Academic literature on the topic 'Charles Nuremberg (Germany)'

AbstractOn September 4, 1939, a special bureau was established within the legal department of the Wehrmacht with the task of ‘ascertaining violations of international law committed by enemy military and civilian persons against members of the German armed forces, and investigating whatever accusations foreign countries should make against the Wehrmacht’. The purpose of this article is to provide a brief overview of the material collected by the Germans during the war, to test the credibility of the German investigations, review case-studies and inquire into the integrity of the judges carrying out the investigations. The Wehrmacht bureau functioned from the very beginning until the final days of war. It investigated some 10,000 war crimes, of which the files for perhaps some 4,000 have survived. Half the files contain investigations of war crimes in the Soviet Union; the other volumes refer to war crimes allegedly committed by American, British, French, Polish, Yugoslav and other Allied nationals. After a careful review of the bureau's records and methods of operation, the conclusion is warranted that the investigations were carried out in a methodically correct manner and that many of the reports present prima facie cases that deserve further investigation. There remains thefundamental question of the judges' integrity, how it was possible for them to carry out investigations into Allied war crimes, when the German government, the SS, the Einsatzgruppen and the Wehrmacht were engaging in various degrees of official criminality. In search of an answer, the author reviews the testimony of numerous witnesses at the Nuremberg trials, including SS judge Georg Konrad Morgen, who had the commander of Buchenwald arrested on corruption charges, but was prevented from completing investigations into concentration camp killings. Hitler's order no. I concerning secrecy appears to have been largely observed, thus frustrating investigation attempts and keeping knowledge of the Holocaust relatively limited.

The ancient dream of international criminal jurisdiction is gradually becoming a reality. Article 227 of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles provided that German Emperor Wilhelm II should be tried by an international court to answer charges of “flagrant offences against international morality and the sacred authority of treaties”. But since the Netherlands refused to give up the accused, the trial never took place, and Wilhelm II died in exile in Holland in 1941. Articles 228 and 229 of the Treaty providing for the prosecution of war criminals were applied in a disappointing way in the Leipzig trial. The Nuremberg and Tokyo trials after the Second World War undeniably represented progress towards the creation of a body with truly international criminal jurisdiction, but they were greatly influenced by their origins and in effect applied the law and justice of the victors rather than those of the universal community of States.

The article is devoted to the issue of procedural and substantive rules of law, on the basis of which the International Military Tribunal was created and conducted its work over the main functionaries of the Nazi regime in Germany. The author explains the legal foundations of the Nuremberg tribunal's activities from the point of view of the law sources (forms) doctrine, and indicates the main sources and their role in the process of preparing the legal framework for the trial of war criminals. The author studied the main normative agreements drawn up by the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition for the organization of the trial of the fascist regime functionaries in Germanу, and examined the acts relating to the establishment of a military tribunal and determining the order of its work. As a special source underlying the conviction, the generally recognized principles of law are highlighted: humanism, moderation of repression, respect for human rights, etc. The author concludes that the procedural side of the legal support for the activities of the Nuremberg Tribunal had a solid basis in the form of a number of normative treaties concluded by authorized representatives of the winning countries, and the charges were based on an extensive layer of legal rules, denounced in the form of international treaties and recognized by the world community principles of law. At the same time, a distinctive feature of the sources underlying the charges was the lack of unified and universally recognized sanctions, which marked an obvious gap in international law, filled by the granting broad powers to the international military tribunal on the nature of possible defendants punishment. According to the author`s opinion, the importance of the Nuremberg tribunal, as a precedent that marked the beginning of the formation of institutions for bringing war criminals to justice, lies in the creation of a mechanism for the application of international criminal law sanctions.

With Hitler’s 1933 power seizure, the fate of roughly 9000 political and racial “enemy” neuroscientists was sealed. In the “Gleichschaltung,” or coordination of German neuroscience, step-wise legal and professional sanctions occurred against “non-Aryan” neuroscientists at every university neurology department in Germany. These were either dismissed within the first months of the Nazi takeover or by the passage of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws. Sometimes the dismissed neuroscientists were forcibly removed by colleagues and sometimes they were arrested and imprisoned for trumped-up charges. Even private neurologists were forbidden from seeing insurance panel patients. Half of all German doctors joined the Nazi party, eager to take the positions vacated by their Jewish and communist comrades. The German neurology and psychiatry societies were merged to facilitate Gleichschaltung and Nazi influence on the specialties. And flourishing research and clinical programs were halted and then replaced by the racial hygiene agenda of the Nazi state.

This chapter explores the underlying offences which can constitute crimes against humanity. Crimes against humanity are composed of two core elements: a chapeau or contextual element and an underlying crime committed in and sufficiently linked to the chapeau. The list of underlying crimes that could, in theory, qualify as crimes against humanity is limited in nature and has not significantly evolved since Nuremberg. The Nuremberg Charter provided for six categories of crimes against humanity: murder; extermination; enslavement; deportation; other inhumane acts; and persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds. Control Council Law No. 10, which regulated the subsequent prosecution of Nazi war criminals in occupied Germany, provided for the same six categories and added three other crimes to the list: imprisonment, rape, and torture. The chapter then assesses which crimes against humanity form part of customary international law.