Chris Dodd: “He pointed out something that needs to be made clear. He said: Make one thing crystal clear, it's the burning desire of…”

“He pointed out something that needs to be made clear. He said: Make one thing crystal clear, it's the burning desire of the United States to create international law using those trials. Great Britain initially opposed the Nuremberg trials and urged simply shooting top Nazis out of fear, they would use the trials for propaganda. Stalin favored conducting trials only to establish punishments, not guilt. Like Great Britain, he thought punishing the top Nazis should be a political, and not a legal, decision. The trials happened as they did only because the United States insisted on them for purposes of establishing future law--a task that summary justice at executive say-so could never have done. At the London conference that wrote the Nuremberg Charter, France and Russia both objected to criminalizing aggressive war for anybody but the Axis countries. But Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, the American representative insisted that creating universally binding international law was the prime purpose of the tribunal. And he prevailed in that argument. The history is particularly poignant to me because my father, who served in this body, from whose desk I speak this morning, served as Robert Jackson's No. 2, as the executive trial counsel at Nuremberg. Mr. President, the Nuremberg trials rendered their first judgment 60 years ago.…”