War Crimes
War Crimes
“Were the Nuremberg Trials fair?”
To me, it’s a both “yes” and “no” type of answer. The Nuremberg trials being fair is because the accused were represented by lawyers and they were allowed to argue their defense in a public court, the trials not being fair because the accused weren’t allowed to use “I was a soldier following orders” as a defense. This all leads to a dialectical sort of answer, bouncing between the fair and unfair.
In a sense the trials were as fair as they could possibly be when you have four different justice systems to try and mesh up to form one for the trials. On one side you had the British and American systems, which are fairly similar, the French which is somewhat different and the Russian which is not entirely open to the accused getting any sort of say in the outcome.
Certainly fair in the sense that the war criminals/soldiers got their chance of a fair hearing and their version of the truth in their defense but there were so many “political considerations” regarding the administration of post-war Germany, that thousands of war criminals not only got off free, they went back into jobs set up for them by their allies, (France, the U.S, Britain, and Russia). Those who were convicted however had hard evidence proving their crimes against humanity and were sentenced to either the death penalty or faced jail terms. Those who were being tried felt that they had simply been soldiers on the field and “following orders”. The Trial held them to the standard of being moral/ethical human beings, thus making the defense “I was only following orders” useless and it had no credibility. Some would say that the Nuremberg Trials were meant to only the punish Germans and not all those who had committed criminal acts during the war. For the first trial of its kind, it was probably as good as could be expected for the time. They managed to combine the four different justice systems for the specific trial. They gave the defendants the right
“Were the Nuremberg Trials fair?”
To me, it’s a both “yes” and “no” type of answer. The Nuremberg trials being fair is because the accused were represented by lawyers and they were allowed to argue their defense in a public court, the trials not being fair because the accused weren’t allowed to use “I was a soldier following orders” as a defense. This all leads to a dialectical sort of answer, bouncing between the fair and unfair.
In a sense the trials were as fair as they could possibly be when you have four different justice systems to try and mesh up to form one for the trials. On one side you had the British and American systems, which are fairly similar, the French which is somewhat different and the Russian which is not entirely open to the accused getting any sort of say in the outcome.
Certainly fair in the sense that the war criminals/soldiers got their chance of a fair hearing and their version of the truth in their defense but there were so many “political considerations” regarding the administration of post-war Germany, that thousands of war criminals not only got off free, they went back into jobs set up for them by their allies, (France, the U.S, Britain, and Russia). Those who were convicted however had hard evidence proving their crimes against humanity and were sentenced to either the death penalty or faced jail terms. Those who were being tried felt that they had simply been soldiers on the field and “following orders”. The Trial held them to the standard of being moral/ethical human beings, thus making the defense “I was only following orders” useless and it had no credibility. Some would say that the Nuremberg Trials were meant to only the punish Germans and not all those who had committed criminal acts during the war. For the first trial of its kind, it was probably as good as could be expected for the time. They managed to combine the four different justice systems for the specific trial. They gave the defendants the right