It was surely a sign that the rule of law was finding its way into international relations when, after a world war of unmatched brutality during which new technologies of killing had claimed millions of lives, the victorious Allies decided to mount a public trial of Germany’s leaders. A special tribunal would weigh charges of “supreme offense against international morality and the sanctity of treaties” and then render its verdict. But Germany’s supreme leader had fled to the Netherlands and the Dutch refused to extradite him. The Allies, whose experiences of war and motives for holding a trial differed significantly, began to bicker among themselves and eventually lost interest. The tribunal never convened.
Thus ended World War I. Kaiser Wilhelm II lived out his days in exile on an estate near Utrecht, chopping down trees and hunting. Belated attempts by the French and the British to force Germany to prosecute suspected war criminals accomplished little beyond galvanizing outraged Germans to protest against victors’ justice. It was at one such rally in 1922 that Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering first met. When the German army conquered the Netherlands in May 1940, Wilhelm sent Hitler a congratulatory telegram. He sent another one in June, after the Germans defeated France. To his sister, Princess Margaret, Wilhelm wrote later that year (in English):
The hand of God is creating a new World & working miracles…. We are becoming the USof Europe under German leadership…. The Jews [are] being thrust out of their nefarious positions in all countries, whom they have driven to hostility for centuries.
He died in June 1941 at the age of eighty-two, on the eve of Hitler’s ruinous invasion of the Soviet Union.
After World War II the victorious powers—the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union, along with France—were determined not to repeat this mistake. The International Military Tribunal (IMT) they established at Nuremberg in November 1945 was designed to reveal to the world, and not least to the Germans themselves, the full extent of Nazi crimes and to punish the individuals most responsible for them. Beyond that, the Nuremberg Trial would demonstrate that the forces of civilization could triumph over barbarism. “Four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury,” US Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, the lead American prosecutor at Nuremberg, said in his opening statement, had chosen to “stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the
judgment of the law.” Impersonal, objective law would sublimate the desire for revenge, he contended, thereby enacting “one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.”
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