Undoing Nuremberg

This chapter analyzes the Advisory Board’s recommendations that seventy-six of the eighty-nine Nuremberg war criminals deserved clemency. The Board systematically questioned the parameters of individual guilt or responsibility as established by the Nuremberg tribunals, at times coming dangerously close to reviving the discredited “superior orders” defense deployed by most of the Nuremberg prisoners at trial. In some cases, the Board simply disagreed with the tribunals’ findings, deeming the judgments insufficient to justify a conviction on one or more charges without consulting the evidence. Whatever the amorphous concept of “American Justice” meant to McCloy, the Advisory Board’s case reports indicated that it was absent at Nuremberg. Since the Board framed its reports on individual prisoners in the language of justice done or injustice corrected rather than mercy, each clemency recommendation implicitly questioned the legitimacy of the Nuremberg verdicts. Because of McCloy’s affirmation of the Board’s conclusions in his own pronouncements on the cases, the Board’s private criticisms and rejections of the tribunal findings entered the public sphere, while also serving as an internal HICOG reference point for all future clemency and parole evaluations through 1958.