Nazi Conspiracy & Aggression 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
[Page 171]
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
[Page 172]
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
[Page 173]
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, rom 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
[Page 174]
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.]
The
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Volume
I Chapter V
Justice Jackson's Opening Address for the United States of America
(Part 17 of 17)