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"Civilization asks whether law is so laggard as to be utterly helpless to deal with crimes of this magnitude by criminals of this order of importance." – Robert Jackson, Chief Prosecutor at the Nuremburg Trials.
This week marks the 60th anniversary of the start of the Nuremburg Trials.
Harvard Law School has over 1 million pages of documents from the trial, and has launched a project to index and digitize the content for the Web. The Nuremburg Trials Project can be accessed here.
An essay in Der Spiegel notes that the Nuremburg Trials represented the idea of "peace through justice":
The name "Nuremberg" is synonymous with both. Nuremberg played host to the Reich’s political conventions — a government that brought death, ruin and barbarism to Europe. But it was also in Nuremberg that the victorious Allied Forces dealt with the defeated power. In the history of man, their bold actions were wholly without precedent. There was no bloodbath, no peace treaty — instead, there was a trial — call it peace through justice.
Nuremburg was the first trial where the phase "crimes against humanity" was used. Now the nation that brought justice at Nuremburg is itself engaged in crimes against humanity. The list grows longer with each new revelation in the press: torture, extraordinary renditions, chemical weapons (white phosphorus), illegal detentions (Guantanamo). What has been lost in the last sixty years?
Read Jackson’s closing comments. At one point he quotes Schacht from the cross examination:
"I think you can score many more successes when you want to lead someone if you don’t tell them the truth than if you tell them the truth."
But history eventually does record the truth – there are no "exemptions" from the verdict of history.
