ZGram - 4/6/2003 - "The Nuremberg Trials" - Part I

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny:  Now more than ever!

April 6, 2003

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Now that Western Civilization's laws are being more and more 
perverted and corrupted to cater to the needs and whims of special 
interest groups, perhaps it brings some clarity to study one crass 
precedent. 

Ernst Zundel wrote this essay in the mid-1990s - almost ten years ago 
- and what it told us of the subjugation of a defeated country, 
Germany,  has haunted me ever since.  It's up to you to draw some 
parallels to what is happening today.

This essay comes in two parts:

[START]

Nuremberg:  The Crime That Will Not Die

PART I

On the eve of the 50th Anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials, it is 
appropriate that I share with my English-speaking readerships a few 
reflections pertaining to those trials. I'd like to start with a 
revealing and thought-provoking quote coming from none other than 
Nahum Goldman, long-time president of the World Jewish Congress, in a 
book entitled "The Jewish Paradox."


"Apart from my encounter with the survivors of the concentration 
camps after the liberation, I only returned officially to Germany in 
order to meet Chancellor Adenauer and open negotiations about 
reparations. These reparations constitute an extraordinary innovation 
in terms of international law.

Until then, when a country lost a war, it paid damages to the victor, 
but it was a matter between states, between governments. Now for the 
first time a nation was to give reparations either to ordinary 
individuals or to Israel, which did not legally exist at the time of 
Hitler's crimes. All the same, I must admit that the idea did not 
come from me.

"During the war the WJC (World Jewish Congress) had created an 
Institute of Jewish Affairs in New York (its headquarters are now in 
London). The directors were two great Lithuanian Jewish jurists, 
Jacob and Nehemiah Robinson. Thanks to them, the Institute worked out 
two completely revolutionary ideas: the Nuremberg tribunal and German 
reparations." ("The Jewish Paradox," Grosset & Dunlap, 1978, p 122)


In the United States, the new specialty channel, "Court TV," is 
treating the whole of the North American continent to a special about 
Nuremberg--a television hate fest lasting about 15 hours in total 
length. Likewise, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Radio 
Division, recently aired a sequel using static-distorted, crackling 
old short wave newscasts from the proceedings in Nuremberg in 1946. 
Once again, newsreel commentators regurgitate ad nauseam all the 
disgusting and lying testimony of perjurers and con artists, along 
with the sad "testimony" frequently tortured out of Germany's 
military and political leaders.

I can only call these broadcasts "spreading of hate," which is a 
crime in Canada under its hate law against an identifiable ethnic 
group, namely the Germans--under the guise of showing "history." The 
current German vassal or Quisling state (my apologies to Mr. 
Quisling!) established by the Allies in post-war Germany--a state 
whose roots and foundations stem out of those disgusting proceedings 
of Allied vengeance against a vanquished German people--will not 
defend its own people against this avalanche of hate and lies, so I 
will try to do it.

It speaks to the tenor of our times that this may be the first time 
some of my readers may have been exposed to a different historical 
slant on the Nuremberg Trials. We are so habituated to slander and 
libel that often we don't even notice it or recognize it as such. We 
are so used to seeing Germany as the convenient and deserving 
whipping boy for all its "Nazi crimes" we hardly ever give a thought 
to its creation--or its Godfathers.

Nahum Goldman writes in "The Jewish Paradox", page 123:


During a meeting of the World Jewish Congress in London, a Russian 
Jew called Noah Baron, a wonderful man and great idealist . . . 
talked me into taking an active part by first of all meeting 
Adenauer. I was very hesitant at heart, because it was no easy matter 
for me to talk to the Germans again. And in fact it was eventually my 
head, and not my heart, which decided me to negotiate. But I laid 
down a precondition: before I would meet the Chancellor to open 
negotiations: Adenauer had to make a solemn statement to the 
Bundestag; he must say that although the Germany of those days was 
certainly not the Germany which had produced Auschwitz . . . it 
nevertheless inherited the Nazis' responsibilities, and reparations 
were its duty; he must add that material reparations could not erase 
the evil done to the Jews by the Germans. (emphasis added).


Let's see now how it all began--and evolved!--this matter of the 
"Nuremberg Trials" resulting in such guilt and such enormous sums of 
reparations squeezed out of a defeated country, Germany, over the 
last 50 years.

When we think of the Nuremberg trials, we think of Auschwitz, Bergen 
Belsen, Dachau--places that the Allies "liberated" and where they 
"found those skeletons"--which yielded those much-exploited and 
useful photographic backdrops to justify what was to follow ever 
since.

Guilt, expertly used, is a terrible weapon, a powerful tool and also 
a handsome cash cow. There was, in fact, a policy and program locked 
in place to punish Germany for alleged war time crimes which was 
planned and implemented long before the "crimes" of Nazi Germany were 
"revealed" via newsreels and sensationalized headlines to a stunned, 
shuddering, horrified world.

There are millions of words, and tens of thousands of books, which 
have been written about the Nuremberg proceedings in response to 
these alleged crimes--publications in all kinds of languages, all 
parroting the post-war Allied propaganda and borrowing its footnotes 
from each other. A lie repeated six million times, however, does not 
become the truth by mere repetition. This essay will inspect the 
pre-conditions and the reasons for the lie--one of which was that 
Nuremberg and those disgusting proceedings turned out to be the 
midwives of the Holocaust propaganda.

The generations who have grown into adulthood since the end of the 
Second World War have been allowed little chance to look at the 
Nuremberg trials critically. They have not been allowed access, for 
instance, to information showing what some important people and 
personalities at the time thought about the whole disgusting process 
of using ex post facto laws against a virtually defenseless, 
militarily defeated and militarily occupied former enemy.

According to Nahum Goldman, former president of the Jewish World 
Congress, even during the war plans were being mapped out with great 
care and cunning and the foundation for the lie was being laid. Long 
before America agreed to feed its young men into a fratricidal war 
fought not for American national interests but for the interests of 
an alien people and a State that did not even then exist, there came 
into being an Institute of Jewish Affairs in New York that cooked up 
a devilish brew.

Writes Goldman in The Jewish Paradox, pages 122-123, addressing this questio=
n:


The Institute's . . . idea was that Nazi Germany ought to pay after 
its defeat. That still required belief in the defeat, at the time 
when it seemed likely that the war in Europe was lost for the Allies, 
but like Churchill and de Gaulle I kept my faith. I never doubted for 
a moment, because I knew that Hitler would never manage to moderate 
himself and that his excesses would draw the Allies into the 
conflict. According to the Institute's conclusions, the German 
reparations would first have to be paid to people who had lost their 
belongings through the Nazis. Further, if, as we hoped, the Jewish 
state was created, the Germans would pay compensation to enable the 
survivors to settle there. The first time this idea was expressed was 
during the war, in the course of a conference in Baltimore.


As we all know and are never allowed to forget, in due time Hitler 
lost the war. Now it was time to conduct Stalinist type show trials 
against the defeated German leadership and then hand the world its 
villains.

Was this about "punishment"? Think again!

Continues Goldman:


The importance of the tribunal which sat at Nuremberg has not been 
reckoned at its true worth. According to international law it was in 
fact impossible to punish soldiers who had been obeying orders. It 
was Jacob Robinson who had this extravagant, sensational idea. When 
he began to canvass it among the jurists of the American Supreme 
Court, they took him for a fool. "What did these Nazi officers do 
that was so unprecedented?" they asked. "You can imagine Hitler 
standing trial, or maybe even Goering, but these are simple soldiers 
who carried out their orders and behaved as loyal soldiers." We 
therefore had the utmost trouble in persuading the Allies; the 
British were fairly opposed, the French barely interested, and 
although they took part later they did not play any great part. The 
success came from Robinson managing to convince the Supreme Court 
judge, Robert Jackson. (The Jewish Paradox, p 122)


What followed next? Total communications control and news 
manipulation through censorship.

After the war was over and Germany had lost, the Allied powers, in 
effect, by virtue of having established a military government--one 
might as well call it a military dictatorship, in many ways more 
restrictive than Adolf Hitler's state had been--had a tight grip on 
all channels of communications. This fact cannot be overstated.

=46rom control and supervision of the mail service to the telegraph and 
telephone systems to radio stations to book, newspaper and magazine 
publishing houses, the Allies were fully in charge through a clever 
"licensing system." Anyone who did not toe the Allied propaganda line 
lost their license or had their license suspended as punishment. 
Journalists lost their accreditations. Newspapers lost their already 
very scarce paper or printer's ink allocations or reduced-rate postal 
shipping privileges. Additionally, Germany was divided into military 
occupation zones, which were like mini-states, issuing their own 
passports, food and fuel as well as clothing and stationary ration 
cards and coupons. If you wanted to travel in occupied Germany from 
one zone to another in the immediate postwar years, you had to 
explain to the local military authorities in a written request why 
you wanted to travel to another zone, whom you wanted to see, and 
where you intended to stay. You had to request ration coupons for the 
period of your absence. There were other bureaucratic, for the 
Nuremberg defense team extremely inconvenient restrictions as 
well--some by design, some by default. Many trains didn't run on 
schedule or not at all for lack of coal. Most buildings were 
unheated. The populace starved. The country was largely without men. 
There were ruins wherever you looked. There was misery 
everywhere--more misery than there had ever been during the bitterly 
fought war.

I find in my conversations and interviews and even during my court 
cases that judges, prosecutors and even defense lawyers have not the 
foggiest idea what life was really like for the defense teams in 
Nuremberg in 1946-1949. Today's generation, brainwashed by the 
high-tech razzle-dazzle of the O.J. Simpson media-feeding frenzy and 
image glut-out, has not a clue under what circumstances the German 
defense lawyers worked. Not a clue! Furthermore, I suspect that the 
cynical generation of money-grabbing, self-promoting attorneys, 
prosecutors and judges of today don't give a damn about what was the 
horrible truth and the reality then. Nonetheless, some of these 
things must be recorded for history's sake.

Imagine if you told the occupation powers you wanted to go to 
Nuremberg to testify in defense of Rudolf Hess, Joachim von 
Ribbentrop, Kaltenbrunner, G=F6ring, Streicher or military leaders like 
Keitel, Jodl, D=F6nitz, Raeder or others! If the military man to whom 
you applied for permission was a Jew in the uniform of Russia, 
=46rance, America or England, imagine the response! Would he not think 
the German applicant was still a "Nazi lover" intent on additional 
"mischief"? It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out how many 
people would shy away from getting politically involved as defense 
witnesses or experts after having just survived a brutal war, 
horrendous bombing raids and the raping and plundering hordes of the 
self-appointed "liberators." Who would choose voluntarily to expose 
himself to arrest, beatings, torture etc., considering the 
circumstances?

It is remarkable that there were defense witnesses at all who came 
forward and tried to help those hapless prisoners in Nuremberg. There 
are instances of the defense lawyers having located and convinced 
crucial defense witnesses to testify who were being held as prisoners 
in Allied prison camps, only to find them--convenient for the 
prosecution!-- getting "lost" in transfers, "lost" long enough until 
the proceedings had passed the point where their testimony could have 
been of use to the defense.

These defense lawyers themselves worked against almost insurmountable 
odds. They sat in cold, wet, bombed-out basements of half-ruined 
houses with boarded-up windows, working in overcoats, writing with 
stiffened fingers, wearing hats, scarves and gloves to guard 
themselves against the cold and creeping dampness, trying to write 
some text and formulate some argument so that a client, who was daily 
vilified in the press and on radio, in the news reels and on Armed 
=46orces radio as a despicable monster and a criminal with no human 
traits, might get a semblance of a defense in those nightmarish, 
Kafkaesque proceedings called the Nuremberg Trials.

Those were truly desperate times for the Germans! The defense was 
hampered by lack of staff, space, typewriters and ribbons and even 
carbon paper as well as photocopying facilities and paper supplies. 
Remember that, in 1945, a photocopy meant exactly what it said. A 
photograph had to be taken using special line-film. A negative had to 
be developed and dried. This, in turn, had to be projected by means 
of an enlarger onto light-sensitive photographic paper in a dark 
room, which had then to be developed using chemicals not easily 
available and electric drum dryers using up precious electricity to 
dry the prints. (Electricity was rationed severely to approximately 
two hours every day, with only so many kilowatt allowed per person.)

Try to put yourself in the defense lawyers' or in this case, the 
whole German defense teams' place, when two dozen lawyers, defending 
a great number of different clients, are handed a 30, 50, 100 or 200 
page document by the prosecuion--often this was the only set of a 
document for all the lawyers!--and you had a limited time till court 
day to study, analyze, weigh the charges, look for potentially 
exonerating witnesses in a bombed-out country where tens of millions 
were homeless, freezing and starving. The old, still existing phone 
books and city directories were virtually useless, because telephone 
service was not yet restored in many places and private people hardly 
ever got a phone approved by the occupation authorities unless you 
were "essential"--let's say, like a medical doctor.

Now let's look at the defendants' rights to get the lawyer of their 
choice--a sacred right in most civilized countries. What do you think 
that meant in those hysterical, lawless days in post-war Germany? 
Which lawyer could afford to side with a "Nazi monster"? Many years 
later, my own lawyer has been accused during my own trials in 
peaceful, democratic Canada for ". . . being too closely associated" 
with me, the accused, by media commentators, even lawyers and even, 
occasionally, a judge who showed the intolerance rampant against a 
vilified accused like me by those in contemporary society who have 
the fate of accused people in their hands. Imagine what courage it 
must have taken for those Nuremberg defense lawyers--who also were 
fathers of children, who were husbands to wives--all glad to have 
survived the war, all of them trying to build new careers out of the 
rubble of defeated, devastated and decimated Germany in 1946.

It took much more than guts. It took real dedication to a principle 
and a love of justice few in today's society could claim to have or 
hold.

Let's say you were a lawyer of such heroic proportions. The Allies, 
more often than not, could declare you a "Nazi" as well, putting you 
in the class of "criminals," since the Nazi party was declared a 
"criminal organization" by the conquerors. Most of the mental elite 
of Germany had been members of the National Socialist Party, and 
almost all had gone to war and, chances were, had been killed or 
severely wounded. Those who survived, were really persona non grata. 
They came back from a devastating war and found themselves not only 
criminalized but deprived of their civic and human rights by cruel 
conquerors who all the while kept on prattling incessantly in their 
propaganda about the wonderful Allied New Order.

If, against tremendous odds, you finally found yourself screened, 
interrogated, and accredited as a lawyer at the Nuremberg 
trials--what did you face, in fact? Let's take a cold, hard look at 
this so-called International Military Tribunal. How righteous and 
noble that sounds! A label like that can hide many a sore. The 
Nuremberg sore is still running.

Here is what Nuremberg was:

It was not an international military tribunal at all. It was not even 
international in composition. The victors instead sat in judgment 
over the vanquished. Justice Harlan Fiske Stone, who was then the 
Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and Justice Jackson's (the 
Chief American Prosecutor at Nuremberg) boss in that role, had this 
to say while speaking to a reporter for Fortune Magazine, as quoted 
in: Harlan Fiske Stone: Pillar of the Law, Alpheus Thomas Mason, The 
Viking Press, page 715:


"For your information, but not for publication as coming from me, I 
would like to advise you that the Supreme Court had nothing to do, 
either directly or indirectly, with the Nuremberg Trials, or the 
governmental action which authorized them. I was not advised of 
Justice Jackson's participation until his appointment by the 
Executive was announced in the newspapers.

"So far as the Nuremberg trial is an attempt to justify the 
application of the power of the victor to the vanquished because the 
vanquished made aggressive war," (Stone) explained, "I dislike 
extremely to see it dressed up with a false facade of legality. The 
best that can be said for it is that it is a political act of the 
victorious States, which may be morally right, as was the 
sequestration of Napoleon about 1815. But the allies in that day did 
not feel it necessary to justify it by an appeal to nonexistent legal 
principles. As a practical matter, it seems to me that the 
difficulties and uncertainties of saying who is the aggressor under 
the conditions which produce modern war should make us hesitate to 
lay down for the future a principle which would always require that 
question to be answered by the victor.

"All wars are in fact aggressive. The real source of authority is 
`the powers of the victors over the vanquished.'

"It would not disturb me greatly," he wrote, "if that power were 
openly and frankly used to punish the German leaders for being a bad 
lot, but it disturbs me some to have it dressed up in the habiliments 
of the Common Law and the constitutional safeguards to those charged 
with crime. It looks as though we were committing ourselves to the 
proposition that the outcome of every war must be that the leaders of 
the vanquished must be executed by the victors."

[END]

=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D

Conclusion in tomorrow's ZGram