Judge Dennis Davis
The Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, Part 1
Summary
The Nuremberg trials was a historical moment where there was a possibility of conceiving a cosmopolitan vision of the world and a different global value system. While there is a vast amount of literature and commentary available about the significance of Nuremberg, in this first session, the focus is on the context, background, and nature of the main trial. Part 1 of 2.
Judge Dennis Davis
Dennis Davis is a judge of the High Court of South Africa and judge president of the Competition Appeals Court of South Africa. He has held professorial appointments at the University of Cape Town and University of the Witwatersrand, as well as numerous visiting appointments at Cambridge, Harvard, New York University, and others. He has authored eleven books, including Lawfare: Judging Politics in South Africa.
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a professor of theatre and performance studies in the UK. He has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and New York University (Global Division), and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing. He has written eleven plays and directed forty in places like South Africa, New York, Brussels, London, Berlin, Zulu Kingdom, Athens, and more. His writing has been published widely and he is the editor of Armed Response: Plays from South Africa (2009) and the interactive digital book Theatre in the Camps (2012). He is on the board of the Pinter Centre in London.
At the time when they were pre-planning the prosecution, they would’ve known because of the massive documentation complied for Nuremberg. They spent a couple of months after the London Charter, and even before then, trying to get as much evidence as they possibly could. So they certainly would’ve known about the concentration camps.
Stalin certainly would not have wanted Hitler put on trial at all. In fact, to the contrary. Stalin would’ve liked to deal with Hitler in his Gulag style rather than in any kind of trial.
Roughly 200 people were charged and I think they were all Germans if my memory serves me correctly.
Ten actually were finally executed pursuant to the Nuremberg trial. Goring escaped the hangman because he committed suicide.