The End of the War Crimes Commission

excerpted from the book

The Splendid Blond Beast

by Christopher Simpson

Common Courage Press, 1995

Originally, a second international trial at Nuremberg was to focus primarily on the activities of German finance and industry during the Third Reich. The "industrialists trial," as it was called at the time, was widely regarded as of equal importance to the prosecution of the Nazi and SS high command. Hermann Abs and other major bankers were important targets, at least judging from the recommendations made by U.S. war crimes investigators at the time.

But Justice Jackson vetoed this plan, declaring in the autumn of 1945 that the United States would refuse to participate in any further international trials of German defendants and would instead hold separate prosecutions on its own. These trials became the "Subsequent Proceedings" organized under the leadership of General Telford Taylor.

... Taylor's three U.S. trials of [of German] industrialists lasted slightly more than a year altogether, resulting in nineteen convictions and fourteen acquittals. The U.S. judges tended to be hostile to the prosecution, particularly in the Friedrich Flick case. The court "was apparently unable to feel that offenses by industrialists fell into as severe a category as when committed by a common man," as noted legal historian John Alan Appleman put it.

Flick's successful defense depended directly on the social dynamics of international law and of genocide. Flick beat all but one of the slave labor and plunder charges, because three prominent U.S. judges concluded that the director and owner of a corporation should not be held accountable for slavery and looting by his companies, unless the prosecution could prove that he personally ordered each particular crime to be carried out. Without proof of that type, every bit of ambiguous evidence had to be interpreted by the court in favor of the individual defendants, namely Flick and his circle of executives.

Worse, the Flick case established a legal precedent for a corporate defense of "necessity"-a close cousin to the defense of acting under orders-that went beyond even what Flick had argued on his own behalf and that contradicted many aspects of the earlier ruling on this issue by the International Military Tribunal. Amazingly, the legal precedent left by this series of trials seems to be that a nineteen-year-old draftee accused of war crimes cannot successfully plead that he was acting under orders, but the owners and directors of multi-billion-dollar companies can.

The U.S. government cut off funding for the prosecution staff at Nuremberg in mid-l948, bringing the Subsequent Proceedings to an abrupt end. The staff abandoned pending investigations and potential prosecutions, sometimes with little more than a note to the files indicating the case had been closed. Less than two and a half years after that, the new U.S. high commissioner for Germany, John McCloy, granted clemency to every single industrialist who had been convicted at Nuremberg.

Splendid Blond Beast

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