Extract from a memorandum by Michael Rynne
'Senator Taft and the Nuremberg Trials'¹

[matter omitted]

4. The Nuremberg Tribunal was set up originally by an Agreement (usually called 'the London Agreement') between Britain, the USA, France and the USSR on the 8th August 1945.

   Annexed to the Agreement was a document called the 'Charter of the International Military Tribunal', Article 6 of which defined certain acts which the Tribunal was to regard as 'crimes' coming within its jurisdiction and for which individuals were to be deemed to be responsible.

   The Article set out three main classes of crime:

   • Crimes against Peace;
   • War Crimes, and,
   • Crimes against humanity.

   The acts comprised in the two last-mentioned categories above were clearly 'crimes' in the generally accepted sense, being mostly described as such by international conventions (Hague etc.) of long standing.

   The first category, however, related to normal acts of war, which could only be regarded as crimes on the ground that the State to which the accused belonged had been engaged in aggressive war. The 'Crimes against Peace' were indeed of a kind which a critic might say were mere 'political' crimes, or even not crimes at all, seeing that no law had clearly defined them as such prior to the commencement of the Second World War.

   This view of the 'Crimes against Peace' was not really opposed by the President of the Tribunal in reply to defence criticisms. Lord Justice Lawrence simply remarked that 'it was not necessary to consider whether and to what extent aggressive war was a crime before the execution of the London Agreement'.

   He regarded the making of that Agreement and its Charter as 'a legitimate exercise of sovereign legislative power by countries to which the German Reich surrendered unconditionally'.

   In other words, the Nuremberg Court appears to have admitted that it was simply the instrument of the victorious Allies established to punish certain individuals, citizens of a defeated Axis State, Germany, for deeds committed during the war, which three months after the war were defined as crimes against peace.

5. As against this confession of its own lack of a moral, or truly legal, basis, one might argue that the Tribunal was really applying good international law in sentencing individuals for acts of war where the war had been waged by them in the first instance 'as an instrument of national policy'. This argument would depend on a rather strained interpretation of the famous Kellogg Pact of 1928, whereby wars of aggression were 'outlawed'.
6. The weight of public opinion in the neutral countries, at least, may well tend to align itself with Senator Taft's condemnation of the Tribunal's conclusions. It is still too soon to be certain of this point. So far, we have only seen a denial in the press of a report that the Vatican was appealing for clemency for the condemned men. However, neither the report nor the denial appear to have been officially sponsored.