The Pittsburgh Press (October 19, 1945)
Background of news –
International crime
By Bertram Benedict
Twenty-four high-ranking Nazi leaders were indicted yesterday in a 25,000-word document accusing them of plotting and starting World War II, and of atrocities, persecution and devastation unmatched in history.
Goering, Hess and von Ribbentrop were the top names on the list of Hitlerites indicted. They will be tried by a four-power court at Nuernberg, probably next month.
If the international indictment is ruled valid against the objections raised against it, a precedent will have been created.
Napoleon on St. Helena was considered simply a prisoner of war; he never underwent formal trial. After the American Civil War, Jefferson Davis was imprisoned for two years but never underwent trial; the lawyers for the government found flaws in every charge suggested against him.
In the treaty of Versailles, the Allies and the United States “publicly arraigned William II of Hohenzollern, formerly German emperor, for a supreme offense against international morality and the sanctity of treaties.”
But the Netherlands refused to surrender the ex-kaiser for trial.
Little action last time
The Versailles Treaty required Germany to surrender German war criminals for trial before Allied tribunals for violations of the “laws and customs of war.” But the Allies later allowed the German government itself to conduct the prosecution of the few Germans actually brought to trial. And this time it was France itself which tried and sentenced Petain and Laval.
Some persons who are sincerely anti-Nazi deplore, as ex post facto procedure, the international trial of the high-ranking Nazis for having launched a war of aggression. To these persons there is no legal basis for one government trying the heads of another government; and there is no law by which a war of aggression, however deplorable, is a punishable crime.
This contention was vigorously disputed by Justice Robert H. Jackson, chief counsel for the United States in the prosecution of Axis war criminals, in his lengthy report to President Truman June 7.
As for atrocities, they violate the rules of war drawn up in the Hague Convention of 1907, which were “well established and generally accepted by the nations.”
Classified as crimes
As for wars of aggression, Justice Jackson admits that they were not classified as crimes in international law as taught in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But after World War I, the nations of the world agreed so to classify them.
The Geneva Protocol of 1924, signed by 48 governments, declared: “A war of aggression constitutes an international crime.” The Eighth Assembly of the League of Nations, in 1927, of which Germany was then a member, made the identical pronouncement.
And in the Briand-Kellogg Pact of 1928, practically all the nations renounced war as an instrument of national policy; thereby, according to Justice Jackson, they established aggressive war as a crime and the instigators of it as criminals.
To make heads of state immune from international legal liability is to reestablish the obsolete doctrine that kings rule by divine right and are not accountable for what they do. The Nazi leaders, by violating the accepted obligations among nations, became in effect international pirates, and precedents have long allowed pirates to be punished on capture without regard to their nationality.