Waiting For Our Nuremberg Trials…

A reckoning. Justice. Requital. After yet another man was killed by ICE, once again a mistaken identity on top of it, there is nothing I long for more than the certainty that everybody involved with these heinous crimes will be held accountable. Everybody, from the top down. I’m hoping for something like the Nuremberg Trials, where leaders and collaborators of the Nazi regime had to answer for the atrocities they had committed. Almost 100,000 Germans were arrested and tried as war criminals.

When I grew up, Nazis and fascists had been defeated. Yes, Franco remained Spain’s dictator until his death in 1975, but I rarely heard about him and I don’t think he influenced the politics of the rest of Europe very much. “Never again” was something I grew up with, something that one had to work for, that needed to be preserved at all cost.

I don’t remember the Nuremberg Trials, they started before I was born. So I had to go to Wikipedia to find out more exactly what went on. What I learned dampened my expectations a little. For one thing, it was an “international military trial”. The United States, France, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union first held a conference in London from 26 June to 2 August 1945, where representatives of the four countries decided upon the ways to proceed which was signed as the Nuremberg Charter on August 8, 1945. By then, the Allies had reached an agreement concerning several sticky points. There were laws which defined war crimes, but they didn’t cover atrocities committed against civilians, crimes that a government committed against its own citizens, such as German Jews. The Allies finally agreed on “crimes against humanity”, a term that was unsuccessfully used to prosecute the perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide. The relevant part of Article 6 of the Nuremberg Charter reads:

“(c) Crimes against Humanity: namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.”

But the crimes against humanity had to be committed in connection with an international war of aggression. Both the United States and the Soviet Union refused to allow the International Military Tribunal any influence on their own, peacetime, treatment of its citizens: the racial segregation in the Southern United States (Jim Crow Laws) as well as Stalin’s Great Purge which killed over one million Soviet citizens had to be excluded from Crimes against Humanity. Think about that…

This led to the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials, from December 9, 1946, to April 13, 1049. Strictly connecting the crimes against humanity committed by Germans to the wartime, excluded all atrocities which happened before the beginning of the war. The Control Council Law No. 10, adopted on December 20, 1945, led to the arrest of almost 100,000 Germans as war criminals. Each of the twelve trials that followed was focused on a particular area of criminal activity: the Doctors’ Trial, for example, dealt with Nazi doctors who had performed medical experiments and involuntary euthanasia (= murder) on helpless human beings, numbering in the hundreds of thousands. Another one was the Judges’ Trial which involved state prosecutors, chief justices, and other members of the Nazi judicial system. And then there was the Krupp Trial, which held twelve former directors of the steel- and weapons producing company responsible for crimes committed against humanity. These included “murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, imprisonment, torture, and use for slave labor of civilians who came under German control, German nationals, and prisoners of war” and involved over 100,000 people who were used in their slave labor program.

Was justice truly served? Some of the worst Nazi perpetrators such as Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler, had committed suicide. 24 men were indicted in the first Nuremberg Trial; twelve were sentenced to death (still claiming their innocence!), seven received prison sentences, three were acquitted, and no decision was made in the case of the president of the Krupp company because of his ill health. The subsequent twelve Nuremberg Trials processed 489 cases which involved 1,672 defendants, 1,416 of them were found guilty. These trials resulted in less than 200 death sentences, and life sentences for 279 defendants. An amnesty in 1951 either released them or commuted to shorter terms. When I grew up, it was well known that some former Nazis were part of the government. But there was at least a serious attempt to hold these criminals accountable.

After learning more about the Nuremberg Trials, I’m somewhat worried about our situation. For one thing, they were conducted by an international tribunal, something that will never happen here. With the corrupt Supreme Court majority, even if we’ll experience the desperately hoped-for “blue tsunami” in November, even if we elect an intelligent, empathetic progressive (who is emotionally stable) in 2028, there’s no guarantee that everybody involved with the current regime will be held responsible. Trump and his corrupt family. Every one of them. The unqualified collection of individuals who make up the cabinet: former co-host of FOX & Friends Weekend on the FOX News Channel Pete Hegseth who seems to enjoy playing war. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a lawyer who is convinced he knows more about health than medical scientists with many years of research and studies. Plus, most individuals connected with ICE and Homeland Security, past and current, such as “ICE Barbie” Christi Noem, “border czar” Tom Homan, Nazi officer look-alike Greg Bovino. Let’s not forget former attorney general Pam Bondi and her handling of the Epstein Files, the clueless DOGE adolescents who wreaked havoc with foreign aid and our social security numbers, and who generally behaved in an illegal and potentially unconstitutional manner. The list of people who should be held accountable for all the damage and suffering they caused goes on and on.

I don’t belong to the legal profession and have no idea how this could proceed, but I sure hope there are some lawyers and judges who work with legislators and hash out a plan. They certainly should start now, and not wait until November. And while they’re at it: how about formulating the equivalent to Project 2025. I’m still scratching my head, wondering why this hasn’t happened years ago… Maybe I’m trying to compare apples and oranges. A recent article by Christopher Armitage (Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder) points out brain differences in conservatives and liberals that neuroscientists have discovered using brain scans. They found that left-leaning people tend to be more empathetic. And I’ve read about studies that show conservatives are more fearful, which means they accept authority easier than liberals. Maybe it’s a good thing that democrats are all over the place and can’t be corralled under one dogmatic doctrine. And yet, if we want to see justice, a road map for the future is absolutely necessary.