Fifty years ago this month, Associate United States Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson made the opening statement in what would become known as the Nuremberg war crimes trial.
"The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a great responsibility," Jackson told the International Military Tribunal. "The four great nations flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law.
"The crimes 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," he said.
During the next ten months, prosecutors from the four victorious powers -- the United States, Great Britain, France and Russia -- presented their case against 22 Nazi leaders. In trying to fix German guilt, the prosecutors had charged the defendants with conspiring and launching aggressive war and committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.
In the end, three of the defendants were acquitted. Eight received long prison sentences and the rest were sentenced to death. At 10:45 p.m. on October 15, 1946, Hermann Goering cheated the hangman with a cyanide capsule. Two hours later, the executions began.
The trial of Goering, Rudolf Hess, Albert Speer and the others was part show trial and part noble effort to create new international law in the face of crimes that negated civilization's progress. To some extent, it reflected the optimistic sentiments for world cooperation (which were rapidly eclipsed by the Cold War) that led to the creation of the United Nations. It was a political effort to find human-sized justice for crimes that were so hideous.
This was the trial of the century. In the words of Norman Birkett, who served as a British alternate judge: it was "the greatest trial in history."
A Special Court TV Presentation
Beginning November 13, 1995, Court TV broadcast 15 hours of Nuremberg. It was the most extensive coverage of the trial ever broadcast.
Some of the trial was filmed by the U.S. Army Signal Corps, Soviet cameramen and commercial newsreel companies such as Paramount and Universal. But there were many days when nothing was filmed.
A nearly complete record of the proceedings does exist on audio tape, recorded as it was spoken in the four languages of the trial - English, German, French and Russian. Court TV's broadcast supplemented selected portions of the existing film with audio tape. Where only audio exists, we added still photographs or film that was shot in the courtroom during that particular portion of the trial.
The cameras of the mid-1940s used 35 mm film on 10-minute reels. There were no zoom lenses, so cameramen used turret lenses that held close-up, normal and long lenses. Cameramen switched lenses while shooting and often did not focus after a lens change. The footage was shot and edited for newsreels that were shown in movie theaters, and choices about what was shot reflected the needs of the newsreel companies. The cameras often were placed at awkward angles to avoid disrupting the proceedings.
As stated earlier, the proceedings were held in four languages. All documents were to be translated and made available in each language, and a team of translators was employed. But the sheer volume of the material insured that the translators could not keep up.
The Legacy of Nuremberg
In the view of most historians, Nuremberg's legacy is mixed. They are generally favorable to the attempt made by the Allies to bring some form of international judicial accounting for the horrors of the Nazi regime. To this day, Nuremberg remains the most thorough record of Hitler's rise to power, and the planning, launching and execution of World War II. As such, it was no small achievement, and one that was forged out of the chaos and rubble immediately following World War II.
But some argue that the International Military Tribunal was a victor's justice, and the trial has been criticized for a variety of reasons. The list of those accused was somewhat arbitrary. There also were basic misgivings. The accused had been charged with violations of international law, but such law was binding on nations, not individuals. Individuals, it was argued, could be brought to justice only under the laws of their own country, not on the basis of a new order established after a war. It may have been imperfect justice, but there was no alternative.
Nuremberg has never fulfilled its brightest promise -- a permanent international tribunal for war crimes. Various efforts have been made in the ensuing half century, but all have languished. Only recently, with the establishment of the U.N.'s International Criminal Tribunal that is addressing war crimes in the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, have the ideals set at Nuremberg taken a tangible form.
The final business of Nuremberg remains unfinished.
