Religion & Law

Sixty-five years ago yesterday, Justice Robert Jackson delivered his opening statement at tne Nuremberg trials.  It was, according to Prof. John Barrett (St. John's) "one of the most powerful, eloquent, and important speeches in human history."  Here are the opening paragraphs:

The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility.  The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.  That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that power has ever paid to reason. 

This Tribunal, while it is novel and experimental, is not the product of abstract speculations, nor is it created to vindicate legalistic theories.  This inquest represents the practical effort of four of the most mighty of nations, with the support of seventeen more, to utilize international law to meet the greatest menace of our times?aggressive war.  The common sense of mankind demands that law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people.  It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power and make deliberate and concerted use of it to set in motion evils which leave no home in the world untouched.  It is a cause of that magnitude that the United Nations will lay before Your Honors. 

In the prisoners' dock sit twenty-odd broken men.  Reproached by the humiliation of those they have led almost as bitterly as by the desolation of those they have attacked, their personal capacity for evil is forever past.  It is hard now to perceive in these men as captives the power by which as Nazi leaders they once dominated much of the world and terrified most of it.  Merely as individuals their fate is of little consequence to the world.

What makes this inquest significant is that these prisoners represent sinister influences that will lurk in the world long after their bodies have returned to dust.  We will show them to be living symbols of racial hatreds, of terrorism and violence, and of the arrogance and cruelty of power. They are symbols of fierce nationalisms and of militarism, of intrigue and war-making, which have embroiled Europe generation after generation, crushing its manhood, destroying its homes, and impoverishing its life.  They have so identified themselves with the philosophies they conceived and with the forces they directed that any tenderness to them is a victory and an encouragement to all the evils which are attached to their names.  Civilization can afford no compromise with the social forces which would gain renewed strength if we deal ambiguously or indecisively with the men in whom those forces now precariously survive.

What these men stand for we will patiently and temperately disclose.  We will give you undeniable proofs of incredible events.  The catalog of crimes will omit nothing that could be conceived by a pathological pride, cruelty, and lust for power.  These men created in Germany, under the ?Führerprinzip,? a National Socialist despotism equaled only by the dynasties of the ancient East.  They took from the German people all those dignities and freedoms that we hold natural and inalienable rights in every human being.  The people were compensated by inflaming and gratifying hatreds towards those who were marked as ?scapegoats.?  Against their opponents, including Jews, Catholics, and free labor, the Nazis directed such a campaign of arrogance, brutality, and annihilation as the world has not witnessed since the pre-Christian ages.  They excited the German ambition to be a ?master race,? which of course implies serfdom for others.  They led their people on a mad gamble for domination.  They diverted social energies and resources to the creation of what they thought to be an invincible war machine.  They overran their neighbors.  To sustain the ?master race? in its war-making, they enslaved millions of human beings and brought them into Germany, where these hapless creatures now wander as ?displaced persons.?  At length bestiality and bad faith reached such excess that they aroused the sleeping strength of imperiled Civilization.  Its united efforts have ground the German war machine to fragments.  But the struggle has left Europe a liberated yet prostrate land where a demoralized society struggles to survive.  These are the fruits of the sinister forces that sit with these defendants in the prisoners' dock.