Court Of Humanity Will Never Adjourn

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 12, Issue 89, 1 September 1948, Page 5

Court Of Humanity Will Never Adjourn

The United States has made the greatest step forward in human morality in history, a war crimes trial judge declares. The trials of Nazi war criminals have much more purpose than punishment for the mass killings ordered by Hitler, Capt. Michael A. Musmanno said in an interview. Captain Musmanno, presiding judge in the trial of a score of Nazis for wanton slaughter of a million men, women and children, has just returned from Germany. He will soon leave the Navy for his former judgeship in the Pittsburgh Court of Common Pleas. ' “We have established, a precedent • —a law- of humanity—a tower of justice for all mankind,” he said. “It is of tremendous importance that humanity can be defended in court. \ “Now there is a law—an international law, and where law exists a court' will rise. The court' of humanity will never adjourn.. That is the great achievement—largely overshadowed by, the detailed horrors of the trials.” - ‘ “ ' A lifelong opponent ,of . capital punishment, he sentenced 14 men to the gallows, seven to long imprisonment, acquitted one. -, a Nothing irritates the judge so quickly as the suggestion that losers of a-future war will be put to capital punishment by the victors; ■ because . of the , precedent set by the Nuremberg trials., r • . ' ' “A brigadier general said that to me once,” he recalled. ‘He said, “what wil happen to us if we lose a war?” , “I said, ‘my dear general, if you do what these men did, whether we win or lose a war, you should be taken out and hanged’.”