THE NATIONS: Victors’ Law

Victor’s Law

A book-length indictment was returned this week against 24 top Nazis. The legal principle behind it was basically new, grave with future implications. The principle: that individuals of a defeated nation may be held legally responsible for such public acts as wars of aggression and the politics and propaganda which precede them. Obviously, any victor might see comparable crimes in the policies of any vanquished nation.

World War II had not been merely a war between nations and ideologies. It had been, preeminently, a war between good & evil. Because the people of the world saw it that way, they demanded punishment, whether by judicial proceeding or by the lynchings and other acts of violence against Nazis which broke out in liberated Europe. At Nürnberg next month, when the indicted 24 are tried, the victors will attempt to lift this demand for punishment onto the plane of established law.

The list included arch-Nazi Göring, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Banker Hjalmar Schacht. Missing was the greatest criminal of all, Adolf Hitler. Dead or alive, Hitler was still the world’s most hated man. With real pleasure British workmen dragged a huge Hitler bust from Germany’s former London Embassy.