by Mark Weber
Do the ‘war crimes’ trials prove extermination?
A common response to expressions of skepticism about the Holocaust story is to say something like “What about Nuremberg? What about the trials and all the evidence?!” This reaction is understandable because the many postwar “war crimes” trials have given explicit, authoritative judicial legitimacy to the Holocaust extermination story.
By far the most important of these was the great Nuremberg trial of 1945-1946, officially known as the International Military Tribunal (IMT). The governments of the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and France put on trial the most prominent surviving German leaders as “Major War Criminals” for various “war crimes,” “crimes against peace,” and “crimes against humanity.” In the words of the Tribunal’s Charter, these “Nazi conspirators” carried out their crimes as part of a great “Common Plan or Conspiracy.”
In addition, twelve secondary Nuremberg trials (NMT) organized by the US government alone were conducted between 1946 to 1949. Similar trials were also conducted by the British at LĂŒneburg and Hamburg, and by the United States at Dachau. Since then, many other Holocaust-related trials have been held in West Germany, Israel and the United States, including the highly-publicized trials in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann and John Demjanjuk.
Germany’s wartime treatment of the Jews figured prominently in the Nuremberg trials. In their condemnation of the defendants, the Allies gave special emphasis to the alleged extermination of six million European Jews. Chief US prosecutor Robert H. Jackson, for example, declared in his opening address to the Tribunal: / 1
The most savage and numerous crimes planned and committed by the Nazis were those against the Jews … It is my purpose to show a plan and design, to which all Nazis were fanatically committed, to annihilate all Jewish people…. The avowed purpose was the destruction of the Jewish people as a whole… The conspiracy or common plan to exterminate the Jews was … methodically and thoroughly pursued… History does not record a crime ever perpetrated against so many victims or one ever carried out with such calculated cruelty.
Echoing these words, chief British prosecutor Sir Hartley Shawcross declared in his final address to the Tribunal: / 2
There is one group to which the method of annihilation was applied on a scale so immense that it is my duty to refer separately to the evidence. I mean the extermination of the Jews. If there were no other crime against these men [the defendants], this one alone, in which all of them were implicated, would suffice. History holds no parallel to these horrors.
How compelling was the evidence presented at Nuremberg to substantiate such damning words? How did the defendants respond to the charges?
While much of the specific testimony and documentation presented in these trials has been dealt with in other Journal articles, here we take a closer look at the general trustworthiness of the evidence cited at Nuremberg and elsewhere for the Holocaust extermination story. This chapter also focuses on the basic character of these trials, which have played such an important role in “legitimizing” the Holocaust story.
Political justice
The Nuremberg enterprise violated ancient and fundamental principles of justice. The victorious Allies acted as prosecutor, judge and executioner of the German leaders. The charges were created especially for the occasion, and were applied only to the vanquished. /3 Defeated, starving, prostrate Germany was, however, in no position to oppose whatever the Allied occupation powers demanded.
As even some leading Allied figures privately acknowledged at the time, the Nuremberg trials were organized not to dispense impartial justice, but for political purposes. Sir Norman Birkett, British alternate judge at the Nuremberg Tribunal, explained in a private letter in April 1946 that “the trial is only in form a judicial process and its main importance is political.” /4
Robert Jackson, the chief US prosecutor and a former US Attorney General, declared that the Nuremberg Tribunal “is a continuation of the war effort of the Allied nations” against Germany. He added that the Tribunal “is not bound by the procedural and substantive refinements of our respective judicial or constitutional system …” /5
Judge Iola T. Nikitchenko, who presided at the Tribunal’s solemn opening session, was a vice-chairman of the supreme court of the USSR before and after his service at Nuremberg. In August 1936 he had been a judge at the infamous Moscow show trial of Zinoviev and Kamenev. /6 At a joint planning conference shortly before the Nuremberg Tribunal convened, Nikitchenko bluntly explained the Soviet view of the enterprise: /7
We are dealing here with the chief war criminals who have already been convicted and whose conviction has been already announced by both the Moscow and Crimea [Yalta] declarations by the heads of the [Allied] governments… The whole idea is to secure quick and just punishment for the crime…
The fact that the Nazi leaders are criminals has already been established. The task of the Tribunal is only to determine the measure of guilt of each particular person and mete out the necessary punishment — the sentences…
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