The Utility of the Proposed Trial and Punishment of Enemy Leaders

The present war has now reached the stage when definite plans are being announced for the control and punishment of the enemy nations when they shall have been defeated. There is a strong and apparently growing sentiment among the citizens and officials of the United Nations for prosecution of the “Axis criminals” and quarantine of Axis nations. Committees of eminent scholars, some of them presumably acting under instruction from their governments, are now drawing up plans for these trials. Many individuals, however, doubt whether it will prove feasible to carry out these proposals. Others reject the whole idea of retribution or reparation against a defeated nation or its leaders as unethical and destructive of the ends for which we say we are fighting.We wish to be neither vindictive nor gullible. Hence the popularity of suggestions that we must be prepared to give food and medicine to the people of the Axis nations during the early postwar months. But there is widespread support also for the belief that we must be ready to administer German economic and political life for some years if we wish to be sure that war will not come again from the same quarter. This balancing of generosity against sternness means, as Walter Lippmann puts it, that “our apparently contradictory war aims can be reconciled.”