In August 2024, the German judiciary confirmed a two-years suspended jail time for a 99-year-old woman named Irmgard Furchner. She was prosecuted for being an accessory to over 10,000 murders when she was 18, working as a secretary at the Stutthof concentration camp. She was likely the last person to be tried for Holocaust crimes.
In Argentina, elderly former military personnel and ex police officers are still undergoing trials for crimes against humanity they committed during the 1976-1983 dictatorship.
The judicial paths to bring perpetrators to court in both countries have several differences, but they are both considered to be turning points in terms of prosecution of crimes against humanity.
This year marks the 80th anniversary of the Nuremberg trials that took Nazi officials to the dock. December 9 also marked 40 years since the verdict against the Argentine military Juntas that led the dictatorship was announced.
Nuremberg was a key precedent that served as a baseline to the Juntas trial. Before 1945, the concept of “crimes against humanity” did not exist. But the legal process Argentina undertook in 1985, and the trials against those who committed crimes during the dictatorship which continued over the span of the last two decades, would also leave important lessons.
“There had never been a trial like that in Argentina. The only precedent was Nuremberg,” said Ricardo Gil Lavedra, a former judge who was part of the jury that tried the Argentine dictators, during a conference on the Nuremberg and military Juntas trials at the University of Buenos Aires’ Law School.
“The Juntas trial was an example for the world.”
Nuremberg: a revolution in international law The Nuremberg trials carried out by France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States in occupied Germany judged the crimes of the Holocaust and other violations committed in the name of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich between 1939-1945.
The trials took place between November 20, 1945, and October 1, 1946, and are considered the birthplace of international law.
“Nuremberg was revolutionary. For the first time, it established individual responsibilities [instead of convicting the state], and stated that due to their scope and severity those crimes concerned the international community,” Gil Lavedra said.
While figuring out how to carry out the trials, the concept of crimes against humanity emerged as a way to investigate atrocities that didn’t fall into the category of war crimes.
This included inhumane acts committed against civilians, before or during a war, among other crimes. At the time, however, they still had to be somehow connected to a war to be considered as such.
Nuremberg Trials defendants on November 22, 1945. Front row, left to right: Hermann Goering, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel, and Alfred Rosenberg. Back row, left to right: Karl Doenitz, Erich Raeder, Baldur von Schirach, Fritz Sauckel, and Alfred Jodl. Credit: Harvard Law School Library “The creation of the concept of crimes against humanity puts humanity and dignity at the core of international criminal law,” explained Christoph Safferling, legal scholar at the Friedrich-Alexander University and director of the International Nuremberg Principles Academy, who also spoke during the conference.
“In 1945 it wasn’t clear the concept could be applied outside wartime,” Safferling said. This would change after the Nuremberg trials. The new legal category would transcend borders and reach domestic judiciaries, no longer being limited to international law.
The Juntas trial It would take forty years for something similar to Nuremberg to happen again: the trial against the military Juntas that spearheaded the 1976-1983 dictatorship.
In 1985, Argentina became the first country in history to judge the dictators and perpetrators of genocide within their own country in a civil trial. The hearings began on April 22 and ended on December 9, when the verdict was read.
The legal process judged nine of the ten members of the armed forces that led the three military Juntas that illegitimately governed the country during the dictatorship. It was the first televised trial in Argentine history and caused widespread media attention.
Several survivors testified in court, revealing chilling details of the hell they had gone through.
Five of the dictators were sentenced for what the court considered to be a criminal plan designed by the Juntas. Jorge Rafael Videla and Emilio Eduardo Massera were convicted to life in jail for their responsibility in dozens of murders, and cases of torture and false imprisonment. The other four were acquitted.
The Buenos Aires Herald carried out a comprehensive coverage of the trial and its aftermath. Legendary former editor of the Herald Robert Cox testified during the proceedings and told the court about the “hundreds if not thousands of letters reporting abductions,” according to a Herald article from April 27, 1985.
At the time, the Herald was the only newspaper publishing articles on the reported abductions.
Former Buenos Aires Herald editor Robert Cox (bottom) testifying under the gaze of prosecutors Julio César Strassera (second from the right) and Luis Moreno Ocampo (right). From the Herald archive An example for the world Gil Lavedra, one of the six judges that tried the dictators, said during the talk at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) that one important difference between the Juntas trial and Nuremberg was that the former happened within the local judiciary, instead of an international court.
The judges had to try the accused using local legislation since, at the time, the country had not adhered to international agreements regarding human rights.
Some of the difficulties that the court, as well as prosecutors Julio César Strassera and Luis Moreno Ocampo, had to face was that Argentina had only just recovered its democratic rule two years earlier and all the accused were still active and powerful members of the armed forces.
There was also no precedent on how to judge such an enormous amount of crimes.
After the trial, Argentina became an international beacon for human rights and an example of how to prosecute crimes against humanity.
However, the road to justice had its setbacks: in the following years the government and Congress approved what were commonly known as “impunity laws,” which pardoned those convicted of crimes during the dictatorship and put an end to further trials.
But many years later, when those laws were annulled, in 2003, the Juntas trial would set the grounds for the hundreds of legal cases against perpetrators of crimes against humanity during the dictatorship that are still ongoing.
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In the past two decades, almost 1,300 people have been convicted for crimes against humanity in Argentina, many of them middle and lower ranked military officials, in addition to civilians.
Speaking with the Herald after the UBA conference, Safferling highlighted the importance of continuing to carry out these trials, even after more than 40 years since the dictatorship.
“Society has a right to confront that person with what he or she has done. And, in particular, the victims have a right to truth,” he said.
Cover photo: The Military Juntas trial in 1985. Left to right: Armando Lambruschini, Leopoldo Galtieri, Orlando Agosti, Jorge Rafael Videla, Omar Graffigna, Jorge Anaya, Basilio Lami Dozo, Roberto Viola, and Emilio Massera. Credit: Télam.