Oldal 62 [62]
VIOLETA BESIREVIÉ
At first sight, there is not much in the IMT legacy that could have advanced the
ICTY contribution to reconciliation either. Not only that such word never figured
during the Nuremberg trial, but also the idea was at odds with the circumstances.
Reconciliation between Germans and Jews was not a chief concern of the Allies
because of the massiveness of the crimes that offended everyone’s conscience.
Given the large scale of atrocities, to list reconciliation among the goals of the
Nuremberg trials were morally absolutely unacceptable. Reconciliation between
the victorious powers and Germany was neither a priority because the Allies’ focus
was to punish those responsible for crimes and not to restore broken relations with
Germany. Moreover, if the Nuremberg trial had been about reconciliation between
Germans and the victors, the victors would have not excluded from the IMT’s
jurisdiction their own grave wrongdoings, such as the massive bombing of cities
with extremely high civilian casualties. Reconciliation between them did happen,
but it was mainly achieved with the help of the Marshall Plan, the European
integrations based on political messianism, and moving individual gestures, like
Willey Brand’s in Warsaw at the Ghetto memorial, and the Duke of Kent’s in the
Lutheran Cathedral in Dresden in the year of 2000.
However, if reconciliation is associated with the truth-seeking and promotion of
individual rather than collective guilt within the course of international criminal
proceedings, then in that sense, the IMT, without having been explicitly mandated to
contribute to reconciliation, served this aspiration well, much better than the ICTY.
The IMT’s legacy related to establishing the truth is impressive. In the words of
Justice Jackson, the Tribunal managed to establish “a well-documented history of
what we are convinced was a grand, concerted pattern to incite the aggressions and
barbarities which have shocked the world.””° Despite being perceived as an extension
of military victory, the Nuremberg model was a perfect, ideal setting for clarifying
historical record. Thus, a total victory enabled the Allies to have direct access to the
secret archives of the defeated enemy, while the Nazi obsession of keeping records
of everything enabled the IMT to establish historical facts beyond those necessary
to clarify the guilt of the defenders.” For example, a documentary film entitled Nazi
Concentration Camps, which explicitly illustrated the results of the horrifying crimes
with which the defenders were charged, although of little help in establishing individual
guilt of the defenders, contributed a lot to creating a full record of Nazi atrocities and
secured that no one ever doubts the meaning of ‘the crimes against humanity.’
Note that the trials organized by Allies in their occupational zones in post-war
Germany rendered a strong historical record of horrifying Nazi policy, too. The
20 Taylor, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trial, 54.
1 See discussion of Robert Wolfe in Panel I: Telford Taylor Panel: Critical Perspectives on
the Nuremberg Trials, 472.
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