28 No. 77 JUSTICE encounter with the Soviet judicial system — both in the territories it controlled and in their experience as partisans in the forests—its tyranny and the paltry value it placed on human life and freedom. This system spoke in the name of lofty values, words that amounted to nothing more than lip service, certainly with regard to its Jewish citizens. Having learned bitter lessons under these two regimes, they were now expected to cultivate hope that the system of justice and punishment that the Allies would establish after the war would be democratic and just (even with the Soviet Union among them), would grant the suffering-hardened Jewish People the justice they deserved, and would ensure that all perpetrators received appropriate punishment. Such hope seemed to them naïve and unrealistic. Hope was rekindled when they witnessed the preparations for the Nuremberg Trials. The group arrived in Germany in August 1945 and divided into several smaller units. Each unit settled in a different city, aiming to find employment in the local water system and to wait until Abba Kovner would bring from the Land of Israel the poison they planned to pour into the drinking water of German civilians. One of the larger units settled in Nuremberg, and its members passed daily by the building where preparations for the opening of the trial were underway. In light of these preparations, the Avengers began to nurture hope that the Allies would indeed conduct a comprehensive trial of the criminals for their unprecedented crimes, as they had declared and committed themselves to doing several times during the war.2 Such a trial — public, international, that would truly repay the criminals according to their deeds— might alleviate the bitter sense that justice and punishment were slipping away. In the meantime, several members of the German leadership had committed suicide, several hundred lower-ranking officials had fled to South America and Arab countries, and tens of thousands of SS men who had been Allied prisoners were released to their homes without trial. This hope, however, was accompanied by grave concerns: would there be adequate representation for the Jewish People, the primary victims? Would the trial proceed without defining the attempt to annihilate the entire Jewish People as a distinct and special criminal offense requiring a separate trial, instead subsuming it within a general framework? Would the punishments match the severity of the crimes? How long would such a complex trial last, while a new world stood at the threshold and Germany was already beginning to rehabilitate itself? And more broadly, why did the Germans — who had trampled every local and international legal system with crude and arbitrary force — deserve a trial conducted according to all the rules of law and justice? The trial of the Nazi leadership began in November 1945, not in Berlin, which was almost completely destroyed, but in Nuremberg, the city where the grandiose ceremonies of the Nazi Party had been held. In Jewish eyes as well, this was an appropriate choice: it was there that the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 had been enacted, symbols of discrimination and the arbitrary nullification of civil rights. The trial opened with the address of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, appointed chief prosecutor on behalf of the four Allied powers. The speech, which lasted three and a half hours, is considered to this day a foundational text in international law. Jackson began by referring to the heavy responsibility resting upon the judges, as this was the first time in human history that state leaders identified as major offenders would be put on trial. This would not be a show trial, nor an expression of the victors’ revenge, he promised. On the contrary, the four great nations, crowned with victory yet wounded, would reject the path of revenge and, of their own free will, submit their captured enemies to the judgment of law and conduct a just trial. The proceedings, Jackson announced, would rely not on fickle testimony, but on written documentation. The defendants, who constituted the leadership of Nazi Germany, would be tried for four categories of crimes, all defined for the first time: crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and planning an overall conspiracy to commit these crimes. International law would not be powerless in the face of crimes and criminals of such magnitude, Jackson promised, for the benefit of all humanity, which is entitled to live under the protection of law.3 2. Commitments to put on trial: In the St. James Palace council (at which the Allies War Crimes Commission was established), in the British Parliament special session in December 1942, at the Moscow (1943), the Yalta and Potsdam (1945) conferences, and especially in the London (1945) Treaty. 3. For Jackson’s full speech see Robert H. Jackson, THE CASE AGAINST THE NAZI WAR CRIMINALS, OPENING STATEMENT AND OTHER DOCUMENTS (Alfred A. Knopf 1946).
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