Did Churchill Want Nazis to Be Taken Out and Shot?
"Winston Churchill had a simple solution to the problem of what to do with captured Nazi war leaders: as soon as their identities had been established by a senior officer, they should be taken out and shot, preferably within six hours. The Soviets rejected this idea, not because they had any doubts about the guilt of the German elite and certainly not because they had any qualms about summary executions, but because they recognized the political value of putting Nazism on trial."
James Sheehan's description of Churchill's position on what to do with captured Nazi war leaders is somewhat misleading. As Richard Overy writes in Interrogations: The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands, 1945, Churchill did express his desire to have 50 to 100 Nazis shot in the months running up to the end of the war in May, 1945.
However, it is important to keep in mind what the historian Martin Kitchen has observed about Churchill, that he was"seldom consistent and was easily carried away." In fact, records of the discussions of the"Big Three" at the Tehran conference in November, 1943 show that Churchill took the opposite position on summary executions of Nazi war criminals. In his six-volume history, The Second World War, Churchill provides the following account of what happened at Tehran:
STALIN: Some fifty or a hundred thousand German officers must be liquidated. The entire General Staff must go.
CHURCHILL: The British Parliament and public will never tolerate mass executions. Even if in war passion they allowed them to begin, they would turn violently against those responsible after the first butchery had taken place. The Soviets must be under no delusion on this point.
STALIN: Fifty thousand must be shot!
CHURCHILL: I would rather be taken out into the garden here and now and be shot myself rather than sully my own and my country's honor by such infamy.
ROOSEVELT: I have a compromise to propose. Not fifty thousand, but only forty-nine thousand should be shot.
This conversation has been corroborated by numerous sources, which state that Churchill at this point left the meeting and walked off into an adjacent room. Stalin and Molotov followed him in. Stalin insisted he was only joking, and convinced Churchill to resume his place at the table.
We should certainly be grateful that the legacy of Nuremberg was not summary execution, but the triumph of civility, perhaps best summed up in the words of Justice Robert Jackson:
"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 law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason."
I hope that the legacy we pass on to future generations is not a knee-jerk debate over frontier justice. Our time would be better spent sorting out some of the thorny issues left over from Nuremberg, such as the criticism that war crimes tribunals only represent"victors' justice."
After all, if we were to actually calculate what Lincoln called the"terrible arithmetic" of war, we would find that the United States in various conflicts has incinerated many times more civilians than bin Laden. In fact, Major General Curtis LeMay, the mastermind of the U.S. firebombing of Japan that killed about one million civilians, remarked afterwards:"Had I lost the war, I suppose I would have been tried as a war criminal."
Let us also not forget that the man directly responsible for the My Lai massacre, William Calley, now runs a jewelry business in Columbus, Georgia; while the man who bears the broader responsibility for the U.S. policy of targeting civilians in Vietnam, Henry Kissinger, is a frequent guest on network television programs commenting on our current war.
Those who have criticized the past excesses of American foreign policy since September 11 have been branded"unpatriotic," or even"bin Laden apologists." I must protest that I love my country, but I hate the obstructionist role the United States is playing in the international effort to adopt the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. On November 28, George W. Bush signed an appropriations bill into law that contained the anti-criminal court"Craig Amendment." The law prohibits" cooperation with, or assistance or other support to, the International Criminal Court or its Preparatory Commission." A similar Jesse Helms-sponsored bill passed the Senate on December 7, after it was publically endorsed by 12 members of the Republican foreign policy establishment, most notably Henry Kissinger.
This type of arrogance can only serve to undermine the delicate coalition against terrorism that Tony Blair has been so gracious to string together for us. I suggest that bin Laden--along with men like Slobodan Milosevic, Augusto Pinochet, and our own resident war criminal, Henry Kissinger--be tried in an international criminal court that does not distinguish between the winners and losers of armed conflicts, but which separates those who follow international law from those who do not.