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Author : Verrall Richard (Harwood Richard E.)
Title : Nuremberg and other war crimes trials A new look Historical Fact No. 2
Year : 1978

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Introduction. The execution in 1976 of British and American mercenaries in Angola for 'war crimes' has brought back to public attention this peculiar and disturbing subject. During the Angolan trial, the judges intervened at several points to restrain the defence counsel from putting its case too well. The court could not tolerate any evidence which might help the accused criminals, they said. The British press whined hypocritically about this travesty of justice. Yet the simple-minded Angolans were only doing as their European mentors had taught them: the Angolan trial was virtually a carbon-copy of the International Military Tribunal at Niirnberg in 1946. All the ingredients were there: the pretence of justice, the restrictions on the defence, the presumption of guilt · before the trial had even started, the supervision of an international tribunal, the hysterical accusations of prosecution witnesses etc., etc. It is easy for the press to complain about the standards of 'justice' in a backward and far-off land in darkest Africa. But it is not so easy for them to criticise a series of trials for which we were responsible, at least in part, and which have gone down in history and subsequent protocol agreements, as legal precedent. We are subject to no such restrictions. In this short volume, we hope to examine as thoroughly and objectively as possible the vexed subject of the trials at Niirnberg, and in so doing make some contribution to a rational understanding of this aspect of recent history which has, along with other events, been grotesquely twisted by the enemies of truth. One such example is the allegation that six million Jews were gassed as part of an official extermination programme on the part of the German government of the Hitler era and which formed one of the major charges against the Nazi leaders at Nürnberg. ...