My great-uncle was a prison guard at the Nuremberg Trials. He had entered the U.S. Army in the waning days of the Second World War, eager to get in on the action. He did and, after the war, found himself doing occupation duty in the city of Nuremberg. Once a medieval gem, then later the epicenter of all things Nazi, Nuremberg had been reduced to a rubble heap. It was in these ruins that my uncle found himself when they became the stage for the great war crimes trials of the most notorious Nazis. Assigned to the military guard duty, my uncle’s experience was unique. History had given him – born in the forgotten, desperately poor coal-fields of West Virginia – the unique, dubious privilege of keeping watch over some of the most notorious war-mongers, haters, and mass murderers that it had ever produced.
My uncle was most certainly aware of the irony and significance of his historical role. I still remember the disgust on his face – nose wrinkled-up as if it still smelled the stink of war – when he recounted watching “that fat pig” Göring stroll around the prison exercise yard.
As we know, the fat pig escaped justice. Under circumstances still unclear to historians, Göring managed to poison himself, going to a judgment far more terrible than hanging. My uncle, after leaving behind the Army and the War, went on to put himself through college and become a biology professor – the proverbial diamond from a coal mine. He is now much rarer than that: he is one of the few surviving witnesses to the Nuremberg Trials.
But this little anecdote is more than insignificant family history. As the Second World War and its horrors slowly fade from living memory, we risk repeating the same old, catastrophic errors that brought them about. Recalling Stalin’s wickedly cynical line that “a single death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic,” 6,000,000 (or more) deaths can all too easily become a number in a textbook, the sum of their individual tragedies rendered abstract or academic. Today, we once again see the resurgence of extreme nationalism and xenophobia, as well as torture and war as instruments of national policy. War criminals go unpunished. Losing the living memory of World War II and the war-crimes trials that concluded it not only risks breaking the promise of “never again;” just as badly, we might also forget our great human potential for dispassionate reason and justice.
This is because, from 20 November 1945 to 1 October 1946, the victorious Allies did something remarkable. Amidst wrecked cities and fresh graves, their victors’ justice was not summary execution, imprisonment without trial, or even drumhead courts-martial. Rather, the Allies cooperated to put accused Nazi war criminals on real trial, according to the rule-of-law and before independent judges. They accorded dignity, justice, and fair play to the perpetrators of some of the worst atrocities ever committed. What we, as distant observers seventy-years later, cannot truly appreciate is that the Allied Powers offered this improbable grace to their enemies after years of unsurpassed blood and destruction, and over popular anger and an understandable hunger for revenge. To that generation, six-million was not a statistic and few alive were left un-scarred physically or psychologically by the brutalities of war. The trials were not just a revolutionary, ground-breaking legal exercise in the international punishment of war criminals and human rights abusers, though they certainly were that. No, the essence and honor of the Nuremberg Trials go much deeper than their legal precedent.
The real memory of the Nuremberg Trials comes with self-reflection. That is, how do we conduct ourselves, as a society, in the face of fear, justified indignation, great dangers, or even radical evils? It is a question that precedes any legal or political response to crime, terror, war, oppression, or other threat, and it dares us to look inward into the dark recesses of both our individual and collective souls. Outraged and grievously wronged, do we confuse the righteous call for justice with the clamor of hate? Do we descend into the prison yard and wallow with the piggies, or do we stand a tall guard on the walls? Seventy years later, the memory of Nuremberg demands that, like my uncle, we stay on the walls, for it is from walls that civilization is built.
This post also appears on my new blog “Cicero : a personal journal of law - politics - culture,” at https://cicerodicit.wordpress.com/.
Before You Go
