Nuremberg trials
Based on Wikipedia: Nuremberg trials
In the autumn of 1945, something unprecedented happened in a bombed-out German courthouse. The victors of history's bloodiest war didn't simply execute their defeated enemies, as had been done for millennia. They didn't hold a show trial with predetermined verdicts. Instead, they attempted something that had never been tried before: they put an entire regime on trial, with real lawyers, real evidence, and real uncertainty about the outcome.
This was the Nuremberg trials. And the legal principles invented in that courtroom—the idea that individuals, not just nations, could be held accountable for crimes against humanity—became the foundation of international criminal law as we know it today.
The Argument Nobody Expected
Before Nuremberg, the debate among the Allied powers wasn't about how to conduct the trials. It was about whether to have trials at all.
The British wanted summary executions. Winston Churchill's government had watched the catastrophic failure of war crimes prosecutions after World War One, where German courts acquitted most defendants to public applause. Why repeat the farce? Shoot the Nazi leaders and be done with it.
The Soviets, fresh from Stalin's Moscow show trials of the 1930s, wanted a trial—but one where the verdict was decided before opening arguments. The goal would be to publicly document Nazi guilt and, crucially, to build a case for the massive war reparations the devastated Soviet economy desperately needed. Twenty-seven million Soviet citizens had died. Entire cities had been erased. The Soviets wanted compensation, and a trial would establish exactly how much Germany owed.
The Americans had a different vision entirely. They saw the trial as an opportunity to demonstrate the superiority of Western legal systems. A fair trial—genuinely fair, with real possibility of acquittal—would reform Germany and show the world what democratic justice looked like. It was nation-building through jurisprudence.
The French, having just concluded trials of the leaders of the collaborationist Vichy government, brought their own perspective. They were particularly interested in prosecuting German industrialists who had enriched themselves through occupation and plunder.
Inventing New Crimes
Here's where things got philosophically complicated. The Allies wanted to prosecute the Nazis for starting the war—but starting a war wasn't technically illegal in 1939. There was no statute, no international law, that said invading Poland was a crime for which individuals could be punished.
This seems absurd today. Of course launching aggressive war should be criminal. But in 1945, the legal principle didn't exist. Wars had always been the prerogative of sovereign nations. International law governed how wars were fought, not whether they could be fought at all.
A Soviet jurist named Aron Trainin had developed the concept of "crimes against peace"—the notion that waging aggressive war was itself criminal. His ideas were reprinted in the West and gained traction. The Americans, particularly the lead prosecutor Robert Jackson (a sitting Supreme Court Justice), insisted that aggression must be prosecuted. It was, after all, the reason America had entered the war. Jackson threatened to withdraw the United States from the entire enterprise if aggression wasn't on the charge sheet.
The Nuremberg Charter, signed in London on August 8, 1945, created three categories of crimes. Crimes against peace covered planning and waging aggressive war. War crimes covered the traditional violations of the laws of warfare—mistreating prisoners, killing civilians, and so forth. And then there was the new category that would prove most enduring: crimes against humanity.
The Problem of Sovereignty
Crimes against humanity solved a legal puzzle that had stumped everyone. War crimes, by their very definition, applied only to how one nation treated another nation's people during wartime. But what about how Germany treated its own citizens?
The Holocaust presented an unprecedented legal challenge. German Jews were German citizens. The systematic murder of millions had occurred, in many cases, within Germany's own borders. Traditional international law had nothing to say about a government's treatment of its own people. That was a domestic matter, shielded by sovereignty.
The Soviets had proposed calling this "crimes against civilians," but Jackson suggested the more expansive "crimes against humanity." The phrase had been used before—in 1915, France, Britain, and Russia had condemned the Armenian genocide as a "crime against humanity and civilization"—but no legal mechanism had ever been created to prosecute such crimes.
The British drafted the definition: "murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population." This was revolutionary. For the first time in history, there would be limits on what a government could do to its own people.
But there was a catch, and it reveals how compromised even revolutionary justice can be. Both the Americans and the Soviets insisted on limiting the tribunal's jurisdiction over crimes against humanity to those committed as part of aggressive war. Why? The Americans worried that their Jim Crow system of racial segregation might be labeled a crime against humanity. The Soviets had their own domestic atrocities to conceal. Neither wanted an international court that could judge how a government treated its own citizens in peacetime.
The Defendants
The most notorious Nazis were beyond justice. Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Joseph Goebbels had all killed themselves as the Reich collapsed. The twenty-two men who sat in the dock at Nuremberg were, in a sense, the second tier—though they were hardly minor figures.
Hermann Göring was the star defendant, the most infamous surviving Nazi. He had been Hitler's designated successor, commander of the Luftwaffe, and architect of the Four Year Plan that had prepared Germany for war. Fat, arrogant, and unrepentant, he would dominate the proceedings with his intelligence and his contempt for the entire enterprise.
The cabinet ministers included Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler's foreign minister who had negotiated the Nazi-Soviet Pact; Wilhelm Frick, the interior minister who had drafted the Nuremberg Laws stripping Jews of citizenship; and Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi Party's chief ideologist and minister for the occupied eastern territories where millions were murdered.
Then there were the military leaders, the economists, the propagandists. Fritz Sauckel had run the forced labor program that enslaved millions of foreign workers. Albert Speer had been Hitler's architect and armaments minister—he would become famous as the "good Nazi" who expressed regret, though historians now know he was far more complicit in atrocities than he admitted. Julius Streicher had published Der Stürmer, a virulently antisemitic newspaper whose crude cartoons had prepared the German public for genocide.
One defendant, Gustav Krupp, the aging head of the Krupp industrial dynasty, was found mentally incompetent to stand trial. His son would be tried in later proceedings.
The Mechanics of Justice
Nuremberg required inventing solutions to practical problems that had never been faced before. How do you conduct a trial in four languages simultaneously?
The answer was the creation of the first simultaneous translation system ever used in a legal proceeding. Interpreters translated testimony in real-time into English, French, Russian, and German, with each participant wearing headphones to follow along. The system, developed by IBM, revolutionized international conferences. Every United Nations meeting since has used descendants of the technology pioneered at Nuremberg.
The physical setting mattered too. The Palace of Justice in Nuremberg had been chosen partly because it was one of the few large court buildings left relatively intact in Germany, and partly for symbolic reasons. Nuremberg had been the spiritual home of the Nazi movement—the site of the massive party rallies, the city that gave its name to the racial laws. Holding the trial there sent a message.
The building still bore bomb damage and had to be renovated. An attached prison held the defendants. By early 1946, about a thousand people from the four Allied delegations were working in Nuremberg—lawyers, judges, psychologists, translators, graphic designers who created the elaborate charts used to explain the Nazi organizational structure to the court.
The Trial
The proceedings began on November 20, 1945, and would continue for nearly eleven months.
The prosecution's strategy was unusual. Rather than focusing primarily on witness testimony, they relied heavily on documentary evidence—the Nazis' own records. Germany had been a bureaucratic state, and the Nazis had documented their crimes with chilling thoroughness. Orders for mass shootings. Minutes from the Wannsee Conference where the Final Solution was planned. Films and photographs taken by the perpetrators themselves.
This approach served multiple purposes. It avoided relying on potentially unreliable witnesses. It let the Nazis condemn themselves in their own words. And it created an irrefutable historical record that could not be dismissed as victor's propaganda.
Chief Prosecutor Jackson's opening statement articulated the trial's purpose:
We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well.
The trial was not, in other words, meant to be a lynching in judicial robes. It was supposed to be real justice—and if the Allies failed to meet that standard, they would stand condemned alongside those they prosecuted.
Göring's Performance
Hermann Göring nearly derailed everything.
Having lost significant weight in custody (he had been a morphine addict and forced detoxification left him mentally sharper), Göring mounted an aggressive defense. He was intelligent, charismatic, and utterly unrepentant. Under cross-examination by Jackson, he ran circles around the prosecutor, defending Nazi policies with a sophistication that Jackson struggled to counter.
Göring argued that every nation committed the acts for which the Nazis were being prosecuted. The British had bombed German cities. The Americans had dropped atomic bombs on Japan. The Soviets had invaded Finland and massacred Polish officers at Katyn. Who were the Allies to judge?
This was, of course, whataboutism avant la lettre. But it was effective whataboutism. Jackson's cross-examination was widely considered a disaster, and there were genuine fears that Göring might sway the tribunal or at least provide propaganda for Nazi sympathizers.
The British prosecutor, David Maxwell Fyfe, proved more effective. Rather than engaging with Göring's philosophical arguments, he pinned him down on specific facts—particularly his knowledge of and participation in atrocities. Göring's evasions became transparent.
The Verdict
On October 1, 1946, the International Military Tribunal delivered its judgment.
Twelve defendants were sentenced to death by hanging: Göring, Ribbentrop, Keitel, Kaltenbrunner, Rosenberg, Frank, Frick, Streicher, Sauckel, Jodl, Seyss-Inquart, and (in absentia) Martin Bormann. Three were acquitted: Schacht, von Papen, and Fritzsche. The rest received prison sentences ranging from ten years to life.
Göring cheated the hangman. Two hours before his scheduled execution, he swallowed a cyanide capsule that had been smuggled to him—how remains disputed to this day. The other condemned men were hanged on October 16, 1946.
The tribunal's judgment declared the crime of planning and waging aggressive war "the supreme international crime... because it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." This was the prosecution's theory: that aggressive war was the umbrella crime under which all other Nazi atrocities sheltered. Without the war, the Holocaust would not have been possible.
The Controversy
Nuremberg was controversial from the start, and remains so.
The most fundamental objection was retroactive criminalization. The defendants were being prosecuted under laws that hadn't existed when they committed their acts. This violated a basic principle of justice enshrined in legal systems around the world: nullum crimen sine lege, no crime without a preexisting law. You cannot punish someone for breaking a rule that didn't exist when they acted.
The prosecutors had various responses. Some crimes, like murder and enslavement, were obviously wrong regardless of whether specific statutes prohibited them. The Nazis had violated existing treaties and conventions. And in any case, the unprecedented nature of Nazi crimes required unprecedented legal innovation.
Critics also pointed to the selective nature of the prosecution. Why weren't Allied war crimes prosecuted? The British area bombing campaign had killed hundreds of thousands of German civilians. The Soviets had committed atrocities throughout Eastern Europe, including the Katyn massacre of Polish officers. The Americans had dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If starting aggressive war was the supreme crime, what about the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939?
The charge of victor's justice was and is hard to dismiss entirely. The Nuremberg Charter explicitly limited the tribunal's jurisdiction to crimes committed by the Axis powers. There would be no examination of Allied conduct. This was, undeniably, a double standard.
And yet—what was the alternative? Summary execution? A show trial with predetermined verdicts? Letting the Nazi leadership go free? Nuremberg was imperfect, but it represented a genuine attempt to create a new kind of international accountability. The evidence presented was real. The defendants had real lawyers. Some were acquitted. The proceedings created a historical record that Holocaust deniers have struggled against ever since.
The Twelve Subsequent Trials
The International Military Tribunal tried only the top Nazi leadership. Twelve subsequent trials, conducted by the United States alone in the same Nuremberg courthouse, went after the broader apparatus of Nazi criminality.
The Doctors' Trial prosecuted physicians who had conducted horrific medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners. The Judges' Trial examined how the German legal system had been perverted to serve Nazi ends. The Ministries Trial went after the bureaucrats who had administered the machinery of death.
Perhaps most significant were the Einsatzgruppen Trial—prosecuting the mobile killing squads that had murdered over a million Jews in Eastern Europe—and the Industrialists' Trial, which examined how German corporations had profited from slave labor and plunder. The latter established precedents that still resonate in debates about corporate accountability for human rights abuses.
The Legacy
What Nuremberg created was the concept of individual criminal responsibility under international law. Before 1945, international law governed relations between states. After Nuremberg, individuals could be held accountable for crimes against humanity regardless of their official position.
The Nuremberg principles were codified by the United Nations in 1950. They influenced the Geneva Conventions of 1949. They provided the template for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in 1993 and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in 1994. They are the foundation of the permanent International Criminal Court established in 2002.
The phrase "crimes against humanity" entered the global vocabulary. The idea that "following orders" is not a defense became established law. The notion that there are some acts so heinous that they concern all of humanity, regardless of where they occur or who commits them, became a principle of international relations.
This is Nuremberg's most enduring contribution: not the punishment of a few dozen Nazi leaders, but the creation of a legal framework that says some things are simply impermissible. Governments cannot do whatever they wish to their own citizens. There are lines that, if crossed, make individuals criminally responsible to the international community.
Whether this framework is enforced consistently—whether powerful nations submit to its jurisdiction, whether it serves justice or politics—remains contested. The United States has never ratified the Rome Statute creating the International Criminal Court, fearing its citizens might be prosecuted. Other powerful nations maintain similar exemptions for themselves.
But the principle exists. And it exists because of what happened in that damaged courthouse in Nuremberg, where lawyers and judges from four very different nations attempted, imperfectly but genuinely, to create justice out of the worst catastrophe in human history.
The trial was not just about punishing the guilty. It was about establishing a record that could not be denied. It was about demonstrating that law, not just power, could govern the aftermath of war. It was about asserting that there are limits to what any government can do, no matter how much power it possesses.
These are principles worth remembering, especially in moments when they seem most under threat.