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The Utility of the Proposed Trial and Punishment of Enemy Leaders*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

C. Arnold Anderson
C. Arnold Anderson
Affiliation:
Iowa State College
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Extract

The present war has now reached the stage when definite plans are being announced for the control and punishment of the enemy nations when they shall have been defeated. There is a strong and apparently growing sentiment among the citizens and officials of the United Nations for prosecution of the “Axis criminals” and quarantine of Axis nations. Committees of eminent scholars, some of them presumably acting under instruction from their governments, are now drawing up plans for these trials. Many individuals, however, doubt whether it will prove feasible to carry out these proposals. Others reject the whole idea of retribution or reparation against a defeated nation or its leaders as unethical and destructive of the ends for which we say we are fighting.

We wish to be neither vindictive nor gullible. Hence the popularity of suggestions that we must be prepared to give food and medicine to the people of the Axis nations during the early postwar months. But there is widespread support also for the belief that we must be ready to administer German economic and political life for some years if we wish to be sure that war will not come again from the same quarter. This balancing of generosity against sternness means, as Walter Lippmann puts it, that “our apparently contradictory war aims can be reconciled.”

Type
International Affairs
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 37 , Issue 6 , December 1943 , pp. 1081 - 1100
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1943

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References

1 Thompson, Dorothy, for example, accepts the first and rejects the second. “Germany Must Be Salvaged,” American Mercury (June, 1943)Google Scholar, and Reader's Digest (July, 1943), pp. 51–56.

2 The most detailed brief that I have read for setting up United Nations courts to punish the “Axis war criminals” is in an article by Dr.Glueck, Sheldon, in Free World (Nov., 1942), pp. 138–146.Google Scholar The present article applies equally well to a more recent statement by ProfessorGlueck, , “Punishing the War Criminals,” in New Republic, Nov. 22, 1943, pp. 706–709.Google Scholar A summary of what purports to be an official American plan for the control of Germany is given in Smith, Kingsbury, “Our Plan for Postwar Germany,” American Mercury (Apr., 1943)Google Scholar, and Reader's Digest (June, 1943), pp. 21–25.

The subtle interweaving of these two policies is clear in the following statements from Walter Lippmann's column of August 1, 1943: “The supreme heresy of our enemies is … the denial of man's personal responsibility and therefore of his human dignity.” “…we shall not make the moral error of saying…: you were all the innocent victims of the tyrants whom you obeyed.” “Nor shall we say to them: because you obeyed these tyrants, you and your children are … forever cursed.” “Nor shall we say: leave it to us and we shall give you back liberty.” “Nor shall we say:… we shall stuff freedom down your throats….” “The true view is … that men are responsible for their acts … and that therefore the adult Germans and Italians are accountable for the acts of their governments.” He adds that we must temper this justice with mercy. (Italics in original.)

3 As Americans may profit from study of the Reconstruction period, so English jurists might well ponder the history of English-Irish affairs.

4 Two informative studies are Henry, R. S., The Story of Reconstruction (Indianapolis, 1938)Google Scholar, and Buck, Paul H., The Road to Reunion, 1865–1900 (Boston, 1937).Google Scholar

5 Henry, op. cit., p. 25.

6 Buck, op. cit., p. 4.

7 Prison atrocity stories (later disproved almost totally) were a major element in this propaganda. See Hesseltine, W. B., Civil War Prisons; A Study in War Psychology (Columbus, Ohio, 1930).Google Scholar

8 Henry, op. cit., p. 31, and Buck, op. cit., pp. 7, 18.

9 Buck, op. cit., p. 11.

10 Buck, op. cit., p. 10.

11 Buck, op. cit., p. 4.

12 Quoted by Buck, op. cit., p. 56.

13 Quoted by Henry, op. cit., p. 133.

14 Buck, op. cit., p. 10.

15 Buck, op. cit., p. 8.

16 Buck, op. cit., p. 34.

17 Henry, op. cit., p. 36.

18 Henry, op. cit., p. 240.

19 Quoted in Henry, op. cit., p. 167.

20 Henry, op. cit., p. 215.

21 This discussion borrows heavily from Sutherland, E. H., Principles of Criminology (3rd ed., Philadelphia, 1939), pp. 356–368.Google Scholar

22 “But historical truth cannot be established by international treaty—least of all by a treaty imposed by victors on vanquished. The Allied governments, in the passion of the moment, failed to realize that this extorted admission of guilt could prove nothing and must excite bitter resentment in German minds.” Carr, E. H., International Relations since the Peace Treaties (London, 1937), p. 46.Google Scholar

23 As for Great Britain's defense of the blockade in wartime: To oppose it was “‘appealing to the letter of international law but ignoring the spirit…. It was a question rather of international morality than of international law’.” Quoted in Garner, J. W., International Law and the World War (New York, 1920), Vol. 2, p. 321.Google Scholar

24 Carr, E. H., Conditions of Peace, p. 226.Google Scholar

25 Dorothy Thompson, op. cit., pp. 54–55.

26 Ehrmann, H. W., “Washington's Plan for Germany,” New Republic, May 3, 1943, p. 587.Google Scholar

27 Wright, Q., “Legal Liability of the Kaiser,” in this Review, Vol. 13, p. 125.Google Scholar

28 J. W. Garner, op. cit., p. 495. The difficulty of keeping one's thinking straight under the emotional pressures of wartime is neatly illustrated by Garner's remark on the next page: “…even if there were no precise precedents for traducing former heads of States before international tribunals, that in itself would constitute no valid reason for not putting the former German Emperor on trial, for the reason that the offenses for which he was charged were without precedent….”

29 See the discussion of the trials after the last war in Carr, E. H., International Relations since the Peace Treaties, pp. 47 f.Google Scholar

30 Dorothy Thompson, op. cit., p. 52.

31 Carr, E. H., International Relations since the Peace Treaties, p. 48.Google Scholar

32 Carr, E. H., Conditions of Peace, p. 219.Google Scholar

33 K. Smith, op. cit., p. 21.

34 But see Carr: “A public trial by the Allies might well have revived the ex-Kaiser's lost prestige in Germany, and turned him into a German national hero and martyr.” International Relations since the Peace Treaties, p. 47.

35 Carr, E. H., International Relations since the Peace Treaties, p. 45.Google Scholar

36 Carr, E. H., Conditions of Peace, p. 234.Google Scholar

37 Dorothy Thompson, op. cit., p. 53. See again the quotation from Walter Lippmann in note 2, supra.

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