In his opening statement of the trial of the chief Nazi war criminals, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson (on leave from the Court at the time) declared "The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated."
The names of the defendants are well known. Hermann Goring, HItler's designated successor and chief of the Luftwaffe; Hans Frank, HItler's personal lawyer and the "Jew Butcher of Cracow"; Albert Speer, Hitler's cultured, aristocratic architect, who designed his rallies and worked five million slave laborers--thousands of them to death. Julius Streicher, Rudolf Hess, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Generals Jodl and Keitel, and Admirals Raeder and Donitz. In Perisco's Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial we get a mesmerizing recreation of their trial and an intimate portrait of their motives, twisted ideals and loathsome justifications.
Today it is easy to forget that a trial of the Nazi warlords was by no means guaranteed or even predicted. Both Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill at one point advocated shooting war criminals out of hand. The concept of an international tribunal was unprecedented. The Cold War might be said to have begun in the deteriorating relationship among the prosecuting nations--England, France, and particularly the United States and Russia.
At a time when war crimes--in Iraq, Cambodia, Bosnia, Libya and other places--are being investigated, when neo-Nazi movements are surfacing in many countries, and when "revisionists" are denying the very existence of the Holocaust, the importance of documenting and understanding the Nuremberg trials cannot be underestimated.
Terrific book.
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