be great if he would carry this message.
Ben Ferencz - a lawyer at Nuremburg writes:
The Rule of Law -The Crime of Aggression
One of the Einsatzgruppen (EG) commanders was being held in Nuremberg as a potential witness in the IMT trial. Whitney Harris had interviewed him. He became the lead defendant in the new EG case. SS General Dr. Otto Ohlendorf, father of five children, a handsome man, was one of the smartest and outspoken of the accused. He had admitted that his unit killed about 60000 Jews, but he quibbled about the precise number since sometimes his men bragged about the body count. Imagine, bragging that you murdered more than you actually killed! None of the mass murderers showed any remorse whatsoever. Ohlendorf was asked to explain why they had killed all the Jews. Most defendants argued that they were only obeying superior orders. Ohlendorf was much more honest. He said it was necessary in self-defense. Self-defense? Where do you come up with self-defense? Germany attacked all of its neighbors. "Ah, yes", he explained, " we knew that the Soviet Union planned to attack us. And therefore, it was necessary for us to attack them first." (These days we call it "preemption.") "And why did you kill all of the Jews? " "Well, we knew that the Jews were sympathetic to the Bolsheviks, everybody knows that, so, we had to get rid of them too." Question: "And why did you kill thousands of little children? "Well, if they grew up and learned that we had eliminated their parents, they would become enemies of the Reich. So, of course we had to take care of them too. It sounded so natural and logical - to the mass murderer.
It was not persuasive to the three American judges. They carefully considered the doctrine of preemptive self-defense, or anticipatory self-defense, They held, unanimously, that it was not a valid defense that could justify the crimes. If everyone felt they could go out and attack their neighbor, and also kill their children and other perceived enemies, what kind of a world would we have? It was an echo of Justice Jackson's famous phrase that has been quoted here, about not passing the Germans "a poisoned chalice" lest we put it to our own lips as well. Law must apply equally to everyone. Telford Taylor made the closing statement, saying to accept peremptory self-defense as a justification for murder would be as if to say that a man who breaks into a house can then shoot the owner in presumed self-defense. Those who made that argument were found guilty and were hanged. I was a young man then, and it was clear to me that those innocent souls who were slaughtered by these Nazi extermination squads were killed because they did not share the race, or the religion, or the ideology of their executioners. I thought then that such thinking was pretty terrible. I still think it's pretty terrible today. Of course it affects my judgment when I come to consider the view from the US.
http://www.benferencz.org/arts/89.html
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