The Dönitz Conundrum

One incongruity that "just war" theorists seem to miss is that while they claim an abstraction called "just war doctrine" has developed over millennia. examples of its practical application under law are few and far between. Using AI purely as a semi-omniscient reference librarian, I can come up with only a few "juat war" tribunals before the post-World War II Nuremberg trials, such as the 1474 trial of Peter von Hagenbach for atrocities committed during the occupation of Breisach.

After that, we have to wait almost 500 years to reach Article 227 of the Versailles treaty, which "publicly arraigned" Kaiser Wilhelm II for "a supreme offence against international morality." However, he was never brought to trial as the Netherlands refused to extradite him, and he lived there until hbis death in 1941.

In other words, we baaically have only one solid example of applying "just war doctrine" in a quasi-jurisprudential environment anywhere in ancient or modern history, the Nuremberg trials, and like war itself, they're messy indeed.

As we gain more perspective on these trials, it becomes clearer how little actual justice was done. A good many of the worst actors simply escaped, including figures like Adolf Eichmann, who was ultimately kidnapped, tried, and executed in Israel, but many others were never tracked down. Albert Speer, a despicable figure who was handsome and charismatic, ran the Nazi war machine as armaments minister in the last years of rhe war, and as head of the Todt organization actually built the concentration camps.

But he saved his life by portraying hinmself as the repentant "good Nazi", and after 20 years in prison built a media franchise for himself in that role. And a whole range of rocket scientists were too valuable to both the US and Soviets to put on trial at all, like Wernher von Braun, who was able to use NASA's publicity machine to make himself a Cold War US national hero, although he used slave labor to assemble the V2 roxckets.

On the other hand, we have the case of Karl Dönitz. From the start of the war until 1943, he was commander of the U-boats; after that, he was commander-in-chief of the navy. On his suicide on April 30, 1945, Hitler named him his successor, but over his short period as head of state, he saw his main job as constituting the authority to organize the surrender, as well as facilitating the surrender of as many German forces as posasible to the Americans and British, rather than the Soviets. According to Wikipedia,

Following the war, Dönitz was held as a prisoner of war by the Allies. He was indicted as a major war criminal at the Nuremberg trials on three counts. One: conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Two: planning, initiating, and waging wars of aggression. Three: crimes against the laws of war. Dönitz was found not guilty on count one of the indictment, but guilty on counts two and three.

His defense strategy was unique: he argued that he'd done only what the Allies had themselves done in the prosecution of the war. In fact, his lawyers called US Admiral Chester Nimitz, Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, to testify on his behalf. Nimitz testified via a sworn affidavit on July 2, 1946.

Nimitz acknowledged that the US had conducted "unrestricted submarine warfare" from the start of the war in 1941, the same charge made against Dönitz. He confirmed that U.S. submarines were also ordered not to rescue survivors if doing so endangered the submarine.

Because the Allies had employed the same methods they were charging Dönitz with, the tribunal ruled that although he was convicted on two counts of his indictment, his sentence would not be based on his breaches of international law regarding submarine warfare. He received a ten-year sentence, the shortest of any major defendant, a majority of whom were sentenced to death, and less than even Speer's 20 years.

Beyond that, After the verdict, more than 100 senior Allied officers, many of them high-ranking Americans, wrote letters to Dönitz expressing their disappointment and disapproval of his 10-year sentence. He served the full ten years and died at the age of 89 in 1980. Like Speer, he attempted to build a media career after his release, but his publicists apparently didn't have what Speer's had to work with.

Certainly the opinion of many US and Allied officers after the war was that many of the German admirals and generals were competent, professional military men who were simply doing their duty, and Dönitz, even if he wasa a committed Nazi, seems to have been an example on which they focused.

But the Nuremberg trials bring up a major problem with "just war doctrine". It's been developed by philosophers and intelletuals, or in other words, it was created in cloud-cuckoo land, a product of a fantasy that, as General Sherman would say, you can somehow refine war. Dönitz was able, even in a highly politicized show-trial environment, to advance as best anyone could that this isn't the nature of war, and by "just war" standards, each side is going to be found about equally guilty.

And of course, nobody put Truman, Oppenheimer, or General Leslie Groves on trial for crimes against humanity. After all, they won the war. "Just war doctrine" in the end is a propaganda tool and an intellectual exercise in self-congratulation; it promotes an unrealistic fantasy about the nature of war.