Washington University Law Review Volume 1951 Issue 3 1951 Nuremberg and Group Prosecution Richard Arens University of Buffalo Follow this and additional works at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/law_lawreview Part of the Legal History Commons, and the Military, War, and Peace Commons Recommended Citation Richard Arens, Nuremberg and Group Prosecution, 1951 WASH. U. L. Q. 329 (1951). Available at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/law_lawreview/vol1951/iss3/3 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Law School at Washington University Open Scholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in Washington University Law Review by an authorized administrator of Washington University Open Scholarship. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. NUREMBERG AND GROUP PROSECUTION* RICHARD ARENSt INTRODUCTION The trial of the Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg for crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity involved not only the indictment of individual defendants but also the indictment of the major Nazi organizations. 1 An aspect almost completely ignored in the welter of allega- gations concerning the ex post facto basis of the Nuremberg prosecutions2 is that concerning the infliction of collective or group sanctions through adjudication of group criminality. The question touching on the use of such sanctions for the maintenance of public order has become particularly acute in recent years in democratic society faced with the threat of global violence. An ominous resort to group or collective deprivations was highlighted in the Western world during World War II by deportation of West Coast Japanese-Americans to "relocation centers" in the name of security? A subsequent resort to the infliction of such deprivations has become apparent in the * This is the second of two studies on war crimes prosecutions prepared for the Quarterly by Professor Arens.