From the despair of genocide and war on unprecedented scale arose an opportunity to establish ground rules in international law to govern the behavior of states. That opportunity was squandered. In the words of Karl Jaspers, one of Germany’s most liberal, Western-oriented thinkers, the IMT “was, in effect, a singular proceeding of the victors against the vanquished, in which the foundation of a shared legal understanding and legal intention of the victorious powers was absent. It therefore achieved the opposite of what it should have. Law was not made, rather mistrust of law increased. The
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