Eight decades ago, some of history’s greatest monsters were put on trial for “crimes against humanity.” The Nuremberg trials, in which hundreds of top Nazis faced an international military tribunal (IMT), began in November 1945. Holocaust survivors and World War II veterans are now passing from the scene. But tragically the lessons of Nuremberg are more relevant than ever.
A total of 199 defendants were tried, of whom 161 were convicted and 37 sentenced to death. In his opening remarks, Robert Jackson, the American Supreme Court Justice who served as the chief U.S. counsel, noted the gravity of the occasion:
“The wrongs which seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.”
It was, he said, a “grave responsibility” to ensure justice. Jackson hailed the magnanimity of the victorious Allied Powers. In its coverage, the New York Times was similarly triumphant, noting that the “men who cold-bloodedly plotted to conquer the world, and almost succeeded, now sit like common felons in the dock on trial for their lives.”
Nuremberg has since passed into legend. The tribunals have been the subject of numerous books and movies, including a recently released version starring Russell Crowe as Herman Goring, Hitler’s grotesque second-in-command. Nuremberg has become a byword for justice in the face of evil barbarism.
Yet it is a mistake to think Nuremberg was the reckoning that the Third Reich deserved. It wasn’t.
The overwhelming majority of Nazis escaped justice. And not a few—including some of the more prominent collaborators and officials—were aided in doing so by the Allied Powers themselves.
An estimated 99 percent of Nazis got away with their crimes—including long after Nuremberg. In 2018, Mary Fulbrook, a professor of German history at University College London, noted that of the approximately 140,000 alleged perpetrators brought to the courts in West Germany and united Germany only 6, 656 received convictions. “The vast majority,” she noted, “got away with it.” In the 1970s, it was revealed that no fewer than 10,000 Nazis had immigrated to the United States. This revelation came amidst films and novels like The Odessa File, The Boys from Brazil, Marathon Man, and others which depicted aging Nazis on the loose, many protected with government acquiescence. The truth was stranger—and darker—than fiction.
In 1979, spurred by outcry from members of U.S. Congress, the Department of Justice created the Office of Special Investigations (OSI), whose mission was to hunt down Nazi war criminals. A not insignificant number were caught and variously arrested, tried, and deported. Others have lost their citizenship or been barred from entering. The OSI has continued to do important work, often with scant resources and limited funding.
Yet the ugly fact remains: most Nazis did get away with it. And much of the world was indifferent. A cynic could charge that the Nuremberg Trials were but a passing fad. Most nations were content with letting the guilty go. Indeed, some actively welcomed them.
The Nazis famously established so-called “Rat Lines,” many of which led to Latin American nations like Argentina and Brazil. In the former, the government of Juan Peron practically laid out a “welcome mat,” providing refuge to infamous top Nazis like Klaus Barbie, Josef Mengele, and Adolf Eichmann, among many others. In a daring 1960 operation by the Mossad, Israel’s vaunted intelligence agency, Eichmann was captured in Argentina and sent to Jerusalem for trial.
But instead of being celebrated for capturing the man who helped engineer the “Final Solution,” the Israelis were condemned. The United Nations even introduced a resolution castigating the Jewish state for seizing the wanted Nazi war criminal that no one, apart from Israel, seemed particularly interested in finding. The New York Times lamented the “illegality” of Israel’s actions. Eichmann, of course, was famously tried in Jerusalem and sentenced to death. Many of his close associates found safe haven in the Middle East.
Amin al-Husseini, for example, was both the founding father of Palestinian Arab nationalism and a Nazi collaborator. As the historians Barry Rubin and Wolfgang Schwanitz noted, the State Department “considered the idea of trying al-Husseini as a war criminal at the Nuremberg trial,” and the CIA later produced dozens of reports on his involvement. But ultimately the U.S., Britain and France, elected not to do so. As Rubin and Schwanitz observed, “Western inaction was justified by political considerations.”
Husseini was given refuge in France, Egypt, and eventually Lebanon. The man who helped raise SS regiments and broadcast Nazi propaganda to the Arab world would spend the remaining three decades of his life waging war against Israel. He lived comfortably in luxurious villas, with bodyguards, chauffeurs, and his own chefs, while using Nazi funds and weapons against the Jewish state.
Many top Nazi apparatchiks, like Johann von Leers, Joachim Doemling, and Walter Rauff, among others, helped build the security services of Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and other Middle Eastern states. While an estimated 180 to 800 Nazis had escaped to Latin America, it is thought that more than four times that number went to the Middle East.
Nuremberg offers another troubling lesson for today. The Nazis couldn’t have perpetrated the Holocaust without collaborators. Indeed, it would have been logistically impossible to do so. From the Baltic states to Vichy France and beyond, average, everyday Europeans often complied with Nazi demands—some more enthusiastically than others.
As the world enters a new period of rising antisemitism, Nuremberg offers a haunting lesson. Indifference and collaboration made the Holocaust possible. One can’t be a bystander. As one survivor, Elie Wiesel, noted: “Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.” To pretend otherwise is to invite civilizational disaster.
