The Evening Star (October 23, 1946)
On the Record…
Historians will find gaps in the Nuernberg trials
By Dorothy Thompson
Attorney General Tom Clark declared on Monday that the Nuernberg trial “established forever the solemn judgment that the waging of aggressive war is a crime,” and repudiated that “resort to war is a legitimate instrument of statecraft.”
I wish I agreed with the attorney general, but I am afraid I do not. And if I harp upon this theme it is because it is the most important for the human future.
The Nuernberg trials did not establish that it was, is, or shall be, a crime to conspire to wage, or participate in waging “aggressive” war. It only established that it was a crime for the German Third Reich. It actually established that under certain circumstances, which could be interpreted by the attacking party as threatening their own security, unprovoked attacks without declaration of war are justifiable.
The defendants were charged with and convicted of planning or participating in a conspiracy to wage aggressive war. But the extent of the conspiracy was not revealed, nor whether the conspiracy involved other states than the German. Mr. Ribbentrop, who. Following the conclusion of the Russo-German pact, received the Order of Lenin from Stalin, was not permitted to call Mr. Molotov as a witness. Nor did the tribunal receive or pass on – as far as newspaper reports reveal – the minutes of either the Munich Conference or of the meetings resulting in the agreements made between the Russians and the Germans in 1939. This despite the fact that at the time of Munich the Russians and Communists throughout the world charged that Munich was an international Fascist conspiracy to wage war against the Soviet Union.
The record of the Nuernberg trials will, therefore, be a rich source of future material for historians seeking to analyze the events leading to, and the causes of, the late war. But they will find serious lacunae.
It is a matter of Incontrovertible record, however, that from August 1939 to June 1941, when the Soviet Union was attacked by Germany, the Kremlin denied that the Nazis were waging “aggressive” war; instructed the Communist parties in France, Britain, Canada and the United States to denounce the war; publicly defended and participated in the attacks on Poland; were, in turn, publicly defended by Hitler for attacking Finland; mutually, with the Germans, attacked and partitioned the Baltic States and negotiated with the Germans for further collaboration in the war in the Balkans and the Middle East. With each of the countries attacked, the USSR had a non-aggression pact.
When Russia was attacked, the Soviet government justified these previous moves on the ground that, distrusting Hitler and foreseeing his aggressive designs against Russia, the Soviets had only been putting themselves in a more favorable position for defense. In the face of the attack this argument was plausible enough to win acceptance. But the acceptance – and this is the kernel of the matter – amounted to an admission that under certain circumstances unprovoked attacks on states in anticipation of the designs of a “potential” enemy are justified as acts of defense, and may not be branded as aggression even when carried out in collaboration with the “potential” enemy!
Had the USSR, after having defeated the Germans together with the western powers, and with the aid of some of the countries she had previously attacked, restored intact the territories she had incorporated while collaborating with the Germans, the previous defense argument would have been strengthened.
But this did not happen. Russia absorbed the German conquests in the Baltic and added them to her own. And retained most of that part of Poland taken in mutual conquest with the Germans.
Since the USSR sat as prosecutor and judge in the Nuernberg tribunal and her behavior in 1939 was never called into question, no definition of conspiracy or aggression has been established, either as of the past, the present or the future, and the Nuernberg trial does not contribute an iota to dissipating the “age-old terror that resort to war is a legitimate instrument of statecraft.”
That terror will only be assuaged when specifically defined behaviors are banned by enforceable international law and peaceable but compulsory means of judgment and adjustment of grievances are established, for, as it is, war remains the only ultimate means of justice, as well as of conquest.
And in the atomic age, those willing to interpret preventive war as legitimate defense – which is what the Soviet Union has actually succeeded in doing at the Nuernberg trial, as far as her own actions are concerned – may in the future hold some new Nuernberg trials to establish in “international law” that the victim was, in fact, the “potential” aggressor.
In respect to Finland, Poland and the Baltic States, that concept has already been established, in fact, if not in law, and, precisely, at Nuernberg. Why it should give any one cause to abandon fear is beyond my comprehension, especially as in a systematic campaign of verbal attacks, supported by some elements within our own country, the United States is already being branded as a “potential,” “conspiring” aggressor.