Nuremberg Fantasies
Pretend Nazis in the dock
I was twelve when I first saw Judgment at Nuremberg. It ran on television some weekend evening in 1979, and I watched it because the synopsis in TV Guide mentioned that William Shatner was among the cast. (It was an early, small role for the future Captain Kirk.) The 1961 film is a fictionalized account of Nazi war crimes trials, and it features one of the great all-star casts. In brief appearances, two famously troubled stars – Judy Garland and Montgomery Clift – steal the proverbial show. Directed by Stanley Kramer, Judgment remains a cinematic masterpiece, and I recommend it highly.
Hollywood legend says that Montgomery Clift improvised here, as he was too drunk and mentally ill to remember his lines.
Fourteen years later, when I started teaching Modern Europe survey at Pasadena City College, I ran into the problem that bedevils most history lecturers. I couldn’t finish the course. The syllabus called on me to cover the period from 1517 to the present (which was then, 1993). As the semester rolled on, I spent too much time on the French Revolution and the causes of World War One and found myself pressed hard to get to the end of the Second World War in my penultimate lecture. I figured I could try to compress everything from VE day to the fall of the Berlin Wall into a single final hour. Or I could decide to devote the entirety of that concluding lecture to the post-war Nuremberg Trials. Remembering how much I’d loved the movie, I decided on the latter.
For the next twenty years, I taught Modern Europe almost every semester – and every single time, ended at Nuremberg. I did the classic academic thing of making a public virtue out of a private failing. I decided that it wasn’t just that I wasn’t able to manage time, it was that the Nuremberg Trials constituted a watershed moment in human history. For the first time, a tribunal declared that conscience mattered more than obedience. Nuremberg, I told my students, declared that human rights were not only universal, but that awareness of those rights was also inscribed within us. Thanks to Nuremberg, we knew we each had a duty to disobey authority if authority asked us to do the inhuman.
I began the course in 1517, with brave Martin Luther nailing up his 95 Theses to a church door: I ended it with the story of sentences solemnly pronounced over unrepentant Nazis. The through line was the triumph of the idea of the individual over the state, and the triumph of individual conscience over blind submission. It always seemed to go down well with the students. Even now, I’ll occasionally hear from someone who took my class 15 or 25 years ago, and they’ll say that they’ve always recalled that Nuremberg lecture. Ask any old professor – we love to hear that we’re remembered, even if we wince a little to reflect on how we preached and pontificated.
Over the course of those two decades of teaching, I said some things I regret. I taught some things I suspected were at best oversimplifications, and at worst, outright distortions. I occasionally pandered to the audience, and I probably confused being a talented lecturer with being a good teacher. I never, however, considered that celebrating the Nuremberg Trials as highly as I did was inculcating a myth. It was a myth I’d absorbed since I first saw that great Stanley Kramer movie, and it was a myth that I taught in earnest. It was, I realize, a myth, nonetheless.
The myth, simply, is the idea that a public tribunal after a conflict is the best way to end a conflict. I pointed out to my students that after World War Two, the Allies rebuilt Germany with the Marshall Plan. They did not impose collective guilt on the German people. Rather, they put a small number on trial, dispensing death to a few and jail terms to the rest. This combination of leniency towards the many and strict accountability for the few was evidence, I told my classes, that we can learn from history. And if we learn the right lessons, we can bring lasting peace. “There has not been a Third World War,” I always said, “Because the combination of Nuremberg and the Marshall Plan meant that the guilty were punished but the masses were forgiven. There were no seeds of rage left to plant.”
I began my teaching career the same year Bill Clinton began his presidency. Though assorted Rwandans and Bosnian Muslims might not agree, the general perception in the mid-to-late 1990s was that peace was bustin’ out all over. South Africa gave up apartheid and held what seemed like a successful Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Northern Ireland found its way to the Good Friday Agreement. The Oslo Accords promised a new dawn for Israelis and Palestinians. I look back on the 1990s fondly because I was young, slender, handsome, and full of promise. I also look back on the 1990s fondly because there were so many excellent reasons for all of us, slender or not, to be optimistic about the world. And lo, as I told my students for years, surely you can see this long march of progress had all begun with a fair and impartial tribunal!
I do not need to tell you that in America today, everyone and their alpaca wants to see some politician locked up. The left longs to see Donald Trump and, say, Matt Gaetz behind bars; the right hopes the same for Hunter Biden and Hillary Clinton. Everyone seems to crave a “COVID Nuremberg.” The left wants to hold accountable those whom they claim peddled deadly lies about the vaccines, while the right wants to try and jail those who forced the nation into prolonged and unnecessary lockdowns. Everyone is eager to impeach everybody over corruption and borders and laptops and emails and lies.
Everybody is furious that no one really important ever seems to go to jail, like they did at the end of Judgment at Nuremberg. We feel cheated.
Everyone is also drunk on tribunal fantasy. Everyone is intoxicated by the pretty thought that if we can just put the right people on trial, then the truth (as we believe the truth to be) will emerge. The guilty will go to the gallows or to prison, and the rest of us can swagger about in happy vindication. We will look our friends in the eye and say, “It took a long time, Jane, but by God, the system worked in the end.” We imagine that if we can just have a few more Nuremberg moments, if we can just jail our political opponents the way the Allies jailed the Nazis, then – after this long and unpleasant detour – we will find ourselves back on the happy road of destiny.
The thing is, Nuremberg didn’t work as well as we imagine it did. It didn’t eradicate Nazism. Sure, a few of Hitler’s henchmen were hanged. Sure, the swastika was banned. And yet, slowly but surely, the far right regrouped and found a way to survive. You can make it illegal to give the Nazi salute or wave the Nazi banner, but you cannot regulate thoughts. (For civil libertarians, the abject failure of Germany’s ban on Nazi symbols is a grim but satisfying lesson.) The populist right – that at its fringes is very sympathetic to Nazism – is powerful once more in Germany and may even win some state elections later this year.
Of course, when you’re high on tribunal fantasy, you conclude that the answer to any problem is more tribunals. You think of these great trials as functioning like spraying for termites; if the first application proved insufficient to eradicate them all, apply the poison more vigorously. Repeat until the desired result. You never question the method. You just increase the intensity of the application.
Reasonably, the Allies only put high-ranking Nazis -- or those who could be proved to have committed particularly heinous war crimes – on trial. In recent years, having run out of all the important Nazis, the Germans have dragged a series of very elderly and confused men and women into court. Many were teenage camp guards or secretaries who played very minor roles in atrocities that happened eighty years ago. They are put on trial, nonetheless. The implication is clear: Nuremberg was the right idea, but it didn’t go far enough. We must expand the zone of accountability! We must hunt down more who fell short of the mark! Perhaps if we catch every last one, then… then the hoped-for result will come.
In America, a popular conceit on the Woke left is that the end of the Civil War was a missed opportunity. If only Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and the rest of those gray-clad traitors had swung from the gallows! If only every single Confederate officer had been imprisoned for life! If only we had had some splendid tribunals, then the Lost Cause myth would never have survived, Jim Crow would never have emerged, and Black Americans would have been able to embrace the full promise of freedom a century earlier. What fools we were to forgive the unforgivable! What a fumbled chance to write a happier history in the blood of traitors!
I’m not an American historian. Indeed, I’m not an historian at all, anymore. But I sure do know when someone’s drunk on vengeance liquor. I know when someone’s bought into the seductive lie that trials and punishments are the best possible way to encourage that ol’ arc of history to bend towards justice just a bit faster.
I am not saying that we should never put the wicked and the corrupt on trial. I am saying that since about 1946, a lot of us have wildly overestimated the efficacy of those trials to bring lasting healing. It is time to let go of the tribunal fantasy.
Nearly 46 years ago, in another more charitable era, Jimmy Carter issued a posthumous pardon to Jefferson Davis. He restored the late Confederate President’s citizenship. And Carter said something at the time that our current age dismisses, but we do well to remember:
Our Nation needs to clear away the guilts and enmities and recriminations of the past, to finally set at rest the divisions that threatened to destroy our Nation and to discredit the principles on which it was founded. Our people need to turn their attention to the important tasks that still lie before us in establishing those principles for all people.
In other words, you cannot tribunalize your way to peace. The gallows and the prison cell will not clear away the enmities of the past. Turn your attention to the future, to the tasks that lie ahead, and once and for all, abandon the Nuremberg fantasy.