TWELFTH
DAY
Tuesday,
4 December 1945
Morning
Session
THE
PRESIDENT: I will call on the Chief Prosecutor
for Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
SIR
HARTLEY SHAWCROSS (Chief Prosecutor for the
United Kingdom): May it please the Tribunal, on
an occasion to which reference has and will be
made, Hitler, the leader of the Nazi
conspirators who are now on trial before you, is
reported as having said, in reference to their
warlike plans:
"I
shall give a propagandist cause for
starting the war, never mind whether it
be true or not. The victor shall not be
asked later on whether he told the truth
or not. In starting and making a war,
not the right is what matters, but
victory-the strongest has the right."
The
British Empire with its Allies has twice, within
the space of 25 years, been victorious in wars
which have been forced upon it, but it is
precisely because we realize that victory is not
enough, that might is not necessarily right,
that lasting peace and the rule of international
law is not to be secured by the strong arm
alone that the British nation is taking part in
this Trial. There are those who would perhaps
say that these wretched men should have been
dealt with summarily without trial by "executive
action"; that their power for evil broken,
they should have been swept aside into Oblivion
without this elaborate and careful investigation
into the part which they played in bringing this
war about: Vae Victis! Let them pay the
penalty of defeat. But that was not the view of
the British Government. Not so would the rule of
law be raised and Strengthened on the
international as well as upon the municipal
plane; not so would future generations realize
that right is not always on the side of the big
battalions; not so would the world be made aware
that the waging of aggressive war is not only a
dangerous venture but a criminal one.
Human
memory is very short. Apologists for defeated
nations are sometimes able to play upon the
sympathy and magnanimity of their victors, so
that the true facts, never authoritatively
recorded, become obscured and forgotten. One has
only to recall the circumstances following upon
the last World War to see the dangers to