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the semiotic content of The word “Nuremberg”, the name of the old German city – all the meanings, messages and images that this sign transmits – is determined, for the most part, by the historical events associated with a brief but turbulent era: that of Nazism and the Third Reich that was going to last “for a thousand years”, but lasted only 12 (1933-1945). These include the massive Nazi Party rallies there (1923-1938), the “Nuremberg Laws” (1935), the center of Nazi anti-Semitic legislation and, finally, the famous trials (1945-1946) held there by the victorious powers – the Soviet Union, the United States, the United Kingdom and France – against the leaders of defeated Germany.
Conceived as the “end point” to the Nazi period in history – and celebrated, among others, for that reason in a city that is a symbol of its power –, the trials against 22 surviving key figures from the political, military, economic and even media spheres ( sic) of the Third Reich were to be a “lesson” both for the Germans and for the rest of the world. The main charge against the accused was “the crime of conspiracy and war of aggression” as well as, in the case of some, having committed war crimes and crimes against humanity of which “Judeocide” (Arno J. Mayer) was just one of the aspects. In subsequent years, the United States also held 12 “subsequent” trials in Nuremberg, focused more on the Holocaust, against lower-ranking perpetrators. All of these trials gave rise to international criminal law as we know it.
But on the −celebrated last month− 80th anniversary of the beginning of the first trials in Nuremberg that, supposedly, marked “a before and after for the conscience of the civilized world”, the only possible conclusion is that, in reality, “Nuremberg”, despite an apparent semiotic overload, represents rather and largely a void.
The promise of justice and “never again” that the trials seemed to make has never been fulfilled and “civilization” – of course, the Western one – which, in the words of the US prosecutor Robert H. Jackson, “could not bear the repetition (of similar crimes)”, continues to be its generator and guarantor of impunity in times of (more) genocide and (more) wars of aggression.
As Raz Segal – one of the first scholars to recognize that Israel was perpetrating “the classic case of genocide” in Gaza (t.ly/yTcCk) – recently pointed out, emphasizing that it has not stopped and continues, the Nuremberg trials “did not change in any way the ideological and political structures that brought the Nazis to power and on which they built their project: the exclusive nation-state system, which emerged after the First World War. World War and which overlapped with the white supremacy that was at the heart of European empire building and settler colonialism.”
The Third Reich, something that has been obscured in its time by the scale of its crimes, being a supremacist empire based on extreme nationalism bent on “purifying itself of its racial enemies” and having, following the path of war, “Aryan” settlers take over the land in the occupied regions in the East, did not differ, in essence, from other supremacist empires such as the United States, the United Kingdom and France, which, as Segal wrote, “were not willing to be held accountable for their nationalism and that, like the Soviets, they believed that ‘national homogenization’ was the essential condition for security and peace” (t.ly/TLFd0).
It is no coincidence that the first Nakba (1948) occurred a few years after the Second World War and even when the “subsequent” trials in Nuremberg were still underway. The broad consensus at that time – after all the transfers of populations during the war, the almost total annihilation of the Jewish communities in Europe and then the expulsion of the German settlers and minorities − was that national/ethnic cleansing “was good” and that it was the only way to build a nation-state.
Today, the second Nakba in Gaza, which from the beginning sought to conclude what was left unfinished in 1948 – now through a genocidal war whose objective was not Hamas, but the deliberate destruction of the Palestinian people as such, “totally or partially” – follows the same “national-state” and colonialist impulses. Now even in the “ceasefire” phase, as part of a deal of Donald Trump and with the “yellow line” as the new border of the enclave, expelling and concentrating “all the brutes.”
To facilitate this, before our eyes the entire edifice of international law – however rickety it may be, among others, due to the interests of the victorious powers and the “demands” of the cold war− built after Nuremberg through the Genocide Convention (1948), the Geneva Accords (1949) or then the Rome Statute (1998), which created the International Criminal Court (ICC), proving useless after a couple of attempts to act against this genocide, it has been effectively neutralized by Israel’s allies – all champions of “civilization” – as long as it could act with impunity.
In this sense, the emptiness of the meaning of “Nuremberg” must also be understood as the emptiness of the entire idea of “civilization” that the trials sought to defend, but which was not an antithesis of Nazi crimes, but rather one of their sources. Contrary to Prosecutor Jackson’s claim, “civilization” could well endure the repetition of “similar atrocities,” as long as they were committed under its shelter and/or in its name ( t.ly/gs0gR).
