In the lead-up to the beginning of the trials in Nuremberg, a man was giving his thoughts on the IBM simultaneous translation “gizmos”. He commented that the creators seem to have forgotten the Biblical tale of the Tower of Babel. It was a funny anecdote, but for me, it represents an interesting theme of the connection between technological innovation and political revolution.
On a fundamental level, scholars look to Gutenberg as a seminal moment that has democratized information and knowledge and has spurred revolutions, cultural, religious, and political.
In Babel, human collaboration led to a human daring to reach God. The punishment was to diversify languages so they couldn’t understand each other and therefore couldn’t collaborate.
We can see how this innovation then bridges the gap of linguistic difference, fostering a transnational collaboration critical to the success at Nuremberg. When we look at Vienna, Versailles, and Bretton Woods, it’s hard to imagine them happening on the scale they do without modernity.
Indeed, this is not just my tech brain seeing things this way. As Albert Speer said at the conclusion, “as the more technical the world becomes, the more individual freedom and the self-rule of mankind becomes essential. The war has ended on the note of radio-controlled rockets, aircraft approaching the speed of sound,
The airplane, the cargo ship, and mass media have all engineered a global village that further brings us together. The liberal world order owes its existence to its technological underpinnings. These were themes that I couldn’t help but see throughout Nuremberg, as that was indeed a technological turning point as much as it was a political one.
Generally, studying Nuremberg through the film, paired with my ongoing research on universal jurisdiction, has matured my understanding of international relations and the symbolic performativeness and strength of rituals of power, procedure, and norm.
Now, the film in the film itself was very sobering. When Robert said that, up until the film, he did not obtain an understanding, even after the statistics and affidavits he had read. I couldn’t agree more. And when Elsie said she didn’t understand, even then, how such horror could take place, I also agreed.
The twisted morality of the Nazi prisoners, especially Herman Goring, is something we always see in “revolutionary” leaders. Indeed, even leftist revolutionaries like Robespierre exhibited these same paradoxes of actions and ideals.
I couldn’t believe my ears when the Commandant of Auschwitz was speaking, describing his atrocities with striking nonchalance. He felt the need to clarify that he exterminated people in the most humane fashion possible and that no torture was involved. “Does a rat catcher think it is wrong to kil rats?” It is also very interesting to analyze the role of the psychologist in aiding in the longevity of the prisoners and working with Robert as an inside man with the defendants.
I’ve never really studied Nuremberg; it was always glossed over in Global History classes that would lump it in there somewhere as we studied WW2 and the Cold War in one go. So it was all very new information.
