The Nuremburg Trial Were a ?Farce of Justice? Staged for the Benefit of the Jews.
Another piece of denier propaganda attacks the legal validity of the postwar Nuremburg Trials, where much of the Holocaust information first became public, and where the general history of the genocide was first established. The process of bringing Nazi war criminals to justice was a lengthy and complicated effort involving the different legal traditions and policies of the United States, England, France and the Soviet union. As the historical record shows, the allied victors, if anything, failed on the side of leniency toward the accused Nazis. Discussions concerning allied treatment of war criminals had begun as early as October 1943. In the summer months following Germany?s surrender in 1945, British, American, and Soviet representatives met in London to create the charter for an international milirary tribunal to prosecute ?major criminals? whose whose offenses extended over the entire Reich, and who therefore could be punished by the joint decision of the Governments of the Allies. By early fall, the Allies had decided who to prosecute and how to define the crimes committed during the Holocaust; the first trials began in Nuremburg, before an international military court. The chief defendant was Hermann Goering, but the prosecution also selected other leading officials from the Nazi party, German government ministries, central bereaucracy, armament and labor specialists, the military and territorial chiefs. These trials did not result in either guilty verdicts or identical sentences. In fact, of the 21 defentdants, three were set free, one received a 10-year sentence, one a 15-year sentence, two 20-year sentences, three life sentences, and 11 received the death penalty. The defendants, moreover, had access to 206 attorneys, 136 of whom had been Nazi party members. As Raul Hilberg stated, ?The judges in Nuremburg were established American lawyers. They had not come to exonerate or convict. They were impressed with their task, and they approached it with much experience in the law and little anticipation of the facts.?
These five major claims of the deniers are easily refuted by current evidence. France, Belgium and Germany among other countries have laws that make denial of the Holocaust a criminal offense. The reason why we feel the need to remind the world of the Holocaust is exactly the same reason why it has become easy to deny it- the perpetrators have gotten away with it. Hardly any punishment was meted out to the German officials who carried out the extermination of European Jewry. Their defense has been that they were ?obeying superior orders, otherwise their lives would have been in danger.? To legislate against Holocaust denial in the face of freedom of speech is an uphill task and would hardly be adequate. Another objective in keeping the memorial fot he Holocaust alive is to ?prevent it from happening again.? This is a joke. As one diplomat put it recently: ?I can guarantee that the Holocaust will not happen again. Not enough Jews are left in Europe anyway.? The correct attitude to the Holocaust should be that it is not too late to deal out proper punishment to thosw who are in fact our enemies. Our enemies only those who deny that the Holocaust took place, and all who say that Hitler was right to kill the Jews. Denying the Holocaust is denying a historical truth- it is like saying that despite the discoveries, documentation and overwhelming proof, the world is still flat. Deniers and Holocaust supporters must be regarded as if he had taken part in the Holocaust himself. If these deniers could be made to experience the loss of six million people themselves, they would no longer claim that the Holocaust did not take place. Seeking to punish the deniers through the courts would give them platform to propagate their criminal ideas. The unanswered questions regarding this time outnumber those for which we have answers. The denial of the Holocaust has been one of the most notable propaganda movements to develop over the past two decades. It is time to end this propaganda movement. Although it is obvious that the above facts will not dissuade staunch deniers, it hopefully will provide a platform on which any of it?s readers can stand, refuting the arguments of the Holocaust deniers with cold facts.