Nuremberg Trials
Opening Address for the United States
Robert Jackson
This document was retrieved from the archives of Nizkor. Source: Nazi Conspiracy & Aggression, Volume I, Chapter VII, Office of the United States Chief Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality, United States Government Printing Office, Washington, 1946.
May it please Your Honors,
The privilege of opening the first trial in history for
crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave
responsibility. The wrongs which we seek to condemn and
punish have been so calculated, so malignant and so
devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being
ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated. 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 ever has paid to
Reason.
This tribunal, while it is novel and experimental, is not
the product of abstract speculations nor is it created to
vindicate legalistic theories. This inquest represents the practical
effort of four of the most mighty of nations, with the support of
seventeen more, to utilize International Law to meet the greatest menace of
our times aggressive war. The common sense of mankind demands
that law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little
people. It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power
and make deliberate and concerted use of it to set in motion evils which leave
no home in the world untouched. It is a cause of this
magnitude that the United Nations will lay before Your
Honors.
In the prisoners' dock sit twenty-odd broken men. Reproached
by the humiliation of those they have led almost as bitterly
as by the desolation of those they have attacked, their
personal capacity for evil is forever past. It is hard now
to perceive in these miserable men as captives the power by
which as Nazi leaders they once dominated much of the world
and terrified most of it. Merely as individuals, their fate
is of little consequence to the world.
What makes this inquest significant is that those prisoners
represent sinister influence that will lurk in the world
long after their bodies have returned to dust. They are
living symbols of racial hatreds, of terrorism and violence,
and of the arrogance and cruelty of power. They are symbols
of fierce nationalism and militarism, of intrigue and war-
making which have embroiled Europe generation after
generation, crushing its manhood, destroying its
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homes, and impoverishing its life. They have so identified
themselves with the philosophies they conceived and with the
forces they directed that any tenderness to them is a
victory and an encouragement to all the evils which are
attached to their names. Civilization can afford no
compromise with the social forces which would gain renewed
strength if we deal ambiguously or indecisively with the men
in whom those forces now precariously survive.
What these men stand for we will patiently and temperately
disclose. We will give you undeniable proofs of incredible
events. The catalogue of crimes will omit nothing that could
be conceived by a pathological pride, cruelty, and lust for
power. These men created in Germany, under the
Fuehrerprinzip, a National Socialist despotism equalled only
by the dynasties of the ancient East. They took from the
German people all those dignities and freedoms that we hold
natural and inalienable rights in every human being. The
people were compensated by inflaming
and gratifying hatreds toward those who were marked as
"scape-goats." Against their opponents, including Jews,
Catholics, and free labor the Nazis directed such a campaign
of arrogance, brutality, and annihilation as the world has
not witnessed since the pre-Christian ages. They excited the
German ambition to be a "master race," which of course
implies serfdom for others. They led their people on a mad
amble for domination. They diverted social energies and
resources to the creation of what they thought to be an
invincible war machine. They overran their neighbors. To
sustain the"master race " in its war making, they enslaved
millions of human beings and brought them into Germany,
where these hapless creatures. now wander as "displaced
persons". At length bestiality and bad faith reached such
excess that they aroused the sleeping strength of imperiled
civilization. Its united efforts have ground the German war
machine to fragments. But the struggle has left Europe a
liberated yet prostrate land where a
demoralized society struggles to survive. These are the
fruits of the sinister forces that sit with these defendants
in the prisoners' dock.
In justice to the nations and the men associated in this
prosecution, I must remind you of certain difficulties which
may leave their mark on this case. Never before in legal
history has an effort been made to bring within the scope of
a single litigation the developments of a decade, covering a
whole Continent, and involving a score of nations, countless
individuals, and innumerable events. Despite the magnitude
of the task, the world has demanded immediate action. This
demand has had to be met, though perhaps at the cost of
finished craftsmanship. In my country,
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established courts, following familiar procedures, applying
well thumbed precedents, and dealing with the legal
consequences of local and limited events seldom commence a
trial within a year of the event in litigation. Yet less
than eight months ago today the courtroom in which you sit
was an enemy fortress in the hands of German SS troops. Less
than eight months ago nearly all our witnesses and documents
were in enemy hands. The law had not been codified, no
procedure had been established, no Tribunal was in
existence, no usable courthouse stood here, none of the
hundreds of tons of official German documents had been
examined, no prosecuting staff had been assembled, nearly
all the present defendants were at large, and the four
prosecuting powers had not yet joined in common cause to try
them. I should be the last to deny that the case may well
suffer from incomplete researches and quite likely will not be the example of
professional work which any of the prosecuting nations would
normally wish to sponsor. It is, however, a completely
adequate case to the judgment we shall ask you to render,
and its full development we shall be obliged to leave to
historians.
Before I discuss particulars of evidence, some general
considerations which may affect the credit of this trial in
the eyes of the world should be candidly faced. There is a
dramatic disparity between the circumstances of the accusers
and of the accused that might discredit our work if we
should falter, in even minor matters, in being fair and
temperate.
Unfortunately, the nature of these crimes is such that both
prosecution and judgment must be by victor nations over
vanquished foes. The worldwide scope of the aggressions
carried out by these men has left but few real neutrals.
Either the victors must judge the vanquished or we must
leave the defeated to judge themselves. After the First
World War, we learned the futility of the latter course. The
former high station of these defendants, the notoriety of their acts,
and the adaptability of their conduct to provoke retaliation make it
hard to distinguish between the demand for a just and
measured retribution, and the unthinking cry for vengeance
which arises from the anguish of war. It is our task, so far
as humanly possible, to draw the line between the two. We
must never forget that the record on which we judge these
defendants today is the record on which history will judge
us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is
to put it to our own lips as well. We must summon such
detachment and intellectual integrity to our task that this
trial will commend itself to posterity as fulfilling
humanity's aspirations to do justice.
At the very outset, let us dispose of the contention that to
put
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these men to trial is to do them an injustice entitling them
to some special consideration. These defendants may be hard
pressed but they are not ill used. Let us see what
alternative they would have to being tried.
More than a majority of these prisoners surrendered to or
were tracked down by forces of the United States. Could they
expect us to make American custody a shelter for our enemies
against the just wrath of our Allies? Did we spend American
lives to capture them only to save them from punishment?
Under the principles of the Moscow Declaration, those
suspected war criminals who are not to be tried
internationally must be turned over to individual
governments for trial at the scene of their outrages.
Many less responsible and less culpable American-held
prisoners have been and will be turned over to other United
Nations for local trial. If these defendants should succeed,
for any reason, in escaping the condemnation of this
Tribunal, or if they obstruct or abort this trial, those who
are American-held prisoners will be delivered up to our
continental Allies. For these defendants, however, we have
set up an International Tribunal and have undertaken the
burden of participating in a complicated effort to give them
fair and dispassionate hearings. That is the best known
protection to any man with a defense worthy of being heard.
If these men are the first war leaders of a defeated nation
to be prosecuted in the name of the law, they are also the
first to be given a chance to plead for their lives in the name of
the law. Realistically, the Charter of this Tribunal, which gives
them a hearing, is also the source of their only hope. It
may be that these men of troubled conscience, whose only
wish is that the world forget them, do not regard a trial as
a favor. But they do have a fair opportunity to defend
themselves a favor which these men, when in power, rarely
extended to their fellow countrymen. Despite the fact that
public opinion already condemns their acts, we agree that
here they must be given a presumption of innocence, and we
accept the burden of proving criminal acts and the
responsibility of these defendants for their commission.
When I say that we do not ask for convictions unless we
prove crime, I do not mean mere technical or incidental
transgression of international conventions. We charge guilt
on planned and intended conduct that involves moral as well
as legal wrong. And we do not mean conduct that is a natural
and human, even if illegal, cutting of corners, such as many
of us might well have committed had we been in the
defendants positions. It is not because they yielded to the
normal frailties of human beings that we ac-
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cuse them. It is their abnormal and inhuman conduct which
brings them to this bar.
We will not ask you to convict these men on the testimony of
their foes. There is no count of the Indictment that cannot
be proved by books and records. The Germans were always
meticulous record keepers, and these defendants had their
share of the Teutonic passion for thoroughness in putting
things on paper. Nor were they without vanity. They arranged
frequently to be photographed in action. We will show you
their own films. You will see their own conduct and hear
their own voices as these defendants reenact for you, from
the screen, some of the events in the course of the
conspiracy.
We would also make clear that we have no purpose to
incriminate the whole German people. We know that the Nazi
Party was not put in power by a majority of the German vote.
We know it came to power by an evil alliance between the
most extreme of the Nazi revolutionists, the most
unrestrained of the German reactionaries, and the most
aggressive of the German militarists. If the German populace
had willingly accepted the Nazi program, no Stormtroopers
would have been needed in the early days of the Party and
there would have been no need for concentration
camps or the Gestapo, both of which institutions were
inaugurated as soon as the Nazis gained control of the
German state. Only after these lawless innovations proved
successful at home were they taken abroad.
The German people should know by now that the people of the
United States hold them in no fear, and in no hate. It is
true that the Germans have taught us the horrors of modern
warfare, but the ruin that lies from the Rhine to the Danube
shows that we, like our Allies, have not been dull pupils.
If we are not awed by German fortitude and proficiency in
war, and if we are not persuaded of their political
maturity, we do respect their skill in the arts of peace, their
technical competence, and the sober, industrious and self-
disciplined character of the masses of the German people. In
1933, we saw the German people recovering prestige in the
commercial, industrial and artistic world after the set-back
of the last war. We beheld their progress neither with envy
nor malice. The Nazi regime interrupted this advance. The
recoil of the Nazi aggression has left Germany in ruins. The
Nazi readiness to pledge the German word without hesitation
and to break it without shame has fastened upon German diplomacy a
reputation for duplicity that will handicap it for years. Nazi
arrogance has made the boast of the "master race" a taunt
that will be thrown at Germans the world over for
generations. The Nazi nightmare has given the German name a
new and sinister significance throughout the world which will
retard Germany a century. The German, no less than the non-
German world, has accounts to settle with these defendants.
The fact of the war and the course of the war, which is the
central theme of our case, is history. From September 1,
1939, when the German armies crossed the Polish frontiers,
until September, 1942, when they met epic resistance at
Stalingrad, German arms seemed invincible.
Denmark and Norway, The Netherlands and France, Belgium and
Luxembourg, the Balkans and Africa, Poland and the Baltic
States, and parts of Russia, all had been overrun and
conquered by swift, powerful, well-aimed blows. That attack
upon the peace of the world is the crime against
international society which brings into international
cognizance crimes in its aid and preparation which otherwise
might be only internal concerns. It was aggressive war,
which the nations of the
world had renounced. It was war in violation of treaties, by
which the peace of the world was sought to be safeguarded.
This war did not just happen--it was planned and prepared
for over a long period of time and with no small skill and
cunning. The world has perhaps never seen such a
concentration and stimulation of the energies of any people
as that which enabled Germany twenty years after it was
defeated, disarmed, and dismembered to come so near carrying
out its plan to dominate Europe. Whatever else we may say of
those who were the authors of this war, they did achieve a
stupendous work in organization, and our first task is to
examine the means by which these
defendants and their fellow conspirators prepared and
incited Germany to go to war.
In general, our case will disclose these defendants all
uniting at some time with the Nazi Party in a plan which
they well knew could be accomplished only by an outbreak of
war in Europe. Their seizure of the German state, their
subjugation of the German people, their terrorism and
extermination of dissident elements, their planning and
waging of war, their calculated and planned ruthlessness in
the conduct of warfare, their deliberate and planned
criminality toward conquered peoples, all these are ends for
which they acted in concert; and all these are phases of the
conspiracy, a conspiracy which reached one goal only to set
out for another and more ambitious one. We shall also trace
for you the intricate web of organizations which these men
formed and utilized to accomplish these ends. We will show
how the entire structure of offices and officials was
dedicated to the
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criminal purposes and committed to use of the criminal
methods planned by these defendants and their co-
conspirators, many of whom war and suicide have put beyond
reach.
It is my purpose to open the case, particularly under Count
One of the Indictment, and to deal with the common plan or
conspiracy to achieve ends possible only by resort to crimes
against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. My
emphasis will not be on individual barbarities and
perversions which may have occurred independently of any
central plan. One of the dangers ever present is that this
trial may be protracted by details of particular wrongs and
that we will become lost in a "wilderness of single
instances." Nor will I now dwell on the activity of
individual defendants except as it may contribute to
exposition of the common plan.
The case as presented by the United States will be concerned
with the brains and authority back of all the crimes. These
defendants were men of a station and rank which does not
soil its own hands with blood. They were men who knew how to
use lesser folk as tools. We want to reach the planners and
designers, the inciters and leaders without whose evil
architecture the world would not have been for so long
scourged with the violence and lawlessness, and wracked with
the agonies and convulsions, of this terrible war.
A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust
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College of Education, University of South Florida © 2005.