The Pittsburgh Press (November 29, 1945)
Background of news –
Nuernberg’s ‘Iron Virgin’
By Frank Aston
The war crimes trials at Nuernberg bring to mind the story of the Iron Virgin of Nuernberg.
The Iron Virgin was an engine of torture and punishment. George Ryley Scott in his “History of Torture Throughout the Ages” reported that a Dr. Mayer, keeper of the archives of Nuernberg, said such an apparatus undoubtedly existed in the Castle of Nuernberg,
A specimen was found in a collection of antiquities belonging to a Baron Diedrich who said he bought it from someone who obtained it during the French revolution. Some believe the apparatus was invented in Span in the 16th century and imported into Germany while Charles V reigned over both countries.
A French officer under Gen. Lasalle described one discovered in a vault at Toledo, Spain. The officer said it was a wooden figure representing the Virgin Mary. The fore part of the body was equipped with sharp, narrow blades with their points turned toward the spectator.
For heretics and blasphemers
An attendant told the officer the instrument was devised for use on heretics and blasphemers. The accused was taken into the vault and placed in front of the figure, over which played a weird, flickering light.
Operated by an unseen mechanic, the figure would open its arms to the accused, as if inviting him t seek forgiveness. Overwhelmed with awe and astonishment, the prisoner often would walk into the embrace. If he didn’t, he was pushed.
Almost imperceptibly, the arms enfolded him until the blades slowly began to pierce his body. If he refused to confess, his captors either let the engine squeeze and stab him to death; or they took him off to some other form of torture.
Dr. Mayer said that in Germany the device was different.
Plenty of blades
The Nuernberg machine was made of sheet iron and set on a strong frame. The front formed two folding doors. Inside the swinging right breast of the figure were 13 blades. In the left, there were eight.
The victim was backed into the recess. He was obliged to stand.
The two doors were pressed shut by means of machinery back of the statue. The blades were not necessarily long enough to kill. After the apparatus had closed, it would open again and eject the victim. The body would fall through a trapdoor onto a cradle of swords.
Just how this second contrivance was operated has not been explained. Presumably the impact of the body set it in motion. The sharp blades sliced the body to pieces.
The Nuernberg engine had one accessory not found in Spain. The folding doors contained two long poniards set at the level of the victim’s head.
These were intended for the eyes.
St. Petersburg Times (November 29, 1945)
Lerner: Nuremberg and the dream of law
By Max Lerner
When the Nuremberg trials were first discussed and planned, the atom bomb did not yet exist. What was outlined therefore as a matter of international law has now had added to it the stakes of human survival. For the world will surely go to pieces in an age of atomic warfare unless it is held together by the thongs not only of a rudimentary world government, but of a rudimentary world law, and the Nuremberg trials offer the first instance of such world law in action.
The trials will have many sensational aspects, and the duty of the reporters at Nuremberg is to report the dramatic tidbits about Hess and Goering and Streicher and how they behave: that is the stuff of human interest, and that is what most newspaper readers eat up. But if you are concerned with the long range, you will not be deflected by these personalities, nor by considerations of hatred or pity or revenge for them. Long after they are mold and their memory but a dim stench in history, the real meaning of Nuremberg may still live.
That meaning is best summed up in one of the sentences from the opening statement by the American prosecutor, Robert H. Jackson: “I cannot subscribe to the perverted reasoning that society may advance… by the expenditure of morally innocent lives, but that progress in law may never be made at the price of morally guilty lives.”
This drives straight at the heart of Nuremberg’s importance for the world’s future. We have had in the past a few fragments here and there of a body of international law. We have had laws of warfare, more often defied than honored. We have had covenants and treaties for peaceful relations between nations, but the history of diplomacy is also the history of their flouting. There can be no question that the German defendants at Nuremberg violated both the laws of war and the agreements of peace. But what a pitifully trivial way that is of putting the enormity of their acts. We cannot measure how truly monstrous they were unless we measure them not only against the written agreements but against the most elementary conscience of human beings.
Key task at the trial
That is why the task which the American prosecution has taken over – that of presenting the Nazi deeds as crimes against humanity – is the key task of the trial. Its failure or success will determine whether we simply get vengeance out of the trial, or whether we get out of it the big advance in international law since the seventeenth century, when a Dutch lawyer called Hugo Grotius first sought to map out a body of standards of conduct binding on nations.
We must get clear in our minds why we seek to punish the twenty-odd broken and bedraggled men who sit at the bar at Nuremberg.
It is not out of a sadistic desire for revenge or even a measured belief in retribution. Either in terms of personal revenge or historic retribution, their death will be but the paltriest sort of repayment for what they and their fellows have done. It will not wipe out their acts, neither will it add to our own moral stature if we act from such motives.
Nor should we punish them in order to rid the world of them and make sure they will not again commit such crimes. As political forces these men are through. No millions will ever again cheer them; no armies will march at their orders.
Nor do I see much in the idea that the punishment of these men may be a healing and reforming principle for the rest of the German people. Most Germans have been so denuded morally, and are now so sunk in the desperate struggle for sheer physical survival, that one doubts whether the trials will mean very much to them, one way or another.
The idea of punishment as a deterrent is more in point. To establish the precedent that the leaders of armies and states cannot hide behind the screen of being simply the instruments of state policy, may be a big step in warning other states and army leaders who may plan aggressive and inhuman war in the future. It is time to remove the impersonal state as a screen behind which the worst crimes can be committed. It may be a healthy thing to make statesmanship a dangerous profession, and to get the idea across that the leaders of states do not necessarily die in bed.
Yet none of these four conventional theories of punishment – retribution, prevention, reform, deterrent – really gets at the meaning of Nuremberg. You get much closer to it when you see it as an immense and revolutionary effort to give utterance to a collective human conscience, to bring into being a collective standard by which the gross violations of that conscience can be punished.
The conscience and the moral sense
For centuries men have dreamed of the time when crimes could be punished on a world scale as well as between states; when the fact that a criminal had magnified his crimes a millionfold would not make him immune while the petty criminal who took only one human life was punished. Always there stood in the way the fact that there is no clear body of statute law for the world, and that nations recognize only the law they have themselves made.
It is better to punish with a clear statute than without it. But in this case of the Nuremberg trials the act of punishment can, like any great forward-moving act in history, help create a new consciousness which may lead us to set down some day, as clear law the things that are now only part of the human conscience. If we do this at Nuremberg it will be an act so crucial that it could have been produced only by the most violent revulsion of the moral sense of men. It is possible that we needed something as monstrous as Nazism to produce that revulsion.
There are those who will argue, as the German defendants do, that this dream is all very pretty, but that you cannot punish men unless they have violated explicit law by an explicit government; and that this must wait until we have set up a world government which will codify a world law. I do not think that will be the sequence. The statute will be, if at all, the end product. It cannot come into being unless we have a world government; but the world government cannot come into being unless we have a collective conscience and a collective will to punish the violations of it. Thus, the conscience and the moral sense come first. Once we have them, and once we are aware we have them, the rest will follow. That is why the Nuremberg trials may prove a more important prelude to an enduring peace than even the San Francisco Charter.
Some may jibe that I am speaking of a “human conscience” and a “moral sense” that are vague and formless, things on which no body of law can be built. I submit they are the only things that a body of law ever rests on. The surest basis of a future world society lies in the sense of our common plight. When a Negro is lynched, all of us are strung up on that rope. When the Jews were burned in the Nazi furnaces, all of us were burned. When Hitler told his generals and his party leaders about his plans for exterminating the Polish people, and when Goering – on hearing the plans – jumped up and down on the table in sadistic glee, he was jumping on the bodies not only of the Poles, but of us all.
If we never saw this clearly before, we must see it now in the age of the atom bomb. Some of our commentators are talking of making the laws against the use of the atom bomb binding directly on individuals, rather than on nations only. I am all for it. But it will be hopeless ever to make the human conscience binding in the future on the men of the atom bomb unless we make its binding now at Nuremberg on the men of the human furnaces.
A new international law will not be made in the courtroom or the council chamber any better than it is made in our own hearts.