War Crime Trials + Prosecutions

“I thought at the time and still think that the Nuremberg trials were unprincipled. Law was created ex post facto to suit the passion and clamor of the time. The concept of ex post facto law is not congenial to the Anglo-American viewpoint on law. Before criminal penalties can be imposed there must be fair warning that the conduct which one undertook was criminal.”—William O. Douglas, LL.D. (Associate Justice, Supreme Court of the U.S., 1939-1975)

We used to have these trials listed under postwar crimes, but since most visitors don't expect them there, hence had a hard time finding it, we moved it up one notch. If you wonder why we put it there in the first place: because the Allied tribunals and all the trials that followed in their wake were a crass violation of international law and thus a crime by definition. Here are papers bringing that message home.

Publish the Rosenberg Diaries

By Richard A. Widmann- Recent news accounts tell how the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) have located the long-lost diary of Alfred Rosenberg.  While it is certainly surprising, to me at least, that ICE and Homeland Security spend their time looking for lost documents from the Second World War, the…

Made-for-TV Movie More Fair than the “War Crimes” Trial It Depicts

““Nuremberg”” (television drama miniseries). Based on the book Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial, by Joseph E. Persico. Screenplay by David Rintels. Produced by Alec Baldwin, Jon Cornick, Gerry Abrams, Suzanne Girard, and Peter Sussman. Directed by Yves Simoneau. Turner Network Television (TNT). Actual running time: 180 minutes (four hours with commercials, in two parts). First segment…

The Papon Trial

On April 2, 1998, after the longest trial in all of French history, Maurice Papon, aged 87, was found guilty of complicity in “crimes against humanity,” and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment as well as ten years’ privation of his civic, civil, and family rights. He was also stripped of all his decorations, particularly that…

Nuremberg: Woe to the Vanquished

Nuremberg: The Last Battle, by David Irving. London: Focal Point, 1996. Hardcover. 380 pp. Photos. Source notes. Index. (Available for sale from the IHR for $39.95, plus shipping.) Daniel W. Michaels is a Columbia University graduate As Jackson came to more fully understand the (Phi Beta Kappa, 1954), a Fulbright exchange student to Germany (1957),…

Retirement, “Nuremberg” and Auschwitz “Rambo'

Retiring, Not Quitting Doug Collins, an award-winning journalist, has worked for several Canadian daily newspapers, and is the author of several books. He served with the British army during the Second World War, and then with the British control commission in postwar occupied Germany. The three essays published here are reprinted from his columns in…

Demjanjuk, Israel and The Holocaust

The Israeli Supreme Court has finally acquitted John Demjanjuk of the charge of being “Ivan the Terrible,” the Treblinka guard who is said to have killed and tortured countless Jews. The acquittal is also a vindication of Pat Buchanan, who led the calls for the old Ukrainian's release. It has become increasingly obvious that Demjanjuk…

Vindication for Demjanjuk

On April 18, 1988, an Israeli court solemnly declared “without hesitation” that a simple Ukrainian-born auto worker, John Demjanjuk, was “the sadistic motorman who had operated the gas chambers at the Nazi death camp in Treblinka.” When the verdict was announced, hundreds in the Jerusalem courtroom jumped to their feet and launched into gleeful shouts…

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