Of Stanley L. Cohen*
Source: Comedonchisciotte
“The wrongs we seek to condemn and punish were thus premeditated, so evil and so devastating, that a civilization cannot tolerate them being ignored, because it could not survive their reiteration"
With these authoritative words, Robert H. Jackson, Chief U.S. Attorney, had opened the work of the War Crimes Tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany, immediately after the conclusion of the Second World War.
In charge of ascertaining the guilt of prominent members of the army, of politics and the judicial apparatus for violations of international laws... including war crimes, crimes against humanityand against them laws of war…the court had validated the principle of personal responsibility for the genocide against Jews and other ethnic groups, that had been considered, from the German state, a threat to one's own, declared, racial supremacy, religious and political.
Although these crimes had manifested themselves in different forms, their savagery resulted, actually, from a shared collective thought, who considered all those destined to be suppressed by the state not only (beings) inferior, but unworthy of life itself… men, women and children, young and old, reduced to little more than objects of grotesque derision, whose very existence contaminated the national concept of racial supremacy.
There are no more secrets about the terror campaign unleashed from the Third Reich, as he invaded nations and unleashed international violence never seen before. Nor have its methods of total war ever been subject to serious debate, both towards the military, than against civilians. Even if someone has chosen to dispute the number of victims or to rework the exact instruments of persecution, no serious historian doubts the role played by cattle trucks, from the ghettos and crematoriums in a conscious effort to silence the diversity of life, while most of the world looked elsewhere. Read More
