War Glance
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In the fall of 1945, a bit more than six years after Nazi Germany invaded Poland and started the biggest and deadliest conflict in history, a largely self-taught lawyer from a tiny hamlet in the southwest corner of New York State set out to convict the surviving Nazi leadership of crimes “so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.”
In his roughly four-hour opening statement at the first Nuremberg trial, Robert H. Jackson, chief prosecutor for the United States, offered the first full public picture of how the Nazis had planned and carried out the many horrors that shock the world to this day, including the systematic murder of an estimated six million Jews.
The war in Europe had ended just six months earlier. But, as Jackson made clear to the International Military Tribunal, assembled to decide the fate of these higher-level Nazis, the Allies’ great victory would be incomplete without a legal reckoning suited to the scale of the offenses.
“The common sense of mankind demands that law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people,” he said, as 21 defendants, including Hermann Göring, commander in chief of the Luftwaffe, and Hans Frank, who had led the Nazi terror campaign in Poland, looked on from the dock.
“It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power and make deliberate and concerted use of it to set in motion evils which leave no home in the world untouched.” The veteran litigator told the French, British, Soviet and American judges hearing the case—and the grieving world—what was to come: “We will give you undeniable proofs of incredible events.”
On Monday, August 6, 1945, after six months of intense firebombing of 67 other Japanese cities, the United States dropped a nuclear weapon nicknamed "Little Boy" on the city of Hiroshima , Japan. This attack was followed on August 9 by the detonation of the "Fat Man" nuclear bomb over the Japanese city of Nagasaki. To date, these are the only attacks with nuclear weapons in the history of warfare.
