German boot. The St. James Declaration called for action "through the channel of organised justice" and asked for the punishment only of those who had been "handed over to justice" and found guilty. It is clear that condemnation of the atrocities as crimes under lawa condemnation to be pronounced in judicial proceedings-was a prime objective of the St. James Declaration, quite as important as, if not more important than, the punishment of individual perpetrators of atrocities. And the view that war crimes should be handled by legal process was echoed by the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union in their acknowledgments of the St. James Declaration. Roosevelt warned those guilty of atrocities "that the time will come when they shall have to stand in courts of law ... and answer for their acts," Churchill declared that the accused "will 1 Punishment for War Crimes; The Inter-Allied Declaration Signed at St. James's Palace, London, on 13th January 1942, and relative documents (Issued by the Inter-Allied Information Committee, London, 1942), pp. 3-4. have to stand up before tribunals," and the Soviet reply stated that the Nazi leaders must be "arrested and tried under criminal law." A few weeks later, in simultaneous announcements dated 7 October 1942, President Roosevelt and the British Lord Chancellor (Viscount Simon) announced the willingness of their respective governments to join with other Allied nations in establishing a "United Nations Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes." Thereafter seventeen nations (Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Czechoslovakia, France, Greece, India, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, South Africa, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Yugoslavia) formed the "United Nations War Crimes Commission" (UNWCC), which first met in October 1943. The Soviet Union was willing to participate, but disagreement arose over the demand that each of the sixteen Soviet Republics should be independently represented. No solution was reached, and Russia never was represented on the Commission. The UNWCC, under the chairmanship first of Sir Cecil Hurst and later (after 31 January 1945) of Lord Wright of Durley, became an important center of war crimes activities. It was, however, a “clearinghouse" rather than an "operating agency"; it received and indexed charges filed by the member nations, and published lists of war crimes suspects and other valuable information, but it did not itself conduct investigations or institute prosecutions. I On 1 November 1943, at the Moscow Conference, the “Declaration on German Atrocities in Occupied Europe" was published by Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States. This declaration was the third major step in the development of an international war crimes program; the participants announced: At the time of the granting of any armistice to any government which may be set up in Germany, those German officers and men and members of the Nazi party who have been responsible for or have taken a consenting part in the above atrocities, massacres and executions will be sent back to the countries in which their abominable deeds were done in order that they may be judged and pun |