Volume 23, Number 21 & 22 · January 20, 1977
The Shadow of the Furies
By Harold Rosenberg
The Memory of Justice
directed by Marcel Ophuls
In Marcel Ophuls's The Memory of Justice, Stalin is quoted as having proposed shooting 50,000 top Nazis at the end of the war as a beginning of retaliation for their murder of millions. Historical accounts show that Roosevelt and Churchill had also been in favor of summary executions.[1] In time, however, legalistic reasoning prevailed, and a trial of twenty major Nazis lasting almost a year was conducted at Nuremberg. Ever since that four-nation tribunal was assembled, there have been disputes about whether justice was done by it, or whether the Nuremberg Trial was an act of revenge carried out by the victors against the vanquished. If Nuremberg was not an expression of justice, it has been taken to follow that the convicted Nazis were unfairly condemned, that given the pressures on Germany in the Thirties and the abnormalities of war their behavior was no worse than that of others would have been (as evidenced by the fire-bombing of Hamburg and Dresden by the Americans and British, the atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the slaughter of the Polish officers by the Russians), and that therefore they deserve sympathy and remorse.
Review, 3689 words
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