Nuremburg Trials
The Decisions of Dr. Michael A. Musmanno
By Yale F. Edeiken
Introduction:
". . . . There should be one document sufficiently
comprehensive to which the legal profession and the lay public, now and in
the future, can turn for an authoritative account on concentration camps.
They should not be required to read through thousands of pages of transcript
and scan tons of documents to obtain an adequate picture of this supreme
crime against humanity through he ages. . . . thus, this concurring opinion
is being filed so that there will be readily available a longer discussion
for those desiring a more detailed account of the facts which brought about
the judgment." - Justice M. Musmanno, 5 Green Series 1067-8
As part of its on-going process of making the documentary history of the
crimes of the Third Reich available on the internet, The Holocaust History
Project presents the decisions of Dr. Michael A. Musmanno, Justice of the
Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, who sat as one of the judges on the
Nuremberg Military Tribunal. We
consider them important documents which not only set forth the evidence
available at the end of World War II but also demonstrates what
contemporaries thought of those crimes and their perpetrators.
When the United States entered World War II, Justice Musmanno was a Judge
of the Court of Common Pleas in Allegheny County (Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania
and, as such, exempt from military service. He went anyway.
Justice Musmanno served in the U.S. Navy where he saw action both at sea
and land following a code of honor unknown the defendants in his courtroom.
He received the Distinguished Service Cross for leading to safety enemy
civilians accidently caught in an artillery barrage. When the ear ended, he
was appointed to serve on the Nuremberg Military Tribunals which were trying
the Nazis accused of war crimes. Justice Musmanno served as a judge at two
trials (Case No. 2 and Case No. 4) and was the presiding judge at a third
trial concerning the murders of the einsatzgruppen (Case No. 9). All of
these cases dealt with the perpetrators of the worst of the crimes against
humanity perpetrated in the name of the Third Reich.
Historians have been able to gather much more evidence than was available
to Justice Musmanno at the trials. What they cannot do, however, is view
those crimes and those perpetrators with the eyes of a contemporary. The
filters of time and knowledge provide a far different perspective than the
spectacle paraded before his bench. He had witnessed the unrelenting
brutality of modern war. His court was located amid the piles of rubble of
a destroyed city in the center of a devastated continent. Justice Musmanno
saw the tortured bodies of the victims before they had an opportunity to
heal; he inspected the twisted souls of the perpetrators before they had a
chance to erect protective barriers. He peered into the darkness and saw
the eyes of evil unrepentant staring back at him. He did not flinch.
Justice Musmmano was shocked and disgusted and angered by the horrors of
the crimes of the Third Reich. He was learned; he was eloquent; he was
passionate; he was just. And in the decisions he wrote after each trial,
Justice Musmanno wielded those qualities to describe that evil just as an
infantryman uses his rifle and his bayonet. Throughout his service Justice
Musmanno retained his moral compass and his commitment to justice. He
wrote these decisions not for vengeance but from a devotion to the rule of
law and the certain knowledge that the history of freedom is written in
blood:
"America and her Allies bestowed upon Germany what
no desire can achieve and what no money can buy. The Allied nations gave the
blood of their youth to water the roots of the tree of liberty and tolerance
which had withered in the twelve-year drought of National Socialism. It is
to reveal who were responsible and what was responsible for the desiccation
of that tree and to proclaim to the world the inevitable consequences to
others who degrade the soil with the pollution and prussic acid of
oppression that these trials have been established. The present trial is one
chapter in the book which will forever condemn Mein Kampf and offer to the
new German nation a volume of proved fact, whose every page will tell of the
sorrow awaiting any people which permit any man or men to hoist deceit above
truth, power above justice, oppression above tolerance, war above peace and
man above God." - 2 Green Series 859
After the war Justice Musmanno was elected to the Pennsylvania on which he
served unitl his death. Justce Musmanno was known as a spokesman for the
common man and a defender of his rights. In 1961 he appeared as witness in
the trial of Adolf Eichmann.
1. Case No.2: US v. Milch
(Slave labor)
2. Case No.4: US v. Pohl et al.
(concentration camps)
3. Case No. 9: US v. Ohlendorf et al.
(einsatzgruppen)
available on The Einsatgruppen Page
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