Revenge or tribunal?

Sixty years ago, the Nuremberg Trials, the most famous trial of the 20th century, began. A court that is still controversial and criticized from various sides. Some are dissatisfied with the “severity” of the court, others with its “softness”.

The contribution of the Nuremberg judges to modern international law can hardly be overestimated. It was in Nuremberg that the position was clearly formulated that the executor of a criminal order cannot “hide” behind the superior person who gave this order. In Nuremberg, the use of slave labor was unequivocally condemned: SS General Sauckel, who was directly responsible for its introduction, was hanged, and Arms Minister Speer, who was involved in the crime, received twenty years. In Nuremberg, the initiators of an aggressive war were convicted for the first time. Also, for the first time, organizations guilty of mass crimes against humanity (SS, SD, Gestapo, NSDAP leadership) were recognized as criminal.

The first critic to accuse the Nuremberg trials of being “soft” was Joseph Stalin. It was on the initiative of the Soviet authorities that the USSR representative at the tribunal, Jonah Nikitchenko, drew up a “special opinion” in which he demanded a death sentence for “Nazi No. 3” Hermann Hess, the conviction of three high-ranking officials - the Minister of Economics and the head of the Reichsbank Schacht, the vice-chancellor and diplomat Papen and Goebbels' collaborator Fritsche, as well as the recognition of the German government of the Hitler period and the military command as criminal organizations.

Since then, this point of view has become canonical in Russian literature. However, upon careful analysis of the trial materials, it becomes clear that the judges made justice decisions. Thus, after the famous flight to England in May 1941, Hess, for obvious reasons, did not participate in Nazi crimes, including the “final solution” to the Jewish question. In addition, some doubts remained about his mental adequacy. Many of the actions of the acquitted defendants may be morally condemnable (for example, Schacht's long-term support of the activities of the Nazi Party or Papen's activities in support of pro-Hitler forces in Austria), but the court drew a clear line between morality and law. If you condemn a person only because his actions are contrary to moral standards, you can go far - that’s why the court did not create a dangerous precedent.

It was problematic to recognize Hitler’s government as criminal, if only because it did not actually function as an institution: Hitler had not convened it for meetings since the 30s (by the way, almost all ministers were sentenced to death or imprisonment, so what about removing criminals from there was no answer). As for the military leadership, the generals against whom real evidence could be collected were convicted, but the tribunal prevented the indiscriminate prosecution of career military personnel for the very fact of their service in the General Staff or other governing army bodies.

Now about the opposite accusations - that the tribunal became a form of revenge of the victors on the vanquished. You should pay attention to criticism, if only because it comes not only from neo-Nazi circles (this is just banal), but also from some respectable politicians. Let us at least note that one of the first to formulate this thesis was Senator Taft, who was tipped for US President from the Republican Party. Of course, the Nuremberg Tribunal was not perfect - just as any human court is imperfect. But in an extremely difficult post-war situation, when the victims of Nazism - both countries, peoples, and millions of people - called for fair retribution, the court found the strength to abandon revenge and for 11 months scrupulously worked to establish the guilt of specific defendants, who were given real the right to defense (the accused in the bloody Nazi “People's Court Chamber” did not have this). While it took 74 days to present evidence for the prosecution during the trial, the defense took 133 days. The very fact that some of them were acquitted (as well as, for example, the refusal to accept Stalin’s version of the Katyn tragedy on faith) testifies to the objectivity of the judges. It is noteworthy that serious researchers criticize only some decisions of the tribunal for their severity - for example, out of 12 death sentences, only one is in doubt (to General Staff General Alfred Jodl, the evidence of whose guilt in war crimes was very contradictory).

The Nuremberg Tribunal set an important precedent for international justice today. Its successors are the tribunals for ex-Yugoslavia and Rwanda, which are designed to punish those responsible for ethnic cleansing. In Russia, few people are interested in Rwanda (let’s just say that politicians and military men from the local Hutu tribe are being tried, who did everything in their power to destroy the neighboring Tutsi tribe). But international judges are subjected to severe criticism here for putting our Serb brothers in prison.

What can you answer to this? Firstly, they are imprisoned not for being Serbs or Orthodox, but for very specific crimes, which sixty years ago would have attracted capital punishment. Secondly, for international judges it does not matter who appeared before them - a Serb, a Croat or a Muslim (remember that well-known Croatian and Muslim generals, as well as commanders of Albanian militants, were also investigated and tried). The main thing is the evidence base in their cases, the quality of the work of investigators, prosecutors and lawyers. Thirdly, no “high” motives - such as the fight against terrorism, the protection of Christian Europe from Islamic expansion, etc. - can be an excuse for crimes, the commission of which is not currently denied by the Serbian authorities.

However, for modern Russian critics of the tribunal for ex-Yugoslavia, these arguments are not serious - they are guided by emotions (including wounded “post-imperial” pride), rather than respect for the letter of the law and legal procedure, which was characteristic of the Nuremberg judges 60 years ago.