Written by Basil E. Dalack   

Civilization can exist only if the rule of law exists. Without law, man is back in the jungle, each man fighting his neighbor to survive.
The War which Germany launched on September 1, 1939, came to an official end on May 8, 1945. The victors in that war, the United Kingdom, France, the USSR, and the United States, seized the surviving leaders of Germany, and were all for stinging ’em up now.
Calmer heads among the victors said: “Wait a minute; if we do that we’d be no better than they are; we can string ’em up only if what they did constituted crimes warranting hanging.”
And so the London Agreement of August 8, 1945, which established rules of law for dealing with the vanquished, came to be.
The most important contribution to the rule of law the victor made was their articulation of criminal behavior that was implicitly prohibited by international treaties Germany was party to, especially the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928.
The two most significant provisions of the international treaty, to which the victors as well as the vanquished were parties, read as follows:
ARTICLE I
“The High Contracting Parties solemly (sic) declare in the names of their respective peoples that they condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce it, as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another.”
ARTICLE II
“The High Contracting Parties agree that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them, shall never be sought except by pacific means.”
The conduct which those provisions prohibited was initiating a war, and so initiating a war (adding the term “aggression” to “war” is a needless superfluity) is prohibited conduct—a crime—and so the legislation of the four parties in 1945 London, which was ratified by nineteen other countries, made the initiating of a war a crime: The Crime Against Peace.
Although the Tribunal dissolved itself after the Nuremberg trials, the international community, which had promulgated, inter alia, the Crime Against Peace, never repealed the legislation it had passed in August 1945, and so that legislation, especially the Crime Against Peace, is still “Good Law”.