The Point of the Nuremberg Trials

Though far from perfect, the trials were an attempt to put hyper aggressive and ambitious men on notice that they can't massacre people with impunity.

I received a great deal of reader response to my essay of last night, Have the Nuremberg Trials Been Forgotten?

The most thoughtful was from a friend in Boston, who sent me an e-mail with the following:

I often think about how we have a tendency both to reify and deify government, when at bottom it is just a collection of individuals who have a monopoly on power and, as Hayek said in The Road to Serfdom, this typically attracts the worst. Haliva is one of many examples. The blood curdling comments from Lindsay Graham are much closer to home.

I concur. The state invariably attracts hyper energetic and aggressive gangsters who usually end up taking advantage of the people who mistakenly view them as saviors.

It’s a very peculiar thing about human nature that we get lulled into believing that rules like those that came out of Nuremberg are only applicable to obvious monsters like those that ran Germany in 1933-1945.

We don’t stop to think that the German commanders in the Balkans viewed the Serbians in precisely the same way that Israeli commanders now view the people in Gaza, or that U.S. army officers viewed the Sioux and Cheyenne, or that Roman army officers viewed Jewish rebels in the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132-136.

The Roman Emperor Hadrian regarded the Jewish rebels as superstitious fanatics. U.S. army officers regarded the Sioux and Cheyenne as primitive savages. British officers in South Africa regarded the Boers as savages who mutilated British soldiers, so they rounded up the Boers (including their women and children) and put them into concentration camps. The German high command in the Balkans regarded the Serbian partisans as subhuman barbarians who mutilated German soldiers. Now certain Israeli politicians and army officers view the Palestinians as animals.

In each case, politicians and military officers thought, “This time it’s different, because we really are civilized, and our dreadful opponents really are animals.”

And so history endlessly repeats itself.

As imperfect as they were, the Nuremberg Trials were supposed to put hyper aggressive and ambitious men on notice that they can’t massacre people with impunity, no matter how uncivilized the people in their crosshairs seem to be. We abandon the rules that emerged from Nuremberg at our peril.

General Wilhelm List is handed his indictment at Nuremberg Trial