Everyone is marked by it like the participants in a battle—Verdun or Stalingrad—there’s even a certain camaraderie. I sense that one can be incorporated and begin to feel at home in it. I can see it in those who work here writing press reports, wading through files, writing out affidavits, working for the prosecution or the defense. But here too I’m just a flaneur, suspiciously idle, an outsider with no real connections, no obligations, but sharp-eyed, a silent observer, so probably a spy. People can’t see my uneasiness. Not a syllable, not an expression, not a look betrays how the conflicts, the contradictions, and the absurdities here are eating at me. John doesn’t hold his tongue when the talk turns to the world-historical significance of this trial: “World-historical significance!” he sneers. “It’s a scandal, a farce that will permit us to play the Last Judgment through the next century and always be the judges, never the accused . . . Who set up this Punch and Judy show? What does the Nuremberg Tribunal represent? Surely it’s not a show trial for the victors to humiliate the vanquished? No no, we’re much too pure and noble for that. We believe in the rule of law; didn’t the Hague Convention of 1926 brand war a crime? All well and good, but it didn’t provide us with the legal tools to try to punish those responsible. That’s what we’re out to accomplish here. To condemn the intention to go to war when you have to go to war? A moral analysis of the reasons to do so, after the fact? How are you going to accomplish that? With the flimsy charge of conspiracy? When the next conflict breaks out, would anyone have the nerve to indict the presidents and prime ministers of the nations involved for conspiracy—I mean, without making himself a laughing stock? And how would he proceed? According to what legal principles? Germany and most other European countries follow the ancient Roman principle of nulla poena sine lege. On the other hand, there’s the Anglo-Saxon conception that the judgment arrived at and carried out in a proper trial sets a legal precedent, i.e., has the power of a law that can be invoked in future cases. So here in Nuremberg we have an Anglo-Saxon court judging Germans, i.e., a court imposed from without, a court of victors. But no, that would have been immoral; that would not have been in line with our lofty ethical principles. The Nuremberg Court, so they say, was installed by the Germans themselves. To be sure, there was no German sovereignty to install it, so the Allies had to jump in. On the basis of Germany’s unconditional surrender, the four victorious powers comprise the present German government. And this government installed the Nuremberg court. And that’s why it’s judging not according to German law but to Anglo-Saxon law. What may have been overlooked in the process was this: Which German signed the unconditional surrender and may perhaps be strung up—General Jodl, for example, or Admiral Reeder—and has thus signed his own death warrant . . .”