Andrew Walker: The law above the law

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Eighty years ago last week, the Nuremberg Trials began. It was an unprecedented attempt to hold leaders of the Holocaust to account.

WORLD Opinions Managing Editor Andrew Walker says Nazi war crimes cried out for a justice beyond the reach of man-made laws.

NEWSREEL: At Nuremberg, the Hitler gang has gone on trial. For the first time, criminal war leaders are being judged by an international court.

ANDREW WALKER: I confess that the events of Nuremberg fascinate me. On the one hand, the idea that a temporary military tribunal comprised of the Allied Powers would formulate legal standards almost ex nihilo  to put Nazi leaders on trial raises perennial philosophical questions about legal authority and legitimacy. Was this a court with true jurisdiction or simply the moral will of the victors? The question still lingers.

Yet as a professor of Christian ethics, it is not merely the procedural complexity that holds my attention—it is the moral gravity. Nuremberg was not simply a courtroom. It was humanity’s attempt to reckon with evil so horrific and so intentional that ordinary categories seemed insufficient. The Nazis’ crimes were grotesque and intentionally dehumanizing, and those crimes demanded justice. The trials stand as evidence that human conscience and the laws of nations cry out for justice.

NEWSREEL: Judges from Britain, America, Russia, and France assemble in Nuremberg's courthouse. Empowered to impose the sentence of death or such punishment it may consider just, the tribunal sits in judgement of 20 leaders from the Nazi party…

Four legal categories were established at the tribunal: crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and conspiracy to commit the same. These standards did not arise from any nation’s legal code but from universal principles of justice. They rested on the natural law.

That point is decisive: The Nazis’ preferred defense—“we were obeying lawful orders”—collapsed the moment a law higher than German positive law was acknowledged. Natural law established a moral jurisdiction transcending national sovereignty.

Why, then, was a trial necessary? Justice Robert H. Jackson of the Supreme Court of the United States, the chief American prosecutor, framed the answer soberly and unmistakably in his opening statement:

“The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.”

For Jackson, Nuremberg was not merely punitive—it was a civilizational test for whether the world possessed the legal temerity to reckon with the horrors that visited it. Humanity had to prove it possessed moral resources sufficient to prevent such evil from recurring.

NEWSREEL: There have always been ambitious and ruthless men ready to gamble with the lives of their fellows. Now for the first time, international gangsters stand trial as common criminals.

Still, the trials were morally and philosophically fraught. Were the Allies themselves not guilty of moral wrongs in war? Was it legitimate to try defendants on legal grounds formulated after their actions had occurred? And could anything called “international law” truly bind—and supersede—sovereign nations?

These questions are not trivial. They remain live issues in jurisprudence, ethics, and international relations.

Even so, one feature stands out with clarity: When confronted with atrocities of such scale, humanity instinctively appeals to an objective moral standard. Abstract academic debates about relativism sound impressive in seminar rooms. They sound absurd amid the piles of shoes at Auschwitz.

NEWSREEL: Imagination sickens at the crimes laid upon the accused now stripped of the trappings of power. The world’s writ has run to Nuremberg and justice waits ...

Nuremberg stands as a modern vindication of the moral law of God—the natural law. It demonstrated that evil cannot be excused by legality, that positive law cannot be the final authority, and that justice demands reference to a universal moral order grounded in human dignity.

At Nuremberg, the nations of the world looked into the abyss of human depravity and rendered judgment—not merely by power, politics, or treaty, but by appeal to a law higher than man. That law is nothing less than the law of God—written on the heart and revealed in creation.

We often repeat the phrase, “There are no atheists in foxholes”—meaning that at the brink of death, the denial of God collapses under the weight of staring existential reality down at the end of a gun barrel. That is true.

When we confront evil so profound that language strains to describe it, the human heart knows instinctively: There must be justice, and justice must be grounded in something higher than the state. But the moral horror we feel in the face of Nazi atrocities teaches an additional truth: There were no atheists at Nuremberg either.

I’m Andrew Walker.

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