Media Watch--O'Reilly Wrong On Nuremberg
Tuesday, May 8, 2012 at 07:22PM
Quite by coincidence, the very day I quoted Robert Conot's book "Justice At Nuremberg" in this blog, I tuned into Bill O'Reilly, who usually gets his information right, and found a rather egregious errors on the Nuremberg trials. The Fox News superstar misinformed his millions of views by claiming that Nuremberg trials were by a military tribunal!
Wrong, totally wrong, and O'Reilly owes his audience a correction.
I was so flabbergasted I dug out the Conot book and rediscovered that two very famous non-military Americans were involved in the trials. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson served as one of the prosecutors, and Francis Biddle, an Attorney General under FDR, was one of the judges.
Also, while O'Reilly didn't specifically say that all the Nuremberg defendants were found guilty, he implied that, and it simply is not true.
In fact, three (economist Dr. Schacht--an extremely fascinating man, the one who rescued Germans from rampant inflation in 1923--diplomat Von Paper, and propagandist Fritzsche) of the 21 Germans on trial at Nuremberg were found not guilty on all charges.
Of course, had drones been sent in to kill everyone, being not guilty would not have made much of a difference, now would it. As I recall, the Russians wanted everyone found guilty (they also sought the death penalty for Rudolf Hess), but the American, British, and French judges actually listened to the evidence, and a 2-2 vote resulted in dismissal of charges.
Conot quotes Judge Lawrence that Papen "engaged in both intrigue and bullying. But the Charter does not make criminal such offenses against political morality, however bad these may be."
Fritzsche was actually held for trial because Goebbels had committed suicide. While Fritzsche was deemed to have engaged in acerbic propaganda statements, Conot writes, "The Tribunal is not prepared to hold that they were intended to incite the German people to commit atrocities on conquered peoples, and he cannot be held to have been a participant in the crimes charged."
Thus, unlike with drones killing those merely thought to be guilty of crimes, there was JUSTICE AT NUREMBERG, and it was NOT military justice.
Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, NOT guilty at Nuremberg
Reader Comments (2)
Your guy, Schacht, may have been found NOT guilty of something other than a war crime per se, or a crime against humanity. It may have been a crime against re-armament.
I like Albert Speer's books better.
It was hardly a military court in the sense of what is going on in the U.S. now. It was an INTERNATIONAL TRIBUNAL, and military personnel were used neither as judges nor the main prosecutors...Thomas Dodd, father of Chris, was one. Since the military occupied Germany at the time, the prisoners were obvioulsy held in military facilites, but that does not make it a military trial.
Speer has apparnelty succeeeded with you as he has with milions of others, pulling the wool over your eyes. He's like Talleyrand, able to go from one regime to another, participating in great wrongs, always with the excuse that he never really supported the regimes he so participated in! His charm was so great that he avoided the death penalty at Nuremberg and went on to distort history in a most insipid way--the contention that he tried to kill Hitler with the ventilation in the bunker system has been proven a mere canard! If any deserved the death pentalty (and that point is debateable), then certainly Speer did. Sauckel was hanged for his role in slave labor, but the slave labor was being used for Speer's factories!! But he was a great charmger, and I've read his memoirs--but only after reading other accounts of his treachery.