The Legacy of World War II
By Elliott Adams, WarIsACrime.org
June 6th came once more. D-day was a long time ago and I didn't
intend to make anything of it. I was surprised by the emotional turmoil
I felt, by how I felt about that day in my gut. I realized that while I
was born after the war was over, D-day and World War II were a real and
tangible part of my childhood. It was part of my family's life, my
teachers lives, my friends parent's lives. It wasn't just old men who
remembered it, every adult in my youth had stories from that war. It was
amputees on street corners selling pencils and people all around me
still dealing with it. It was part of my life and it played a role in my
enlistment for Vietnam. Of course I felt this day in my guts. Why did I
think it would be otherwise?
The stories were part of the world I grew up in; stories of D-day, of
every counter-espionage agent for a year saying the first attack will
be a feint, of the phantom 1st Army with decoy tanks, fake radio chatter
and empty tents looking like an army poised for an imminent invasion,
of Omaha Beach, of Utah Beach. The death, the military blunders, the
maimed, the successes, the “discovery” of the concentration camps, the
Battle of the Bulge, these stories were tangible and a part of my
childhood. Many of the stories were told after I was in bed, at
breakfast they were alluded to quietly by my parents, and we children
were told never to ask the adults about them.
So what is the legacy of WWII? For the people around me in my youth
it was not D-day or even VE day or VJ day. Those were just markers of
relief, of joy, that the war would come to an end. The war was not
fought just to win the war. No, the adults of my youth knew there was a
bigger issue – how do we keep this from ever happening again? In their
experience, the world could not live through another world war, and it
could not afford another war at all. The legacy of World War II was the
question of how we assure that the next crazy, the next despot, the
next aggressor nation does not start another war.
The Allies discussed this. Stalin believed that we should take the
top 50,000 living Nazi leaders and execute them. That would send a clear
message to not only the heads of state, but to the people who did the
work to implement their aggression. Churchill, who incidentally had not
personally been touched by the 30 million deaths on the Eastern Front,
thought that Stalin was being excessive. Churchill proposed that
executing the top 5,000 Nazi leaders would be enough death to make those
who might support an aggressive nation's acts of war think twice.
Truman thought we needed the rule of law, that we needed to establish
that these acts of war were crimes and that people could expect to be
prosecuted for them. Thus the Nuremberg Tribunals were formed. The Tokyo
Tribunals followed, but it was Nuremberg that set the standard and
established the law.
Robert H. Jackson, a US Supreme Court Justice who took a leave from
the court to become a main architect of the Nuremberg Tribunals, said on
August 12, 1945 “We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for
which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war,
but that they started it. And we must not allow ourselves to be drawn
into a trial of the causes of the war, for our position is that no
grievances or policies will justify a resort to aggressive war. It is
utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy.” This, not
D-day, is what the people of my youth talked about. This was the legacy
the war, this was the high ideal that made the whole war effort worth
while.
I was recently talking with some US Airmen and found that they did
not know what the Nuremberg Tribunals were, even when I prompted them
with leads like WWII and trials. Is it possible that after all that
blood and gore, the lasting legacy, the summation of what WWII was
fought for has been lost? Lost even to our people in uniform.
In preparation for the tribunals the Allied powers passed the
Nuremberg Charter. This set out the process of the trials and the crimes
that would be prosecuted. There would be no revenge summary executions.
The process established was for fair and open trials in which each
defendant was presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable
doubt, with right to present evidence of defense. The Nuremberg Charter
went on to establish the crimes that would be prosecuted, thus we have
words familiar to us today, such as war crimes, crimes against humanity,
and crimes against peace.
It was the intent of the Nuremberg Tribunals to make starting a war
illegal and prosecutable, even planning a war of aggression was a
crime. The new laws established by Nuremberg were summed up in the
seven Nuremberg Principles, among them that the sovereign or the head of
a sovereign state is not above the law, and could be tried for war
crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes against peace. Up until then
they were generally considered above the law, or more accurately were
considered to be the law, thus could not be prosecuted. Principle IV
says if you participate in a war crime, you can not be absolved of guilt
by claiming you had just followed orders; if you were part of the war
crime you can be prosecuted. These two principles alone radically
changed the prospect for the officials and functionaries of an aggressor
state and hopefully would would keep rogue leaders from starting wars
and their subordinates from going along with them.
At the opening of the Nuremberg Tribunals on November 10, 1945,
Robert H. Jackson, US Chief Prosecutor at the Tribunals, on leave from
the US Supreme Court, said ”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 has ever paid to Reason.”
Returning to June 6th and what it means, the veterans and people I
grew up among in the shadow of World War II did not talk about winning
another war, they believed the world could not even survive another war –
they talked about Nuremberg, what it meant and the hope that Nuremberg
brought. As we remember that day, D-day, let us not loose sight of what
all those lives were lost for, of what the people who lived through
that war did to keep the scourge of war from ever consuming our world
again. Make June 6th your day to study the Nuremberg Tribunals. Look up
the Nuremberg Charter (also called the London Charter), the Nuremberg
Tribunals and perhaps most importantly, the Nuremberg Principles. It
would be wrong, no it would worse than just wrong, for us to let the
loss of 72 million lives, the pain, and the destruction wrought by World
War II to be for naught by our forgetting about Nuremberg.
Elliot Adams is a Veterans For Peace (VFP) member from New York State and past president of VFP’s National Board.
