Nuremberg: The Last Battle. A Review
By Stephen
J. Sniegoski
Published: 1998-04-13
Nuremberg: The Last Battle by David Irving. Focal Point Publications, 1996. 377 + x pp.
As stated in
the title of by David Irving's book, the Nuremberg Trial was the last battle of
World War II in Europe. Nazi Germany had already been physically destroyed by
the superior military power of the Allies. The purpose of Nuremberg was to
demonstrate to the world the unparalleled evil of Nazism and, consequently, the
fact that the Allied military victory constituted the triumph of superior
morality.
In the words of the chief prosecutor, Robert Jackson, "We want to
prove to Germany and to the world that the Nazi regime was as wicked and as
criminal as we have always maintained." (p. 166) The trial, its adherents
fondly believed, would do far more than terminate the war; it would also
fulfill the idealistic war aims that the Allies had preached during the war. It
would create the legal framework to prevent aggression and atrocities from
occurring in the future; in the international realm, violence would be replaced
by the rule of law. Although the Allies were all-powerful, while the Germans in
Irving's words were "unarmed and had few friends," this last battle
would prove something less than a decisive victory for the trial's supporters.
Irving provides an overview of the Nuremberg Trial of Germany's major war
criminals, which lasted from November 1945 until October 1946. (There were
other war-crime trials at Nuremberg conducted exclusively by the United States,
but this trial of the principal figures of the Third Reich conducted by the
International Military Tribunal [IMT] — the United States, Great Britain,
France, and the Soviet Union — is what is usually meant by "Nuremberg
Trial.") During the war, the Allies had repeatedly stated their intention
to punish German leaders for their heinous crimes. How this punishment would be
effected, however, was in question. Churchill and the British government sought
summary executions of the high-ranking Germans. The Soviets mentioned both
summary executions and trials, meaning "show trials" that would have
propaganda value.
In the United States, both the trial and summary-execution positions had
their proponents. The advocates of the Morgenthau Plan, who sought to mete out
a harsh collective punishment to the German people, identified with swift
executions. The contrary idea of a judicial trial conducted by an international
court was pushed by the War Department headed by Henry Stimson. President
Roosevelt never firmly committed himself to either position, though he leaned
toward a judicial trial. Harry Truman, upon becoming president after
Roosevelt's death in April 1945, opted firmly for a trial. That the German
leadership would be given a trial, however, does not mean that there was any
question about the outcome. Encapsulating Truman's view, Irving writes,
"The Germans should be given a fair trial first — and then hanged."
(p. 32)
To represent the United States in negotiations with its allies for the
international trial, Truman chose Robert Jackson, a justice of the U.S. Supreme
Court; Jackson would later serve as the trial's chief prosecutor. Irving
describes him as "an idealist endowed with clearly defined notions of
justice and fair play" (p. 61) and dubs him the "architect of a new
international law." (p. 67) Jackson's fundamental goal was to have the
trial set the foundation for a new kind of international law that would
prohibit wars of aggression.
In short, the United States was the driving force behind the international
trial, which embodied America's somewhat naive and self-righteous brand of
idealism — a description on which Irving and I agree. Because of its power and
prestige, the United States was able to drag along the other major Allies —
Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. Considerable squabbling broke out
between those countries regarding the specifics of the proposed trial, but
finally the London Agreement was concluded on August 8, 1945, setting up the
International Military Tribunal and defining its procedures. Ironically, that
occurred during the same week as the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Statute drew up four counts of crimes for which the German leadership
would be tried. The first count involved conspiracy — conspiring to engage in
the other three counts. That charge was pushed by Jackson but not understood by
the jurists from the other countries. (The conspiracy charge is rather
intriguing, since the Establishment generally ridicules the idea of
conspiracies.)
Count two was "crimes against peace" — the actual planning,
preparing, and waging of aggressive war. That count was generally interpreted
as criminalizing the waging of war to alter the status quo. Thus, the Germans
could not use the unfairness of the Versailles Treaty to justify making war to
bring about its revision.[1]
The third count was "war crimes" — a category that included killing
and mistreating soldiers and civilians in ways not justified by military
necessity.
Count four consisted of "crimes against humanity," which was a
new idea, dealing with inhuman actions committed against civilians. Included in
count four was the mass murder of Jews.
The London Statute called for the indictment of the major war criminals,
and, after much debate, the IMT came up with a list of 24 names, 22 of whom
would, in the event, be tried. Among those listed were Herman Göring, Joachim
von Ribbentrop, Admiral Karl Dönitz, General Alfred Jodl, Alfred Rosenberg,
Albert Speer, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Hans Frank, and Julius Streicher. Martin
Bormann, who is now believed to have died prior to the indictment, would be
tried in absentia. Also indicted were the leading organizations of the Third
Reich — the Reich Cabinet, the Nazi Party leadership, the SS, the Gestapo, the
General Staff, and the SA.
Nuremberg was not a show trial along the lines of those perfected by Joseph
Stalin. The defendants were allowed to defend themselves and were given
lawyers. But the scales of justice were weighted heavily against the defense, a
fact long recognized by commentators on the trial. Contrary to the traditional
American concept of justice, the Germans were being judged by ex post facto
laws — being tried for violating laws that did not exist at the time of the
actual offenses. The retroactive nature of Nuremberg troubled many legal minds
of differing political persuasions, including William O. Douglas on the Left
and Robert Taft on the Right. Also, the Statute prohibited the accused from
offering the defense of having obeyed orders from a superior. Furthermore, the
defendants were interrogated before the trial with no lawyer present, and,
Irving says, "they were never cautioned as to their rights, because they
had none." (p. 141) Irving shows that interrogators used blackmail threats
and sometimes even physical torture to gain incriminating evidence from
witnesses (though the defendants themselves were not tortured).
The defendants had lawyers who sincerely worked for their interest, but the
defense had no access to the archives of documents used by the prosecution.
They could get hold of documents only through the offices of the prosecution,
and documents that would aid the defense were routinely concealed from them.
The London Statute prohibited the defense from challenging the impartiality of
the judges, who openly fraternized with the prosecution.
Probably the most embarrassing feature of the trial was that there were few
crimes for which the Germans were convicted that were not also committed by the
Allies. In light of the likely comparison, the London Statute specifically
prohibited the "tu quoque" defense — "you did it too."
However, it is revealing to compare crimes for which the Germans were convicted
with analogous Allied actions. Regarding the crime of aggressive war, the
Soviet Union attacked Poland and also Finland. A secret protocol of the 1939
Nazi-Soviet Pact had turned over much of Eastern Europe to Soviet control, and,
in fact, it was that agreement that initiated World War II. The British
violated Norwegian neutrality and occupied Iceland, Persia, Madagascar, and
French North-West Africa. The Soviets murdered thousands of Polish officers in
Katyn Forest (although the Germans were indicted for that crime at Nuremberg)
and murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians in the areas of Eastern Europe
that they took over in 1939-40. At the end of the war, the Western Allies
repatriated to the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia millions of soldiers who would
be murdered by the Communists. At Dachau, the Americans murdered German
soldiers after they had surrendered and been disarmed. The Americans and the
British engaged in the intentional bombing of civilian populations, and Churchill
had made plans to equip the bombers with mustard gas and anthrax.[2]
Although mainstream commentators have acknowledged some of those Allied
atrocities, Irving stands virtually alone in pointing out that the Allied
crimes did not cease with the war's termination. The Soviets and the new pro-
Soviet governments of Eastern Europe, for example, were engaging in the ethnic
cleansing of Germans from areas turned over to Poland and Czechoslovakia, and
were communizing Eastern Europe by homicidal means. Both the Soviets and the
Western Allies mistreated German prisoners and required forced labor from the
conquered civilian populace. In essence, at the same time the Germans were
being condemned at Nuremberg, the Allies were engaging in similar criminal acts
themselves that took the lives of millions of people. It was apparent from the
outset that the Allies did not intend to abide by the high moral standards they
so piously preached and by which the Germans were judged.
Irving acknowledges that the Allied crimes do not mitigate the crimes of
Nazi Germany. "It is pointless to weigh, one against the other, such
catalogues of horrors and atrocities," he writes. "The deeper lesson
is that war itself is a crime — and that the real crime of war is not genocide
but the far broader bestiality which embraces genocide, and which we can label
Innocenticide, the Slaughter of the Innocents." (p. 39) Today, of course,
it is the Holocaust that stigmatizes Nazi Germany as the epitome of iniquity —
the Holocaust being portrayed as a crime infinitely worse than anything the
Allies (or, for that matter, anyone else in history) committed. Thus, failure
to acknowledge the unparalleled nature of Nazi Germany's atrocities is to
engage in what Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt labels "immoral
equivalency" — a crime only one step less heinous than outright
"Holocaust denial."[3]
Yet as Irving points out, Nuremberg did not focus on the killing of Jews.
Representatives of influential Jewish organizations, including Zionist leader
Chaim Weizmann, had attempted to pressure Jackson to concentrate on the Nazi
persecution of Jews, but Jackson would have none of it. Instead, he responded,
"we are prosecuting these Nazis not because they killed Jews, but because
they killed men and women." (p. 90) It was essential, Jackson believed, to
prevent the trial from being seen as a "Jewish trial" engaging in
vengeance.
The persecution of Jews was only one of many "crimes against
humanity" charged against the Germans. Irving writes: "In retrospect
it may seem remarkable that the Nazi 'factories of death' played a much smaller
part in the Nuremberg trial than did the shooting of a number of R.A.F.
officers who had escaped from the prisoner-of-war camp at Sagan, and the
conditions under which Speer's slave-labourers worked in the munitions
industry." (p. 235)
Although Nazi mass murder of Jews did not become a central focus of the trial,
prosecutors did deal with the issue. Jackson charged the Germans with killing
5.7 million Jews, a figure that sounded more precise than the round 6 million
being claimed by Jewish authorities.[4] Even those
commentators who acknowledge Nuremberg's legal shortcomings credit the trial
with uncovering, documenting, and making known to the world the heinous German
effort to exterminate European Jewry.[5] In the
conventional view, Nuremberg revealed the Nazi persecution of Jews with a
degree of clarity and precision not available with respect to other instances
of mass killing. Thus, while historians differ dramatically on many aspects of
the Turkish slaughter of Armenians or the Soviet mass murder of various classes
and nationalities, there is a basic consensus on the Holocaust.
It is here that Irving strays the farthest from historical respectability
(and, in some European countries, from legality) by denying that such evidence
was clear-cut or conclusive. First, he points out that evidence on the alleged
Nazi death camps was supplied largely by the Soviet Union, hardly noted for a
devotion to objective truth.[6] And for the United States
much of the information was gathered by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS),
which was likewise noted for disseminating propaganda.[7]
Moreover, torture and blackmail appear to have been used on occasion to induce
witnesses to confess or provide evidence.
Some of the evidence was contradictory and patently incorrect. Testimony
accepted as factual at Nuremberg included such atrocity legends as gas chambers
at Dachau, mass killing by steam, and the making of soap from the remains of
victims — tales now rejected even by Establishment historians. Overall, the
information presented to the court had been selectively chosen to incriminate
the Nazis for pursuing a systematic policy of Jewish extermination.[8] Information that might have served to exonerate them was
left out, such as a 1942 statement by Dr. Hans Lammers, chief of the Reich
chancellery, that Hitler would take care of the Jewish problem after the war.
Finally, the Allied prosecutors read into the documents more than was
there: for example, the Wannsee Protocol, which was alleged to be the "key
document" outlining the systematic policy for extermination, actually
makes no explicit reference to killing Jews.[9] The
fundamental purpose of the whole Nuremberg undertaking, as it emerges in
Irving's account, was not to arrive at truth but to convict and demonize Nazi
Germany.[10]
In contrast to a common contention of Holocaust historians that the
Nuremberg defendants did not deny the existence of the crimes but merely denied
their own culpability, Irving points out that the defendants seemed unaware of
the crimes against the Jews and were ashamed for their country when informed of
those deeds.[11] What had the greatest emotional impact on
the defendants was an OSS documentary film on the concentration camps, based on
pictures taken by military photographers as the American and British armies
advanced through Germany. That documentary evidence, of course, did not deal
with the "death camps," which were in areas occupied by the Soviet
Union. The British and Americans, Irving writes, had "found and
photographed for posterity disturbing scenes of death from starvation and
pestilence — scenes which should not, in retrospect, have surprised the Allied
commanders who had spent the last months bombing Germany's rail distribution
networks and blasting the pharmaceutical factories in order to conjure up
precisely these horsemen of the Apocalypse." (p. 50)
What all the Nuremberg material on the German persecution of Jews should
have done, but definitely did not do, was absolve the German people of
complicity in the crime. For, as Irving points out:
"Nowhere in the Allied archives, which contain mountains of
intercepted cipher messages and the reports on bags of mail captured from enemy
ships or from overrun enemy positions, is there the slightest evidence that
such atrocities were commonly known to the German public at large."[12]
On the German mass killing of Jews, Irving concludes: "The whole of
the Nazi drive to liquidate their enemies had proceeded in such a ramshackle,
haphazard, and disorganised manner that it is difficult even now to state with
certainty precisely what happened and what did not. The historian's task is not
eased by the laws imposed, fifty years after the event, by some European
countries specifically stifling informed conjecture and investigation."
(p. 236)
Ultimately the Nuremberg court acquitted three of the defendants. Twelve
were sentenced to death by hanging. Three were sentenced to life imprisonment,
and four were sentenced to imprisonment for terms ranging from 10 to 20 years.
Irving goes over the specifics of the cases of the individuals, bringing
out some of the anomalies. For example, Julius Streicher received a death
sentence although he played no role in the German government from 1939 onward
and consequently could have had no direct responsibility for its wartime
actions. In essence, Streicher was sentenced to death for publishing
anti-Semitic views. Also uninvolved in government policies was Rudolf Hess, who
did not engage in war planning and had departed Germany in May 1941 before the
onset of the killing of the Jews. Hess had been imprisoned by the British after
flying to Scotland to seek a negotiated peace. Yet he was sentenced to life
imprisonment. Admiral Karl Dönitz had not acted in a military capacity any
different from that of Allied naval leaders, yet he was sentenced to 10 years
in prison. The American judge at Nuremberg, Nicholas Biddle, acknowledging that
"Germany waged a much cleaner war than we did" (p. 259), would have
acquitted Dönitz.
Nuremberg standards were not applied equally to the defendants. Hjalmar
Schacht, Hitler's economic czar, was acquitted because of support from
influential bankers, although Jackson saw him as a key figure in the
development of the Third Reich. In Jackson's opinion, Schacht was "the
most contemptible of all the defendants. He had provided the finance for the
spectacular rise and rearmament of Hitler's Germany. More than any other, this
man's financial genius had paved the way for the violation of the Versailles
Treaty." (p. 102)
Albert Speer, who ran German war industry in the latter part of the
conflict, received a 20-year sentence instead of a harsher penalty because of
his urbane character and his efforts to portray himself as Hitler's opponent.
Irving points out that the German war industry relied on brutalized slave labor
and that Speer had evicted Jews from Berlin, "which became the first stage
of the expulsion of those Jews from Germany to uncertain fates in the eastern
territories and at Auschwitz." (p. 231) By Nuremberg standards Speer
deserved execution.
Irving shows strong antipathy for those who, like Speer, tried to divorce
themselves from Hitler and his actions, and shift the blame to others. In
contrast, Herman Göring, who took responsibility for and defended German actions,
emerges as a heroic figure. His heroism culminated in his successful avoidance
of a humiliating death by hanging when he ingested a cyanide pill.[13] As Irving depicts it: "There is no doubt that
Hermann Göring's 'escape' — for that is how he at least had regarded it — sent
a thrill through Germany at a time when starvation stalked the ruined streets
and prison camps, and the humiliation of defeat and the rigours of the Allied
occupation were barely being endured." (p. 297)
In summary, Irving points out that "the world saw Nuremberg as the
old- fashioned practice of the victors putting the vanquished to the sword,
behind a facade of retroactive law and elegant speeches." (p. 312) The evidence
in the book clearly brings that out. An impartial application of the Nuremberg
standards would have led to the punishment of many leaders of the Allies, not
just Soviet but American and British as well.[14] The
critical fact was not that the individual Germans had committed crimes of an
unparalleled nature but rather that they had lost the war. Moreover, Nuremberg
did not achieve its promise. It failed to set a precedent for international
law, since its principles were never codified. Quite obviously, it failed to
prevent future wars of aggression, which have been launched even by such
purportedly impeccable countries as Israel.[15]
But Irving's assessment of Nuremberg is not completely negative. The
Nuremberg Trial, he maintains, compared favorably with other war-crime trials
conducted in the same period. For example, although witnesses were tortured,
Nuremberg did not feature the savage beatings that were routinely used to get
prisoners to sign false confessions in U.S. Army trials at Dachau. "All
the defendants agreed they would have suffered far greater indignities at the
hands of their fellow-countrymen, had they been put before German courts,"
he writes. (p. 280) And most significantly, Irving holds that the punishment
meted out to most of the defendants was justified: "In most cases, the
basic justice of the sentence passed at Nuremberg was undeniable: German courts
would have disposed of many of the defendants for their actual responsibility
for known murders — the killings after the Röhm putsch, the widespread
liquidation of political enemies or racial groups, the murder of enemy prisoners-of-war."
(p. 280)
It would have been helpful if Irving had more thoroughly developed his
point about the "basic justice" of the Nuremberg sentences.
Undoubtedly, some of the defendants deserved their severe punishment, but the
connection between more than a few of the defendants and "known
murders" seems at best tenuous.
Irving gives his account of the Nuremberg trial the aura of a Greek
tragedy. It was a tragedy for the American proponents of the judicial trial,
since its promise of world order based on law was never realized. And that was
a rather unexpected defeat, given America's overwhelming power and moral
prestige. But in a sense, Irving contends, the defeat was deserved because of
America's hubris and self-righteousness.
Irving sees the tragedy of Nuremberg as being embodied in the career of
Robert Jackson: "If this story needs a hero, then he is Jackson." (p.
vii) Jackson was an individual of integrity who fought to make the trial
legitimate and not simply a show trial based on cooked-up evidence, which was
the aim of the OSS.[16] Irving writes:
Through his absence [from the U.S. political scene while] at Nuremberg, he
had lost his chance of becoming chief justice of the United States, perhaps
even president, and through his sponsoring of the trial he had become a figure
of controversy. His motives were misunderstood; he was linked in many eyes with
the scandalous series of war crimes trials held concurrently with his own, by the
military authorities. Worst of all his dream of establishing a precedent for
the prosecution of aggressive warmongering went unfulfilled. (p. 310)
But Irving's depiction of Nuremberg's negative impact on Jackson's career
is exaggerated. It does not seem to be based on secondary accounts of Jackson's
life, nor does Irving make a significant effort to prove his point. It is not
apparent that Jackson would have become chief justice: he had vehement and
influential enemies on the Supreme Court. It seems even less likely that he
would have become president, given the fact that the Supreme Court has never
been a springboard for the presidency. Moreover, Jackson (a Democrat) died in
1954, so he would have been able to run only in 1952, and Dwight Eisenhower was
a very formidable Republican opponent.
Irving's rather cavalier assumption that the Nuremberg Trial was a failure
also is unwarranted. It can be judged a failure only in the sense that it did
not accomplish the august goals of its original proponents. Most later
accounts, however, have portrayed it as at least a partial success, arguing
that the trial succeeded in punishing evildoers and, even more important, in
documenting the unparalleled crimes of Nazi Germany.[17]
Given the prevalence of those favorable accounts of Nuremberg, it would be
valuable to have a revisionist work that directly countered their arguments.
Irving's work does not even attempt such a refutation. A debate with other historians
is precluded by Irving's historical methodology, whereby he focuses almost
entirely on documentary rather than published secondary sources.[18] In many of his works, Irving's primary-source-oriented
methodology has enabled him to make use of unexploited materials. But it is of
limited success in the present book.
Irving does inject new material (or, at least, material adduced only by
revisionists) when dealing with the Holocaust and the Allies' treatment of
Germany. I regard that information as the book's greatest contribution.
However, Irving only briefly touches on those issues. (That this review has
given considerable attention to them is not indicative of the actual coverage
in the book.) Instead of focusing on those controversial subjects, Irving has
striven for inclusiveness. Much of his work rehashes information and issues
that have been covered at length by mainstream historians. And Irving does not
really present as clear a picture of those issues as do some other recent works
on the subject. Although Irving's Nuremberg is in many respects a
valuable work, it falls short of being what this reviewer would envision as an
ideal revisionist account of the subject.
Notes
[1]
The criminalizing of war to alter the status quo was ironic, since the
fundamental doctrine of Communist Russia was revolution against the status quo.
[2]
According to today's media, Saddam Hussein's possession of chemical and
biological weapons makes him the world's greatest monster.
[3]
Deborah E. Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and
Memory (New York: The Free Press, 1993), pp. 212-15\.
Although
seemingly contradicting the bulk of the evidence he has marshaled, Irving at
one point does identify with the orthodox view of unparalleled German evil when
he writes that "Hitler's soldiers committed crimes on a scale that
beggared all comparisons in history." (p. 54)
[4]
Irving writes with skepticism about the 6 million figure: "Given the
turmoils and tragedies of a war-torn Europe ravaged by bombs and plagues, it
was not a data basis on which a statistician would properly have relied. Where
were the shifting frontiers? Who, indeed, was a Jew? These were questions about
which cartographers, ethnographers, religious fanatics, and politicians are
still at each other's throats. Six million? By sad but extraordinary
coincidence, the American Jewish community had raised a similar outcry about a
'holocaust' a quarter of a century earlier, after World War One. In a 1919 speech
the governor of New York, Martin Glynn, had claimed that 'six million' Jews
were being exterminated." (p. 62)
[5]
For example, Joseph E. Persico, Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial (New York: Viking
Penguin, 1994) writes: "The one indisputable good to come out of the trial
is that, to any sentient person, it documented beyond question Nazi Germany's
crimes. To those old enough to remember personally the first horrifying film
images of piles of pallid corpses being bulldozed into mass graves, it is hard
to believe that this evidence of our eyes would ever be challenged." (p.
441)
[6]
Truth from the Soviet Marxist-Leninist perspective was simply that which
advanced the Soviets' own interests.
[7]
Irving does not mention this fact, but the OSS was riddled with Communists and
Communist sympathizers.
[8]
Irving discusses the testimony of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss at some
length (pp. 240-46), pointing out its contradictions and other discrepancies,
and the fact that Höss had undergone torture before initially providing such
information. (Höss provided an affidavit and was called upon to testify as a
defense witness for Kaltenbrunner.) Höss gave the most detailed account of the
gassing policy, and it usually features in overall accounts of Auschwitz..
Regarding the much-cited testimony of SS officer Dr. Wilhelm Höttl — that Adolf
Eichmann in August 1944 had told him of a report he had presented to Heinrich
Himmler documenting the killing of 6 million Jews — Irving points out that no
such German report ever surfaced. Moreover, Höttl gained release from American
confinement, despite his background in the murderous activities of the SS.
Irving implies that his testimony induced that favorable treatment. (pp.
236-38)
[9]
P. 91. Orthodox Holocaust historians focus on what they regard as code words
and euphemisms to prove the systematic extermination policy.
[10]
Establishment academia has considered partisanship as a rationale for rejecting
the validity of extensive eyewitness testimony in certain cases — e.g.,
Communist infiltration of the United States government during World War II and
the illegal actions of William Jefferson Clinton, especially in Arkansas. This
reviewer regards much of the evidence used at Nuremberg to be more tainted than
that dealing with the aforementioned subjects.
[11]
Of course, it is impossible to prove a negative — that some alleged event never
took place. The most that can be said is that one has no knowledge of it.
[12]
P. 168. The ideas that the German people were complicit in the crimes against
the Jews and that the Nazis went to extreme lengths to conceal their
extermination process would seem to be a major contradiction in Holocaust
orthodoxy. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's controversial Hitler's Willing
Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred E. Knopf,
1996) significantly revised the Holocaust story to emphasize the direct role of
ordinary Germans in the killing process.
[13]
Göring would have accepted execution by a firing squad, which he considered an
honorable death.
[14]
That does not mean that there was any possibility or desire to establish an
impartial court to objectively judge the activities of the belligerents of
World War II. It is understandable that the Allies would punish the leaders of
the defeated. Germany probably would have acted likewise.
[15]
Israel initiated war in 1956 and in 1967. By the Nuremberg standard, Israel
would be judged guilty of making aggressive war. Of course, standards applied
to other countries are generally not applied to Israel.
[16]
Irving writes: "It soon became clear that the O.S.S. had intended all
along to stage-manage the whole trial along the lines of an N.K.V.D.
show-trial, with Jackson little more than a professional actor." (p. 150)
The OSS, whose agents were skilled in propaganda, still played a significant
role in gathering information for the trial. Holocaust revisionist Arthur Butz
claims that the OSS played a major role in the creation of the "Holocaust
hoax." See The Hoax of the Twentieth Century (Torrance, Calif.: Institute
for Historical Review, 1976), pp. 93-94.
[17]
Among histories favorable to the Nuremberg Trial, in addition to Persico's,
are: Robert E. Conot, Justice at Nuremberg (New York: Harper & Row, 1983);
Airey Nave, On Trial at Nuremberg (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1978);
and Ann Tusa and John Tusa, The Nuremberg Trial (New York: McGraw-Hill Book
Company, 1983).
[18]
For example, in Hitler's War (New York: Viking Press, 1977, 1-vol. ed.), pp.
xxii, Irving writes: "I eschewed as far as possible all published
literature...."
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