Celebrating the Jackson Center

‘Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial’ author coming to Jamestown

By ROBERT W. PLYLER

The Robert H. Jackson Center is bringing yet another author to town to enhance the learning and understanding of the world of our citizens who are free of responsibilities in the mid-day.

We’re happy to celebrate the art of good writing, and to help readers to participate in the rich and busy schedule of activities our community is provided.

While we’re at it, it gives us some space to share some of the other materials, which have been sent to us for review. We hope you’ll enjoy them:

Nuremberg

At 12:30 p.m., Monday, Joseph Persico will speak in person at the Jackson Center, which is located on Prendergast Ave., stretching from Fourth to Fifth streets.

Persico is an author, researcher and former speechwriter for Vice President Nelson A. Rockefeller. Among his works is a history of the trial of Nazi leaders which made Justice Jackson internationally known. Its title is Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial and it served as the basis for the television film by the same name, which was broadcast on Turner Network Television. The film stars Alec Baldwin and it is also available on video and DVD.

If you’re not a history scholar and you’ve wondered about what our area’s famous son has done to merit a center in his honor, this is the best book I’ve come across, to teach you what the fuss is all about, without the lengthy and distracting details which more scholarly writing must employ.

Persico’s style is easy reading, clearly expressed and it employs colorful and diverse vocabulary. The bibliography is impressive and the narrative seems to go out of its way to be fair to reasonable challenges which have been made to the trial and the way in which it was held.

Let me provide some quick background, for those who aren’t comfortable that they understand the circumstances of the book:

When World War II ended in Europe, It was finally possible to grasp the size of what has come to be called the Holocaust. In the war, millions upon millions of people had been killed in direct fighting, in bombing raids by both sides of the conflict upon one another’s territory, and by the inevitable lack of food, fuel and necessities of life which takes place during war, not to mention the spread of diseases without adequate medical treatment.

Furthermore, and even worse, it was learned that an additional approximately 11 million people, including six million Jews, had been methodically and deliberately rounded up and murdered, for reasons ranging from a need to conserve vital food and shelter in a country whose free trade has been deliberately shut off by its enemies, to racial and social bigotries beyond imagination. Dead people don’t need food, or fuel, or shelter, or jobs or anything else. And, the living can share the possessions of the dead. Dead people don’t protest when they’re blamed for living leaders’ blunders, too.

Some people, including Winston Churchill, prime minister of Great Britain, one of the major victors of the war, believed that Nazi leaders should be shot, as soon as they were identified. Instead, the idea prevailed that while millions bore some responsibility for this relentless murder, the principal leaders should be put on trial, as a way to educate the world to what had been done and to demonstrate the intention of the world’s great powers that such behavior was repugnant and utterly unacceptable, even in all-out war.

The president of the United States at the time was Harry Truman. He selected a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and former Attorney General, Robert H. Jackson, to organize these trials and to arrange the trials of German leaders. Jackson was born just across the Pennsylvania line from Chautauqua County, grew up in Frewsburg and began his law career in Jamestown.

In 1946, Germany had been bombed relentlessly for more than three years. Its cities, rail lines, airports, food supplies and its housing and public buildings were largely piles of rubble, under which numerous corpses decayed until there was time and manpower to uncover and bury them.

Furthermore, Germany had been divided into four separate zones, each of which was occupied by troops of one of four countries: the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union and France. Each of those countries had different court systems, different perceptions of the war and differing degrees of support for the trials.

Certainly Jackson was not flawless in his efforts, but a trial of 21 men, representative of all elements of German society, was held. The men were allowed to speak in their own defense and to have attorneys of their own choice. The lawyers were provided with all of the prosecution’s evidence, secretarial services, translators, office space and whatever else they might reasonably need to defend their actions.

Adolf Hitler himself, undoubtedly bearing the ultimate responsibility for everything that happened to his country, had escaped punishment by committing suicide. So had many of his principal assistants. Others had successfully fled or hidden.

No country catches all of its criminals. No justice system is utterly just in its prosecution of its laws. Civilization is possible because a genuine effort is made.

No written account of a long series of events can possibly cover every element of what happened. The author does take some liberties, although none which would seem to justify a belief that the author is hijacking history for his own purposes.

Just as an example, the defendants were given their lunch, on trial days, in a room in the attic of the courthouse. Persico tells us they would use this time to look out the windows at the countryside and the Pegnitz River and to think of their former days of power and freedom.

That’s probably true, but it isn’t historical. Maybe they opted not to look out the windows, or they focused on the pigeons roosting on the sills. No one will ever know. The point is, it humanizes the defendants and makes the reading less dry and overwhelming for the reader and if it’s wrong, it really doesn’t matter.

In the words of the author, ‘‘All the men who went to prison or mounted the gallows (as a result of the tribunal) were willing, knowing, and energetic accomplices in a vast and malignant enterprise. They were there for valid moral, if not always perfect legal, reasons ... their fates do not remotely compare to the injustice done to a five-year-old sent to a gas chamber.’’

The book ends with a chapter in which the author seeks to analyze the effect these trials had on history. In the years between 1945 and 1992, he tells us, there were 24 wars among nations, which took more than 6.6 million lives. There were an additional 93 civil wars, wars of independence and insurgencies, costing 15,513,000 more lives. Since his book came out in 1994, it obviously doesn’t include many more millions which have happened in the 12 years since.

The biggest gain, it seems to Persico has been to Germany itself, which has been able to confront its shocking history and move past it. Following World War I, the Germans continued to believe they had fought a noble fight and had been tricked by their enemies and betrayed by their own leaders.

If the Nuremberg trials prove nothing else, they proved that the second war was anything but a noble fight. Today, German children are required by law to tour the sites of the concentration camps their country operated during the war and are taught accurately about the period.

In my personal experiences, Germans are more likely to be willing to discuss and evaluate the war than citizens of other countries whose performance was less than stellar, including France.

The book is full of interesting observations, including the conflicting rivalries among the people involved, which makes the events of the trials less of a legend which can’t possibly inform real people, into a cautionary tale of what can be, and what could be.

And the author’s view of those who insist the Holocaust never happened, or was grossly exaggerated? ‘‘Crackpots at best, racists at worst.’’ The evidence is overwhelming, not the least the fact that the men who were on trial for their lives never once denied that these things happened, their defenses ranging from blaming others to stating that they never grasped the reality of it.

The commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, for example, learned with horror, after the war that among the millions of people he had sent to their deaths was one of his father’s best friends. ‘‘They were just shadows passing by,’’ he explained. ‘‘I never thought of them as people.’’

Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial was published in paperback form by Penguin Books, copyright 1994. It has 443 pages, not including extensive indices and appendices and careful documentation of facts. Just the section quickly reminding you who everyone was is immensely useful, as names are similar and unfamiliar.

It sells on a popular web-based bookseller for $11.05. It can be purchased through the Jackson Center, in downtown Jamestown.

And, if you can possibly do so, be at the Jackson Center to hear the author talk about his book.

The Post-Journal

Saturday, June 9, 2006

Vol. 179, No. 354

Section C, Page 7