Interview Transcript: Professor John Q. Barrett
Start Recording
Barrett: And their allies had total control and total power. Germany had surrendered unconditionally. Future prisoners and they, you know, rather than doing a law process or a trial process, they could have just used force, they could have done summary execution, they could have done anything else. So Jackson is, a choice by Truman to take a law path rather than a force or summary or military path. And I think you know that because Jackson was a man of the law and a civilian not a warrior, not a soldier, not a general, not a firing squad guy.
Jen: Right. I know leaders like Churchill and Stalin wanted summary execution. How do you think the rest of the general public felt about it?
Barrett: I think the the general public sort of in the heat of the moment, would have been very happy to see a whole bunch of Nazis meet their makers. This war had embroiled much of the world for seven years and horrible tolls, horrible sufferings, horrible service all of which add up to a desire for vengeance. So putting up your hand and saying, “Wait a minute, lets do this in a lawful process, lets do this based on evidence, we are not going to rush forward to just satisfy our fury,” was a little bit against the public grain. And I think that is one of the reasons people got worried or impatient with Nuremberg. It was a relatively fast international trial, it was a relatively fast trial but it was still a year. And I think a lot of people would have been happy with something much faster and much more decisive and brutal, than a trial.
Jen: How do you think other lawyers thought about this unprecedented move?
Barrett: There were a lot of debates. There were various legal questions about it, with this law being made up after the fact-- ex post facto, or did the law exist before the Nazis violated it? But even if you agree with that or that way, which was Jackson’s view, certainly this International Military Tribunal, this court system is being set up after the fact. And are the hands of the prosecuting nations clean enough to be doing this, or is it hypocritical because everyone in war is doing horrible things? Its just a matter of, the winners are in a position to prosecute the losers. You know, kind of victor’s justice. Well you know lawyers debated those issues in a very heated way. Jackson, obviously had his view and was successful in persuading the tribunal, and I think in time persuading public opinion, but, you know, it wasn’t unanimous. And it wasn’t particularly easy to sort of 3:37 convince everyone that this was the right path, or a fair path, or a lawful path. Those were his views.
Jen: How do you think that, how do you think they went about… I think they banned the use of the tu quoque argument in the courtroom…
Barrett: Right, which, you know, means ‘you too.’ It is basically the ‘no clean hands’ argument. They defined it as off limits, as a matter of the rules of the tribunal. And I think that’s a standard saying in criminal process, certainly in the United States and Great Britain, I think generally. You know, you don’t as the person on trial get to put the person that’s prosecuting you or the government on trial. (...) So, I’m on trial for tax evasion, well you’re a tax cheat, too, isn’t an admissable or relevant argument. It’s a distraction or a collateral argument. And I think it’s a necessary boundary line. Every trial can’t be about everybody. 5:00 And frankly, very few people are saints. But a focused trial is about the accusation against a particular individual, and does the government have the proof (...) to prove that that guy broke the law. You hope that law enforcement and trials go after the most serious perpetrators, the most deserving of prosecution. But you know, never, ever does any system get every bad guy. Never, ever, does any system have angels that are doing the decision making and the prosecuting. This is a human process. So, you know, I violate the speeding laws every day to and from work, and I did that when I was a prosecutor. That, I don’t think, made me morally unfit to be a prosecutor, or made it morally unfair for me to prosecute somebody for whatever federal crime. The cases were about those actors, not the ‘and you too’ stuff. Now the international war crimes (law?) or, the aggressive war area, you know, I think it is relevant if the perpetrators on trial are interchangable with their prosecutors. If the US, and the Russians, and the British, and the Nazis are all exactly the same, that is a serious critique. It’s not a legal argument, but I think it’s a philosophical question. And I think the answer is, you know, history demonstrates that in the WW2 context, it wasn’t just the deceited people but it was the worst people who got prosecuted. 7:00 Not that everybody else was an angel, but you know the systematic aggression of the Nazis, they started it, the systematic human rights violation, extermination, Holocaust, et cetera, policies of the Nazis, they were unique.
Jen: So, especially the count of the war of aggression, and crimes against humanity, those were fairly new legal concepts brought in by Nuremberg. How do you think the prosecution went about, really against the defense, with the new legal foundation?
Barrett: Well, that kind of comes back to ex post facto. It is new to be prosecuting individuals for those crimes. It is a sort of rejection of previous ideas of immunity, that nations and their leaders were just free to engage in warfare, it’s what countries did. So it’s a new enforcement, but the (criminal?) enforcement isn’t making up a new rule in 1945. (...) 8:23 after WW1, and a lot of treaty commitments not to engage in warfare. So, it’s new to hold somebody accountable individually for violating those kinds of commitments, [but] those commitments had been made. Things like the Kellogg-Briand pact, and various non-aggression treaties. It’s the argument of the prosecutors and the decision of the Nuremberg Tribunals was that these were norms, these were moral rules, in every civilization, every legal community, every code. And the German law, the American law, the British law, the Biblical law, you know, oh show me the system that said, ‘feel free to exterminate people.’ You know, everybody already had these as rules, in various forms, what’s new is that Nuremberg is enforcing them internationally.
J: Do you think that the new legal development that came out of Nuremberg has been successful in the way of deterring future violence?
Barrett: You know, it’s impossible to prove (...), but you know, our entire kind of humanities, legal 10:07 efforts are based on the idea that we are rational actors, and that people are (...) and that people are improvable. And that includes deterrable. And, you know, I’m sure that in the back of many minds has been knowledge of Nuremberg, which wasn’t in the back of the Nazi’s minds because obviously, there had never been anything like Nuremberg. Has that really deterred this dictator or that atrocity? I can’t prove it. I think it’s worth the effort and I’m hopeful that it has. You do get little glimpses in, I don’t know, evidence from wire taps or intercepted communications, there are places where the word Nuremberg comes up. And you know, you’re in South Sudan, and the commander of a militia force, whatever, and you just line up everybody and machine gun them, (or?) you say ‘the law could hold me accountable.’ Well, in places like that, sure people mention Nuremberg now and then. So I think that’s proof. We also have a very violent world and lots of wars and so forth, but at least in the kind of European land mass, heartland of Nuremberg, we’ve certainly not had anything on the scale of a world war since the 1940s. Obviously we’ve had the former Yugoslavia, and there are horrible things that have happened 11:54 but I don’t think it’s too simplistic to say ‘It happened in 1914. And then it happened again in 1939, and then since Nuremberg it hasn’t happened a third time.’ You know, that indicates something. Well, it at least indicates that we got lucky, and maybe the Nuremberg helped us be lucky.
J: And perhaps also the United Nations (...)
Barrett: Yeah, oh yeah. No, absolutely. And Nuremberg is a piece of a development to that post-war period where the world community is uniquely united. And (...) nations, and undertaken the Nuremberg project, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 12:43 the Genocide Convention, and Russia was boycotting by 1950 but the United Nations (...) to defend the Republic of South Korea, the Korean War, those are all connected. And since the Cold War period, since the 1990s, things like the Rwanda Tribunals, the Yugoslavia Tribunal, the creation of the International Criminal Court, you know, those are all kind of legacy developments that are (...) of Nuremberg. So I mean, about the ex post facto, one other answer is that even if Nuremberg was entirely ex post facto, and there are serious questions about whether it was legitimate to do, the fact that it happened means that it’s never again ex post facto in the Yugoslavia, Rwanda, et cetera context. You know, Nuremberg maybe should have, I don’t believe this but one could say, ‘Nuremberg shouldn’t have done what it did to the Nazis.’ But Nuremberg having happened put everyone on notice for the future. 13:56 That, you know, now there is a precedent, now there is a rule. Now there is a possibility of international accountability.
J: So the ICC was one of the most recent being developed, and finally enacted in the 1990s. Do you think in the past decade has developed into more functional and effective criminal court?
Barrett: Well the ICC only went into effect in 2002. The Rome treaty was the plan basically, was agreed to by the state’s parties is what they’re called, in 1999, but then they each had to go home and ratify it as a nation. And only when there were 66 I think nations did the ICC actually come into being. But that happened very fast, that happened in that 3 or 4 year period. The ICC has had 11 years. It’s only had, I think, 3 pieces come to a judgement, a verdict. It’s got pending matters and a lot of pending investigations. It’s not an organization that every country belongs to, and some of the countries that don’t belong are some of the biggest and most powerful, the US. 15:23 So, you know, it’s definitely not a newborn baby, but it’s not yet the strongest athlete in the olympics, either. It’s growing and developing, and I think it’s had it’s early challenged, but it’s also had its successes.
J: So, regarding the trials, critics point out various procedural, like, I guess they call ‘defects’ of the trial. Why do you think some critics focus on the ex post facto argument of it, and even after the light of the atrocities of the Holocaust were given at Nuremberg? I’m sorry, that was a very confusing question.
PHONE DISCONNECT
J: Hi, sorry, I think we got disconnected.
Barrett: Yeah, no we did.
...
J: So I think my question was, uh, so the Nuremberg, they tried to get representatives of each aspect of the Third Reich. Do you think that their selection of the defendants was representative enough?
Barrett: Uh, you know, it’s not perfect, and Nuremberg, we viewed from the back end, and maybe we’re assuming too much because we’re viewing it from a historical perspective. You know, it was a start-up, and it was chaotic, and it was disorganized, and it was in the wreckage of this (...) end of the war. 18:09 It happened pretty fast, and it was 4 nations trying to harmonize differing legal systems, and it was 4 different languages, and it was all that kind of stuff. And a lot of the sort of, best people to prosecute, were dead. I hate to put it that way, but who was most representative? You know, you have Hitler. And then you sort of have a second tier of inner circle senior advisors. And the Nuremberg trials had some of them, but some died with Hitler. So it’s kind of the ‘best guy we can find alive in the sector that doesn’t have a better representative who’s a guy who we have evidence on.’ Laughs. I guess that’s the principle. And to the credit of the tribunal, I think by far the weakest case, the least deserving defendant, the guy that was almost there accidentally, was a guy named Hans Fritzsche, who was acquitted. He was basically a stand-in for Joseph Goebbels who was the propaganda, communications mastermind of, you know, Hitler’s inner-inner-circle. And Goebbels was dead. So, you know, who else was involved in radio-broadcast and propaganda and so forth? Well the Russians had captured Fritzsche, and the Russians felt very strongly that one of their prisoners should be a Nuremberg defendant, because the US had most of the prisoners. So, you know, the Russians said, ‘We’ve got the notorious Fritzsche!’ And a lot of other people said, ‘Remind us, exactly, who is Fritzsche?’ Laughs. And you know, over the course of the trials, it turned out Fritzsche was not a very important person, and frankly had not been a decision maker. So kind of across the roster of the defendants, you know, people like that are totally appropriate defendants. At the other end of the spectrum, Von Papen, who was sort of an old man (...) Fritzsche maybe didn’t belong there. 20:45
J: I read somewhere that perhaps the reason why the Russians offered him up, they felt like they needed to offer a defendant in addition to the US.
Barrett: Yes, definitely. It’s sort of a national pride thing. ‘We’ve got important prisoners, too.’ Something like that.
J: In terms of the Soviet Union’s involvement, how do you think the dynamic was between Jackson and the Soviet prosecutors and judges?
Barrett: There were sort of different levels. In the courtroom, where the actual sort of prosecuting work, Jackson thought very well of his Soviet colleagues, his counterparts. They were smart, honest, hardworking lawyers. Coming from a totally different system and background, and obviously they were devoted communist party officials and Soviet government officials but they were counterparts. But, you know, in the background behind them, were the KGB in Moscow, you know, the kind of supervision and control which, you know, Jackson didn’t know the details of. He knew it was there, and he knew it limited the kind of freedom of his Soviet counterparts, so he kind of thought they were good men doing the best they could to be honest lawyers and prosecutors. In a system that was really not comparable at all to Jackson’s own system, which, you know, the freedom to be the decision maker. So, the prosecutors, Jackson thought it didn’t affect them very much in the end, that they could do their day to day work, and obviously they were prosecuting very guilty people and had abundant evidence so what Moscow wanted them to do politically and what they wanted to do with integrity kind of matched up. Whereas the Russian judges, Jackson kind of knew it didn’t really matter what happened in the trial, they were going the vote guilty against everybody and (...) everybody. Because that’s what Moscow wants. 23:17
J: Do you think that, I know the Russians first advocated doing sort of show-trials which they had back in the Soviet Union. With, I believe, a different court system where there was no, sort of, debate or argument.
Barrett: Right, exactly. You would have an opportunity to speak and to confess your guilt basically, which is, the decision to prosecute really was the same thing as the decision to confess. And, you know, that was a Soviet model. And they spent the summer before Nuremberg having lots of discussions, and basically the rules of the International Military Tribunal are an American (...) proof beyond a reasonable doubt, (...) independent judiciary, 24:19 real opportunity to be acquitted, system of justice. (...) You know ‘our system’ not a ‘show trial’ system. And, you know, the Russians agreed to that, and the prosecutors conducted themselves in accordance with those rules who, you know, did good work. But in the end the Russian judges, I think, you know, they were controlled by Moscow.
J: Well, I think that’s all my questions.
End Recording
Barrett: And their allies had total control and total power. Germany had surrendered unconditionally. Future prisoners and they, you know, rather than doing a law process or a trial process, they could have just used force, they could have done summary execution, they could have done anything else. So Jackson is, a choice by Truman to take a law path rather than a force or summary or military path. And I think you know that because Jackson was a man of the law and a civilian not a warrior, not a soldier, not a general, not a firing squad guy.
Jen: Right. I know leaders like Churchill and Stalin wanted summary execution. How do you think the rest of the general public felt about it?
Barrett: I think the the general public sort of in the heat of the moment, would have been very happy to see a whole bunch of Nazis meet their makers. This war had embroiled much of the world for seven years and horrible tolls, horrible sufferings, horrible service all of which add up to a desire for vengeance. So putting up your hand and saying, “Wait a minute, lets do this in a lawful process, lets do this based on evidence, we are not going to rush forward to just satisfy our fury,” was a little bit against the public grain. And I think that is one of the reasons people got worried or impatient with Nuremberg. It was a relatively fast international trial, it was a relatively fast trial but it was still a year. And I think a lot of people would have been happy with something much faster and much more decisive and brutal, than a trial.
Jen: How do you think other lawyers thought about this unprecedented move?
Barrett: There were a lot of debates. There were various legal questions about it, with this law being made up after the fact-- ex post facto, or did the law exist before the Nazis violated it? But even if you agree with that or that way, which was Jackson’s view, certainly this International Military Tribunal, this court system is being set up after the fact. And are the hands of the prosecuting nations clean enough to be doing this, or is it hypocritical because everyone in war is doing horrible things? Its just a matter of, the winners are in a position to prosecute the losers. You know, kind of victor’s justice. Well you know lawyers debated those issues in a very heated way. Jackson, obviously had his view and was successful in persuading the tribunal, and I think in time persuading public opinion, but, you know, it wasn’t unanimous. And it wasn’t particularly easy to sort of 3:37 convince everyone that this was the right path, or a fair path, or a lawful path. Those were his views.
Jen: How do you think that, how do you think they went about… I think they banned the use of the tu quoque argument in the courtroom…
Barrett: Right, which, you know, means ‘you too.’ It is basically the ‘no clean hands’ argument. They defined it as off limits, as a matter of the rules of the tribunal. And I think that’s a standard saying in criminal process, certainly in the United States and Great Britain, I think generally. You know, you don’t as the person on trial get to put the person that’s prosecuting you or the government on trial. (...) So, I’m on trial for tax evasion, well you’re a tax cheat, too, isn’t an admissable or relevant argument. It’s a distraction or a collateral argument. And I think it’s a necessary boundary line. Every trial can’t be about everybody. 5:00 And frankly, very few people are saints. But a focused trial is about the accusation against a particular individual, and does the government have the proof (...) to prove that that guy broke the law. You hope that law enforcement and trials go after the most serious perpetrators, the most deserving of prosecution. But you know, never, ever does any system get every bad guy. Never, ever, does any system have angels that are doing the decision making and the prosecuting. This is a human process. So, you know, I violate the speeding laws every day to and from work, and I did that when I was a prosecutor. That, I don’t think, made me morally unfit to be a prosecutor, or made it morally unfair for me to prosecute somebody for whatever federal crime. The cases were about those actors, not the ‘and you too’ stuff. Now the international war crimes (law?) or, the aggressive war area, you know, I think it is relevant if the perpetrators on trial are interchangable with their prosecutors. If the US, and the Russians, and the British, and the Nazis are all exactly the same, that is a serious critique. It’s not a legal argument, but I think it’s a philosophical question. And I think the answer is, you know, history demonstrates that in the WW2 context, it wasn’t just the deceited people but it was the worst people who got prosecuted. 7:00 Not that everybody else was an angel, but you know the systematic aggression of the Nazis, they started it, the systematic human rights violation, extermination, Holocaust, et cetera, policies of the Nazis, they were unique.
Jen: So, especially the count of the war of aggression, and crimes against humanity, those were fairly new legal concepts brought in by Nuremberg. How do you think the prosecution went about, really against the defense, with the new legal foundation?
Barrett: Well, that kind of comes back to ex post facto. It is new to be prosecuting individuals for those crimes. It is a sort of rejection of previous ideas of immunity, that nations and their leaders were just free to engage in warfare, it’s what countries did. So it’s a new enforcement, but the (criminal?) enforcement isn’t making up a new rule in 1945. (...) 8:23 after WW1, and a lot of treaty commitments not to engage in warfare. So, it’s new to hold somebody accountable individually for violating those kinds of commitments, [but] those commitments had been made. Things like the Kellogg-Briand pact, and various non-aggression treaties. It’s the argument of the prosecutors and the decision of the Nuremberg Tribunals was that these were norms, these were moral rules, in every civilization, every legal community, every code. And the German law, the American law, the British law, the Biblical law, you know, oh show me the system that said, ‘feel free to exterminate people.’ You know, everybody already had these as rules, in various forms, what’s new is that Nuremberg is enforcing them internationally.
J: Do you think that the new legal development that came out of Nuremberg has been successful in the way of deterring future violence?
Barrett: You know, it’s impossible to prove (...), but you know, our entire kind of humanities, legal 10:07 efforts are based on the idea that we are rational actors, and that people are (...) and that people are improvable. And that includes deterrable. And, you know, I’m sure that in the back of many minds has been knowledge of Nuremberg, which wasn’t in the back of the Nazi’s minds because obviously, there had never been anything like Nuremberg. Has that really deterred this dictator or that atrocity? I can’t prove it. I think it’s worth the effort and I’m hopeful that it has. You do get little glimpses in, I don’t know, evidence from wire taps or intercepted communications, there are places where the word Nuremberg comes up. And you know, you’re in South Sudan, and the commander of a militia force, whatever, and you just line up everybody and machine gun them, (or?) you say ‘the law could hold me accountable.’ Well, in places like that, sure people mention Nuremberg now and then. So I think that’s proof. We also have a very violent world and lots of wars and so forth, but at least in the kind of European land mass, heartland of Nuremberg, we’ve certainly not had anything on the scale of a world war since the 1940s. Obviously we’ve had the former Yugoslavia, and there are horrible things that have happened 11:54 but I don’t think it’s too simplistic to say ‘It happened in 1914. And then it happened again in 1939, and then since Nuremberg it hasn’t happened a third time.’ You know, that indicates something. Well, it at least indicates that we got lucky, and maybe the Nuremberg helped us be lucky.
J: And perhaps also the United Nations (...)
Barrett: Yeah, oh yeah. No, absolutely. And Nuremberg is a piece of a development to that post-war period where the world community is uniquely united. And (...) nations, and undertaken the Nuremberg project, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 12:43 the Genocide Convention, and Russia was boycotting by 1950 but the United Nations (...) to defend the Republic of South Korea, the Korean War, those are all connected. And since the Cold War period, since the 1990s, things like the Rwanda Tribunals, the Yugoslavia Tribunal, the creation of the International Criminal Court, you know, those are all kind of legacy developments that are (...) of Nuremberg. So I mean, about the ex post facto, one other answer is that even if Nuremberg was entirely ex post facto, and there are serious questions about whether it was legitimate to do, the fact that it happened means that it’s never again ex post facto in the Yugoslavia, Rwanda, et cetera context. You know, Nuremberg maybe should have, I don’t believe this but one could say, ‘Nuremberg shouldn’t have done what it did to the Nazis.’ But Nuremberg having happened put everyone on notice for the future. 13:56 That, you know, now there is a precedent, now there is a rule. Now there is a possibility of international accountability.
J: So the ICC was one of the most recent being developed, and finally enacted in the 1990s. Do you think in the past decade has developed into more functional and effective criminal court?
Barrett: Well the ICC only went into effect in 2002. The Rome treaty was the plan basically, was agreed to by the state’s parties is what they’re called, in 1999, but then they each had to go home and ratify it as a nation. And only when there were 66 I think nations did the ICC actually come into being. But that happened very fast, that happened in that 3 or 4 year period. The ICC has had 11 years. It’s only had, I think, 3 pieces come to a judgement, a verdict. It’s got pending matters and a lot of pending investigations. It’s not an organization that every country belongs to, and some of the countries that don’t belong are some of the biggest and most powerful, the US. 15:23 So, you know, it’s definitely not a newborn baby, but it’s not yet the strongest athlete in the olympics, either. It’s growing and developing, and I think it’s had it’s early challenged, but it’s also had its successes.
J: So, regarding the trials, critics point out various procedural, like, I guess they call ‘defects’ of the trial. Why do you think some critics focus on the ex post facto argument of it, and even after the light of the atrocities of the Holocaust were given at Nuremberg? I’m sorry, that was a very confusing question.
PHONE DISCONNECT
J: Hi, sorry, I think we got disconnected.
Barrett: Yeah, no we did.
...
J: So I think my question was, uh, so the Nuremberg, they tried to get representatives of each aspect of the Third Reich. Do you think that their selection of the defendants was representative enough?
Barrett: Uh, you know, it’s not perfect, and Nuremberg, we viewed from the back end, and maybe we’re assuming too much because we’re viewing it from a historical perspective. You know, it was a start-up, and it was chaotic, and it was disorganized, and it was in the wreckage of this (...) end of the war. 18:09 It happened pretty fast, and it was 4 nations trying to harmonize differing legal systems, and it was 4 different languages, and it was all that kind of stuff. And a lot of the sort of, best people to prosecute, were dead. I hate to put it that way, but who was most representative? You know, you have Hitler. And then you sort of have a second tier of inner circle senior advisors. And the Nuremberg trials had some of them, but some died with Hitler. So it’s kind of the ‘best guy we can find alive in the sector that doesn’t have a better representative who’s a guy who we have evidence on.’ Laughs. I guess that’s the principle. And to the credit of the tribunal, I think by far the weakest case, the least deserving defendant, the guy that was almost there accidentally, was a guy named Hans Fritzsche, who was acquitted. He was basically a stand-in for Joseph Goebbels who was the propaganda, communications mastermind of, you know, Hitler’s inner-inner-circle. And Goebbels was dead. So, you know, who else was involved in radio-broadcast and propaganda and so forth? Well the Russians had captured Fritzsche, and the Russians felt very strongly that one of their prisoners should be a Nuremberg defendant, because the US had most of the prisoners. So, you know, the Russians said, ‘We’ve got the notorious Fritzsche!’ And a lot of other people said, ‘Remind us, exactly, who is Fritzsche?’ Laughs. And you know, over the course of the trials, it turned out Fritzsche was not a very important person, and frankly had not been a decision maker. So kind of across the roster of the defendants, you know, people like that are totally appropriate defendants. At the other end of the spectrum, Von Papen, who was sort of an old man (...) Fritzsche maybe didn’t belong there. 20:45
J: I read somewhere that perhaps the reason why the Russians offered him up, they felt like they needed to offer a defendant in addition to the US.
Barrett: Yes, definitely. It’s sort of a national pride thing. ‘We’ve got important prisoners, too.’ Something like that.
J: In terms of the Soviet Union’s involvement, how do you think the dynamic was between Jackson and the Soviet prosecutors and judges?
Barrett: There were sort of different levels. In the courtroom, where the actual sort of prosecuting work, Jackson thought very well of his Soviet colleagues, his counterparts. They were smart, honest, hardworking lawyers. Coming from a totally different system and background, and obviously they were devoted communist party officials and Soviet government officials but they were counterparts. But, you know, in the background behind them, were the KGB in Moscow, you know, the kind of supervision and control which, you know, Jackson didn’t know the details of. He knew it was there, and he knew it limited the kind of freedom of his Soviet counterparts, so he kind of thought they were good men doing the best they could to be honest lawyers and prosecutors. In a system that was really not comparable at all to Jackson’s own system, which, you know, the freedom to be the decision maker. So, the prosecutors, Jackson thought it didn’t affect them very much in the end, that they could do their day to day work, and obviously they were prosecuting very guilty people and had abundant evidence so what Moscow wanted them to do politically and what they wanted to do with integrity kind of matched up. Whereas the Russian judges, Jackson kind of knew it didn’t really matter what happened in the trial, they were going the vote guilty against everybody and (...) everybody. Because that’s what Moscow wants. 23:17
J: Do you think that, I know the Russians first advocated doing sort of show-trials which they had back in the Soviet Union. With, I believe, a different court system where there was no, sort of, debate or argument.
Barrett: Right, exactly. You would have an opportunity to speak and to confess your guilt basically, which is, the decision to prosecute really was the same thing as the decision to confess. And, you know, that was a Soviet model. And they spent the summer before Nuremberg having lots of discussions, and basically the rules of the International Military Tribunal are an American (...) proof beyond a reasonable doubt, (...) independent judiciary, 24:19 real opportunity to be acquitted, system of justice. (...) You know ‘our system’ not a ‘show trial’ system. And, you know, the Russians agreed to that, and the prosecutors conducted themselves in accordance with those rules who, you know, did good work. But in the end the Russian judges, I think, you know, they were controlled by Moscow.
J: Well, I think that’s all my questions.
End Recording