2011/1
The Nature of the Nazi State and the Question of International Criminal Responsibility of Corporate Officials at Nuremberg: Franz Newmann's Benehmoth at the Industrialist Trials
Doreen Lustig
New York University School of Law
This paper explores how various conceptions of the Nazi totalitarian state influenced the prosecution
and decisions of the Industrialist Trials at Nuremberg which were conducted against key officials in
the companies of Flick, Krupp and I.G. Farben. Drawing on archival materials, I argue that the debate
over the Industrialist responsibility could be read as a struggle between competing theories of the
totalitarian state. The paper considers the influence of the Frankfurt School and Franz Neumann’s
theory of the Nazi state as Behemoth on the prosecution’s innovative theory of the Nazi regime and
the opportunity it provided for a finding of corporate and individual accountability for international
legal crimes. The Tribunal’s refusal to find guilt implies that it rejected the Behemoth model in favor
of a more static, traditional, and monolithic notion of the state famously celebrated in Hobbes’s
Leviathan. Having established these competing notions of the Nazi state, the remainder of the article
analyzes their influence on the Tribunals’ limited conception of accountability of the industrialists in
three central aspects of trials: the Crime of Aggression, the crimes of spoliation and plunder and the
atrocities of enslavement, torture and extermination.
