Iain MacGregor
‘The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated,’ declared Justice Robert H. Jackson in his opening statement at the Nuremberg Trials, on 20 November 1945.
Eighty years on, those words land with the full weight of history. Picture the room: panelled wood, a tangle of microphones, translators in glass booths, a forest of uniforms and armbands muted now by defeat. Outside, Nuremberg is rubble – its grand avenues scoured of pageantry, its stonework scorched and fissured; the theatre of power inverted into a courtroom for accountability. Inside, Jackson fixes the narrative from his first sentence: this will not be a trial for vengeance, but an insistence that the modern world, having created the machinery of annihilation, must also forge a law to judge those who used it. Even Jackson’s earlier phrase about the defendants – ‘They are symbols of fierce nationalisms and of militarism… living symbols of racial hatreds… of the arrogance and cruelty of power’ – cut like a chisel into stone, carving the plaque that would hang over the entire proceedings.
The men in the dock were already familiar to the world by their surnames alone: Göring, Ribbentrop, Keitel, Hess, Streicher, Kaltenbrunner, Sauckel, Jodl, Frank, Frick, Doenitz, Schacht, Funk, Speer. These names had become a grim catechism of the Nazi regime. Hermann Göring, Reichsmarschall, first among equals, sat with a swaggering composure that seemed to defy the moment. He was still the decorated aerial ace of the Great War, the founder of the Gestapo, the strutting embodiment of the regime’s vanity and cruelty. And yet, the mask had slipped many months before once he was in allied captivity, when he had been stripped of his pocketful of morphine ampoules and costly uniforms. Now, in the courtroom, behind the bravado was a performer who knew the script was ending without him.
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