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.
THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THIS TRIBUNAL
To apply the sanctions of the law to those whose conduct is found
criminal by the standards I have outlined, is the responsibility
committed to this Tribunal. It is the first court ever to undertake the
difficult task of overcoming the confusion of many tongues and the
conflicting concepts of just procedure among divers systems of law, so
as to reach a common judgement. The tasks of all of us are such as to
make heavy demands on patience and good will. Although the need for
prompt action has admittedly resulted in imperfect work on the part of
the prosecution, four great nations bring you their hurriedly assembled
contributions of evidence. What remains undiscovered we can only guess.
We could, with witnesses testimony, prolong the recitals of crime for
years- but to what avail? We shall rest the case when we have offered
what seems convincing and adequate proof
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of the crimes charged without unnecessary cumulation of evidence. We
doubt very much whether it will be seriously denied that the crimes I
have outlined took place. The effort will undoubtedly be to mitigate or
escape personal responsibility.
Among the nations which unite in accusing these defendants the United
States is perhaps in a position to be the most dispassionate, for,
having sustained the least injury, it is perhaps the least animated by
vengeance. Our American cities have not been bombed by day and night, by
humans and by robots. It is not our temples that have been laid in
ruins. Our countrymen have not had their homes destroyed over their
heads. The menace of Nazi aggression, except to those in actual service,
has seemed less personal and immediate to us than to European peoples.
But while the United States is not first in rancor, It is not second in
determination that the forces of law and order be made equal to the task
of dealing with such international lawlessness as I have recited here.
Twice in my lifetime, the United States has sent its young manhood
across the Atlantic, drained its resources, and burdened itself with
debt to help defeat Germany. But the real hope and faith that has
sustained the American people in these great efforts was that the
victory for ourselves and our Allies would lay the basis for an ordered
international relationship in Europe and would end the centuries of
strife on this embattled continent.
Twice we have held back in the early stages of European conflict in the
belief that it might be confined to a purely European affair. In the
United States, we have tried to build an economy without armament, a
system of government without militarism, and a society where men are not
regimented for war. This purpose, we know now, can never be realized if
the world periodically is embroiled in war. The United States cannot,
generation after generation, throw its youth or its resources onto the
battlefields of Europe to redress the lack of balance between Germanys
strength and that of her enemies, and to keep the battles from our
shores.
The American dream of a peace and plenty economy, as well as the hopes
of other nations, can never be fulfilled if those nations are involved
in a war every generation so vast and devastating as to crush the
generation that fights and burden the generation that follows. But
experience has shown that wars are no longer local. All modern wars
become world wars eventually. And none of the big nations at least can
stay out. If we cannot stay out of wars, our only hope is to prevent
wars.
I am too well aware of the weaknesses of juridical action alone
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to contend that in itself your decision under this Charter can prevent
future wars. Judicial action always comes after the event. Wars are
started only on the theory and in the confidence that they can be won.
Personal punishment, to be suffered only in the event the war is lost,
will probably not be a sufficient deterrent to prevent a war where the
war- makers feel the chances of defeat to be negligible.
But the ultimate step in avoiding periodic wars, which are inevitable in
a system of international lawlessness, is to make statesmen responsible
to law. And let me make clear that while this law is first applied
against German aggressors, the law includes, and if it is to serve a
useful purpose it must condemn aggression by any other nations,
including those which sit here now in judgment. We are able to do away
with domestic tyranny and violence and aggression by those in power
against the rights of their own people only when we make all men
answerable to the law. This trial represents mankind's desperate effort
to apply the discipline of the law to statesmen who have used their
powers of state to attack the foundations of the world's peace and to
commit aggressions against the rights of their neighbors.
The usefulness of this effort to do justice is not to be measured by
considering the law or your judgment in isolation. This trial is part of
the great effort to make the peace more secure. One step in this
direction is the United Nations organization, which may take joint
political action to prevent war if possible, and joint military action
to insure that any nation which starts a war will lose it. This Charter
and this trial, implementing the Kellogg-Briand Pact, constitute another
step in the same direction juridical action of a kind to ensure that
those who start a war will pay for it personally.
While the defendants and the prosecutors stand before you as
individuals, it is not the triumph of either group alone that is
committed to your judgment. Above all personalities there are anonymous
and impersonal forces whose conflict makes up much of human history. It
is yours to throw the strength of the law back of either the one or the
other of these forces for at least another generation. What are the real
forces that are contending before you?
No charity can disguise the fact that the forces which these defendants
represent, the forces that would advantage and delight in their
acquittal, are the darkest and most sinister forces in society --
dictatorship and oppression, malevolence and passion, militarism and
lawlessness. By their fruits we best know them. Their acts have bathed
the world in blood and set civilization
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back a century. They have subjected their European neighbors to every
outrage and torture, every spoliation and deprivation that insolence,
cruelty, and greed could inflict. They have brought the German people to
the lowest pitch of wretchedness, from which they can entertain no hope
of early deliverance. The have stirred hatreds and incited domestic
violence on every continent. These are the things that stand in the dock
shoulder to shoulder with these prisoners.
The real complaining party at your bar is Civilization. In all our
countries it is still a struggling and imperfect thing. It does not
plead that the United States, or any other country, has been blameless
of the conditions which made the German people easy victims to the
blandishments and intimidations of the Nazi conspirators.
But it points to the dreadful sequence of aggressions and crimes I have
recited, it points to the weariness of flesh, the exhaustion of
resources, and the destruction of all that was beautiful or useful in so
much of the world, and to greater potentialities for destruction in the
days to come. It is not necessary among the ruins of this ancient and
beautiful city, with untold members of its civilian inhabitants still
buried in its rubble, to argue the proposition that to start or wage an
aggressive war has the moral qualities of the worst of crimes. The
refuge of the defendants can be only their hope that International Law
will lag so far behind the moral sense of mankind that conduct which is
crime in the moral sense must be regarded as innocent in law.
Civilization asks whether law is so laggard as to be utterly helpless to
deal with crimes of this magnitude by criminals of this order of
importance. It does not expect that you can make war impossible. It does
expect that your juridical action will put the forces of International
Law, its precepts, its prohibitions and, most of all, its sanctions, on
the side of peace, so that men and women of good will in all countries
may have "leave to live by no man's leave, underneath the law."
[In most instances, documents referred to or quoted from have been cited
by number, even though some of them have not been introduced in evidence
as a part of the American case. Where they were not offered as evidence
it was chiefly for the reason that documents subsequently discovered
covered the point more adequately, and because the pressure of time
required the avoidance of cumulative evidence.
In some instances no citations are given of documents quoted from or
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referred to. These are documents which for a variety of reasons were not
introduced in evidence during the American case. The length of some of
them was disproportionate to the value of their contents, and hence
instead of full translations only summaries were prepared in English. In
some cases a translation of the document referred to was made only for
use in the address and was not included in the evidence which it was
proposed to offer in court. In other cases the document, although
translated, was turned over to the French or Russian delegations for use
in the proof of Counts III and IV, and hence forms no part of the
American case.]
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