Robert H. Jackson Center in Jamestown, NY

Yesterday, I looked up the text of the opening speech by Robert H. Jackson at the Nuremberg IMT on November 21, 1945 and one of the web sites that I found in my search was the web site of the Robert H. Jackson Center in Jamestown, NY.  I was very surprised to find this photo on the home page of the web site:

Boy standing in the ruins of the city of Nuremberg, 1945

Here is the description of the above photo from the Robert H. Jackson web site:

Nuremberg was severely damaged in Allied strategic bombing from 1943–45. On January 2, 1945, Nuremberg was systematically bombed by the Royal Air Force and the U.S. Army Air Forces and about ninety percent of it was destroyed in only one hour, with 1,800 residents killed and roughly 100,000 displaced. In February 1945, additional attacks followed. In total, about 6,000 Nuremberg residents are estimated to have been killed in air raids. Despite this, the city was rebuilt after the war and was to some extent, restored to its pre-war appearance including the reconstruction of some of its medieval buildings.

To me, this seems to be the worst possible photo to put on a web site about the legacy of the famous American prosecutor of the German war criminals of World War II.  Is this a photo of a German war crime?  No, it is a photo of an Allied war crime. Shouldn’t they have put a photo of a German war crime on a web site about Robert H. Jackson, the famous prosecutor of the German war criminals?

Actually, the charges against the German war criminals at Nuremberg did not include the crime of bombing Allied cities.  The Allies wisely decided not to bring that up because it would have caused most people to think of the atomic bombs dropped on two cities in Japan and the destruction of Dresden and Nuremberg.  A new rule was made up by the Allies, for the trials of the Germans, that crimes committed by the Allies could not be mentioned.

I have the same photo, that is shown above, on my web site here.  I scanned the photo from a book that I purchased in Nuremberg in 1997.  I’m not positive about this, but I think I was the first person to put this photo on the world wide web.  My purpose was to show that a war crime was committed by the Allies in bombing a city that was not a military target so late in the war.

I would suggest a photo of the Germans digging up the bodies in Katyn Forest, a crime which the Soviet Union blamed on the Germans at the Nuremberg IMT, but admitted in 1989 that this was a crime perpetrated by the Soviets.

My second choice would be a still photo from the American film of the fake gas chamber constructed by the American military at Dachau in 1945; this film was shown at the Nuremberg IMT.

In any case, the photo on the web site of the Robert H. Jackson Center is in poor taste.  It shows that the Allies were vengeful during the war; it is not a suitable photo to illustrate how the Allies were allegedly fair to the Germans at the Nuremberg IMT.