November 20, 1945: Understanding The Nature And Causes Of Evil- The Nuremberg Trials Begin

[vminfla]

Source: Sigmund, Carl, and Alfred

No trial provides a better basis for understanding the nature and causes of evil than do the Nuremberg trials from 1945 to 1949. Those who come to the trials expecting to find sadistic monsters are generally disappointed. What is shocking about Nuremberg is the ordinariness of the defendants: men who may be good fathers, kind to animals, even unassuming–yet who committed unspeakable crimes. Years later, reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt wrote of “the banality of evil.” Like Eichmann, most Nuremberg defendants never aspired to be villains. Rather, they over-identified with an ideological cause and suffered from a lack of imagination or empathy: they couldn’t fully appreciate the human consequences of their career-motivated decisions.

Twelve trials, involving over a hundred defendants and several different courts, took place in Nuremberg from 1945 to 1949. By far the most attention–not surprisingly, given the figures involved–has focused on the first Nuremberg trial of twenty-one major war criminals. Several of the eleven subsequent Nuremberg trials, however, involved conduct no less troubling–and issues at least as interesting–as the Major War Criminals Trial. For example, the trial of sixteen German judges and officials of the Reich Ministry (The Justice Trial) considered the criminal responsibility of judges who enforce immoral laws. (The Justice Trial became the inspiration for the acclaimed Hollywood movie, Judgment at Nuremberg.) Other subsequent trials, such as the Doctors Trial and the Einsatzgruppen Trial, are especially compelling because of the horrific events described by prosecution witnesses. (These three subsequent trials each receive separate coverage elsewhere in this website.)

In 1944, when eventual victory over the Axis powers seemed likely, President Franklin Roosevelt asked the War Department to devise a plan for bringing war criminals to justice. Before the War Department could come up with a plan, however, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau sent his own ideas on the subject to the President’s desk. Morgenthau’s eye-for-an-eye proposal suggested summarily shooting many prominent Nazi leaders at the time of capture and banishing others to far off corners of the world. Under the Morgenthau plan, German POWs would be forced to rebuild Europe. The Treasury Secretary’s aim was to destroy Germany’s remaining industrial base and turn Germany into a weak, agricultural country.

Secretary of War Henry Stimson saw things differently than Morgenthau. The counter-proposal Stimson endorsed, drafted primarily by Colonel Murray Bernays of the Special Projects Branch, would try responsible Nazi leaders in court. The War Department plan labeled atrocities and waging a war of aggression as war crimes. Moreover, it proposed treating the Nazi regime as a criminal conspiracy.


Read more: http://sigmundcarlandalfred.wordpress.com/2011/11/21/november-20-1945-understanding-the-nature-and-causes-of-evil-the-nuremberg-trials-begin/

[izquierdista]

1. Ideological causes

That's the true villain. Once you can overlook people and their problems and rally around a cause, you're halfway to atrocities. No matter what the cause, racial purity or nationalizing industries, lebensraum or cutting the deficit, there are always some ordinary people who stand to lose. If the perfect renewable energy source could be discovered, giving a great boost to the environmental cause, some coal miners would be out of a job.

Although liberals and left-wingers can get caught up in an ideological cause, their causes usually involve trying to see that ordinary people get a fair (or fairer) deal. Conservatives and fascists have no such constraint. They build their causes on what sounds good, things like "liberty" or "freedom" or "tax cuts", never mind what the logical result of their cause is.

I've given up on ideological causes. No cause is going to solve the world's problems. Problems are solved one person at a time, one place at a time. Wars on drugs, terror, and yes, even poverty are destined to fail. But reduced down to the personal level, one person, with a little bit of help, can renounce violence, get off drugs, and improve their economic situation.

[Bluenorthwest]

2. All that fuss when FDR could have just waved a hand and

commanded 'Look forward, turn the page' as Obama did when he had the job of punishing great war crimes.

[No Elephants]

3. Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

Actually, I'm not sure Dummya still has the Crawford spread. He's in Dallas now, but way more than rich and well-connected enough to have several homes.

All in the U.S. or Canada, of course--and I'm not sure about Canada anymore.

Don't know if Cheney or Rummy has a ranch either.

Or Condi. Or Bybee. Or Yoo. Or Tenet. Or our other well-respected war criminals whom we don't wish to annoy with prosecution while they are busy at writing books, teaching lawyers, sitting on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, etc.

Yeah, Nuremberg was an aberration for us. I don't think we'll be doing that again anytime soon.

Then again, I could be wrong. We're supporting rebels in Tahrir Square and smashing OWS skulls in the U.S., so apparently, we don't embarrass easily.

[AlbertCat]

4. "Banality of evil"

Boy, if that doesn't describe a GOP debate.....

[yodermon]

5. "The Childhood Origins of World War II and the Holocaust"

These things have causes, and they are not magical.
("ideology causes genocide" is magical reasoning. What, then, causes the ideology?)

In order to understand the traumatic nightmares being acted out in World War II and the Holocaust, we will have to first understand in detail the nightmarish terrors of German, Austrian and Japanese childrearing at the beginning of the 20th century.
...
LATE 19TH-CENTURY GERMAN AND AUSTRIAN CHILDREARING
The first decision German and Austrian parents had to make when an infant was born was whether it should be killed. Newborn were not in most cases considered human since they did not yet have a soul, and so could be “killed in a kind of late abortion.”3 Mothers often “had their babies in the privy, and treated the birth as an evacuation…a bowel movement…killing their children by smashing their heads like poultry.”4 Even the underestimated figures given by officials showed German infanticide at the end of the twentieth century {sic: should be 19th century} as 20 percent, half again higher than France and England.5

more..
http://www.psychohistory.com/originsofwar/06_childhoodOrigins.html

(and P.S.: to explain a thing is not to excuse that thing.
Lot's of people "need" the causes of the holocaust to be purely "evil" (read: magical) because a natural cause & effect explanation is too horrible to contemplate.)