Robert H. Jackson: Closing Statement before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, Germany

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Over the eight months of testimony held between November 1945 and July 1946, the Allied nations presented evidence in rotating phases, with evidence of the atrocities committed at Auschwitz presented during the French phase and evidence of German atrocities in Eastern Europe presented during the Soviet phase. On July 26, 1946, Jackson delivered his closing statement as the prosecution began its summation toward the end of the first set of trials.

In his closing statement, Jackson revisits several themes he had developed in his opening statement. He again refers to the notion that civilization itself is on trial as much as are the Nazi war criminals. If civilization cannot adequately and justly respond to the crimes that have been perpetrated, then the events and beliefs that led to those crimes might be repeated, again resulting in catastrophic war and culminating, in Jackson's words, in “the doom of civilization.” Jackson also defends the proceedings to which the Nazi defendants were submitted. Consulting the trial record, he says, will dispel any questions regarding the fundamental justice of the trials. If this is the first case in history in which the defeated were tried in such a way, it is also the first time that they were able to defend themselves against the charges facing them. The defendants in this trial, Jackson says, will have had their chance to be heard in the kind of trial that they never provided those accused of crimes against the Nazi regime. All the same, he warns against seeing fairness as weakness, contending that fairness and justice are always strengths and reminding the court that the proceedings have relied on German sources of evidence and documentation. Rather than letting the victorious Allies formulate the case against the German defendants, the prosecution instead allowed the defendants' own words, records, and documents to build the case against them.

Jackson constructs his statement with the logic that provided the framework for the tribunal, treating the Nazi government as a criminal plot and prosecuting the Nazi wars of aggression as inherently criminal. In so doing, he systematically dismantles the arguments put forward by the defendants, that they were insignificant “role players” or that they had no knowledge of events happening beyond their departments or even within their departments. All of those truly guilty, the defendants claimed, were already dead. What sort of situation do we then confront, Jackson wonders sardonically, when the guilty are already dead and those left living are themselves innocent of the crimes of which they are accused? The evidence, he says, leads clearly to the opposite conclusion. At no time were those in power not aware of their actions and of the consequences of those actions. At no time were they not planning the next steps that their regime would take to increase its power, territorial holdings, and ability to utilize “undesirable” peoples, such as Eastern Europeans and Jews, as slave labor en route to eventual extermination.

In pursuing the prosecution as a criminal conspiracy, Jackson also seeks to discredit the notion that “following orders” was sufficient defense against the charges brought by the tribunal. At best, he argues, this line of defense can extend only to mitigation, not to exculpation. This is a critical moment in the statement, in which Jackson takes on the idea that there can be no charge of conspiracy within a dictatorial government, because the dictator, in this case Adolf Hitler, held everyone under him within his grasp. If the men on trial became slaves to Hitler, Jackson says, it was their own doing, for without their active support on his behalf, he could never have consolidated his own power over them or over Germany. Likening this argument to that of the boy who killed his parents and begged for mercy because he was an orphan, Jackson reiterates one of the principal aims of the tribunal in dismissing this claim, that those who created the power to which they were subject remained culpable for their actions, that the force of law must not fall solely upon the petty criminals on the streets but also upon those who create and utilize the machinery of the state to commit crimes against their own people, against world peace, and against civilization and humanity itself.