Eugene Davidson (1902–2002)

One red thread runs through the trial and binds in a curious way both the victors and the vanquished. It is the power exerted by an ideology. The power was manifested in those on the German side who accepted the fixed ideas of their society, in their Russian opposite members who could cooly accuse the Germans of a crime they knew the defendants had not committed (the Katyn massacre), in the American and British who could swallow almost any legal nostrum as long as it made them see a postwar society of their imagining. Small things were rescued at Nuremburg (although they meant in some cases the difference between life and death), such as the unspoken principle that no one be convicted of the same crime the Allies conceded their side had committed, that no one be hanged for the crime of having waged or plotted to wage war. For the deeper answers we must look to history and its meaning for ourselves.