WAR CRIMES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 465, 21 May 1948, Page 11

WAR CRIMES

NUREMBERG. By Peter Calvocoressi. Chatto and Windus, BOTH the legal and the moral backgrounds of the great trial at Nuremberg are the theme of Peter Calvocoressi’s book. He is a vigorous writer (apparently English) who can use slang discreetly without disfiguring the general earnestness of tone of a book which has the explicit purpose of justifying the Wwar-crimes trial in human as well as legal terms. I feel he succeeds in this, although I am not sure that he entirely disposes by the skill of his advocacy of the various objections, on moral grounds, to the trial, the chief of which is that the victors tried the vanquished, Undoubtedly the accused were guilty of the terrible crimes for which they were sentenced-one sympathises, too, with the Soviet minority dissenting judgment on the acquittals-but was not the real crime for which they were punished that of having lost the war? The legal basis for the trial is a good deal firmer than a layman might suppose. The trial was scrupulously fair, though it is disturbing to find that by Article 19 of the tribunal’s charter the court was empowered to disregard "technical rules of evidence" and could "admit any evidence which it deems to have probative value," an opening to. abuse which might become as wide as a church door. The accused had, in spite (continued on next page)

BOOK REVIEWS (continued from previous page) of being tried by their enemies in an ad hoc court whose procedure was unrestrained by any one national legal tradition (though British-American standards were dominant), every advantage which their counsel and their own ingenuity could devise for them. Peter Calvocoressi sketches in briefly but effectively, by his discretion in the choice of examples, the type of crimes for which the 21 defendants (counting out the absent Bormann) found themselves arraigned at Nuremberg. Skill is needed to build up that picture, because the full tale of the brutalities inflicted on Europe by Germans in the recent war dazes the imagination, and, by its umseizable horror, blunts the sensitivity. | The book, regrettably short, contains a good deal of valuable material of continuing historical interest. The appendix which describes the defence of the Warsaw ghetto in 1943 chronicles one of the most heroic episodes in the martyrdom of the Jews. The status of the German army officers is well described; the Nazis were not the only group in Germany which seriously menaced world peace, The great trial was, Mr. Calvocoressi shows, good law and good justice; he hopes it will prove good history, as a rebuttal of propagandist legend in the future. "The Nuremberg judgment shows that wars do not just happen. It is somebody’s fault when they do." His own approach to the trial is here and there polemical, but his point of view is both consistent and high-minded, It is refreshing when law, justice, and comMmonsense can be made to harmonise so closely. i