When Hermann Goering and other German leaders went on trial in a Nuremberg courtroom a half-century ago, defeat had stripped away much of the chin-jutting arrogance they once exuded in Nazi newsreels.
"They did not look like the leaders of a great nation. They looked like people who were picked off the street," Whitney R. Harris, a lawyer who was on the U.S. prosecution team at the 1945-46 Nuremberg war crimes trial, said in an interview from his home in St. Louis.The Nuremberg International Military Tribunal was hailed as a milestone in jurisprudence when it brought vanquished Nazi leaders to account for their actions in World War II. But it has proved a fleeting lesson.
"Crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity . . . have occurred repeatedly on four continents," laments Richard Goldstone, the chief prosecutor of two United Nations tribunals set up to try alleged war criminals from former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.
Genocidal conflicts in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Cambodia, Uganda and Somalia illustrate how human rights have been violated with impunity and perpetrators seldom prosecuted in the years since Goering and 20 colleagues went on trial on Nov. 20, 1945.
"The hope of `never again' has become the reality of `again and again,' " Goldstone, a South African jurist, said during a conference this fall in the same Nuremberg courthouse where Adolf Hitler's henchmen faced the evidence of their wartime deeds.
Hitler escaped justice by killing himself in the closing days of the war. But most of his top aides were captured and taken to Nuremberg to face judges and prosecutors from the four victorious World War II powers - the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union and France.
All but three defendants were convicted in the 10-month trial.
Twelve were sentenced to die for their roles in the murder of 6 million Jews, torture of prisoners of war, enslavement of the citizens of occupied nations, sadistic medical experiments. Seven got prison sentences.
Goering, Hitler's designated successor, cheated the hangman by committing suicide with a poison capsule. Martin Bormann, Hitler's deputy, was never found - Hitler's chauffeur said he was killed trying to get out of Berlin as Soviet troops closed in - and received a death sentence in absentia.
Sitting in Nuremberg's Palace of Justice, dressed in bland suits and uniforms stripped of medals, the defendants showed no remorse. All 21 pleaded not guilty, and their lawyers said the court had no authority over them.
Prosecutors argued they were guilty of shattering civilized standards by organizing or abetting atrocities and by laying waste to Europe in history's worst war.
The defendants faced signed documents, testimony of death camp survivors, a confiscated Nazi film showing SS men committing murder. Also among the evidence was the head of a Polish officer, shrunken to the size of a fist to serve as a paperweight.
The verdicts and punishments were read on Oct. 1, 1946.
Goering committed suicide in his cell on Oct. 15. The next day the remaining 10 condemned men were hanged, one after the other, over a two-hour period by U.S. Army Master Sgt. John C. Woods.
The last to drop through the trapdoor of the gallows was Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the Nazi administrator of the occupied Netherlands. His last words were: "I believe in Germany."
Nearly 200 more Nazis were tried in 12 successive international military trials at Nuremberg. Thousands more were tried by national courts in West and East Germany and in the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia and other countries invaded by Hitler's legions.
A 1946-48 international tribunal in Tokyo also convicted Japanese political and military leaders of war crimes and hanged some of them.
But while the United Nations condemned brutalities by other regimes over the years, there was no concentrated push for another international war crimes tribunal until 1992 reports from Bosnia about Nazi-like atrocities at Serb-run internment camps. Then in April 1994, government leaders in Rwanda instigated the massacre of 500,000 people, many of them minority Tutsis.
But unlike postwar Germany and Japan, there are no victorious foreign powers in Bosnia and Rwanda to hunt down suspected war criminals.