httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcudlm6tPa0&feature=related

Footage of the sentencing of the Nazi leadership

On this date in 1946 the surviving Nazi leaders were sentenced at the Nuremburg Trials.

Frye in “The Knowledge of Good and Evil”:

The Nuremberg and other Nazi trials even raised the question whether a (necessarily hopeless) resistance to the demands of a perverted social order was not only morally but legally binding, and whether one who did not make such a resistance could be considered a criminal. It was feared at the time, no doubt correctly, that the nations who prosecuted these trials would not show enough moral courage to respect this principle where their own interests were involved. In contrast, the more powerful the social structure, the more apt one’s loyalty to it is  modulated from concern to concerned indifference.  The enemy become not people to be defeated, but embodiments to be exterminated.  (Stubborn Structure, 28-9)