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Nuremberg Trials: Fair? Dangerous?

22 Thursday Mar 2018

Posted by in Allies, Americans, Crime, postwar

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The Nuremberg Trials are generally seen as a landmark in international law. When I first learned about the trials in school, I took for granted that they were a good thing, that the big wig Nazis got their due, and that the trials were fair, maybe even more than fair considering the men (and some women) they prosecuted and the severity of the crimes.

Digging deeper, especially into sources from the time period, a different picture develops. Nuremberg was controversial right from the beginning. Even as the trials were running, the world media was debating whether they were fair at all. Nothing quite like it had ever been done. How could the Allies be sure they were not committing an act of revenge on Nazi Germany cloaked in a legal process?

That’s one of the topics in the fascinating article Nuremberg: A Fair Trial? A Dangerous Precedent by Judge Charles E. Wyzanski Jr., published in the US magazine of political analysis The Atlantic from April 1946. It’s not easy reading, but if you give it a chance, you get a deep look at how the trials worried legal experts, especially in the United States, the driving force of most of the trials. What were the long-term implications of trying people for acts that were not crimes under their own laws? What about trying them for breaking laws “invented” after the fact, solely in order to investigate and punish those people? Was it fair to try them under a legal system from another country? In the end, was Nuremberg mostly a political act?

I’m not a legal expert and can’t go deeply into these issues myself, but I recommend reading the article and then thinking about the relationship of the United States to today’s International Court of Justice at the Hague. (The US no longer accepts the court’s jurisdiction when it comes to alleged US violations of international law). The article about Nuremberg from 1946 discusses how sincere America’s conviction was that “all wars of aggression are crimes,” one of the beliefs that underpinned Count 2 of the indictment (crimes against peace).

In the end, the Nuremberg Trials were murkier than they seemed. They weren’t just about punishing Nazis, but about legal concepts and precedents that apply (or not) today.

For some additional reading and transcripts about Nuremberg, try Yale University’s the Avalon Project and the National Archives Collection. And if you’re interested in how Wyzanski’s view of the trials evolved, he wrote an update in The Atlantic in December 1946, Nuremberg in Retrospect.

 

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The Fragebogen

10 Monday Sep 2012

Posted by in Denazification

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At the Potsdam Conference in 1945, the Allies decided to rid Germany of its Nazi elements. The International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg tried the big name Nazis for war crimes. Another solution had to be found to assess just how complicit in the regime other Germans in the western zones were.

The Americans and British produced the famous Fragebogen, 131 questions on six pages. The questionnaire summarized the life, professional and political activities of the person who filled it out. At first, only German civil servants such as police, judges and city government officials had to fill out the form. Early in the process, many were removed from office because of their brown pasts. The Americans with 13 million forms for their Zone had high hopes for the Fragebogen.

Reality didn’t live up to those hopes. The Germans were too busy surviving in the ruins, still stunned by defeat, not interested in delving into their pasts. Some protested that a questionnaire was too simplistic a way to decide someone’s guilt or innocence. When German Spruchkammer were set up to conduct hearings of people suspected of complicity with the Nazis, public opinion felt the little people were being persecuted while the bigger fish got away. They weren’t altogether wrong. After a first intense wave of denazification, the Americans and British saw it was impossible to fire so many Germans with expertise in the very things the Allies needed to help rebuild the country. Many old Nazis returned to their jobs.

The Landesarchiv Baden-Wurttenberg has a wonderful copy of a Fragebogen, with all questions in German and English. It’s a fascinating look at how thorough the Allies wanted to be. It asks everything from military service to membership in Nazi organizations to whether the person was involved in stealing Jewish property. The first 3 pages are reproduced here, with a.link to the Landesarchiv’s full 6-page Fragebogen.