(soft orchestral music)
- After the liberation, this Russian,
he happened to be a colonel in the army.
You know what he told me?
He said, "we will give you guns,
and you can go around, any German you see, you can shoot."
And we're thinking to ourselves, "what?
What the heck is he talking about?"
I didn't like what they were doing to us!
So why should I go do that?
Justice, yes.
Vengeance, no.
- 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.
(suspenseful piano music)
- The International Military Tribunal,
which we more generally know of as the Nuremberg Trial,
began in November 1945.
So only months after the end of the war in Europe,
and it lasted for one year until the verdicts were issued.
- The defendants are the people
who are surviving, principal Nazi leaders.
So you have the Reichsmarshal, Hermann Göring,
Hitler's number two,
Rudolf Hess, who had been Hitler's number three,
you have Ribbentrop who was the foreign minister.
You have the military leaders of the army and of the navy.
- After you came to power, you regarded as necessary-
- The indictment had four counts.
Conspiracy to wage aggressive war,
waging aggressive war,
traditional war crimes,
and count four was brand new,
crimes against humanity.
Crimes against civilians that were divorced entirely
from military operations, as well as crimes
we would later call genocide.
- They don't have the word Holocaust,
but in a sense over the course of the year
of the international trial at Nuremberg,
they're discovering the enormity of it.
- Much of what we know about the history of the Holocaust
first emerged at the International Military Tribunal.
For example, the number of 6 million Jewish victims
appeared at that trial.
Testimony about the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto
emerged at Nuremberg.
Additionally, the tribunal was heavily covered by the press
in a way that public knowledge of atrocities
had never before been reported.
- At the end of the process,
September 30th and October 1st of 1946,
the International Military Tribunal returns its judgment.
- 19 were convicted,
12 were sentenced to death,
and three were acquitted.
As important as the convictions were,
perhaps [the] most important verdicts were the acquittals.
The acquittals gave the trial instant credibility.
- By and large, the trial was fair.
Defendants had a chance to defend themselves.
The four powers presented a case that was based on law,
and the result was what I think has been properly termed
as the origins of international criminal law.
- The most critical takeaway for Nuremberg
is the fact that the international community
can hold a state responsible,
more importantly, individuals responsible for atrocities.
- Previously, a viable defense could have been,
"well, it wasn't my responsibility.
I had orders to do it,
and if I didn't carry out those orders,
I would've been shot."
The tribunal took away that defense.
- Nuremberg showed us once and for all
that when you have a regime that harnesses and misuses
the power of law, that that doesn't have to stand.
- Governments are going to be held accountable
under international law
in the eyes of the international community.
And that's essentially what happened at Nuremberg
that's persisted to this day.
- Reflecting on the Holocaust,
we're talking about a crime that's state sponsored.
And instrumental in the bureaucracy of the Holocaust
was an SS officer named Adolf Eichmann
who really was the coordinator,
coordinating the arrest, the assembly of Jews
in the occupied countries and their transportation
to the places where they would be killed.
He was probably responsible for the murder
of at least 1.3 million people.
- After the war, he escaped Europe,
and went to South America,
lived under the radar under a different name,
but lived a normal life for over a decade
until he was found by Israeli agents who brought him back
to the state of Israel to stand trial.
- Unlike the Nuremberg Trial,
the Eichmann trial focused exclusively
on that series of events that we now call the Holocaust.
It gave, on an international stage,
the opportunity for Holocaust survivors to tell their story.
- People standing up, often in great pain,
often for the first time, and telling what happened to them.
How they were tortured, how their families were murdered,
how their communities were destroyed.
Yet again, like Nuremberg, he is not just killed.
He is given a lawyer.
He is given a public trial with immense press attention,
with witnesses, with the chance to mount a defense.
- In May of 1962, he was pronounced guilty on appeal
and executed.
And that did a very important thing.
It established the principle
that there's no statute of limitations for these crimes.
When you commit genocide and war crimes
and crimes against humanity,
you spend the rest of your life
waiting for justice to happen.
- Justice.
It isn't perfect, it isn't always right,
but at least the world has learned
that those people who commit crimes of that nature
can no longer count on getting away with it.
- The legacy of Nuremberg is not so much
the judgments that were rendered,
but rather the philosophy that was rendered.
The philosophy that there are certain crimes
for which individuals should be held responsible
and certain crimes for which the international community
will stand up and say that we will not stand for that.
And in my mind, whether you're looking at
the situation in Bosnia,
or you're looking at the situation in Sudan,
of Sierra Leone, or Rwanda, or any other horrific situation,
that's the reference point.
Nuremberg still very much exists.
- If there's going to be a chance to eradicate genocide,
to reach a point where never again really does ring true,
we have to make some kind of commitment within ourselves
that we will do what we can to honor the victims,
to remember the history,
to remember that when genocide is perpetrated,
there are perpetrators.
To face those hard truths,
because that's the only way I think
that we're ever going to stop them.