By LESTER VOGEL and PROSSER GIFFORD
An international group of historians, legal scholars, former prosecutors, and interested members of the public met at the Library and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on Nov. 13 and 14 for a symposium on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Nuremberg war-crimes trials.
"Nuremberg and Its Impact: 50 Years Later" was sponsored by the Museum's Research Institute and the Library's Manuscript Division and Office of Scholarly Programs.
Sybil Milton of the Research Institute and David Wigdor, assistant chief of the Manuscript Division, were the conference organizers. Proceedings on the first day were held in the Library's Mumford Room, while the Museum's Meyerhoff Auditorium was the site of the meeting's concluding sessions. The event was made possible through generous grants from Mrs. Ruth Meltzer of Philadelphia and members of the Library's Madison Council.
The conference was seen as an opportunity to reflect on the significance of the Nuremberg trials experience; to examine the legal and political aspects of the International Military Tribunal (IMT) and subsequent American trials at Nuremberg; to explore the lasting value of their precedent-setting program for dealing with Nazi war criminals; to consider the subsequent war crimes trials in Germany, Austria and Japan; and to weigh the prospects for contemporary war crimes trials related to the conflicts in Bosnia and Rwanda. Recent American legal proceedings and the implications of the Nuremberg principles for contemporary politics and culture were also addressed. Plans are under way to publish the conference papers.
William Jackson, a New York lawyer and son of Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, presided over the opening session. He had served as personal assistant to his father after President Truman appointed Justice Jackson to be the U.S. chief counsel before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Justice Jackson, the principle organizer of the trials of the surviving Nazi hierarchy at Nuremberg in 1945, eloquently opened the prosecution's case before the world. His papers are in the Library's Manuscript Division.
The first session dealt with the Nuremberg trials as a historical event On the question of What has Nurem-berg accomplished? Mr. Jackson said, "Nuremberg was a warning to future tyrants."
Because laws are not self-enforcing, he said, they are frequently subject to nonlegal considerations. For example, the international response to several postwar crimes has allowed politics to interfere with justice. The establishment of a permanent international criminal court, one of the initiatives born of Nuremberg, would make it easier for law and justice to overcome such barriers. Mr. Jackson noted how the effort to establish such a court continues today.
The other legacy of Nuremberg, according to Mr. Jackson, was the accumulation of irrefutable documentary evidence. This huge body of material recorded not only the extent of Nazi criminality, but also in effect constituted a case study in the rise and fall of a brutal totalitarian state. Through this amassed testimony, Nuremberg stands as a post mortem examination of how the erosion of simple human freedoms eventually led to the collapse of a tyrannical regime. "The Nuremberg trial put these things on the wall, for the oppressor and the oppressed to read," Mr. Jackson declared.
Whitney R. Harris, former assistant trial counsel before the IMT at Nuremberg, and Benjamin B. Ferencz, former chief prosecutor of the Einsatz-gruppen case before the U.S. Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, offered moving recollections of their growing awareness of the full horror of the record before them and their subsequent experience in prosecuting those accused of was crimes.
Both agreed that as young lawyers, the experience had been highly formative in their later careers. Mr. Harris recalled in detail Justice Jackson's skill in dealing with the many complex legal, political, and moral questions raised by the effort of the Allies to indict the initial 24 defendants, 22 of whom were later tried by the IMT. Sometimes, Mr. Harris recalled, the unfolding of the prosecution's case depended on luck in addition to legal skill. For example, when a defense lawyer called a former camp commander of Auschwitz to the witness stand, the prosecution found it was suddenly presented with an unexpected opportunity to have testimony about the camp and its nefarious purposes inserted into the trial record.
Mr. Ferencz pointed out that the charter of the IMT provided for subsequent trials, and these included the prosection of lesser Nazi officials such as doctors, legal functionaries, industrialists and foreign office staff who were accused of having carried out particular crimes. Mr. Ferencz posed and then answered a list of questions about his Nuremberg experience, recalling his involvement in the prosecution of what had been called the "biggest murder case in human history." Because the court's docket could hold only 22 persons at a time, only 22 were tried in this single case. In their roles as commanders of the special mobile squads assigned to execute civilians behind military lines, the defendants were accused of killing more than 1 million people. The four squads, consisting of some 3,000 men, operated over a period of about two years. Mr. Ferencz recalled the defendants as being intelligent, highly motivated people, "not sadists or fools," but idealistic in their aspirations to create a different world according to their particular scheme - one that included the elimination of who did not fit.
The national trials after Nuremberg were the focus of the first day's afternoon program. Gerald Schwab, a retired foreign service officer with the State Department, moderated the sessions. Before starting, Mr. Schwab, who served as a translator-interpreter at the Nuremberg trials, noted that the distinctive headphone system that supplied simultaneous translations of the trial proceedings, and which used an experimental closed-circuit broadcast system developed by IBM, was later adopted for use by the United Nations. The original Nuremberg headphones are part of the Holocaust Museum's collections, and those worn by defendant Hermann Göring were put on display outside the Museum's Meyerhoff Auditorium.
Mr. Schwab moderated a discussion of the German experience in prosecuting cases against Nazi war criminals. Attitudes toward prosecution became distinctly more favorable in Germany by the late 1970s, with the rise of a new democratic generation and widespread viewing of the television miniseries "Holocaust."
The second day of the conference shifted to the Holocaust Museum and began with a vigorous session chaired by Walter Rockler, a former assistant counsel before the U.S. Military Tribunals at Nuremberg. Mr. Rockler also served as the first director of the Office of Special Investigations of the United States Department of Justice. Allan A. Ryan Jr., another former director of the Office of Special Investigations, enumerated many of the complications of extradition. He noted, for example, that to bring accused persons to justice there must be a second country willing not only to file for extradition but also to follow the difficult process through to prosecution.
Attention then shifted to the Tokyo war crimes trials and developments in international law since Nuremberg. Onuma Yasuaki of the Faculty of Law of the University of Tokyo urged that principles of justice and fairness require all nations to apply the Nuremberg principles. He was followed by Louis Henkin of Columbia University School of Law, who told how international law has changed since the Nuremberg trials. Noting that some progress had been made since Nuremberg. Mr. Henkin lamented that there had been little growth in mankind's capacity to avoid such crimes in the first place. He, like others, advocated that a permanent international criminal be established.
The last session of the conference focused on precedents established by the Nuremberg Trials and some of the current practices in international law and policy, moderated by Mr. Ferencz. Rochus Pronk of the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law of American University detailed current efforts to prosecute, in specially constituted tribunals at the Hague, war criminals associated with conflicts in Bosnia and Rwanda.
In the final address of the conference, "Nuremberg in American Politics and Culture," former CIA Director R. James Woolsey offered an analysis of the philosophical underpinnings of Nuremberg and subsequent history. He noted that the Nuremberg trials grew out of an Enlightenment philosophical belief in universally applicable truths and ethical norms, while many subsequent political movements were informed by vagaries of moral relativism.
Mr. Ferencz's summation of the two days ended the conference on a note of subdued optimism: After failure to establish a system of international accountability in the wake of World War I, the legacy of Nuremberg stood as both a revolutionary step forward and a challenge to humanity.
Two aspects of the conference were particularly noteworthy for co- organizer David Wigdor. "I was impressed by how deeply involved the prosecutors have been in subsequent years, in trying to establish an ongoing significance to the Nuremberg experience," including the instituting of a permanent international criminal court. In addition, by offering an opportunity to a contemporary policymaker like Mr. Woolsey to "stand back and try to make sense and order out of Nuremberg and recent events" this was an occasion for all to think about law and justice, policy and morality. These aspects made "the conference's own contribution that much more significant," he concluded.
Mr. Vogel and Mr. Gifford are in the Office of Scholarly Programs.