Robert E. Conot (1929–2011)

Our family papers show keen interest in the evils and evildoers of World War II, and not just because my cousin Herb Gawronski was a busy judge in Allied-occupied Germany. Conot's courtroom drama certainly fades alongside the breathtaking scale of war crimes: Germans on the home front who had not recognized the Final Solution also failed to ask about emaciated foreigners who replaced their conscripted co-workers, or healthy elders at the old-age home suddenly pronounced dead from lingering illness. The evasive defendants at Nuremberg embody not only the banality of evil, but also the sin of comfortable ignorance.… (mehr)

An in depth book about the trials at Nuremberg after WWII. This was a very long book about the top German leaders both military and political in charge under Hitler. Personally after reading this book, some of them were released after their sentences showed that this court was faulted. Some lifers got out early and shorten sentences for others. 11 defendants got execution which they deserved. Goering of those eleven committed suicide before his hanging. Three high ranking officials got released without punishment.… (mehr)

Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial
Joseph E Persico
New York: 1994, Penguin, 520 pages

Justice at Nuremberg
Robert E Conot
New York: 1983, Harper & Row, 593 pages

We filter current events through our reading of history.

At the same time, though, we write history through a lens of current events.

For Joseph Persico, the West’s feeble response to Serbian ethnic cleansing and the Clinton administration’s delicate sidestepping calling Hutu mass-murder of Tutsis genocide, colored his vision of the Nuremberg trial of the surviving Nazi leaders.

For Robert Conot, the rise of Holocaust deniers and historical revisionists demanded precise definition and description of the crimes for which the major Nazis were tried.

Each cover the same ground but draw differing inferences from the particulars. Both are valuable.

Some botches were inevitable. International law on war crimes was ill-defined.

On the one hand, some previous war crimes trials had appeared to be victor’s vengeance: after Appomattox, for example, a federal court martial hanged Henry Wirz, commandant of the Confederate prison camp at Andersonville although the perpetrators of the Union’s equally lethal Camp Douglas escaped indictment, let alone punishment.

On the other hand, after World War I, Germans accused by the Allies of war crimes were turned over to German courts, which imposed laughably light sentences.

Some Allied leaders, such as Winston Churchill, recommended summary proceedings against the Nazis: shoot on sight. Others recognized that not only must the obvious crimes (mass murder, looting, devastation) be punished but the world must see that justice had been done.

As Hannah Arendt noted in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), “What Justice Jackson failed to point out is that in consequence of this yet unfinished nature of international law it has become the task of ordinary trial judges to render justice without the help of, or beyond the limitation set upon them through positively posited laws.”

If the trials of the major Nazi failed to prevent later atrocity, why study them?

Certainly, each of the prosecuting powers went on to base major policy on willingness and preparedness to commit crimes of greater magnitude.

But the trial of the major Nazis established precedent. Although local tinpots may have drawn courage for their felonies from the major powers' subsequent unwillingness to circumscribe policy by that precedent, the moment four countries spoke for the world and condemned was not thereby diminished.

Shofar December 2009… (mehr)