…Our Western concept of justice relies on the impartial administering of the law. Such justice is not possible when the judges are the political enemies of the accused, and when the accused are prosecuted for acts of war the Allies themselves had committed…. the defense had access only to those documents which the prosecution considered material to the case. The defense had no right to review the tons of remaining documents that might help them defend their clients… at the same time that more than 9.3 million Germans, mostly women and children, were being intentionally starved to death and subjected to mass rape…

The U.S.-led delegation employed more than 600 people, compared to 168 who worked for the British and less than half that number who worked for the French and Soviets combined… (Why? Was WWII fought predominantly on American soil?)



Southern Methodist University’s Nuremberg Attorneys

Southern Methodist University (SMU) proudly states that four of its former law professors served as prosecutors at the Nuremberg trials in Germany. SMU law professor Chris Jenks, who is the director of SMU’s Criminal Justice Clinic and an expert in the law of armed conflict, states:

“For SMU to have had only one professor involved in the Nuremberg Trials would be a badge of honor. But to have had four? That’s extraordinary.”[1]

This article will show that the participation of these four SMU law professors in the Nuremberg trials was not as honorable as many SMU professors think.

ROBERT G. STOREY

U.S. Army Col. Robert G. Storey joined SMU as dean of its law school in 1947. Storey set out to make SMU an international law center. Storey was the founder of the Center for American and International Law (CAIL), serving as president from 1947-1972. The current president of CAIL, Michael Marchand, writes:

“Dean Storey returned from Nuremberg realizing American lawyers didn’t know that much about international law. He also wanted to create a world that would never need another Nuremberg.”[2]

John Q. Barrett, a law professor at St. John’s University and board member of the Robert H. Jackson Center, writes:

“Based in Paris, Storey oversaw the collection of reams of evidence, which provided the smoking gun for the Trials—one in many ways that was led by the Americans.”

The U.S.-led delegation employed more than 600 people, compared to 168 who worked for the British and less than half that number who worked for the French and Soviets combined.[3]

U.S. attorney Drexel Sprecher wrote:

“Subject to Jackson’s supervision Colonel Storey was given executive responsibility for determining the order and manner of proof, for coordinating the work of the trial-counsel, and for resolving conflicts between counsel, the committees, and the sections. This was a gigantic assignment and Storey’s work brought him to the attention of the American legal profession. A few years after Nuremberg, Storey was elected president of the American Bar Association.”[4]

Storey wrote concerning his role in the original International Military Tribunal (IMT):

The trial of the major Axis war criminals at the end of World War II was the most significant criminal action in history. It was my honor to serve as the Executive Trial Counsel to Mr. Justice Jackson in that proceeding until completion of the presentation of the affirmative case… The purpose of the Nuremberg trial was not merely, or even principally, to convict the leaders of Nazi Germany and affix a punishment upon them commensurate with their guilt. Of far greater importance, it seemed to me from the outset, was the making of a record of the Hitler regime which would withstand the test of history.[5]

The IMT, however, has not withstood the test of history. Although it had an appearance of fairness in a courtroom setting, the IMT was organized for political purposes rather than to dispense impartial justice. The victorious Allies had control over the judges, prosecution, defense, and execution of the surviving German leaders. Our Western concept of justice relies on the impartial administering of the law. Such justice is not possible when the judges are the political enemies of the accused, and when the accused are prosecuted for acts of war the Allies themselves had committed.

The defendants at Nuremberg were rarely able to confront their accusers, since affidavits from witnesses who had been deposed months before sufficed. The prosecution made it difficult for the defense lawyers to have timely access to the documents introduced into evidence by the prosecution. Also, photocopies and transcripts were usually submitted into evidence instead of the original German documents, which in many cases had disappeared. Finally, the defense had access only to those documents which the prosecution considered material to the case. The defense had no right to review the tons of remaining documents that might help them defend their clients.[6]

A prime example of the unfairness of the IMT was the showing of horrific films of dead inmates in camps liberated by American and British troops without presenting medical evidence proving that most of these inmates died of natural causes. For example, American forensic pathologist Charles P. Larson performed hundreds of autopsies at Dachau and some of its sub-camps. Dr. Larson concluded from his autopsies that the vast majority of inmates at Dachau died of natural causes.[7]

Likewise, Dr. John E. Gordon, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of preventive medicine and epidemiology at the Harvard University School of Public Health, was with U.S. forces at the end of the war. Dr. Gordon determined that disease, and especially typhus, was the number one cause of death in the German camps liberated by American and British troops.[8]

Dr. Russell Barton, a physician who entered Bergen-Belsen with British forces as a young medical student, concluded from his investigation that the horrific scenes at Bergen-Belsen were attributable to extreme overcrowding and the collapse of the German economy at the end of the war.[9] None of the medical reports from these doctors was introduced into evidence at the IMT because they would have proved that most of the inmates in the German camps died from natural causes rather than from an extermination program. Such medical evidence is required to be submitted into evidence in a legitimate court of law.

Nevertheless, many defenders of the IMT maintain that the 42-volume Trial of the Major War Criminals (The Blue Series) supplies a massive compilation of damning evidence against Germany’s National Socialist regime. In his book Made in Russia: The Holocaust, Carlos Porter confronts the evidence directly by reproducing page after page from the Blue Series. Porter shows that many of the charges made at Nuremberg are so bizarre that most defenders of the so-called Holocaust have long since let them lapse. In addition to killing Jews in homicidal gas chambers, the Germans at Nuremberg were accused of:

building special electrical appliances to zap inmates to death with mass electrical shocks;

forcing prisoners to climb trees and then killing the prisoners by cutting down the trees;

killing 840,000 Russian prisoners at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp using a pedal-driven brain-bashing machine, and then burning the bodies in four mobile crematories;

torturing and executing people at the Yanov camp in Russia in time to music created by a special orchestra selected from among the prisoners, and then shooting every member of the orchestra;

grinding the bones of 200 people at one time as described in documents and photographs that have disappeared;

making lampshades, handbags, driving gloves, book bindings, saddles, house slippers, etc. out of human skin;

killing prisoners and concentration camp inmates for everything from having soiled underwear to having armpit hair; and

steaming people to death like lobsters in steam chambers at Treblinka.[10]

WHITNEY R. HARRIS

Whitney R. Harris was a U.S. Navy captain who led the prosecution case against Ernst Kaltenbrunner at the IMT. Harris taught law at SMU from 1948 to 1959 and was instrumental in helping to establish the International Criminal Court in 1998.[11]

Whitney Harris and other Americans interviewed Rudolf Höss, a former commandant at Auschwitz, multiple times during the first week of April 1946.[12] Harris was convinced that Höss’s testimony would be very damaging to Kaltenbrunner, but he could not get Höss’s testimony into evidence since the prosecution had rested its case. However, Kaltenbrunner’s defense attorney put Höss on the witness stand, allowing Höss’s testimony to be entered into the record at the IMT.[13]

Höss’s testimony at the IMT was the most important and striking evidence presented there of a German extermination program. Höss testfied that more than two and a half million people were exterminated in the Auschwitz gas chambers, and that another 500,000 inmates had died there of other causes.[14] No defender of the Holocaust story today accepts these inflated figures, and other key portions of Höss’s testimony at Nuremberg are widely acknowledged to be untrue.

In 1983 the anti-Nazi book Legions of Death by Rupert Butler showed that Sgt. Bernard Clarke and other British officers tortured Rudolf Höss into making his confession. The torture of Höss was exceptionally brutal. Neither Bernard Clarke nor Rupert Butler finds anything wrong or immoral in the torture of Höss. Neither of them seems to understand the importance of their revelations. Bernard Clarke and Rupert Butler prove that Höss’s testimony at Nuremberg was obtained by torture, and is therefore not credible evidence in proving a program of German genocide against European Jewry.[15]

Despite the evidence that Höss had been tortured by British officers, Whitney Harris stated in a 2001 interview that there was no question Höss’s testimony was entirely credible.[16] Harris also wrote concerning the IMT and later Nuremberg trials:

“That no general reprisals were taken against the German people at the end of the war is proof of the wisdom—and of the humanity—of utilizing the judicial process to determine war guilt.”[17]

Harris’s statement is incredibly ignorant. An estimated 1.5 million German POWs, 2.1 million German expellees, and 5.7 million German residents died needlessly after the war because of Allied policies. This is more German deaths than had occurred during the Second World War. Millions of these Germans slowly starved to death while the Allies withheld available food. The majority of these postwar dead Germans were women, children and very old men. Their deaths have never been honestly reported by the Allies, the German government, and most historians.[18]

WALTER W. BRUDNO

U.S. Army Private First Class Walter W. Brudno served as assistant trial counsel to present the case against Alfred Rosenberg and his role in the plunder of European art treasures and other alleged crimes. Drexel Sprecher wrote:

“Brudno’s appearance was especially noted in a number of newspapers. The Army newspaper Stars and Stripes carried a special article on him as ‘Man of the Week.’ ”[19]

Brudno was later an adjunct professor of law at SMU from 1965 to 1980.[20]

World War II historians correctly state that National Socialist Germany looted paintings, sculptures and other valuables from the nations it conquered.[21] However, Germany was not alone in practicing looting. All of the major Allied nations looted German art and other valuables after the war.

For example, many years after the war German art treasures turned up in the United States. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 also revealed the colossal and secret cache of art housed in the Trophy Museum in a Moscow suburb. This museum, which had never been opened to the public, was crammed to the ceiling with valuable art and other items that had been written off as missing. Most of the items in the Trophy Museum had never even been unpacked, let alone catalogued.[22]

Thus, as was typical of many of the charges at the IMT, Brudno was prosecuting Rosenberg for crimes similar to those committed by Allied nations after the war.

JAN P. CHARMATZ

Jan P. Charmatz, a native of Prague, Czechoslovakia, served as a trial attorney and associate prosecutor at the I.G. Farben trial at Nuremberg. Charmatz was a comparative law scholar and a law professor at SMU from 1958 to 1970.[23]

Charmatz said about the I.G. Farben trials:

“The Farben directors have 80 lawyers and hundreds of Farben employees working for them. We have 12 lawyers and less than 12 interrogators and investigators.”

He claimed that the prosecution attorneys and staff were overwhelmed.[24] Charmatz, however, failed to mention the limitations imposed on the defense team. For example, if the defense team had been allowed to conduct a forensic investigation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, it could have proved that there were no homicidal gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The most effective defense strategy in the I.G. Farben trial was the “defense of necessity.” This defense emphasized that so far-reaching was the Reich’s regulations and so stringent was their enforcement that refusal to comply exposed an industrialist to imprisonment and even death. In order to survive, the defendants had to obey even the most hideous demands of Hitler’s government; hence the phrase “defense of necessity.”[25]

Defense attorneys put forth an argument that was persuasive to the judges: “Replace IG by ICI for England, or DuPont for America, or Montecatini for Italy and at once the similarity will be clear to you.” The defendants were honest industrialists who had worked for their country’s defense—just as any patriotic American in a similar position would have done on behalf of the United States.[26]

Lead prosecuting attorney Josiah E. DuBois, Jr. wrote after the I.G. Farben trial,

“The sentences were light enough to please a chicken thief, or a driver who had irresponsibly run down a pedestrian.”[27]

The I.G. Farben defendants, however, were guilty of nothing more than helping defend Germany against Soviet Communism and overwhelming Allied forces. These I.G. Farben executives should never have been brought to trial in the first place.

CONCLUSION

SMU law professor Chris Jenks states:

“We’re proud of Dean Storey’s work, which we endeavor to continue through our scholarship, course offerings, amazing externships, trips and events. Ultimately, though, it’s our SMU students and graduates who, through their efforts in human rights and international criminal law, not only will continue Storey’s work, but also inspire the next generation of leaders.”[28]

Rick Halperin, the director of SMU’s Embrey Human Rights Program and a faculty member of SMU’s Department of History with an expertise in Holocaust studies, also praises the work of the four SMU law professors at Nuremberg.[29] Halperin states concerning Holocaust revisionism:

“It’s outrageous. It should be a crime itself. It is a moral abomination.”[30]

The Nuremberg trials, however, were a disgrace to our judicial system. Karly Zrake, a recent graduate of SMU’s Embrey Human Rights Program, describes her takeaway from a trip exploring Native Americans’ human rights struggles:

“That the victor writes history, making it our duty as human rights advocates to share the other side.”[31]

Hopefully, SMU graduates will realize that World War II history was written by the Allies, making it the duty of human rights advocates to share the German side of the war.

ENDNOTES

[1] http://blog.smu.edu/overheard/2016/10/29/the-rest-of-the-storey-smus-ties-to-nuremberg-trials-more/.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Sprecher, Drexel A., Inside the Nuremberg Trial: A Prosecutor’s Comprehensive Account, Vol. 1, Lanham, MD: University Press of America, Inc., 1999, p. 91.

[5] Harris, Whitney R., Tyranny on Trial: The Trial of the Major German War Criminals at the End of World War II at Nuremberg, Germany, revised edition, Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 1999, p. xi.

[6] Porter, Carlos Whitlock, Made in Russia: The Holocaust, Historical Review Press, 1988.

[7] McCallum, John Dennis, Crime Doctor, Mercer Island, WA: The Writing Works, Inc., 1978, pp. 60-61.

[8] Gordon, John E., “Louse-Borne Typhus Fever in the European Theater of Operations, U.S. Army, 1945,” in Moulton, Forest Ray, (ed.), Rickettsial Diseases of Man, Washington, D.C.: American Academy for the Advancement of Science, 1948, pp. 16-27. Quoted in Berg, Friedrich P., “Typhus and the Jews,” The Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1988-89, pp. 444-447, and in Butz, Robert, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, Newport Beach, CA: Institute for Historical Review, 1993, pp. 46-47.

[9] Kulaszka, Barbara, (ed.), Did Six Million Really Die: Report of Evidence in the Canadian “False News” Trial of Ernst Zündel, Toronto: Samisdat Publishers Ltd., 1992, pp. 175-176.

[10] Porter, Carlos Whitlock, Made in Russia: The Holocaust, Historical Review Press, 1988.

[11] https://www.smu.edu/News/2016/nuremberg-trials-anniversary-24oct2016.

[12] Mattogno, Carlo, Commandant of Auschwitz: Rudolf Höss, His Torture and His Forced Confessions, Uckfield, UK, 2017, pp. 37-69.

[13] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hq2uwzfstv8.

[14] Taylor, Telford, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992, p. 363.

[15] Faurisson, Robert, “How the British Obtained the Confessions of Rudolf Höss,” The Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 7, No. 4, Winter 1986-87, pp. 392-399.

[16] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hq2uwzfstv8.

[17] Harris, Whitney R., Tyranny on Trial: The Trial of the Major German War Criminals at the End of World War II at Nuremberg, Germany, revised edition, Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 1999, p. 497.

[18] Bacque, James, Crimes and Mercies: The Fate of German Civilians under Allied Occupation, 1944-1950, 2nd edition, Vancouver, British Columbia: Talonbooks, 2007, p. 124.

[19] Sprecher, Drexel A., Inside the Nuremberg Trial: A Prosecutor’s Comprehensive Account, Vol. 1, Lanham, MD: University Press of America, Inc., 1999, p. 497.

[20] https://www.smu.edu/News/2016/nuremberg-trials-anniversary-24oct2016.

[21] Davies, Norman, No Simple Victory: World War II in Europe, 1939-1945, New York: Viking Penguin, 2006, p. 342.

[22] Ibid., p. 343.

[23] https://www.smu.edu/News/2016/nuremberg-trials-anniversary-24oct2016.

[24] DuBois, Josiah E., The Devil’s Chemists, Boston: The Beacon Press, 1952, pp. 34, 48.

[25] Borkin, Joseph, The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben, New York: The Free Press, 1978, pp. 148.

[26] Jeffreys, Diarmuid, Hell’s Cartel: IG Farben and the Making of Hitler’s War Machine, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008, p. 395.

[27] DuBois, Josiah E., The Devil’s Chemists, Boston: The Beacon Press, 1952, p. 339.

[28] http://blog.smu.edu/overheard/2016/10/29/the-rest-of-the-storey-smus-ties-to-nuremberg-trials-more/.

[29] https://www.smu.edu/News/2016/nuremberg-trials-anniversary-24oct2016.

[30] “Students’ Artwork Conveys the Horror of the Holocaust”, The Dallas Morning News, January 28, 2007, Metro Section, p. 1B.

[31] https://blog.smu.edu/stories/karly-zrake/?alias=mag18zrake.