WILL the world see another Nuremberg Trial? Or is accountability only for the history books? In 1946, an International Military Tribunal representing the victorious Allied powers (the US, UK, USSR and France) passed judgement at Nuremberg on 24 Nazi acolytes of Hitler. They included Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess and Joachim von Ribbentrop.

At the Potsdam Conference of 1945, the Big Three (Harry Truman, Clement Attlee and Joseph Stalin) were clear on why they had occupied a defeated Germany. They sought five Ds: “disarmament, demilitarisation, denazification, democratisation and decentralisation”. The tribunal members, however, differed on the trial’s aims.

The British wanted “a swift, political decision, rather than a judicial one”. Winston Churchill regarded Nazi leaders as “outlaws”, to be shot on sight. The Soviets introduced “the concept of crimes against peace”. Having suffered incalculable damage and the loss of 27 million Soviets, they demanded reparations. The US insisted on a reform of Germany’s body politic, an ‘Americanisation’ of Germany. The French broadened the concept of culpability to include not just the Nazis but all Germans.

To understand that period, one should read Lara Feigel’s The Bitter Taste of Victory: In the Ruins of the Reich. It provides a searing insight into the years 1945-1949. It reveals a substrata of Western writers, painters, poets, actors, and film directors who travelled to Germany to report on the war’s gory aftermath. They included writers Ernest Hemingway, Evelyn Waugh, Rebecca West and Harold Nicolson; painter Laura Knight; poets W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender; actors Marlene Dietrich and Sybil Thorndike; and film director Billy Wilder who compiled a documentary on German concentration camps. (Later, in 1959, he directed the comedy Some Like It Hot, featuring Marilyn Monroe.)

Leaders would have us believe that war is justified.

The recollections of each make chilling reading. Nicolson describes the once sinister Nazi defendants as “having the appearance of people who travelled in a third-class railway carriage for three successive nights”. Thorndike is asked to perform G.B. Shaw’s Arms and the Man in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where there were still “40,000 inmates […] and 10,000 corpses rotting in the sun”. And Wilder, filming “a whole landscape of corpses”, focuses on a man who “glances apathetically at the camera. Then he turns, tries to stand up, and falls over, dead”. Yet, despite the horrors surrounding them, nothing prevented these aesthetes from conducting liaisons and affairs, often with Germans. For many of them, Berlin in July 1945 “became the site of a summer-long cocktail party, taking place against the backdrop of an overheated morgue”.

Leaders would have us believe that war is justified. They are wrong. It is no more than a bloodstained “jigsaw puzzle of fighting men, bewildered, terrified civilians, noise, smoke, jokes, pain, fear and unfinished conversations”.

If World War I was “the war to end all wars”, World War II spawned the hope that there would never be a World War III. The Nuremberg Trials were part of that catharsis. Some like Waugh thought the trials an “injudicious travesty”. Others like Nicolson saw it as a corrective restoration of man’s natural order: “The inhumane is being confronted with the humane, ruthlessness with equity, lawlessness with patient justice, and barbarism with civilisation.” The Nuremberg Trials differed from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1995-2003), in that the TRC pinpointed individual accountability, not collective culpability.

Will Donald Trump, Benjamin Netan­yahu or any other lea­der ever be charged with war crimes? In 2024, the Internat­io­nal Criminal Court issued arrest warra­nts for Netanyahu and his defence minister Yoav Gallant for crimes against hum­anity, “including us­­ing starvation as a method of warfare in Gaza”. They have escaped the short arm of international law — unlike the Nazi Adolf Eichmann, whom Israeli agents abducted from Argentina in 1960, tried in Israel and then hanged.

Modern warfare recognises neither international law nor holy days. The Arab attack in 1973 took place during Yom Kippur; Israel’s latest blitz on Iran began on Feb 28 (a Sabbath) and violated Nauroz and Ramazan. Did Iran have the right to resist unlawful aggression? The answer lies in the French aphorism: “This animal is very bad; when you attack it, it defends itself.”

Meanwhile, as World War III limps into its fourth week, Trump has performed yet another political pirouette. He has declared a one-sided truce for five days. He claims “productive conversations” with Iran. Iran has repudiated this. Pakistan, in yet another diplomatic gyration, has positioned itself as a mediator, an honest broker in this conflict. It has all the qualifications. None could be more honest, and none broker.

The writer is an author.

www.fsaijazuddin.pk

Published in Dawn, March 26th, 2026

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