Issue of the French weekly Europe-Amérique, dated May 30, 1953. Its headline: “Les vaincus au poteau!” – “The defeated to the gallows!” At its opening, a central article attacking the manner in which the Nuremberg Trials were conducted and defending the Nazi war criminals, written by the German Holocaust denier Ernst Heinmann.
At the opening of the issue appears a lengthy article published at the time against the backdrop of the release of some of the Nuremberg defendants who had completed their sentences. In his remarks, Heinmann criticizes the manner in which the Nuremberg Trials were conducted and portrays the greatest criminals in human history as judicial victims of a conspiracy orchestrated by the Allies. “These war crimes trials, those held in Nuremberg, were not primarily the result of the fact that the Germans started the war, but of the fact that they lost it.” His central claim in the nine-page article is that the Nuremberg Tribunal invented legal charges and principles that had no universal legal validity, with the aim of settling scores with its vanquished enemies. “Was this court truly authorized to judge ‘crimes against peace, ‘ ‘war crimes, ‘ and ‘crimes against humanity’ as defined by the Charter of the Tribunal established by the representatives of the Big Four? Or was it a court of victors, merely seeking to create a semblance of legality?” He argues that the Tribunal invented laws with no precedent, solely to fit the conclusion it had already predetermined: “The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg was established by an agreement signed in London on August 8, 1945, between the United States, France, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union. Attached to this agreement was the ‘Charter of the Tribunal, ‘ which defined the composition of the court, its procedures and legal doctrine, as well as the list of acts that would be deemed criminal… It thus became apparent that certain actions, previously unmentioned in any international legal texts, were now considered criminal. The defendant would have to answer for these acts as such, even though it had never previously been stated anywhere that they were subject to condemnation.” Against the principles that guided the Nuremberg Tribunal, Heinmann invokes the international legal principle that “no one can be convicted for acts that were not punishable before the law was published.” He continues by quoting the words of American judge Charles Wenstrom, who stated: “No victorious nation should have the right to determine the guilt of citizens of the ‘defeated’ nation in war.”
If there had been any room to assume that Heinmann sought merely to raise legal-judicial concerns, the second part of the article leaves no doubt: he goes so far as to praise the Nazi war criminals for their conduct in court. Thus he writes: “Hermann Göring maintained a mocking tone throughout the trial. After being defeated on the military front, he emerged victorious ideologically. He knew full well that deep down, the Nuremberg judges supported him. After all, they had submitted to the law of the strong — one of the principles he held most dear!” And he adds: “In short, nearly everyone today agrees that the Nuremberg Trials were a mistake. Except, of course, for those who have turned the exploitation of Nazi atrocities into a profession, or a tool in the service of national interest. It was more than a mistake, it was a wicked farce… The concentration camps in the Soviet Union even surpassed the worst camps of the Nazi regime!”
Ernst goes on to raise the absurd claim that compares the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps to “the methods used by American investigators to extract confessions from senior SS members who had fallen into their hands.” He alleges that the defendants were subjected to severe abuse while held by the Allies in the Nuremberg prison. Next to a photograph of prosecutor Jackson that appears in the article, the caption reads: “Pictured is Prosecutor Jackson, the inventor of crimes against humanity”, and elsewhere in the article he refers to him as “the inventor of crimes against peace.”
It is astonishing to see how, relatively soon after the war’s end, the denial machine was already in full operation, diminishing the magnitude of the Nazi monsters’ crimes. We note that this item is being offered for educational purposes – it is important to preserve such issues, which prove that Holocaust denial and the minimization of the defendants’ responsibility began to emerge immediately after the war. What we have before us is a vile example of that.
31 pages. Light stain on the cover. Good condition.
