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Nuremberg
was largely an American creation. ("Typical
American humor," scoffed Karl Dönitz,
in his Nuremberg cell.) Britain and the Soviet Union
were forced to follow America’s lead. Roosevelt’s
free-wheeling and haphazard administration thus
offers the single most important and vivid example
of how governments argue about international justice.
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grand American debate over Nuremberg was waged mostly
between two of Roosevelt’s most powerful cabinet
members: Henry Stimson, the secretary of war, and Henry
Morgenthau Jr., the treasury secretary. Stimson insisted
on trials for the top Nazis; Morgenthau wanted summary
executions. In March 1945, Stimson, while emphasizing
postwar economic and political issues over the question
of war criminals, gave a good first-hand outline of the
way the decision was made:
Never
has anything which I have witnessed in the four years
shown such instance of the bad effect of our chaotic
administration and its utter failure to treat matters
in a well organized way. …Morgenthau advanced
his project for destroying industrial Germany and
turning it into a "pastoral" country. …Then
the President pranced up to the meeting at Quebec
in September taking Morgenthau and leaving Hull and
me behind, and there he put his initials to the fantastic
"pastoral Germany" program which was drawn
by Churchill and Morgenthau. Morgenthau came back
and told us about it, and the character of the paper
leaked out evidently through somebody in the Treasury
Department. It was at once torn to pieces by public
opinion and the President hastily retreated from his
position. At a luncheon with me in the White House
he spoke of this paper as something that had been
put over him in Quebec and which he had never fathered.
I had a copy of it in my pocket, fished it out, and
showed his initials at the bottom of it. Then he said
he had made a great mistake and has admitted that
with great frankness since.
Then for a while Morgenthau was in the doghouse…
While
more than a little self-congratulatory, this account
is basically accurate. The Morgenthau Plan, which Churchill
and Roosevelt initialed at the Québec Conference
in September 1944, called for the summary execution
of the Nazi leadership as war criminals. But Stimson
managed to triumph, insisting that even Nazi war criminals
be given the benefit of due process as it had evolved
in America.
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