Report Arianna Publishing
Of Paul Craig Roberts – 14/01/2018

Source: Like Don Quixote
The mock trial in Nuremberg against a somewhat arbitrary group of 21 surviving Nazis in 1945-46 it was a spectacle orchestrated by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who was the chief prosecutor. Because I have long been an admirer of Jackson, I always thought he did a good job.
My admiration for Jackson comes from his defense of the law as a shield of the People rather than a weapon in the hands of the government and his support for the legal principle known as “Mens Rea”; or a crime (to be considered as such-N.d.T.) requires voluntariness. I often quote Jackson for his defense of these legal principles which are the very foundation of freedom. In fact I mentioned Jackson in my recent chronicle of 31 July. His defense of law as a check on government powers plays a central role in the book I wrote with Lawrence Stratton, “The tyranny of good intentions”.
In the 1940 Jackson was Attorney General of the United States. In his communication to federal prosecutors he warned them against the idea of ​​"choosing one man and then putting investigators to work, to charge him with a crime". It is in this area - in which the prosecutor chooses a person who he does not like or who he wants to put in difficulty, or select a group of unpopular people and then look for a crime (to be given to him- N.d.T.) – that there is the greatest risk of abuse of power during a judicial investigation. This is where law enforcement becomes a personal matter, this is where the actual crime becomes being unpopular within the dominant or power group, or the fact of being connected to bad political opinions or of being personally disliked or disliked by the prosecutor himself.
Some time later, as a Supreme Court judge, Jackson overturned a lower court's conviction against a person who had no idea, or any reason, to believe he had committed a crime.
After finishing reading David Irving's book “Nuremberg”, of the 1996, I was devastated to learn that during his work as a prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials, Jackson violated every legal principle for which I had admired him for so long.. To be clear, in Nuremberg, Jackson prosecuted Nazis, but it was only a means to an end: establish the international legal principle than starting a war, initiate military aggression, it was a crime.
• The problem certainly was that in Nuremberg the defendants were judged according to a law promulgated after the facts had taken place, which did not exist at the time of the actions for which they were convicted.
• Also the penalty -death by hanging- it was decided before the trial and before the accused were chosen.
• Furthermore, the accused were chosen and an investigation was then conducted against them.
• Exculpatory evidence was rejected. The charges for which the accused were convicted turned out to be false.
• The trial was so skewed in favor of the prosecuting attorney, that the defense was a pro forma.
• The accused were ill-treated and some were tortured.
• The accused were encouraged to give false testimony against each other, which most of them refused to do, except Albert Speer who was the only one to accept, in exchange for a prison sentence and not the death penalty.
• The wives and children of the accused were arrested and imprisoned. It must be said for Jackson that this infuriated him.
•
President Franklin D Roosevelt, General Eisenhower and Winston Churchill thought that surviving Nazis should be shot without trial. Roosevelt laughed when he talked about liquidating 50.000 officers of the German Army. Eisenhower told Lord Halifax that the Nazi leaders should be shot as if they were trying to escape, the common euphemism for assassination. The Russians talked about castrating Germans and making German women pregnant to annihilate the German race. US Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau wanted to reduce Germany to an agricultural society and send able-bodied Germans to Africa as slaves to work on a major infrastructure project.
Robert Jackson saw in these intentions not only class criminality among the Allied leaders but also a missed opportunity to create a legal principle that criminalized war, and thus eliminate the catastrophe of war from future history. Jackson's goal was certainly admirable, but the means required circumventing American legal principles.
Jackson had his opportunity, perhaps because Joseph Stalin vetoed an execution without trial . Rather a false trial, declared Stalin, to demonstrate their guilt so as not to make martyrs of these Nazis.
How the list was chosen 21 o 22 people to be brought to trial? Well those who the Allies had in prison were chosen! Not as many as they would have liked.
They had Reich Marshal Hermann Göring commanding the Air Force. Whatever the valid charges against Göring, the fact that under Göring's command the German air force was mainly used against enemy formations on the battlefield and not, come (they did) the American and British air forces, for massive bombings to terrorize the inhabitants of civilized cities like Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, e Nagasaki, nor the fact that in the last period Hitler had withdrawn all the tasks from Göring, had expelled him from the party and ordered his arrest.
The Nuremberg trials are paradoxical in that the law that Jackson intended to consolidate had to apply to all countries and not just Germany. The “ex post-facto” law (promulgated after the events to be judged - Editor's note:) by virtue of which the Germans were sentenced to death and prison characterized the massive bombing of German and Japanese cities by the British and American air forces as equally criminal. However, the law was applied only to the Germans who were in the cage of the accused.
In his book “Apocalypse 1945 : The Destruction of Dresden” (1995), Irving cites the dissidence of the American general George MacDonald regarding the directive that prescribed the bombing of civilian cities such as Dresden. General McDonald's qualified the directive to "exterminate populations and destroy cities" as a war crime according to the Nuremberg norms.
They had Foreign Minister Ribbentrop. They had Marshals Keitel and Jodl and Admirals Raeder and Dönitz. They had a German banker, Hjalmar Schacht who was saved from execution by the intervention of the Bank of England. Then they had a reporter. And they had Rudolf Hess who was in a British prison from 1941 when he went to Britain on a peacekeeping mission to end the war. They wanted an industrialist, but Krupp was too old and ill. The incarnation of the Devil was missing. You can read the full list in Irving's book.
Göring knew from the beginning that the trial was a hoax and that his death penalty had already been decided. Throughout his detention he had the means to commit suicide (a poison capsule), and would thus have deprived his captors of the humiliation they had planned. Instead he kept the accused Germans together, and they remained "standing" (they have maintained a dignified attitude.). With his high intelligence quotient he sometimes made his captors look like imbeciles. He made so much fun of Robert Jackson during the trial that the whole court burst into laughter. Jackson never digested being ridiculed in the courtroom by Göring.
Göring was not content to pass off his captors as stupid and incompetent people. His, the generals and admirals, they called for a military execution in due and proper form, but out of meanness, the Tribunal wanted to see them hanged. Göring told his captors that he would allow them to shoot him, but that they would not have hanged him and a few minutes before they put him on the gallows in front of the assembled press and the cameras, he took the poison capsule accelerating the propaganda spectacle of his execution. To this damage he added another, leaving it to the prison commandant, Colonel Andrus, a note telling him he had had three pills. One that he left for the Americans to find, to allow them to reflect on the fact that his means of escape had passed under their noses. Another who took a few minutes before the show of his execution and explained where to find the third. He had easily circumvented the regular and thorough searches that had been inflicted on him for fear of his suicide and for fear that he might escape the use of his execution foreseen by the propaganda.
There was a time in Anglo-American law during which the irregularities of the Nuremberg trials would have resulted in the recusal of the judges and the release of the accused. Also by virtue of that "ex post facto" law and the extra terms- judicial and extralegal by virtue of which the accused were judged, at least two of the condemned people deserved to be freed.
It is unclear why Admiral Dönitz was sentenced to 10 years in prison. The chief American judge of the Tribunal declared:"In my opinion it is an offense to our concept of justice to punish a man who did exactly what we did too. The Germans waged a much cleaner war at sea than ours.”
Jodl, who had canceled many Nazi orders, he was sentenced to death. The injustice of the sentence was defined by a German court of 1953 who canceled all the accusations made in Nuremberg and posthumously rehabilitated him. French judges at the Nuremberg Tribunal at the time declared that Jodl's conviction was baseless and constituted a miscarriage of justice.
The whole Nuremberg trial reeks of scandal. The defendants were blamed for the German invasion of Norway. What was excluded from the trial was that the English were about to invade Norway, and the Germans more efficient, they knew it and managed to invade it first.
The accused were found guilty of using slave labor, which is paradoxical if you think about the usual practices in the Soviet system. Furthermore, while the trial was underway, the Soviets apparently rounded up Germans in force to serve as slave labor to rebuild their war-ravaged economy.
The accused were found guilty of mass executions despite the fact that the Russians who were part of the prosecution and the panel of judges had massacred 15.000 o 20.000 Polish officers and buried them in a mass grave. Indeed, the Russians insisted on blaming the Germans during the Katyn Forest massacre trial. (1)
The accused were found guilty of assault on Poland, but Ribbentrop was not allowed to mention in his defense the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact which divided Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union and without this Germany could not have invaded Poland. The fact is that the Soviets who were judges at Nuremberg against the Germans, they had also invaded Poland.
Plus without the cheap British cover granted to Poland, the Polish military dictatorship would probably have agreed to return the territories taken from Germany with the Treaty of Versailles and the invasion could have been avoided.
The greatest hypocrisy was the accusation of aggression against Germany while the facts indicate that the Second World War began when the English and French declared war on Germany. Germany Conquered France and pushed the English out of the European continent after the English and French began the war with a declaration of hostility against Germany.
Irving's book is evidently politically incorrect. However, in the introduction he enumerates the voluminous sources on which the work relies: Robert Jackson's official documents and verbal history, the papers and private diaries of Francis Biddle, the diaries of Colonel Andrus, of Admiral Reder, by Rudolf Hess, interrogations of prisoners, interviews with defense lawyers, with the prosecutors, interrogations and letters from prisoners to their wives. This and much more was made available by Irving on microfilm for researchers. He compared copies of the original trial tapes with the paper transcripts and published transcripts to make sure the words spoken and the words published were the same.
What Irving does in his book is to report the story told by the documents. This history is different from the patriotic propaganda written by historians with which we are all steeped. And he asks us the question: Irving is either pro-truth or pro-Nazi? The National Socialist German government is the most diabolical government in history. Any reduction in evilness is unacceptable, therefore Irving is liable to demonization by those determined to protect their unshakable certainties.
Zionists branded Irving a Holocaust denier, he was found guilty of this charge by an Austrian court and passed 14 months in prison before the conviction was overturned by a higher court.
In his book “Nuremberg”, Irving suppresses several propaganda legends surrounding the Holocaust story and reports observations by authorized individuals, that many of the deaths in the concentration camps were caused by typhus and malnutrition, especially in the last days of the war when food and medicine had disappeared from Germany, but no chapter in the book denies it, he says, that a large number of Jews actually died. The way I see it it seems like a simple modification, truthful, of an element of the official Holocaust story is enough to brand a person as a Holocaust denier.
My interest in the book and my interest in Robert Jackson. He had a noble reason - that of proscribing war- But in trying to do so, he has set precedents for U.S. Attorneys turning the law into a weapon to pursue their noble causes., just like this was used against the Nazis -condemnation of organized crime, child abuse, drug trafficking, terrorism. Jackson's indictment of the Nazis at Nuremberg, He questioned the obligations placed on U.S. attorneys, so that Americans nowadays are no more protected by the law than the accused at Nuremberg.
Update of 12 August 2017 : here is David Irving's account of his arrest, his trial and incarceration in Austria. His conviction was overturned by an appeal court, and was released.
http://www.fpp.co.uk/Banged/up.pdf
Paul Craig Roberts
Source: http://lesakerfrancophone.fr/
Link: http://lesakerfrancophone.fr/tyrannie-a-nuremberg
11-08.2017
Translation from French for www.comedonchiscitte.org by GIAKKI49
Commentary by the Saker Francophone
The devastating repercussions of this process are yet to come. What will happen if this process is attacked and canceled on the legal level, if the latter will one day be re-established? This way of denying justice is very suitable for fueling all types of fantasies on both sides and paradoxically reinforces those who attempt to rehabilitate characters rightly branded with infamy., especially if we consider that at the time of the trial the Germans were "invited" to the United States and that some of them certainly had a Nazi past.
Making distinctions does not mean washing away responsibilities. But justice is not morality and that prosecutor should have remembered that. So what types of lies are hidden behind this rigged process and what other responsibilities including those of the allies? The “memorial” laws, certainly politically effective in the short term to silence opponents and historians, they are still a terrible answer, and leave future generations with a triggered bomb.
The other shocking aspect is discovering that Paul Craig Roberts didn't know or pretends not to know, not even remotely, the background of the trial while instead it is one of the topics that immediately come to the surface when you start to dig into the story a little, like the background of the French Revolution, the financing of the rise of Nazism in Germany… The fact that PCR is only now discovering it, while the book was released in 1996 and there are many other sources of information as well, it says a lot about the conditioning of consciences in the United States and the lack of culture of the American elite.
And as consciences collapse in the United States and in the West in general, the story hidden under the carpet reappears like a Golem and rekindles badly dormant passions.
Translator's Notes.
(1) The Katyń Forest Massacre, also known more simply as the Katyń Massacre, it occurred during the Second World War and consisted of mass execution, by the Soviet NKVD, of Polish soldiers and civilians. Currently the expression instead denotes the killing of 21.857 Polish citizens (from Wikipedia)