In an interview on Nov. 16 commenting on a new documentary, “Nuremberg,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that “The verdicts of the Nuremberg Trials contained the principles that were first developed during the trials,” he said. “They served as the foundation of modern international law. They abolished the might makes right principle and established that it is unacceptable to use force and violate humanitarian principles in any conflicts.” He noted that the proposal to hold such trials after the war was first promoted by the Soviet Union in 1941, and incorporated into Allied policy only in 1944 at Yalta.
With this in mind, Lavrov explained, already in 1942, the Soviet Union had established the Extraordinary State Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the Crimes of the Nazi Invaders and Their Accomplices, which was collecting materials on the atrocities. The idea of a tribunal was not accepted at first by the other allies, with both the U.S. and Great Britain simply saying that they should just execute the top criminals, perhaps for fear that it would come out that some in the West had supported the rise of the Nazi regime. But the tribunal proposal was finally accepted.
“It was during the Nuremberg Trials that the principle of inevitable punishment for war crimes, aggression, crimes against humanity and genocide was articulated on an international and universal scale,” Lavrov said.
