What makes this inquest significant is that these prisoners represent sinister influences that will lurk in the world long after their bodies have returned to dust. Merely as individuals their fate is of little consequence to the world. It is hard now to perceive in these men as captives the power by which as Nazi leaders they once dominated much of the world and terrified most of it. Reproached by the humiliation of those they have led almost as bitterly as by the desolation of those they have attacked, their personal capacity for evil is forever past. In the prisoners’ dock sit twenty-odd broken men. It is a cause of that magnitude that the United Nations will lay before Your Honors. It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power and make deliberate and concerted use of it to set in motion evils which.
The common sense of mankind demands that law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people. This inquest represents the practical effort of four of the most mighty of nations, with the support of 17 more, to utilize international law to meet the greatest menace of our times-aggressive war. This Tribunal, while it is novel and experimental, is not the product of abstract speculations nor is it created to vindicate legalistic theories. That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason. The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.
The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility.
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