Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0114/01142.txt

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$Unique_ID{bob01142}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps 1945, The
Chapter VIII: The War Crimes Tribunals - Part II}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Various}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{crimes
war
nuremberg
germany
find
time
trial
am
eichmann
even}
$Date{1987}
$Log{}
Title:       Liberation of the Nazi Concentration Camps 1945, The
Author:      Various
Date:        1987

Chapter VIII: The War Crimes Tribunals - Part II

Delphin Debenest

     I have been asked to talk on the subject of war crimes and the judicial
organizations which heard those trials.  It is not my intention to explain to
you in technical and juridical detail what was involved, because we have been
asked here to bear witness.  I feel that it is on the basis of such bearing of
witness that it will be possible to study and draw up proposals on a judicial
organization and rules that should be used for the functioning of such a
judicial body.

     The witness that I am going to bring to bear I will give you in two
separate categories:  as someone who for four years lived under the German
occupation, as a member of the underground, of the resistance, and also as an
inmate in Buchenwald concentration camp.  Thereafter, I will talk to you as a
General Advocate of France, one of the judges at the Nuremberg trials.

     I will be relating to you facts that I knew and lived through personally
or facts that I read in the authentic documents at Nuremberg. All of these
facts have been proven, unquestionably, without doubt, without challenge.
These are German documents that were collected during the advance of the
Allied armies, especially by the United States forces.  I know how fragile
human testimony and witness is, and I know how easy it is to cast doubt on it,
so I am only going to talk about things that are based on written proof and
documents.

     The speaker from Great Britain, who preceded me here, told you of the
jurisdictional aspects of the courts that heard these crimes.  These
jurisdictions took place in Germany or in the occupied territories.  These
courts were the same in France as in Great Britain, so I will not dwell on
this point so as not to go on any longer than I need to.

     Judge Robert Jackson, who was the chief prosecutor for the United States
in the Nuremberg trials and to whom we owe the organization of the
International Military Tribunals, defined war crimes in accordance with the
norms of all civilized countries.  In other words, these are acts contrary to
the custom and usage and traditions of war as customarily practiced.  A few
examples would be acts of violence against persons and property which do not
aim at a military purpose, including the massacre of the wounded, mistreatment
of war prisoners, pillage, systematic destruction, mistreatment of persons in
occupied territories, persecution for racial or religious reasons, and
following a general and systematic policy of terrorism and repression in the
occupied countries.

     The Second World War started by a true war crime, the air bombing of
Poland on September 1, 1939, without any declaration of war.

     There were many acts of terrorism in occupied France:  the taking of
hostages; the terrorizing and hanging of peasants working in their fields; and
arrests of members of the underground and, their execution without trial in
Paris and in Vercors.  The Germans found wounded people whom they summarily
executed, and they also killed the people who were taking care of them.

     There were also things that were done to the members of the resistance to
make them confess.  There were atrocities, for example, against members of the
resistance, even greater atrocities in Tulle, and in Oradour-sur-Glans, where
healthy men were found, put together, and executed together with women and
children.  They were closed into churches, and the Panzer divisions of the
Germans, after barricading the doors of these churches, burned them.  One
single woman escaped death on this occasion.  In another place, hostages were
taken.  These are just a few examples among many.  And the place where they
were imprisoned was set fire to.  All perished.

     There were commissions of crimes with no reason, no purpose, because they
just confused Oradour-sur-Glans with another town named Oradour in another
place.  The pretext was that nearby there were members of the underground.
But even if there were some, they didn't find them.  There were many acts of
terrorism.  I could name many whole towns and villages burned, Haute-Ubaye in
the Alps, for instance.  And there were many members of the Resistance who
were arrested and underwent terrible tortures in prison when they were not
executed before firing squads.

     I must say that in France - here I am only talking about France because I
know the case better, but the same thing could be said of other countries,
especially Belgium and Denmark - there were people who underwent terrible
tortures even after General Eisenhower made it possible to shut off the
advance of the German troops coming up from the south.

     I won't talk about the documents because time has caught up with me, but
I would like to mention as war crimes what was committed in Bastogne where
people were chained and run over by tanks.  I won't mention either, because of
time restraints, the medical experiments which were found in the concentration
camps, but there is a lot to say about that because these were done on the
orders of the high command of the air force and the army of Germany, and there
is voluminous proof of these crimes in Nuremberg.  I participated in trials on
this, and all of this evidence is very sound.

     We finally were able to find a jurisdiction that could hear these crimes,
and that jurisdiction of course, as you have already been told, is Nuremberg.
Nuremberg was a jurisdiction that needed to be modified, perhaps, but in any
case it was essential that these states, given the validity of the facts and
the events, were able to pass judgment on these people.  Nuremberg is not just
the justice of the victors against the vanquished; it makes it possible to
bring to our young people, who are unaware, the facts they need to know, and
it gives us an opportunity to extend the knowledge of these war crimes to the
coming generations.

Gideon Hausner

     The capture of Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and his transfer to Israel in
1960 provided an occasion for one of the most dramatic trials of our times,
for the accused had been handpicked at the time by the supreme leadership of
Nazi Germany to implement what they had called the Final Solution of the
Jewish question in Europe which, as we all know, had involved the physical
destruction of all Jews within the German sphere of influence.  Wherever a
victorious swastika flag was hoisted, from the icy waters of the Arctic Ocean
in the north to the sun-baked sands of the Sahara Desert in the south, from
the peaks of the Pyrenees in the West to the rugged hills of the Caucasus in
the East, within this vast continent the Jew was doomed.  He had to be
extirpated, by definition.

     This was the decision of a conference convened at Wannsee on January 20,
1942, chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, attended by 13 members of the highest
hierarchy of the Third Reich, and very carefully prepared by Adolf Eichmann.

     I listened with great interest to your observations, Dr. Pilichowski. Our
two countries are among those who took the resolution never to forget. I also
fully endorse your regret that some of the participants in the Wannsee
Conference and other war criminals have not yet been brought to the bar of
justice.  Eichmann's examination, both before his trial and in the courtroom,
had offered us an opportunity for a closer look at this assemblage of
dignitaries which sealed the fate of European Jewry.

     In your kit, you will find one page of the protocol of this conference
where all European countries were listed, one by one, with the number of Jews
to be destroyed.  This staggering total figure, according to this Nazi
document, exceeds the astronomical sum of 11 million.  Some places like
Estonia, then under Soviet sovereignty, are already listed as free of Jews -
judenfrei.

     But the Wannsee people, ladies and gentlemen, were not a bunch of
aborigines of the jungle, nor were they escapees from lunatic asylums, nor
murderous sadists.  They all held university degrees; they were steeped in
European culture; they belonged to the intellectual elite of their country,
for in Germany one could have been a rabid Nazi, a fiery racist, and still be
considered a Kulturmensch, a man of culture.  You could be a university
professor or a Nobel Prize winner like the physicist Philipp Lenard of
Heidelberg or Johannes Stark who undertook to write a new German physics book
omitting Einstein.  In Germany, you could have been an acclaimed intellectual
and at the same time a fanatic Nazi.

     This is the frightening element, for this is also a lesson for the world
today.  Professor Hilberg yesterday spoke of the warning omens of genocide,
the red lights which, when they start blinking, should put us on our guard.
Yet on the human side there are no such red lights.  High education,
accomplishments in the field of science, and academic careers are no warranty.
Often, on the contrary, some of the people who did the dirtiest job in the
field, some of the leaders of Einsatzgruppen, who murdered millions of Jews
and Soviet prisoners of war, were university professors.  To mention just two,
there were Ohlendorf and Six.

     This 20th century of ours, which Churchill called "the terrible 20th,"
began with anarchism, went over to Nazism, and is finishing with terrorism.
Even today you can be an intellectual; you can be considered a progressive
man:  you can be a 'writer, journalist, or actor, and yet also be an adherent
of unbridled terror aimed at synagogues, schoolchildren, or innocent people.
We say, Never Again, but, ladies and gentlemen, it is already happening again.

     In the course of the Eichmann trial, I tried to find out what made the
Nazis break the barrier, "Thou shalt not kill."  Wars have been with mankind
since the dawn of history.  Unfortunately, they have not ceased, and I share
all appeals made from this rostrum that there should be no more wars.

     When going deeper into this at the trial, we discovered that the
pernicious teachings of the 19th century philosophers, theologians, social
scientists, and even Social Darwinists had all contributed to this terrible
sewer of fatality.  Eichmann was not an intellectual; still he claimed that he
wished all his life to be guided by the categorical imperative of behavior
laid down by Immanuel Kant.  Just for the fun of it, he was asked what that
imperative was.  To the astonishment of everybody in the courtroom, he came
out with a more or less correct definition that one's behavior should be such
that you would want it to be a model for general legislation.

     None of the assembled dignitaries of Wannsee raised the slightest
objection to the mass murder of the Jews.  Heydrich, by the way, did not bring
Hitler's order; he brought Hitler's suggestion only, for he [Hitler] had
wanted all of the leadership of Nazi Germany to be implicated in the crimes.

     We have the protocol of this meeting.  Nobody had any observations,
either on the account of morality or even for such pragmatic reasons as what
the people would say outside of Germany about this terrible mass murder.  But
it was possible to discuss the issue and to consider it, as was evidenced by
the lively dispute which took place not on the killing of 11 million Jews, but
what would be the fate of the Mischlinge, the offspring of mixed marriages who
had some good blood in their veins and some "polluted" blood.  They had
disputed which mixture would seal the fate of an individual and which would
still be tolerable.

     I asked Eichmann whether he had met any objection from the leaders of the
Church.  He said no.  This brought about today the reaction of some great
Christian theologians, some present here with us, who decided that they must
find what they call "a Christian answer to Auschwitz."

     We tried to find out when it all began, when Hitler really made up his
mind.  We found a document dated September 1939, when the fighting was still
going on in Poland and when the heroes of the Polish army were still defending
the Westerplatte in Danzig, which revealed that he had already summoned his
Einsatzgruppen leaders and had given them their secret directions for the
Final Solution to come.

     At the Eichmann trial we also had to record perhaps the saddest point of
all - the complete indifference of the free world.  The world had closed its
gates to Jewish refugees and had bolted its hearts.  We were left in a no
man's land of humanity.  Measures were taken to avoid, to frustrate, to make
it impossible for the frantic stampede of Jews across Europe to find asylum
anywhere.

     Conferences were convened, only to cover up the inactivity.  Maybe that
is why today, at least, when the boat-people of Southeast Asia are sailing the
seven seas, they were offered asylum in many places.  Maybe part of the lesson
went home.  I am happy that my country did its share.

     Permit me to make a personal observation.  I am sorry that my country,
Israel, had to be brought to this place through the back door and that there
is no official delegation of Israel for the very strange argument that Israel
did not exist at the time of these crimes.  Israel is the country of the saved
remnant.  It existed in the hearts of all of our martyrs.

     I am sorry that in the material produced here there is not one word of
Hebrew or Yiddish.  These were their languages.  I am happy that at least
Secretary Haig referred to Yad Vashem as the important central institution of
commemoration.

     In Jerusalem we established a precedent - Eichmann was hiding beyond the
seas, and he thought he would find shelter behind the passage of time. Well,
neither helped him.  He was rooted out; he was found; he was brought to court,
and sentenced before the whole world.  Even his attorney had to say it was a
fair trial, and it is the only case in which Israel has ever put into effect
the death sentence.

     At the time of the trial we were thinking of a very Biblical prophecy,
"Saviors shall come up on the Mount of Zion to judge the Mount of Esau and the
kingdom shall be the Lord's." It is very fitting to speak to you liberators as
the saviors.  We have climbed and scaled many mountains and overcome many
obstacles to save the remnants of a nation.  It is our duty, yours and ours,
to band together in order to secure the future of the world.  We owe it as a
reverence to our dead and as a debt of duty to our children, for, verily, we
are our brothers' keepers.

Adrian Fisher

     One of the greatest affectations of Washington is you supply the
introducer with your title and then look embarrassed.  The fact is, I was a
technical advisor.  It is another good way of saying "law clerk," except they
had people like Quincy Wright and others who had rather prestigious jobs.  I
had been a law clerk, too.  I had been a law clerk for [Supreme Court]
Justices Brandeis and Frankfurter, so calling me a "law clerk" didn't bother
me, but it sort of bothered them.  So we got the fancy title of "technical
adviser," and I got a free ride along with them.

     We don't have much time.  I would like to deal with just about three
things:  one is, what did Nuremberg do on this issue of "let's not forget" and
what did it leave undone?  The first thing that this international trial did
was to lay a foundation, without the doubt of any reasonable man of the true
enormity of what had happened.

     You listen to a person describe how an outfit comes into a town, rounds
up all the people, makes them dig mass graves, strips them, and then shoots
them.  I know that some of the U.S. judges for whom I worked, particularly
Judge Parker, just could not believe it until he believed it, and then he went
into almost a funk as a result of it because he just could not accept that
people could be that evil.  So it established without any doubt,
notwithstanding some rather kooky voices from the extreme right, that this
thing in fact happened.

     It also established without much doubt, as General Hausner said, that
there was not a great deal of opposition to it in Germany at that point and
the whole notion of superior orders was a fake.  He mentioned Ohlendorf who
led one of the Einsatzgruppen.  He was asked if his estimate of 100,000 as the
number killed on a particular mission wasn't a little low, because one of the
other groups had said they had killed 150,000.  He said no and that the other
group was just bragging.  That will just give you some idea of the value
judgment.

     You have laid a theoretical basis for dealing with this problem in the
past.  It has a gap; there is no question about that.  The gap is that it
didn't deal with prewar issues.

     As my distinguished colleague has said, there are a lot of things that
were left undone.  The first is, the whole Nuremberg trials and the subsequent
proceedings were based on occupation powers.  No serious difficulty; all of
this argument against the Nuremberg trials was ex post facto nonsense as
applied to this.  The Geneva and Hague Conventions were there, and they made
it clear it was a crime to mistreat people of occupied territory.  It was very
clear.  But this was an occupation problem, and it is also a whole group of
other problems that have been dealt with, such as:  How do you get these guys?
What do you do when the occupation is over?  Are you going to delay the
occupation of what is now the Federal Republic of Germany until the entire war
crime problem has been settled?  It has not been settled yet, and would we
want to delay it that much further?  Was that within the political capability
of any of our countries?  I have some doubt if it was within the political
capability of the United States.

     What, then, are we saying?  One obvious answer is that there is a
convention that deals with this, that carries these modalities lying around
loose.  It is the Genocide Convention.  It deals with such matters as
extradition.  I do not think right now the problem of pre-1939 crimes is the
thing that worries us the most.  What worries us the most is whether or not
the post-1939 crimes are really cleared up.  There is going to be a statute of
limitations on that - not a legal statute of limitations, but a limitation of
death, where people may avoid one punishment to perhaps go to a somewhat more
serious one.

     We really ought to get cracking to ratify the Genocide Convention, so we
won't have all of these technical arguments on these kinds of things.  We have
to recognize that the juridical tools are with us for dealing with this
problem.  The problem is purely one of will, "political will," to use a phrase
I heard very often in arms control negotiations.  If the term is "political
will," it is up to us to tell our respective governments not to get cracking,
but to keep cracking, and that is the only way we can keep this thing in its
proper role.