13 - Crimes against peace: the case of the invasion of Norway at the Nuremberg Trials
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 September 2009
Summary
Few of the judgments of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg have aroused as much disquiet as those relating to the German invasion of Norway in April 1940. The sentence on Admiral Erich Raeder, the navy chief regarded by the Tribunal, along with the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, as one of the two leading instigators of the invasion, was described by a British critic as ‘the most monstrous of all the miscarriages of justice committed as Nürnberg’. In his History of the Second World War Sir Basil Liddell Hart wrote:
One of the most questionable parts of the Nuremberg Trials was that the planning and execution of aggression against Norway was put among the major charges against the Germans. It is hard to understand how the British and French Governments had the face to approve the inclusion of this charge, or how the official prosecutors could press for a conviction on this score. Such a course was one of the most palpable cases of hypocrisy in history.
Indignation has not been confined to those who object to the Nuremberg Trials in their entirety. Even among those broadly sympathetic to the Nuremberg principles the case of Norway has been regarded as a significant lapse: not as blatant as some that called in question the past record of the Soviet Union, but as serious as any involving the three western powers.
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- Diplomacy and Intelligence During the Second World WarEssays in Honour of F. H. Hinsley, pp. 245 - 269Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1985