Judgement at Nuremberg
November 20 is the 70th anniversary of Nuremberg which began on Nov 20 1945. This set of 20 tweets discuss the impact of Nuremberg on the post-war world.

1.The Allies denounced ethnic cleansing policies at Nuremberg, but began cleansing Central and Eastern European countries of their own minorities. Between 1944 and 1948, about 31 million Germans fled or were removed from Central and Eastern Europe.

2.They were then transported in the same cattle cars to the same camps used to contain Jews under Hitler. Half a million are estimated to have died. What was the Allied rationale for this?

3.Not to punish the defeated, but to create ethnically homogenous nations in a region with a legacy of diverse multiethnic populations – a goal uncomfortably similar to the political project Nazism had pursued in Germany and Europe.

4.Germans have since atoned for the Nazi past, paid reparations, built monuments and museums, observed day of remembrance and repudiated anti-Semitic ideology. But not many understand the political meaning of genocide. They do not recognize it as a nation-building exercise.

5. The heart of Nazi thought, that Jews constituted a nation foreign in Europe, was never repudiated at Nuremberg. Why at Nuremberg, the Allies sought to punish individual Germans, but not to reform the political institutions that made the Holocaust thinkable and desirable.

6.Instead, the Allies claimed that responsibility for all violence must be individual and criminal. Crime is an offense against the state. It calls for the restoration of state authority through corrective action against offenders – not its reform.

7.Punishing millions of individuals turned denazification into a punitive rather than a politically transformative project.

8.The Allies also held Germans collectively responsible for Nazism. Many were Nazis, and more benefited from Nazi policies, but Germans were not collectively to blame. Americans refused to work with antifascists after the war.

9.Imposed from the outside, denazification alienated all parties in Germany—ex-Nazis, bystanders, and homegrown idealists, who could have been the vanguard of a new politics.

10.Americans claimed that Germany was defeated, not liberated, on May 8, 1945, suggesting that the problem lay with the nation, not the state; all Germans, not just their leaders, were responsible for National Socialism and the atrocities it perpetrated.

11.Defeat triggered a debate in Germany on the relationship between culture and politics. Was Nazism to be blamed on German culture or on a deviant political class? A state gone awry? A significant point of view argued that Nazism was a project of both the nation and the state.

12.Denazification would have to be a political project. To be durable, the German reckoning with the past would have to be internal and comprehensive; relying on German antifascists and backed by Allies, it would have to promote democratization alongside denazification.

13.Denazification failed. The capacity of the German state for violence was suppressed. Surveys showed that the majority of the public remained appreciative of Hitler and the Final Solution. Former Nazis occupied large numbers of state posts.

14.A political solution to Nazism would have involved a decoupling of state from nation, advancing the possibility of a state of no nation, a state in which all Germans, Christians and Jews, would be assured a rule of law.

15.Nuremberg focused on waging war as a ‘crime against peace.’ At the Tokyo trial, Justice Radhabinod Pal of India argued against this ex post facto law whose real meaning, he said, is “that only a lost war is a crime,” he wrote. The charges smacked of politics, not law.

16.The alternative to the concept of ‘crime against peace’ was that of ‘crimes against humanity’ coined in 1890 by George Washington Williams, the first black member of the Ohio state legislature, who demanded that horrific crimes in Congo transcend statutes of limitations.

http://17.At  Nuremberg, however, the court defined crimes against humanity to mean crimes against stateless individuals, specifically Jews and Roma. The mass extermination in Auschwitz and elsewhere was not deemed a crime against humanity, but “war crimes.”

18.Nuremberg had many pitfalls. It depoliticized the injustice wrought by state and repackaged these as the responsibility of specific people who had done wrong or authorized others to do wrong.

19.Defendants were tried by the very parties they were accused of injuring. It could only dispense victor’s justice. From Yugoslavia to Rwanda, it remains the losers who pay for war crimes, not the winners.

http://20.An  historic opportunity to establish ground rules in international law to govern the behavior of states was squandered.

21.Faced with extreme violence, International institutions like Human Rights Watch and International Criminal Court today focus on individual acts as crime, rather than collective acts as politics. They seek punishment of individuals, not a reform of political communities.

22. For a fuller discussion, please read ch 2 of my new book, Neither Settler Nor Native https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674987326