Because of several decades of propaganda including films such as this most people don't realise that a lot of prominent judges and jurists condemned the Nuremberg trials. Amongst them was US supreme court justice Harlan Fiske Stone who referred to them as a "lynching party" and a "sanctimonious fraud".
http://codoh.com/library/document/2369/
www.cwporter.com/innocent.htm
Fascinating article, honestly. What I found most interesting was the following comment from Mr. Chief Justice Stone: “… Jackson is away conducting his high-grade lynching party in Nuremberg. I don't mind what he does to the Nazis, but I hate to see the pretense that he is running a court and proceeding according to common law. This is a little too sanctimonious a fraud to meet my old-fashioned ideas.”
Given the fact that the justices were 20 years apart in age, it’s no real surprise that Chief Justice Stone harbored what he termed “old-fashioned ideas” regarding proper application of the common law.
The fact is, Justices Jackson & Stone didn’t like each other much (on account of differences in legal philosophy for the most part) and neither was exactly incapable of lobbing an occasional spitball in the other’s direction. Both had come to positions on the Supreme Court literally weeks apart, with Harlan Stone being confirmed as Chief Justice on 27 June and Jackson as an Associate Justice on 8 July 1941.
The last and quite possibly most important point: Chief Justice Stone passed away in the spring of 1946, so whatever perspective he had would have been based solely on his observation of (or exposure to) the first round of proceedings at Nuremberg, which had nothing at all to do with United States of America vs. Josef Altstötter, et al. Indictments in that proceeding were presented on the 4th day of January 1947, and the trial opened on the 5th of March 1947.
Of course the timeline at the head of this film is established as 1948, but that was no doubt a bit of license on someone’s part. In fact I seem to recall some mention somewhat late in the film (by Captain Byers I believe) of an attempt to blockade Berlin. That certainly did happen in 1948, on the 24th day of June.
I agree with the article that the main trial of major defendants 1945-46 was for political rather than legal reasons mainly because of the blatant hypocrisy surrounding it. The Allies who were standing in judgment committed many of the same crimes as the accused. Unrestricted submarine warfare was used by both sides and both sides bombed civilians. I think that for the Soviet Union of Josef Stalin to accuse others of crimes against humanity is sick and twisted in the extreme seeing as to how his regime enforced a man made famine in Ukraine which claimed millions of lives 6 years before world war 2 even started.
www.thenewamerican.com/culture/history/item/4656-holodomor-the-secret-holocaust-in-ukraine
Churchill and the British government also share complicity in the deaths of millions of Indians in British occupied India during the Bengal famine of 1942-43 when they deliberately withheld food from the natives. If the Japanese had done this in occupied Asia I'm sure it would have been classified as a war crime. https://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=8241
Here is a list of some of the more outlandish charges against the defendants at Nuremberg. Because of censorship the average person hasn't a clue about them.
www.cwporter.com/intro.htm
www.cwporter.com/partone.htm
Carlos Porter - Holocaust denier.
shareThank you for providing a thoughtful expose. It is good to have intelligent dialogue on a great film and a subjects that rocks our history, our present and our future. While I certainly agree these trials were necessary, indeed there are many that are necessary but have yet to be brought forth, there can never be a situation of such magnitude in which politics, emotions and vested interests do not play as important a part as the events themselves. However, it is a good and important thing that in some small measure, the voices of the persecuted may speak to the persecutors and the bystanders.
shareThe following link is to a list of war crimes committed by the Allies. No one was put on trial for these atrocities - http://codoh.com/library/categories/911/
shareNo war crimes trials for those who committed atrocities against the Germans - www.hellstormdocumentary.com
shareThe Nazis where lucky to even get a trial. Eff em, may they all rot in hell.
Cheers!
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Why am I not surprised to find you here? Everything you post is so full of antisemitic garbage. Oh boo hoo. The Nazis who were tried and convicted deserved their punishments. They were treated as human beings. Not so for the 11 million people they murdered, including the 6 million Jews.
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Some days, you just can't get rid of a bomb.
I agree Bertram.
They started it and without it nothing else would have happened. War is hell and a lot of innocents will be killed but the German ELECTED Hitler and went along with his war dreams.
THAT caused everything else from that point.
*beep* the Nazis, their trials were not about war but what they did to facilitate the genocide and murder of millions of human beings to purge the world of them.
They who give up liberty to
obtain a temporary safety deserve
neither liberty or safety
The American prosecution at Nuremberg and other trials was the pot calling the kettle black in other words an extreme form of hypocrisy.
A History of US Secret Human Experimentation
www.jrbooksonline.com/HTML-docs/A%20History%20Of%20US%20Secret%20Human%20Experimentation.htm
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