Recently, the British newspaper The Guardian published an article "Britain did not want Nuremberg", dedicated to the famous trial.
As you know, at the Nuremberg trials (20.11.45. - 1.10.46.) The International Tribunal considered the accusation of 24 top leaders of Nazi Germany of crimes against peace, planning and waging an aggressive war, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Among the accused were not A. Hitler, the head of the SS G. Himmler and the head of propaganda J. Goebbels, who committed suicide. Party secretary M. Bormann was tried in absentia - his remains were discovered in Berlin many years later.
According to Ian Cobain, the author of an article in a British newspaper, only recently were the notes of the head of British counterintelligence MI5 Guy Liddell declassified from which, they say, it became known that Britain was against Nuremberg, and wanted to execute a number of war criminals without trial, and send others to prison.
“The Attorney General insisted that the Commission of Inquiry decide that certain people should be executed, and the rest should be sent to prison for different periods, that this proposal should be submitted to the House of Commons and that some military body should be given powers to find and arrest these people, as well as to carry out the sentence. It was a much smarter proposal and would not damage the law's reputation in any way.”
“Winston put forward this proposal in Yalta, but Roosevelt thought that the Americans might demand a trial. Joseph supported Roosevelt, frankly stating that Russians liked public trials for propaganda purposes. (It is clear that we are talking about a conference of the heads of the three great powers in Yalta - V. R.'s note). It seems to me that we are sinking to the level of parodies of justice, characteristic of the USSR for the last 20 years."
In July 1946, Liddell flew to Nuremberg to oversee the trial of 21 Nazi leaders, including G. Goering and A. Speer.
Although currently, Cobain continues, the Nuremberg Trials are considered a defining moment in international law, providing the basis upon which to be held accountable for war crimes, Liddell considered it "unwise to prosecute Nazis for unleashing an aggressive war."
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"It is impossible to shake off the feeling … that a dangerous precedent is being set now," he wrote.
The fact that Great Britain, and certain circles in the United States, were against litigation has been known in Russia since the days of the USSR.
Yes, it was a process of victors, without which, according to I. Stalin, it was impossible to do without, so that in the future it would not occur to anyone to attack the Soviet Union and, all the more, to unleash a world war. But Liddell is silent about the reasons why Britain and the United States were against the trial.
Few people know that our allies agreed to a trial subject to certain conditions.
After all, the whole world knew about N. Chamberlain's Munich agreement with Hitler, knew how the West supported the development of the German military-industrial complex, etc.
The entire pre-war policy of the leading Western countries was aimed at strengthening Nazi Germany and pushing it to attack the Soviet Union. Here are the discussion of these issues, the investigation of the reasons that led to the war, and the two victorious countries tried to avoid.
The British government was the last to agree to the trial in May 1945, but was the first to put forward a stringent demand for drastic restrictions on freedom of speech for the defendants at the Nuremberg Tribunal. It feared "charges against British policy, regardless of which section of the indictment they arise under." This was stated in the English memorandum of November 9, 1945.
The American representative at the trial Jackson said bluntly: "I believe that this process, if discussions about the political and economic reasons for the outbreak of war are allowed, could bring incalculable harm to both Europe … and America."
What incalculable harm to Europe and America did Jackson talk about ?!
The role of the West in inciting World War II was described in his notes by W. Churchill: “In history, which, as they say, is mainly a list of crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind, after the most careful searches, we are unlikely to find anything like such a sudden and a complete abandonment of the five or six year policy of complacent appeasement and its transformation almost instantly into a willingness to go to an obviously inevitable war in much worse conditions and on the largest scale."
That is, Churchill directly indicated what Great Britain was doing before the war, and when Hitler "changed" his obligations to fight Bolshevism in the first place, Great Britain had to enter the war in "much worse conditions." The royal family of Great Britain was also seriously involved in the outbreak of the Second World War.
Immediately after the end of the war, on the personal instructions of King George VI, British intelligence urgently carried out an operation to secretly remove from the German archives a large number of documents discrediting Great Britain.
Everything related to the royal family was seized in another special operation of British intelligence, which was carried out by Anthony Blunt, who was part of the famous "Cambridge Five" of Soviet foreign intelligence.
He stole documents affecting the honor and dignity, as well as the international prestige of the British crown from Holland, through which Hitler's illegal channel of communication with the British crown ran.
Summing up, we can say that Britain really was against Nuremberg.
But you just need to remember more often the reasons why she was against it, and remind not only the Britons of them, but the whole of Europe.
Sergey Filatov