Judge Dennis Davis
Nuremberg War Crime Trials

It’s possible, Susan. I think the reason for the trials taking place as quickly as they did was, of course, already you had lost quite a lot of the Nazis. Martin Bormann, for example, was supposed to be tried at Nuremberg. Most think he committed suicide. There was an anxiety about getting them before the dock. There’s no doubt that there were a series of motivations for this. As I’ve indicated, much of it was kind of perhaps accused of being hypocritical. But I never read anything which essentially that the governments of those two countries, UK and US, felt any mericooper for their abysmal emission in not bombing the various camps at the time. And the book by Jonathan Friedland, which we should be discussing at Lockdown, about the two men who escaped from Auschwitz I think really illustrates precisely why that, to such a considerable extent, is such a crime against humanity of its own and raises questions of about who is responsible, et cetera. But it’s perhaps a topic for different.

Well, if it had been implemented, remember the ICC came into a force after apartheid ended. Had it been there in the early period I would imagine that any South African apartheid politician who had wandered it off to one of the other countries who had been a signatory could have been arrested for that basis and probably should have. That concludes the questions and thank you very much to everybody. That’s excruciatingly difficult topic, which indicated for many of you, of course these one dissatisfied. But it’s important to realise the origins of where this all came from, the promise that it held, and the way in which we haven’t fulfilled that promise, which itself is a cause and a reason for perhaps having further discussions about that.