The Daily Alaska Empire (September 25, 1946)
Atty. puzzled by Russ role at tribunals
Tokyo trials defense council sees possible acquittal for Schacht
TOKYO – Owen Cunningham, one of the defense attorneys in the International War Crimes trial here, told fellow defense lawyers today “the same puzzle exists at Nuernberg as does here: ‘How can we reconcile the Moscow system of justice with that of the Democracies?’”
Cunningham, a Des Moines attorney, just returned from Nuernberg where he conferred with Joachim von Ribbentrop in search of evidence to help his particular Tokyo client, Hiroshi Oshima, former ambassador to Germany.
Speaking of the introduction into the Nuernberg evidence of a Russo-German pact to divide Poland, Cunningham said: “On the one hand Russia was co-author of a law making aggressive warfare a crime; on the other hand she was a co-conspirator in a crime thus created. It did not and does not make sense.”
Neither is it good logic that Russia should be one of the prosecutors in the case against former Premier Tojo and others, he continued. He declared that Russia prosecuting Japan lor planning to divide China, and yet Russia at Yalta agreed to divide China (Presumably, he referred to the Yalta approval of the Sino-Soviet treaty giving Russia joint control with China of the South Manchurian railway, a 30-year lease of Port Arthur and declaring Dairen an open port under joint Sino-Soviet control.)
Of the Nuernberg war crimes cases, in which a decision is due soon, Cunningham speculated: “If anyone is acquitted, I predict he will be Hjalmar Schacht,” Hitler’s finance expert. “Former Foreign Minister Von Neurath has a pretty fair chance of acquittal, and Diplomat Von Papen, also.”