The Nuremberg Judgment

ON September 30, 1946, seven years and a month after the Second World War began with the onset of the German armies across the western frontiers of Poland, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg pronounced a mainly unanimous judgment in a document of 50,000 words on the German personalities and organisations charged before it. This judgment has certainly been an epoch-making event. Nothing at all comparable has ever taken place before. For the first time a court representing the principal nations of the world emerging victorious from a great war has formally tried the political leaders of a sovereign state for responsibility for waging aggressive war defined as a crime. The defendants at Nuremberg have also, of course, been tried for all manner of atrocities committed in connection with German aggressions, and this has not involved any new principle of jurisprudence, for it has long been recognised that the victor in war has the right to try by court-martial officers and others of the defeated nation who have committed atrocities contrary to the accepted laws of war against the victor's nationals. Although this right has not hitherto been invoked in application to the rulers and highest military authorities of an enemy country, it could have been so applied to the Nazi leaders and it provided grounds for the punishment of most of them—all those who have been convicted at Nuremberg on charges of "War Crimes" in the narrow sense and "Crimes against Humanity"—even without any accusation of "Crimes against Peace." But responsibility for the war itself has been the central charge in the Nuremberg indictment, and the Tribunal has declared in its judgment: "To initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."