314. What Was The Nuremberg Trial?

After the terrible things that happened in WWII, the Nazis were put on trial for their crimes against humanity.

Here’s a transcript of our conversation:

Connor: Hey, Brittany.

Brittany: Hi, Connor.

Connor: It’s been a while since we talked about World War II, but I wanna pick up where we left off and I wanna talk more about the end of the war. After, you know, the war ended, there were the allied forces that included the United States, Great Britain and Russia, and others. And, they held a series of what were called military tribunals or trials like in court to hold the Nazis accountable for what was done. And, you know, this is interesting because they were using international law and the laws of war as kind of the justification for how, cuz it wasn’t that, you know, that they were, doing the trial in America or in the UK or in Russia. This was kind of an international thing. So it’s kind of interesting, this concept of international law and what that actually means. These are just kind of like general rules and standards that are kind of agreed upon. It’s not like there’s like a global government necessarily that is coming up with these, laws. And so these trials were, I think, more notable because the Nazis who were being tried, or in other words prosecuted, they were being charged with crimes. These were prominent, members of the Nazi party, you know, in the political side, in the military, judges, even on the economic side, people were, who were helping, fund them. And they’re often called the Nuremberg Trials because they were held in Nuremberg, Germany. And what’s interesting about these trials is it really was this kind of point where there was a difference between kind of the national law, and traditional kind of prosecution people to really this idea of international law and international tribunals and, you know, even kinda United Nations and all this stuff, really growing from this kind of international effort. So Brittany, let me throw it to you. Why don’t you kinda at a broad brush, share a little bit about, what we saw happen in these trials, and then we can tear it down a little bit and help our listeners understand?

Brittany: Yeah, to me, well, first I have a question and then I will answer that. I just realized, and I’ve never thought about this before, Germany was the only country, the access, you know, powers that was actually involved in this. Am I wrong?

Connor: Involved in terms of?

Brittany: In The Nuremberg trials? Cause I don’t, you never hear of like similar something happening with Italy or with Japan. But maybe I’m wrong about this. Maybe I have this mistaken.

Connor: I don’t know the answer to that question and so we’ll let the listeners

Brittany: It’s homework assignments.

Connor: Get some homework. Yeah. Figure out. So let me, lemme be clear. Brittany, your question is, of all the people who were tried or or charged with crimes, in the Nuremberg trials, you’re saying, were they all Nazis from Germany? Yes. Or were there people from other countries? Right?

Brittany: Yes, so, and I think it is just Nazis. But anyway, interesting thing to discuss and maybe you know, why other people weren’t there, but, so to get to your question, Connor, so one of the most important things to come out of this, trial in my opinion, is this belief that I was just following orders is not an excuse. And I have a lot of thoughts on this and this situation particularly is so hard because I know that we have this today and we talk about police officers and when they abuse their power, even TSA agents, I know I’ve had a hard time cause you wanna yell at them and some people will say they’re just doing their jobs and then you kind of wonder, but yeah, they volunteered to do that job. Right. The thing that I think is different about this is that these people did not all volunteer to do this job. And that is where I get, I have to, you know, sit, and I get torn on this a little bit because, you know, young children were put into what was called Hitler youth, or the men were, the girls were put into a program where they learned to be good future mothers and good future housekeepers. but the men were put into Hitler Youth and you didn’t really have a choice. You went to this and you got trained to be a, you know, future Nazi or, I believe your parents could be jailed cuz usually, you know, it was your parents telling you not to go. So it wasn’t really an option. Now I say that and there I also wanna say that there is always an option, right? We’ve talked about the white rose a lot. Yes. And that’s the story. I know our listeners really enjoyed hearing. Now they would’ve gotten in trouble or they did get in trouble if they spoke out too, but they chose to anyway. So let, I want you to kind of keep those two things in mind as I’m kind of discussing my thoughts with you on if this is a good thing or a bad thing. So I do feel for the young, I guess the soldiers, Nazi soldiers who maybe didn’t fully agree with it, but they didn’t feel like they had a choice. There’ve also been some really interesting studies where psychologists tried to determine how easy it is for someone to go along with doing something they know is evil. And there have been a couple, there was one where like somebody had to push a button and they couldn’t see who was on the other side of a cream.

Connor: Oh yeah. Let me talk about that in a minute. I wanna talk about this.

Brittany: Yeah, You want, okay, I won’t spoil it, I’ll let you actually, why don’t you go ahead and talk about it now? I think this is a good place to put it in.

Connor: So, well, it requires a little bit of a backdrop. So in the Nuremberg trials, there’s all these prominent, Nazis and I mean, let’s remember what happened, right? I mean, like around 50 million lives in Europe alone, as a result of, you know, World War II and what the Nazis really triggered and, just massive death and destruction. And so through the Nuremberg Trials, there were a lot of the kind of top leaders who were, being prosecuted. And look, they weren’t finding every single Nazi soldier and putting them through this trial. So to your point, Brittany.

Brittany: That’s the big guys, right?

Connor: Yeah, to your point, you know, the soldiers following orders down at the low end were not really involved here.

Brittany: That’s the point.

Connor: These were the people, that’s the point who largely sought out positions of power, who sought out promotions, who were giving orders, and sure even if they were themselves receiving orders from, you know, Adolf Hitler, they were also directly responsible for then, you know, giving others those orders. And so there were a lot of people like that. And one of those individuals was a gentleman named Adolf Eichman, and he was really heavily involved in the Holocaust. He was over the logistics, which means kind of like how to do things for deporting millions of Jewish men, women, and children to the ghettos and to the extermination camps. In other words, he was overseeing all of that happening. And after the war, he was able to flee Germany using some false papers to Argentina. And he was later kidnapped, by Israeli agents in 1960. So that’s an important timeline because the Nuremberg trials were all in, like 1945, 1946, right after the war. But there were other people responsible who had escaped like this guy Adolf Eichman. And so the Nuremberg Trials were not able to, hold everyone accountable who they wanted to because they then had to hunt some of these people down. So you had the Israeli military and police who would basically go across the world, like through spying work, and try and track these people down like Adolf Eichman. And so they found him in Argentina in 1960. They brought him back to Israel. He was charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity. They televised his trials. So this is like 15 years after the Nuremberg trials. And they televised it in large part because they wanted to educate the public about the crimes committed against the Jews. It had been 15 years, right? Israel wanted to kind of remind the public and whatever. So they broadcast this. Well, there was an individual who watched that trial. His name was Stanley Milgram, and he was a professor at Yale, a university, in the United States. And so he was wondering if Eichman was right or wrong because he used the same defense, Brittany, that you’ve pointed out, that many of the other people used at the Nuremberg trials, that he was just following orders. And you know, this guy Stanley, he wanted to understand if that could explain why many of the Nazis and German people more broadly went along with what they were told to do. So just three months after Eichmann’s trial began, this Stanley guy launched an experiment. And the way it worked in the experiment is that individuals were brought into a room by someone in like a lab coat, like a, you know, looked like a doctor or whatever. And they were instructed to perform a series of tasks. There was a little machine, and each button on the machine would administer a shock to the person on the other side of the room. Okay? And the individual could not see the other person. There was a wall between them, but he could hear, he or she could hear, right? And so the individual in charge of the experiment would tell the other person, you need to do the first shock. And he has a little clipboard and he is, you know, taking notes or whatever. And so the person in this experiment doesn’t know that this is actually pretend and doesn’t know that the actual, person on the other side of the wall is not actually hooked up to the shocks, but he goes ahead and pushes the first button. A minor shock is administered. And so you hear the guy in the other room go, kind of like if you like, touch a battery or, you know, get a little, static electric shock. And so then the gentleman takes notes and writes more notes on the clipboard and it says, okay, next button. And on and on and on, as each button does a worse shock. So pretty soon the person on the other side of the wall is screaming bloody murder. If you don’t let me outta this room right now, I’m gonna, you know, be That’s right.

Brittany: I forgot about that part of it. Yeah.

Connor: Yeah. And so the person sitting in front of this machine is starting to sweat, right? Like, oh my gosh, like I’m doing this. Like, I’m the one responsible. And they clearly, and so oftentimes they’ll beg, they’ll ask the person, you know, in charge with the clip or, Hey, can I stop? Clearly? No, no. It’s very important that the experiment proceeds. You need to continue, we need to see this through to the end, to the point where as they continue hitting buttons with worse and worse shocks, suddenly the person in the other room is not making any more noise. And so then the person pressing the buttons is like, oh, no. Like, are they dead? Like, can we send someone in person with a clipboard? No, no. It’s important that we see this through the end. And so what’s amazing about this is that this experiment has been done again and again and again, different little circumstances, different people. And every time this happens, this experiment, they find consistent results. And that is over 60%, six zero over 60% of participants will inflict the final fatal voltage on the other person. In other words the button at the very end, they will go all the way to the end when they are instructed to do so by the person in charge, even though it’s going against their own conscience, even though they’re begging to stop, they know it’s wrong. They don’t wanna be responsible because the person in authority is telling them to do it. They do it. And so this was born out of the Adolf Eichman, the Nuremberg, the arguments these guys were using. Oh, I was just following orders showing that basically two-thirds of people will go against their own conscience, follow orders and do evil things. I think it’s a very tragic insight into humanity to see how willing people are, including many of these Nazis being tried and then later executed at The Nuremberg Trials to just do what they’re told.

Brittany: Yeah. And I think it’s, you know, one thing that, I think the guy who wrote Gula, Gar Chip Peggo, and Jordan Peterson always say, is, we like to think that we would be the person who doesn’t push the button. And I would like to think that, but you never really know until you’re in that situation. Cause I don’t think the test subjects went in there thinking I’m gonna hurt somebody. Right. You know? So I think that’s kind of a creepy thing. But as we’re kind of getting close to the end of our time, just some other takeaways is this set, like you said, international law, like this was a real foundation for things called Crimes against Humanity for war crimes for wars of aggression. This set a lot of the standards for how you can try other countries after wars. But what I wanna talk about as we’re getting to the end here, Connor, is if that’s a good thing, right? A lot of people look at the Nuremberg trials as, oh, this helped make the human race more civil to each other. We prevented this from happening. And my question to you, Connor, do you think we need it? International law, which I’ll be honest, this helped kind of result in the United Nations and global governance. Did we need this kind of global governance to get us to these conclusions that maybe we already knew or could know?

Connor: So, I think my answer is most bad things are started for what appeared to be good reasons.

Brittany: That’s a good point.

Connor: Rarely are people persuaded to do something bad because it’s bad. It’s always, you know, oh, this tiny little tax is gonna help these few people. And so the income tax is created and it’s super, super small, but now it’s created. And so they just expand it and increase it, and it grows and grows and grows, you know, the welfare state and, you know, war and, and, zoning laws and all kinds of stuff. It’s always like, oh, we just want to, you know, not have, you know, this bad thing happen. Oh yeah, no, I don’t want that bad thing either. So sure, sure sounds good. You know, oh, we just wanna hold, you know, Nazis accountable. So we need an international tribunal. We need to come up with new international law that we’re just gonna come up with and then we’re gonna accuse them and execute them. And now we need the United Nations. Oh. And now the United Nations needs to, you know, tell other countries what to do and needs to, you know, tax everyone and have its own soldiers across the world who then cause all kinds of problems, right? It’s, always this kind of incremental thing. And so, look, these were evil people. They needed to be held accountable. There’s no question about that at all. But the problem is that the way it should have been done should have been extremely temporary and limited to the circumstance and then shut down. But the problem was, it created a precedent. It created, you know, an opportunity for the United Nations. It created, you know, even more precedent for international law. And, we start to lose national sovereignty. We start to lose the ability to, you know, do what we want. We have to all these treaties and all these, you know, relationships with other governments and membership in United Nations and all these things, that were justified, oh, we don’t want another World War happening. We don’t want that to happen again. But, then the creation of global government creates its own conflict, creates its own circumstances in which there are unnecessary, you know, wars and conflicts happening. So, it’s not to say that nothing should have happened, but the way it happened and the rise of the global government that it created, creates all kinds of other problems beyond just war. Think about like taxes and the climate change issue and all these things that, oh, this is a global issue. We need the global government to solve it. And, you know, the best government is the one that governs the least. It’s, the closest to you. And the further away government gets, the harder it is for you to hold it accountable and change it. And so the global government is the worst. I mean, maybe one day we’ll have intergalactic government, I dunno. We’ll have some Star Trek, the Federation of Planets. But, it just becomes worse and worse and worse for individual liberty. So the Nuremberg trials are very interesting to read about. I think one interesting insight is this Stanley Milgram experiment, which was created intentionally to understand, like, why are these people saying they were just following orders? How often will people truly just follow orders? And the experiment shows that you know, most of us will even if we know it’s wrong. And so these are insights that are worth pondering about, worth thinking about what they mean for us today in, you know, the current world we live in, what that looks like, and what the dangers are that we need to be thinking about. Because this isn’t something that just happened, you know, 70, 80 years ago, and it’s not gonna happen again. Stuff like this is happening today, and we need to think about what we’re gonna do about it and how we can make sure we are in the, you know, 40% of people who do stand up who do say, no, that’s not wrong. I’m not gonna participate in that. And, try and stand up for truth and justice despite, you know, authority figures trying to make us do the opposite. So not the most enjoyable subject ever to talk about. Nazis are all evil people, and yet we need to understand how that happened so that we can make sure it doesn’t happen again. Brittany, thanks for the conversation. And until next time, we’ll talk to you guys later.

Brittany: Talk to you later.

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