Nuremberg, eighty years after the trials
That morning at the conference, presenter after presenter spoke about the need to protect the Nuremberg Legacy and the much vaunted, ‘Nuremberg Principles’. At one point in an effort to breathe life into these principles, a speaker gestured towards the dock where the defendants had sat eighty years ago. This at least could be prevented.
We were being invited to remember the past but forget the present. I couldn’t help thinking of Leopold Senghor’s. Discourses on Colonialism: ‘What Europe can’t forgive Hitler is not the crime in itself, the crime against man, it is…the fact that he applied European colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for … Africa.’
On 21 November 1945, US Prosecutor and Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson delivered his opening address at the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials. He announced that the Allies were ‘staying the hand of vengeance’ as they began the prosecution of twenty-two leading Nazis for war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes against peace. The trial ended just over a year later with the conviction of nineteen defendants, twelve of whom were sentenced to death. But only ten of the Nazis were hanged, their bodies cremated at the Ostfriedhof Crematorium in Munich and the ashes scattered on the river Isar. One of the accused, Hitler’s deputy, Martin Bormann, was tried and convicted in absentia (and eventually declared dead by a Frankfurt court in 1973). The most famous of the defendants, Hermann Goering, took his own life in his cell the night before his scheduled execution. Eighty years later, Russell Crowe’s Goering gazes defiantly down at me from posters around London advertising Nuremberg, a new Hollywood movie about the trial.
We sometimes forget, amidst all of this interest, that the trial might never have happened. None of the three Allied wartime leaders at the time initially favoured legal proceedings. Stalin was notoriously partial to other forms of liquidation, Churchill inclined towards summary courts martial and Roosevelt was worried that some defendants might escape justice on a ‘technicality’ (three of the leading Nazis were in fact acquitted). Even as late as 1944, FDR was seriously contemplating the plan of Morgenthau, his Treasury Secretary, for the collective punishment of the German people via the permanent deindustrialisation and ‘pastoralisation’ of Germany itself.
Now though, for all the talk of international law’s weaknesses, it is difficult to imagine responding to aggressive war-making without reference to the prospect of a trial for the culpable leaders (think of the indictments of Netanyahu and Putin or earlier calls to send Blair and Bush to The Hague). The international law elaborated—perhaps even invented—at Nuremberg has become the language we all speak when we speak about war and peace. How would we go about discussing Gaza or Ukraine without relying on this exotic juristic idiom? Everyone’s an international lawyer now, though only a few of us are accredited as such.
This October I was invited to Nuremberg for a series of events to commemorate this ‘Trial of the Century’ and to speak in Court Room 600 where the accused Nazi leadership had eighty years ago sat in various states of disrepair.
On the evening of my arrival, the Bavarian Government hosted a reception in the Rathaus (the Old Town Hall) where Hitler had first addressed his followers in 1933. One dignitary gave a speech emphasising the vital importance of memory. The words ‘genocide’ and ‘anti-semitism’ mingled in the air. Everyone spoke of the War, the Holocaust, the awfulness of Nuremberg’s own history. Certain matters went unmentioned. There was an unmistakable tension in the air. I was told later that a small number of women wearing hijabs had walked out during one of the speeches.
My trip through ‘old Europe’ had begun a few hours earlier as the sleek Eurostar connection to Brussels gave way to the once vaunted Deutsche Bahn. Everyone I spoke to complained about delays and unreliability after decades of underfunding.
Sure enough, the Frankfurt to Nuremberg train—with its shabby, British Rail-era interiors—was cancelled and its replacement crammed with long-suffering commuters, many of them standing.
As I approached what was once the heart of Nazi Germany, the train regularly slowed or stopped inexplicably—can it really be that the Germans are now the only Western Europeans who can’t get the trains to run on time? The dominant mood seemed to be one of resignation. There were a few shoulder shrugs, a sense of ‘well, what can you do?’ The carriages were full of military personnel. Tattooed young infantrymen chatted about postings in the gangways, and naval officers stood on platforms smoking cigarettes. From the train windows, I glimpsed, along with fields of solar panels, the occasional army vehicle. In these moments, Germany felt like a nation preparing—a little insouciantly—for a war still somewhere far off in the middle distance. I found myself wondering how these boyish soldiers would do in a fight with a Russian drone.
Back at the reception, the speeches continued, punctuated by performances of Brahms from a Japanese-German trio. Another Minister rose to his feet to talk of history. On my previous visits to Nuremberg, the past had seemed past; the Nazis, ogres from history, used to be conjured as a warning to us to remain watchful. Drawing on its other heritage, Nuremberg now advertises itself as the ‘City of Toys’, but that is very optimistic PR; it remains a place haunted by wars, past and present.
So, in the Minister’s address (and in many speeches at the Nuremberg Court Room later that weekend), there were frequent references to the rise of the AfD and the need for liberal democracy to ‘fight’ against anti-democratic factions (what would JD Vance have made of it?). We were told that the ‘Nuremberg Principles’ had to be upheld or we would surely perish. These German politicians were steadfast in their commitment to decent European values and condemned the enemies of democracy. As I glanced around the room, it was hard to conceive of any of these middle-class Bavarians ever voting for the AfD. Is this what Nuremberg looked like in 1929?
We were being invited to remember the past but forget the present. I couldn’t help thinking of Leopold Senghor’s Discourses on Colonialism (published in 1950): ‘What Europe can’t forgive Hitler is not the crime in itself, the crime against man, it is…the fact that he applied European colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria…and the blacks of Africa.’
Court Room 600 itself lacks, perhaps, the world-historical impact of the photos from 1945. Refurbished in 1961, it now combines German functionalism with moot court room anonymity (though an enormous crucifix sits above the Bench, placed there by a president of the Higher Regional Court who hoped to ‘exorcize’ the room of its dark history). And yet, the history seeps in. The room is a capsule of European 20th-century history. It was here in the late 1920s that the Weimar courts gave leading Nazis mild sentences for agitation (a softness regretted by Germans and shared by an American I spoke to when he talked about Biden-era litigation in relation to Donald Trump).
It was here in 1942 that Leo Katzenberger, a Jewish businessman, was sentenced to death for ‘sexual and racial defilement’. One of the ominous preliminary ‘findings’ of the Court was that Katzenberger was ‘fully Jewish’. And, it was here, a few years after the trial of the Nazi leadership, that the Americans convened twelve trials intended to punish those further down the ranks of the Nazi elites. One of these proceedings, ‘The Justice Trial’, featured jurists and lawyers who had enforced National Socialist Law, and was later filmed in Hollywood as Judgement at Nuremberg with Spencer Tracy and Burt Lancaster in starring roles.
Rebecca West, who covered the Trial (sometimes reported in bathetic legalese as The United States et al. v. Goring et al.), and was alleged to have had an affair with the US judge, Francis Biddle, was once asked to describe the most remarkable things she had seen at the Nuremberg Trial. ‘Well’, she said, ‘there was a girl growing cyclamens in a makeshift greenhouse outside the court room and a man getting around on one leg’.
In that spirit, and with the intention of getting a feel for the full life of the place, on the Sunday morning of the final event in the courtroom, I walked to the Palace of Justice down the ‘Fürther Strasse’ (where historically Jews expelled from the old city had travelled from nearby Fürth to engage in trade). Along the way, there were small groups of young German-African men gathered in the early morning; there were Caucasian youths staggering home, sullenly boisterous after a big Saturday night. At one point, I saw a Jewish girl crossing the road draped in an Israeli flag. Outside the court, a tyre repair garage teeming with activity on my previous visits had been replaced by a new (empty) centre for the remembrance of the trials. The Jewish cemetery close by was still surrounded by barbed wire.
That morning at the conference, presenter after presenter spoke about the need to protect the Nuremberg Legacy and the much vaunted ‘Nuremberg Principles’. But with every enunciation, these seem to slip further and further from the grasp of the speakers. At one point in an effort to breathe life into these principles and maybe liberal democracy itself, a speaker gestured towards the dock where the defendants had sat eighty years ago. This at least could be prevented. The ghosts of the defendants have always been present in Court-Room 600. Now they are everywhere—in the tin-pot posturing of secretaries of defence, the architectural hubris of presidents, the borrowed mannerisms of populists.
One couldn’t help thinking that we were collectively experiencing a nostalgia for the simple moral distributions of 1945, as if by keeping the Nazis alive or hanging them over and over again, one could also somehow keep international law, or its current incarnation, the ‘global rules-based order’, alive.
But every monument is a monument to forgetting. Here was Nietzsche’s monumental history, obliterating everything in its path. I remembered then counting the number of references made by Bavarian Ministers at the Rathaus to the live-on-TV destruction of Gaza Palestinians, a group with a plausible claim not to have genocide committed against it, to adopt the strangulated wording of the International Court of Justice.
There hadn’t been any.