Many
years later, I was in Hanoi during the Christmas bombing of 1972. What I
was trying to do was to examine the principles laid down at Nuremberg
and see whether we had violated them in Vietnam. Whether we lived up to
our own principles. I took the position that a number of things we did
in Vietnam were violations of the laws of war. As for the bombing of
North Vietnam, I did not believe that under the laws of war that was a
crime. Maybe it should have been. But there was no precedent for
declaring it as such.
Why
did we refrain from bombing the center of Hanoi? I suppose because the
public is increasingly aware of some limitations on warfare. Nuremberg
has built up a body of laws and precedent that needs to be thought
about. Why was there such a hullabaloo about the massacres in the camps
in Lebanon? I think because in Nuremberg there was a systematic
enforcement of these rules. I never would have gone to Hanoi had I not
been involved in Nuremberg.
After
all, the Holocaust was unprecedented in its scope. Surreal? I don’t
know. I’m afraid the human capacity for getting hardened to testimony
about this sort of thing is unlimited. After you’ve heard two, three
days of it, more of it is not new. Take a small child. He takes
everything for granted. I remember when my own children, my two little
girls, aged five and seven, came to Nuremberg, I was showing them the
bomb-damaged houses. ‘The houses are broken’, they said. After they’d
seen one or two of them, they were no longer very interested.