Opening the prosecution of Nazi leaders at Nuremberg in November 1945, Justice Robert Jackson, on leave from the Supreme Court, said: “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.”

Submitting the likes of Herman Goering, Hitler’s deputy, to the judgment of the law rather than to the summary justice of a firing squad was “one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.”