Christopher Hitchens
No Cause to be Proud of our Victor’s Justice
Nuremberg: The Last Battle
By David Irving
Focal Point 400pp £20
The title of David Irving’s latest volume is well chosen. The Nuremberg trials were indeed the last engagement between the Third Reich and the four principal Allies. They were also the first engagement between those four Allies on many of the points that would later be subsumed under the heading ‘Cold War’. And they constituted, in more than one way, an act of war, without which they would have had no real justification. Since Irving is the principal revisionist historian of the Second World War, and has entered numerous dissents about its motives and its conduct, his oeuvre would be incomplete without a second look at the grandest moral effort of the victors.
‘Military justice’, remarked Georges Clemenceau on another occasion, ‘is to justice what military music is to music.’ (I think he was referring to the Dreyfus case – an episode not yet visited by Irving.) The full name of the Nuremberg court was ‘The International Military Tribunal’, and much of its character and proceeding can be deduced from that fact alone. Since it had to conduct a trial on at least two charges – war crime and conspiracy to wage aggressive war – that were new to jurisprudence, it is hardly surprising that many of the proceedings looked and felt as if they had been designed by a wartime bureaucracy.
But, as Irving begins by pointing out, there was nearly no hearing at all. Many of the Allied leaders wanted to kill the Nazi High Command out of hand, or to have them proclaimed fair game to anybody who apprehended them. At different times, Churchill and Roosevelt both espoused this
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
Are iPhones ruining children's lives? A prominent American psychologist thinks so.
@tiffanyjenkins is not so sure:
Tiffany Jenkins - The Smartphone Pandemic
Tiffany Jenkins: The Smartphone Pandemic - The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an...
literaryreview.co.uk
India's 'festival of democracy', or general election, begins next month. Like every good festival, it looks likely to have its fair share of murders and arrests.
@OwenBennettJon probes the state of democracy in India:
Owen Bennett-Jones - New Delhi Confidential
Owen Bennett-Jones: New Delhi Confidential - The Incarcerations: BK-16 and the Search for Democracy in India by Alpa Shah
literaryreview.co.uk
Where is the world's newest narcostate and why is it thriving?
@AdamBrookesWord investigates Asia's meth mecca.
Adam Brookes - Meth Comes to Myanmar
Adam Brookes: Meth Comes to Myanmar - Narcotopia: In Search of the Asian Drug Cartel That Outwitted the CIA by Patrick Winn
literaryreview.co.uk