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June 27, 2021 / 6:54 PM COVID-19 vaccination does not violate the Nuremberg Code . You know? [81] Senior American officials believed that convicting organizations was a good way of showing that not just the top German leaders were responsible for crimes, without condemning the entire German people. [77] Gring, the most famous surviving Nazi, headlined the trial. [34][35] Located in the American occupation zone, Nuremberg was a symbolic location as the site of Nazi rallies. Many of the worst offenders were not prosecuted, for logistical or financial reasons. [64] The division of labor, and the haste with which the indictment was prepared, resulted in duplication, imprecise language, and lack of attribution of specific charges to individual defendants. Their job had been to follow the German army as it invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, and kill Communists, Gypsies and especially Jews. Without simultaneous translation the trial cannot happen. Lesley Stahl: So they went right in after the troops? Benjamin Ferencz: Of course. (Image credit: U.S. He says he's grateful for the life he's lived in this country, and it's his turn to give back. Although controversial at the time for their use of ex post facto law, the trials' innovation of holding individuals responsible for violations of international law established international criminal law. The New Nuremberg Trials 2021: Update from Dr. Reiner Fuellmich - Minds The film, compiled from footage of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps, shocked both the defendants and the judges, who adjourned the trial. Judges deliberate at the trials of Nazi war criminals in Nuremberg, Germany, Jan. 1, 1945. . Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Channette Alexander). [214] By then, the Americans were hoping to use the offer of pardon to convicted war criminals in order to bind West Germany to the Western Bloc. Look at the emancipation of woman in my lifetime. [27] Especially the United States wanted to avoid countenancing any rule that would give an international court jurisdiction over a government's treatment of its own citizens. [132] The inclusion of Katyn in the charges undermined the credibility of Soviet evidence in general. [241][242], Coordinates: .mw-parser-output .geo-default,.mw-parser-output .geo-dms,.mw-parser-output .geo-dec{display:inline}.mw-parser-output .geo-nondefault,.mw-parser-output .geo-multi-punct{display:none}.mw-parser-output .longitude,.mw-parser-output .latitude{white-space:nowrap}492716N 110254E / 49.45444N 11.04833E / 49.45444; 11.04833. [89] Because of the loose evidentiary rules, photographs, charts, maps, and films played an important role in making incredible crimes believable. [98] Jackson maintained that while the United States did "not seek to convict the whole German people of crime", neither did the trial "serve to absolve the whole German people except 21 men in the dock". [58], The charge of conspiracy was spearheaded by the United States prosecution and was less popular with the other Allies. All 22 defendants were found guilty, and four of them, including Ohlendorf, were hanged. The Nuremberg trials were a series of indictments and criminal procedures against Nazi war criminals that were held from 20 November 1945 to 1 October 1946 at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, Germany. [16] On May 2, at the San Francisco Conference, the United States' new president Harry S. Truman announced the formation of an international military tribunal. [132][169] Through a compromise among the judges, the charge of conspiracy was narrowed to a conspiracy to wage aggressive war. . Benjamin Ferencz: Well, if it's naive to want peace instead of war, let 'em make sure they say I'm naive. Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting. By SIMCHA PASKO 01/10/2021 [87] Over the course of the trial, Western judges allowed the defendants additional leeway to denounce the Soviet Union, which was ultimately revealed to be a co-conspirator in the outbreak of World War II. Innocent lamb. One of these-- my defendants said-- He gets up, and he says, "[GERMAN]," which is, "What? . COVID-19 vaccination does not violate the Nuremberg Code General Telford Taylor, in charge of the Nuremberg trials, asked him to direct a team of researchers in Berlin, one of whom found a cache of top-secret documents in the ruins of the German foreign . Ferencz is legendary in the world of international law, and he's still at it. But Ferencz knew they were guilty and could prove it. Benjamin Ferencz: Well, this is typical operation. [106] Although these aspects had already been covered by the American prosecution, Soviet prosecutors introduced new evidence from Extraordinary State Commission reports and interrogations of senior enemy officers. [195][196], These trials emphasized the crimes committed during the Holocaust. They all have already tags on 'em. Without calling a single witness, he entered into evidence the defendants' own reports of what they'd done. [79] Initially, the Americans had planned to try fourteen organizations and their leaders, but this was narrowed to six: the Reich Cabinet, the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party, the Gestapo, the SA, the SS and the SD, and the General Staff and High Command of the Wehrmacht. Another man was sentenced to death in absentia. Between 1939 and 1945, Nazi Germany invaded many countries across Europe, inflicting 27 million deaths in the Soviet Union alone. Nrnberg trials | Facts, Definition, & Prominent Defendants [230] The selectivity in trying Germans but not the Allies has garnered the most persistent criticism. I'm sitting here listening to you. His equivocations, standing in sharp contrast to his genocidal editorial line reflected in slogans like Germany will live as long as it sees the Jews as the mortal enemy of mankind, are now available online for the first time along with hundreds of additional hours of audio and video recordings from the trials of 24 Nazis that ended 1946, nearly 75 years ago. [236][237], The trials were the first use of simultaneous interpretation, which stimulated technical advances in translation methods. [114], In mid-December the Americans switched to presenting the case against the indicted organizations, while in January both the British and Americans presented evidence against individual defendants. [142] In contrast, most defendants avoided incriminating each other. Fact check: Doctors' Trial was one of 13 Nuremberg Trials - USA Today [222] By the late 1950s, the West German consensus on release began to erode, due to greater openness in political culture and new revelations of Nazi criminality, including the first trials of Nazi perpetrators in West German courts. [110] Unlike Jackson, he attempted to minimize the novelty of the aggression charges. Twelve of the defendants were sentenced to death (Gring, Ribbentrop, Keitel, Kaltenbrunner, Rosenberg, Frank, Frick, Streicher, Sauckel, Jodl, Seyss-Inquart, and Bormann). Lesley Stahl: Ben? Ferencz learned quickly. You know, kick 'em in. add_to_queue. [88], The charter allowed the admissibility of any evidence deemed to have probative value, including depositions. I'm a realist. [228] The most controversial charge was crimes against peace. [141] The defendants tried to blame their crimes on Hitler, who was mentioned 1,200 times during the trialmore than the top five defendants combined. [65], Some of the most prominent NazisAdolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Joseph Goebbelshad committed suicide and therefore could not be tried. Other absent and dead men including Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, Adolf Eichmann, and Bormann were also blamed. [189], One set of trials focused on the actions of German professionals: the Doctors' trial focused on human experimentation and euthanasia murders, the Judges' trial on the role of the judiciary in Nazi crimes, and the Ministries trial on the culpability of bureaucrats of German government ministries, especially the Foreign Office. [130] The defense presented evidence of Soviet responsibility,[131] and Katyn was not mentioned in the verdict. And you're full of energy and passion. 2021 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved. The technology will allow users to discover and cut straight to material in a really dense corpus without being an expert on the trial or being a lawyer, and that is really powerful, Van Tuyl said. [105] The American prosecutors were not any more effective when presenting documentary evidence on the conspiracy to commit crimes against humanity, and ended up reaching a "saturation point of horror" by their indiscriminate selection and disorganized presentation of evidence without tying it to specific defendants. [139] Some defendants denied their involvement in, or knowledge of, certain crimes,[140] even resorting to implausible lies. Holocaust Memorial Museum). The courtroom was Nuremberg; the crime, genocide; and the defendants, a group of German SS officers accused of committing the largest number of Nazi killings outside the concentration camps -- more than a million men, women, and children shot in their own towns and villages in cold blood. Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of Channette Alexander), (Image credit: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Courtesy Randy Cole), Stanford Center for Human Rights and International Justice, is an expanded repository of digital records, A better, faster tool for saving water on farms. $211.69. Ben Ferencz, last surviving Nuremberg Trials prosecutor, receives All wars, and all decent people. He didn't deny the killings -- he had the gall to claim they were done in self-defense. There are also transcripts of eyewitness accounts, including that of Hermann Grbe, a construction manager who described the horrors of a mass execution he saw in Dubno, Ukraine. 10 issued by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Benjamin Ferencz: Yes. Not guilty. [125], More so than other delegations, Soviet prosecutors showed the gruesome details of German mistreatment of prisoners of war and forced laborers, as well as the systematic murder of Jews in eastern Europe. The Nuremberg trials were a series of 13 trials carried out in Nuremberg, Germany, between 1945 and 1949 to try those accused of Nazi war crimes. [100], On 21 November, Jackson gave the opening speech for the prosecution. But the trials were already underway, and prosecution staff was stretched thin. [41][42], The United States' chief prosecutor was Supreme Court justice Robert H. [223], The International Military Tribunal, and the drafters of its charter, invented international criminal law essentially from nothing. Nuremberg Code from WWII has nothing to do with coronavirus - ABC [18], At the London Conference, held from 26 June to 2 August 1945, representatives of France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States negotiated the exact form that the trial would take. Jackson submitted his final report to President Truman one week after the verdicts. Stupid to an incredible degree to send young people out to kill other young people they don't even know, who never did anybody any harm, never harmed them. Then a series of subsequent trials were mounted against other Nazi leaders, including 22 SS officers responsible for killing more than a million people -- not in concentration camps -- but in towns and villages across Eastern Europe. [172] All 22 defendants were charged with crimes against peace, and 12 were convicted. [59] The conspiracy charge was used to charge the top Nazi leaders, as well as bureaucrats who had never killed anyone or perhaps even directly ordered killing. Benjamin Ferencz: Of course, is my answer. By submitting the above I agree to the privacy policy and terms of use of JTA.org. I am naive? They should remember, from me, it takes courage not to be discouraged. 40 years on from the Majdanek trial verdict - DW - 06/29/2021 [32] The trial was held under modified common law. A 103-year-old South Florida man who fought Nazi atrocities as a Nuremberg prosecutor is now the recipient of the Governor's Medal of Freedom. Episode 10 - Too Much Paper . Nazi . The main target of the prosecution was Hermann Gring (at the left edge on the first row of benches). [136][137] The Soviet prosecution case was generally well received and presented compelling evidence about the suffering of the Soviet people and the Soviet contribution to victory. Digitizing all the records from the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal Trial Archives is ongoing. [83] The American and British prosecutors focused on documentary evidence and affidavits rather than testimony from survivors, as the latter was considered less reliable and more liable to accusations of bias, but at the expense of reducing public interest in the proceedings. [158][136] In contrast to the opening prosecution statements, all eight closing statements highlighted the Holocaust; and the French and British prosecutors made this the main charge, as opposed to that of aggression. [87], Initially, it was planned to hold a second international tribunal for German industrialists, but this was never held because of differences between the Allies. [106][107] The Americans summoned Einsatzgruppen commander Otto Ohlendorf, who testified about the murder of 80,000 people by those under his command, and SS general Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, who admitted that German anti-partisan warfare was little more than a cover for the mass murder of Jews. Lesley Stahl: Now, you've been at this for 50 years, if not more. In 1946, verdicts were handed down in the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial. Jan Lemnitzer, University of Oxford. [2] German aggression was accompanied by immense brutality in occupied areas and the systematic murder of millions of Jews in the Holocaust. You're sitting here as a female. The Doctors' Trial was one of 13 proceedings. Fact Check: 10,000 Medical Experts Did NOT Start Nuremberg 2 Trial [198] The trials targeted 177 defendants and obtained 142 convictions, including 25 death sentences;[199] the severity of sentencing was related to the defendant's proximity to mass murder. But they were real. 40 years on from the Majdanek trial verdict. Look what's happened to the same-sex marriages. Nearly 75 years ago, the Nuremberg Trial came to a close when on Oct. 1, 1946, a group of convicted Nazi leaders was sentenced by the International Military Tribunal (IMT) for crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during World War II and the Holocaust. [60] Conspiracy charges were especially central to the cases against propagandists and industrialists; the former were charged with providing the ideological justification for war and other crimes, while the latter were accused of economic mobilization without which no war would have been possible. Gabrielle Karampelas, Stanford Libraries: (650) 497-4414, gkaram@stanford.edu. [221] The IMT defendants required Soviet permission for release; Speer was not successful in obtaining early release, and Hess remained in prison until his death in 1987. But he isn't content just being a part of 20th-century history -- he believes he has something important to offer the world right now. Lesley Stahl: Had you prosecuted trials before? [208][209] Many Germans lumped criminal trials with denazification, internment, and confrontation with the concentration camps, as illegitimate victor's justice and the imposition of collective guilt. The Center for Human Rights and International Justice and Stanford Libraries hope to establish a single destination point that can help people understand how to seek justice when crimes against humanity have occurred and how to pursue accountability for systematic and widespread violence. [203], In all, 249 journalists were accredited to cover the IMT[40] and 61,854 visitor tickets were issued. [207][208] In a 1946 poll, 78 percent of Germans assessed the trial as fair, but four years later that had fallen to 38 percent, with 30 percent considering it unfair. All eight judges participated in the deliberations, but the alternates could not cast a vote. Our intention is to make these trial archives visible to the world, via the web, using the best technology we can find, build, adopt or adapt to make scholarship easier on very complex archives, said Michael Keller, the Ida M. Green University Librarian at Stanford. It's never been done before. 1/6. The verdicts against ex-SS guards and . Episode 9 - To Stay the Hand of Vengeance. And the father had routinely saved a piece of his bread for his son, and he kept it under his arm at He kept it under his arm at night so the other inmates wouldn't steal it, you know. They're not real. View of Nuremberg in 1945. The British government was still opposed, unable to see the benefit of such a trial and preferring the summary execution of Nazi leaders. Ben Ferencz in court: The charges we have brought accuse the defendants of having committed crimes against humanity. Google trends show a notable increase in people searching for "Nuremberg trials" since the onset of the pandemic, as well as a dramatic recent increase in searches for "Nuremberg trials 2021". [219][220] The German public took the early releases as confirmation of what they saw as the illegitimacy of the trials. The Nuremberg trials were conducted simultaneously in four languages and required the skills of 36 . [26], The final version of the charter only gave the court the ability to punish those crimes against humanity that had been committed "in connection with any crimes within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal". [24][25] Although a novel construct, "crimes against humanity" covered acts that were already prohibited by the laws of most countries. [202] All four powers later fought independence movements using methods that had been ruled illegal at Nuremberg. It was also a way to indirectly charge crimes committed before the beginning of World War II, which the charter placed outside the court's jurisdiction. I know I'm right. Benjamin Ferencz: You oughta get some more friends. [47] Although the chief British judge, Sir Geoffrey Lawrence (Lord Justice of Appeal), was the nominal president of the tribunal, in practice Biddle exercised more authority. Judge: How do you plead to this indictment, guilty or not guilty? I hear it here for the first time." Watching Ben Ferencz during his daily swim, his gym workout and his morning push-up regimen is to realize he isn't just the sunniest man we've ever met -- he may also be the fittest. At this stage of the project, users will be able to explore digital surrogates of trial records, including transcripts of the court hearings in English, French, German and Russian; case files; trial briefs; evidentiary exhibits filed by the prosecution and the defense; opening and closing statements; final pleas; procedural rules, orders, judgments, dissenting opinions and sentences.