Nuremberg

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 381, 11 October 1946, Page 5

Nuremberg

HE judgment of Nuremberg has not been swift, but it has certainly been sharp — not quite sharp enough for Moscow, but sharper than many people in New Zealand will have expected after all these months of delay. Whether hanging i is a more appropriate punishment than shooting i is open to question, but it is more unpleasant, and a concession to the demand for humiliation as well as death. No one will doubt that |

such a punishment was deserved, but it is possible to regret that justice should in any circumstances at all seem to be tinged with vengeance. The real point however is that punishment has overtaken the authors of so many talculated crimes against civilisa_.tion. Legally the judges have had *to venture in some places on to rather thin ice, but it was better to _tdke that risk than the risk of let- ' ting it be said that humanity could not defend itself against such outTages as these criminals have made it endure, The day will come when Nuremberg will be one of the landmarks on humanity’s tortuous path from the wilderness in which it has been floundering for two genera‘tions to a freer and cleaner world.

In the meantime it has been established that justice can, and will, meet such a hideous challenge as the Nazis hurled at it, and that it is not necessary to fire a shot to become a murderer. The full implications of the judgment require longer study and fuller knowledge than most of us can give to it, but this at least is clear-that it outlaws aggressive war and establishes civilisation’s power as well as its will to say that human beings shall not be degraded and tortured and mutilated and murdered to make the world safer for savages.