An Ambassador’s Journal By David Scheffer of Arizona State University
An Ambassador’s Journal is a new bi-weekly publication on Substack from Arizona State University’s David Scheffer. By subscribing to his substack, you will get to know Professor Scheffer and dive deep into historical topics in world affairs. In his first essay he states, “Given my personal history with international justice, I aim to share my experiences, insights, and stories about the individuals who masterminded atrocity crimes (genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, aggression) that some of you may not know much if anything about, but they occurred in our time and on our watch.”
Professor Scheffer was the first U.S. Ambassador at Large for War Crimes Issues (1997-2001). He negotiated the creation of five war crimes tribunals and chaired the Atrocities Prevention Inter-Agency Working Group (1998-2001). He served on the Deputies Committee of the National Security Council and as Senior Adviser and Counsel to Dr. Madeleine Albright, the U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations, from 1993-1996. His books include “All the Missing Souls: A Personal History of the War Crimes Tribunals” (Princeton 2012), “The Sit Room: In the Theater of War and Peace” (Oxford 2019), and “The UN Charter: Five Pillars for Humankind” (Springer 2025, co-author Mark S. Ellis).
Below is Ambassador Scheffer’s first substack essay titled, “What if we could dissect evil?” (Dr. Douglas Kelley, Chief Psychiatrist portrayed in the film, Nuremberg).
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Welcome to An Ambassador’s Journal, my new Substack essay appearing bi-weekly. This is an ambassador’s journal because I was the first U.S. Ambassador at Large for War Crimes Issues, serving from 1997 to 2001, and I am going to write about mostly historical topics in world affairs. Given my personal history with international justice, I aim to share my experiences, insights, and stories about the individuals who masterminded atrocity crimes (genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, aggression) that some of you may not know much if anything about, but they occurred in our time and on our watch. The trials that brought them to justice in the modern war crimes tribunals are powerful testaments to historical memory, what we owe the victims, and the significance of what I call “forever law,” namely international legal principles that are expressions of everlasting values in our lives. My book, All the Missing Souls: A Personal History of the War Crimes Tribunals (Princeton, 2012), tells my own story of the building of the modern war crimes tribunals during the 1990’s while I served in the Clinton Administration and where these trials have been held during the last several decades.
I embark on this journey inspired, in part, by the enormous amount of interest, not only in America but globally, about “true crime” stories that populate the print media, podcasts, and film. Those of you captivated by such stories of crime and punishment will be introduced to the mass atrocities that scar vast swaths of the world’s surface and leave millions of victims in their wake. To put it bluntly, atrocity crimes are typically egregious assaults on people who are defenseless. Occasionally I intend to step into other domains that might intrigue you.
You may have viewed or plan to view the superbly-acted new movie, Nuremberg (Sony Pictures Classic), starring Russell Crowe and Rami Malek and directed by James Vanderbilt. The movie is streaming on Prime Video now and eventually on Netflix. Because the film frames atrocities in the context of the Nuremberg Trials and has attracted much attention these days, I focus this first essay on the historical context of the movie and introduce you briefly to some other films about prosecuting the Holocaust. Later essays advance forward to the trials of the modern war crimes tribunals.
Nuremberg—released on the 80th anniversary of the start of the trials before the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany, in November 1945—focuses on the individual whose name takes center stage in the most famous Nuremberg judgment: Hermann Göring, Supreme Commander of the Luftwaffe and Adolf Hitler’s close collaborator and designated successor during World War II. I don’t want to spoil the granular plot line for those who have not yet seen the film, but bear in mind the following about what transpired at Nuremberg:
The major objective of the American lead prosecutor, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson (portrayed by Michael Shannon), was to prosecute the crime of planning, preparing, initiating or waging a war of aggression, or participating in a common plan or conspiracy to do so, which the movie depicts in Jackson’s opening statement. Given the state of international law at the time, it would be no easy task to criminalize Hitler’s invasion of other countries. Just prior to his departure to Europe to negotiate the London Charter that would govern the Nuremberg Tribunal, Jackson wrote President Harry S. Truman that they would have to create new international law in the process. Jackson knew that the historical case for the criminality of a war of aggression would have to be sold to the judges and the public as an evolving customary rule that nations have adopted over the years in both practice and diplomacy. The Nuremberg Tribunal’s final judgment accepted that proposition.
During the trial in Courtroom 600 of the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, which remains an active courtroom to this day and the site of many events of the International Nuremberg Principles Academy, the public’s attention and indeed the final exchange with Göring on the witness stand shifted from a war of aggression to the crimes against humanity committed against civilian populations. The British prosecutor knew how to bring that powerful point home in the courtroom and the movie depicts this. Although the very new term “genocide” was known to the prosecution team, it was not yet a precisely defined international crime and did not appear in the London Charter. So, no defendant at Nuremberg was convicted of the mega-crime of genocide per se, namely acting with the specific intent to destroy an entire or sizable part of a group of people simply because of their national, ethnical, racial or religious identity. The intentional mass murder of millions of Jews—the Holocaust—was starkly portrayed in the courtroom but those deaths and the grievous horrors of the concentration camps were prosecuted as more selective crimes against humanity, meaning murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against civilians, as well as various acts of persecution on political, racial or religious grounds.
Nuremberg centers its plot on Crowe, portraying Göring, and Malik as Dr. Douglas Kelley, the chief psychiatrist selected to interview Göring and the other Nazi defendants to determine whether they had the mental capacity, or competency, to stand trial. Dr. Kelley found only one of the Nazi defendants, Robert Ley, to be insane. Ley committed suicide before the trial even began, which the movie depicts. However, Dr. Kelley’s book, 22 Cells in Nuremberg. A Psychiatrist Examines the Nazi Criminals (1947), which explains his findings about the psyche of each defendant, failed to attract many readers. How, after all, does evil manifest itself in the minds of war criminals? In the film, Dr. Kelley asks “What sets these men apart from all others? What enabled them to commit the crimes that they did?” If we understood that phenomenon better, we could confront such mass murderers before they commit more slaughters so as to strategize prevention tactics. But such psychological insights are rarely provided. Dr. Kelley’s post-war career came crashing down with his suicide in 1958 the same way Göring ended life, with a potassium cyanide pill.
In a subsequent trial before a U.S. military tribunal sitting in Courtroom 600, the word “genocide” was invoked occasionally by the young American prosecutor, Ben Ferencz, during the Einsatzgruppen case. (The International Military Tribunal only prosecuted the major Nazi war criminals in the famous trial that included Göring. The U.S. military tribunals were American-administered courts that held 12 additional trials of lower-level German officials.) Ferencz, who during his lifetime became a highly effective champion of international criminal justice, brought 24 Nazi SS officers to justice for the mass killing of more than one million civilians, mostly Jews, on the East European Front and the Soviet Union. Again, however, the convictions centered on crimes against humanity and war crimes. Following the Einsatzgruppen case of early 1948, the Genocide Convention was adopted at the United Nations General Assembly in December 1948 and thereafter the crime of genocide, well defined and codified in the treaty, became the basis for criminal trials against individuals who “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”
If you want to read my book chapter that provides more insight into the Nuremberg Trial, see file:///Users/dscheff1/Downloads/1st%20IHL%20Dialogs%20(2007).pdf (pp. 155-182). The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is soon posting my report illuminating key principles found in judgments about the crime of genocide in international and national courts.
There are some free and easily accessible recent films that bring the Nuremberg legacy, and what followed, to light. An interview of me appears in Prosecuting Evil: The Extraordinary World of Ben Ferencz (available on YouTube). I knew Ferencz as a colleague in law for several decades. I am interviewed in Nazi VR about the breakthrough in German courts of prosecuting those who aided and abetted the Holocaust, a topic also addressed in an excellent documentary on Amazon Prime, The Accountant of Auschwitz.
I’ve led an eclectic life in the world of international law and diplomacy. While my standard bio recites raw data, you will get to know me better as you read this bi-weekly journal.
What I am reading: Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia, by Gary J. Bass (Knopf, 2023). The story of prosecuting the major Japanese war criminals of World War II has never shared equal attention with the Nuremberg Trials. But it is just as compelling and infused with the remarkably complex personalities of the defendants, judges, prosecutors, defense counsel, and U.S. Army General Douglas MacArthur, who oversaw the occupation of Japan. I was interviewed in the 1990’s by the author, Gary Bass, when he was a reporter for The Economist. He has since become an award-winning author and distinguished professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University.
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