As the silver screen flickers to life with “Nuremberg,” the echoes of that infamous tribunal thunder back into our consciousness, a stark reminder of the legal abyss that swallowed justice whole. This was no solemn American courtroom upholding sacred constitutional principles. No, this was the raw might of the victorious Allies, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the iron-fisted Soviet Union, forging a trial from the ashes of World War II. Yet even among these conquerors, discord raged; they could never unite on how to brand and punish these so-called war crimes.
Hear me now: many of these Nazis plunged into unspeakable horrors, their hands drenched in blood, and they reaped the grim harvest they sowed, including the noose’s fatal embrace. My quarrel is not with their guilt, but with the sham of “justice” that condemned them.
Crimes were conjured from thin air, laws retroactively birthed, ex post facto abominations utterly forbidden by the American Constitution. The defeated Nazis faced indictment in a grotesque kangaroo court, where convictions crashed down like thunderbolts, sealing death sentences for twelve of the twenty-one souls in the dock.
Behold the pinnacle of iniquity: Julius Streicher, dragged before the bar for “incitement to murder and extermination” while Jews in the East perished amid unimaginable torment. This, they decreed, amounted to persecution on political and racial grounds, tied to war crimes under their freshly minted Charter, a crime against humanity itself.
For a quarter-century of venomous speeches, scrawled articles, and preached hatred against the Jews, he had poisoned the German psyche, priming thousands for the slaughter that followed. Week after week, month after month, his words spread the antisemitic plague, goading the masses to relentless persecution. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935, stripping Jews of citizenship, bore his malignant stamp. He thundered endlessly for the Jewish race’s utter annihilation.
Though Streicher’s hands never touched the camps or the trains of doom, his relentless incitement, his doctrine of racial venom, branded him an accessory to the carnage. Thought crimes, spanning decades, so vile and profound that they demanded the ultimate retribution.
Thus spake the Tribunal: “Julius Streicher is guilty under Count Four of the Indictment.”
The gavel fell: “Julius Streicher, guilty under Count Four. The Tribunal sentences you to death by hanging.”
(Judgment of the International Military Tribunal for the Trial of German Major War Criminals, 6 F.R.D. 69, 304–312 (1946)).
Let the truth blaze forth: Julius Streicher was hanged for nothing more than publishing hate-filled screeds, words that would stand shielded, inviolable, under the First Amendment of our Constitution.
And then, the cruelest twist: the plea of “only following orders” was scorned, crushed beneath the tribunal’s boot. Yet the bitter reality? Defy those commands, and treason’s bullet would have claimed them first.
Remember this: many joined the party in the shadowed years before the Final Solution crystallized, grasping at jobs in a regime rising from World War I’s ruins. Once ensnared in its gears, escape meant death; obedience was survival’s chain.
Never forget: the vanquished do not pen the annals of history.
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