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— An article by Evgeny Norin, Russian journalist and historian focused on war and conflict in the former Soviet Union, published at RT.
A courtroom gave the defeated Reich’s leaders a chance to defend themselves – and the world a record of crimes they could no longer conceal
RT composite. © Getty Images
On the night of October 16, 1946, 10 individuals were hanged in the Nuremberg prison. These were the main Nazi criminals who had been captured and brought to trial.
Despite the horrifying scale and brutality of the crimes, the Nuremberg Trials remain one of the most controversial proceedings in world history.
Justice instead of revenge
The idea of an international tribunal to address Nazi atrocities had been considered for some time. In 1942, the Soviet Union established a special Extraordinary Commission that gathered information about these crimes. Tragically, it had a lot of work to do. The USSR became the primary battleground for the bloodiest and most brutal war in Europe.
The range and nature of the crimes committed on Soviet soil were staggering: genocide against multiple peoples, mass killings on various grounds, all sorts of war crimes, deliberate attacks on medical facilities and civilian infrastructure, arbitrary executions, economic exploitation, and sexual violence. Essentially, every town liberated from the Nazis had enough evidence to warrant its own tribunal. When the concentration camps were liberated, it became clear that Allied propaganda had not exaggerated but rather understated the extent of Nazi atrocities.
In addition to the Soviet government, the exiled governments of occupied countries – Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Norway, France, and Yugoslavia – also wanted to hold the Nazis legally accountable for their crimes.
On October 19, 1943, the Moscow Conference of Foreign Ministers of the Soviet Union, the USA, and Great Britain began, with Vyacheslav Molotov, Cordell Hull, and Anthony Eden.
On October 30, they and the Chinese Ambassador to the USSR, Fu Bingchang, adopted the Declaration of the Four Governments on General Security, proclaiming the determination of the governments of the USA, Great Britain, the USSR, and China “in accordance with the Declaration of the United Nations of January 1, 1942, and subsequent declarations, to continue military actions against those Axis powers with which they are respectively at war until those powers lay down their arms on the basis of unconditional surrender.”
At the initiative of the USSR, on October 30, the Moscow Declaration on the Responsibility of the Hitlerites for Atrocities Committed was adopted.
It contained a warning that “German soldiers and officers and members of the Nazi Party <…> will be sent to the countries where their heinous crimes were committed so that they can be tried and punished according to the laws of these liberated countries.”
The declaration stated that “the Allied powers will surely find them even at the ends of the earth and hand them over to their accusers so that justice may be done.”
The leaders of the Third Reich and other officials, “whose crimes are not connected with a specific geographic location,” were to be handed over to an international tribunal.
Source: Historian Magazine, translated by Beorn And The Shieldmaiden
The outlines of the future tribunal began to take shape in the fall of 1943 during a conference in Moscow attended by the foreign ministers of the ‘Big Three’ – the USSR, the UK, and the US. The three powers agreed that Nazi leaders who committed crimes across multiple nations should be tried by an international court.
At that time, even the idea of lynching Nazi leaders seemed valid. Benito Mussolini was executed along with his mistress by Italian partisans on April 28, 1945, without any trial. Their mutilated bodies were publicly displayed. No one mourned Mussolini; similarly, no one would have objected if a Red Army soldier had shot Hitler.
Mussolini’s corpse hanged at Piazzale Loretto after his execution in Milan in 1945. © Keystone-France / Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images
Sporadic acts of vigilante justice also occurred as the war neared its end. A well-known incident involved American soldiers executing the staff of the Dachau concentration camp. Polish troops beat to death Oscar Dirlewanger, the commander of a punitive brigade responsible for countless deaths in Belarus and Poland.
Yet vigilante justice was not what the Allied leaders envisioned.
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