Will the world see another Nuremberg Trial? Or is accountability only for the history books? 

In 1946, an International Military Tribunal representing the victorious Allied powers (the U.S., U.K., U.S.S.R., and France) passed judgement at Nuremberg on twenty-four Nazi acolytes of Hitler. They included Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, and Joachim von Ribbentrop.

At the Potsdam Conference of 1945, the Big Three allies (Truman, Attlee and Stalin) were clear on why they had occupied a defeated Germany. They sought 5 Ds: ‘Disarmament, demilitarization, denazification, democratisation, and decentralisation’. The Tribunal members, however, differed on the objectives of the trial.

The British wanted ‘a swift, political decision, rather than a judicial one’. Churchill regarded Nazi leaders as ‘outlaws’, to be shot on sight. The Soviets introduced ‘the concept of crimes against peace’. Having suffered incalculable damage and the loss of 27 million Soviet citizens, they demanded reparations. The United States insisted on a reform of Germany’s body politic, an ‘Americanisation’ of Germany. The French broadened the concept of culpability to include not just the Nazis but all Germans.  

To understand that period, one should read Lara Feigel’s The Bitter Taste of Victory: In the Ruins of the Reich (2016).  It provides a searing insight into the years 1945-1949. It reveals a substrata of western writers, painters, poets, actors, and film directors. They travelled to Germany to report on the gory aftermath of the war.

They included writers: Ernest Hemingway, Evelyn Waugh, Rebecca West and Harold Nicolson; the painter Laura Knight; the poets W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender; the actresses Marlene Dietrich and Sybil Thorndike; and the film director Billy Wilder who compiled a documentary on German concentration camps.  (Later, in 1959, he directed the hilarious comedy Some Like it Hot, featuring Marilyn Monroe.)

The recollections of each make chilling reading. Harold Nicolson describes the once sinister Nazi defendants as ‘having the appearance of people who travelled in a third-class railway carriage for three successive nights’. The actress Sybil Thorndike is asked to perform G. B. Shaw’s Arms and the Man in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where there were still ‘40,000 inmates […] and 10,000 corpses rotting in the sun’.

And Billy Wilder, filming ‘a whole landscape of corpses’, focuses on a man who ‘glances apathetically at the camera. Then he turns, tries to stand up, and falls over, dead.’

Yet, despite the horrors that surrounded them, nothing prevented these aesthetes from conducting liaisons and affairs, often with Germans. For many of them, Berlin in July 1945 ‘became the site of a summer-long cocktail party, taking place against the backdrop of an overheated morgue’.   

Leaders would have us believe that war is justified. They are wrong. It is no more than a blood-stained ‘jigsaw puzzle of fighting men, bewildered, terrified civilians, noise, smoke, jokes, pain, fear, and unfinished conversations’.       

If the First World War was ‘the war to end all wars’, the Second World War spawned the hope that there would never be a Third World War. The Nuremberg Trials were part of that catharsis. Some like Evelyn Waugh thought the trials an ‘injudicious travesty’. Others like Harold Nicolson saw it as a corrective restoration of Man’s natural order: ‘The inhumane is being confronted with the humane, ruthlessness with equity, lawlessness with patient justice, and barbarism with civilization.’

The Nuremberg Trials differed from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1995-2003), in that the TRC pinpointed individual accountability, not collective culpability.

Will Trump, Netanyahu or any other leader ever be charged with war crimes? In 2024, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his defense minister Yoav Gallant guilty of crimes against humanity, ‘including using starvation as a method of warfare in Gaza’. They have escaped the short arm of international law – unlike the Nazi Adolf Eichmann, whom Israeli agents abducted from Argentina in 1960, tried in Israel and then hanged.      

Modern warfare recognises neither international law nor holy days. The Arab attack in 1973 took place during Yom Kippur; Israel’s latest blitz on Iran began on 28 February (a  Sabbath) and violated Nauroz and Ramadhan.  Did Iran have the right to resist unlawful aggression? The answer lies in that French aphorism: ‘This animal is very bad [très méchant]; when you attack it, it defends itself’.  

Meanwhile, as WW III limps into its fourth week, Trump has performed yet another political pirouette. He has declared a one-sided truce for five days. He claims ‘very good and productive conversations’ with Iran. Iran has repudiated this. And Pakistan, in yet another diplomatic gyration, has positioned itself as a mediator, an honest broker in this conflict. It has all the qualifications. None could be more honest, and none broker.

F. S. AIJAZUDDIN

[DAWN, 26 March 2026]