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Volume IV · Page 499
| The International Military Tribunal,
operating under the London Charter, declared that the Charter's provisions
limited the Tribunal to consider only those crimes against humanity which were
committed in the execution of or in connection with crimes against peace and
war crimes. The Allied Control Council, in its Law No. 10, removed this
limitation so that the present Tribunal has jurisdiction to try all crimes
against humanity as long known and understood under the general principles of
criminal law. As this law is not limited to offenses committed during war, it is also not restricted as to nationality of the accused or of the victim, or to the place where committed. While the overwhelming majority of those killed in the present case were Soviet citizens, some were German nationals. A special report prepared by Einsatzgruppe A, and previously quoted in another connection, declared — |
"Since December 1940 transports containing Jews had arrived at short intervals from the Reich. Of these 20,000 Jews were directed to Riga and 7,000 Jews to Minsk * * * all evacuated Jews who survive the winter can be put into this camp (apart of the Riga ghetto) in the spring. Only a small section of the Jews from the Reich is capable of working. About 70 to 80 percent are women and children or old people unfit for work. The death rate is rising continually also as a result of the extraordinary hard winter." [Emphasis supplied.] |
| Another report, already referred to, spoke of
the execution of 3,500 Jews "most of whom had been sent to Minsk from Vienna *
* * Bremen and Berlin." These two instances fall clearly within count one of the indictment which covers, inter alia, crimes against German nationals. Although the Nuernberg trials represent the first time that international tribunals have adjudicated crimes against humanity as an international offense, this does not, as already indicated, mean that a new offense has been added to the list of transgressions of man. Nuernberg has only demonstrated how humanity can be defended in court, and it is inconceivable that with this precedent extant, the law of humanity should ever lack for a tribunal. Where law exists a court will rise. Thus, the court of humanity, if it may be so termed, will never adjourn. The scrapping of treaties, the incitement to rebellion, the fomenting of international discord, the systematic stirring up of hatred and violence between so-called ideologies, no matter to what excesses they may lead, will never close the court doors to the demands of equity and justice. It would be an admission of incapacity, in contradiction of every self-evident reality, that mankind, with intelligence and will, should be unable to maintain a tribunal holding inviolable the |
