wikipedia/trials.json

[
  {
    "page_title": "Nuremberg_trials",
    "name": "Nuremberg trials",
    "type": "trial",
    "summary": "The Nuremberg trials were international criminal trials held by France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States against leaders of the defeated Nazi Germany for plotting and carrying out invasions of several countries across Europe and committing atrocities against their citizens in the Second World War.",
    "description": "Trials of Nazi German leaders",
    "full_text": "Nuremberg trials\nTrials of Nazi German leaders\n\"International Military Tribunal\" redirects here. For the Tokyo Trial, see\nInternational Military Tribunal for the Far East\n. For the 1947 film, see\nNuremberg Trials\n(film)\n.\nThe\nNuremberg trials\nwere\ninternational criminal trials\nheld by\nFrance\n, the\nSoviet Union\n, the\nUnited Kingdom\n, and the\nUnited States\nagainst leaders of the defeated\nNazi Germany\nfor plotting and carrying out\ninvasions\nof several countries across\nEurope\nand committing\natrocities\nagainst their citizens in the\nSecond World War\n.\nBetween 1939 and 1945, Nazi Germany invaded many countries across Europe, inflicting 27 million deaths in the\nSoviet Union\nalone. Proposals for how to punish the defeated Nazi leaders ranged from a\nshow trial\n(the Soviet Union) to\nsummary executions\n(the\nUnited Kingdom\n). In mid-1945,\nFrance\n, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the\nUnited States\nagreed to convene a joint tribunal in\nNuremberg\n,\noccupied Germany\n, with the\nNuremberg Charter\nas its legal instrument. Between 20 November 1945 and 1 October 1946, the\nInternational Military Tribunal\n(\nIMT\n) tried 22 of the most important surviving leaders of Nazi Germany in the\npolitical\n,\nmilitary\n, and economic spheres, as well as six German organizations. The purpose of the trial was not only to try the defendants but also to assemble irrefutable evidence of\nNazi war crimes\n, offer a history lesson to the defeated Germans, and delegitimize the traditional German elite.\nThe IMT verdict followed the prosecution in declaring the\ncrime\nof plotting and waging\naggressive war\n\"the supreme international crime\" because \"it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole\".\nMost defendants were also charged with\nwar crimes\nand\ncrimes against humanity\n,\nthe Holocaust\nsignificantly contributing to the trials.\nTwelve further trials\nwere conducted by the United States against lower-level perpetrators and focused more on the Holocaust. Controversial at the time for their\nretroactive criminalization\nof aggression, the trials' innovation of holding individuals responsible for violations of international law is considered \"the true beginning of\ninternational criminal law\n\".\nOrigin\nJews arriving at\nAuschwitz concentration camp\n, 1944. According to legal historian\nKirsten Sellars\n, the\nextermination camps\n\"formed the moral core of the Allies' case against the Nazi leaders\".\nBetween 1939 and 1945,\nNazi Germany\ninvaded many European countries\n, including\nPoland\n,\nDenmark\n,\nNorway\n,\nthe Netherlands\n,\nBelgium\n,\nLuxembourg\n,\nFrance\n,\nYugoslavia\n,\nGreece\n, and the\nSoviet Union\n.\nGerman\naggression\nwas accompanied by immense brutality in occupied areas;\nwar losses in the Soviet Union alone\nincluded 27 million dead\n, mostly civilians, which was one seventh of the prewar population.\nThe legal reckoning was premised on the extraordinary nature of Nazi criminality, particularly the\nperceived singularity\nof\nthe systematic murder of millions of Jews\n.\nIn early 1942, representatives of nine\ngovernments-in-exile\nfrom German-occupied Europe issued\na declaration\nto demand an international court to try the German crimes committed in occupied countries. The United States and United Kingdom refused to endorse this proposal, citing the failure of\nwar crimes prosecutions\nfollowing\nWorld War I\n.\nThe London-based\nUnited Nations War Crimes Commission\n—without Soviet participation—first met in October 1943 and became bogged down in the scope of its mandate, with Belgian jurist\nMarcel de Baer\nand Czech legal scholar\nBohuslav Ečer\narguing for a broader definition of\nwar crimes\nthat would include \"the crime of war\".\nOn 1 November 1943, the Soviet Union, United Kingdom, and United States issued the\nMoscow Declaration\n, warning Nazi leadership of the signatories' intent to \"pursue them to the uttermost ends of the earth ... in order that justice may be done\".\nThe declaration stated high-ranking Nazis who had committed crimes in several countries would be dealt with jointly, while others would be tried where they had committed their crimes.\nSoviet jurist\nAron Trainin\ndeveloped the concept of\ncrimes against peace\n(waging\naggressive war\n) which would later be central to the proceedings at Nuremberg.\nTrainin's ideas were reprinted in the West and widely adopted.\nOf all the\nAllies\n, the Soviet Union lobbied most intensely for trying the defeated German leaders for aggression in addition to war crimes.\nThe Soviet Union wanted to hold a\ntrial with a predetermined outcome\nsimilar to the 1930s\nMoscow trials\n, in order to demonstrate the Nazi leaders' guilt and build a case for\nwar reparations\nto rebuild the\nSoviet economy\n, which had been devastated by the war.\nThe United States insisted on a trial that would be seen as legitimate as a means of reforming Germany and demonstrating the superiority of the Western system.\nThe\nUnited States Department of War\nwas drawing up plans for an international tribunal in late 1944 and early 1945. The\nBritish government\nstill preferred the\nsummary execution\nof Nazi leaders, citing the failure of trials following World War I and qualms about\nretroactive criminality\n.\nThe form that retribution would take was left unresolved at the\nYalta Conference\nin February 1945.\nOn 2 May, at the\nSan Francisco Conference\n, United States president\nHarry S. Truman\nannounced the formation of an international military tribunal.\nOn 8 May,\nGermany surrendered unconditionally\n, bringing\nan end to the war in Europe\n.\nEstablishment\nNuremberg charter\nAron Trainin\n(center, with moustache) speaks at the London Conference.\nAerial view of the Palace of Justice in 1945, with the prison attached behind it\nRuins of\nNuremberg\n,\nc.\n1945\nAt the London Conference, held from 26 June to 2 August 1945, representatives of\nFrance\n, the\nSoviet Union\n, the\nUnited Kingdom\n, and the\nUnited States\nnegotiated the form that the trial would take. Until the end of the negotiations, it was not clear that any trial would be held at all.\nThe offences that would be prosecuted were crimes against peace,\ncrimes against humanity\n, and war crimes.\nAt the conference, it was debated whether wars of aggression were prohibited in existing\ncustomary international law\n; regardless, before the charter was adopted there was no law providing for criminal responsibility for aggression.\nDespite misgivings from other Allies, American negotiator and\nSupreme Court\njustice\nRobert H. Jackson\nthreatened the United States' withdrawal if aggression was not prosecuted because it had been the rationale for\nAmerican entry into World War II\n.\nHowever, Jackson conceded on defining crimes against peace; the other three Allies were opposed because it would undermine the freedom of action of the\nUnited Nations Security Council\n.\nWar crimes already existed in international law as criminal violations of the\nlaws and customs of war\n, but these did not apply to a government's treatment of its own citizens.\nLegal experts sought a way to try crimes against German citizens, such as the\nGerman Jews\n.\nA Soviet proposal for a charge of \"crimes against civilians\" was renamed \"crimes against humanity\" at Jackson's suggestion\nafter previous uses of the term in the\npost-World War I\nCommission of Responsibilities\nand in failed efforts to prosecute the perpetrators of the\nArmenian genocide\n.\nThe British proposal to define crimes against humanity was largely accepted, with the final wording being \"murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population\".\nThe final version of the charter limited the tribunal's jurisdiction over crimes against humanity to those committed as part of a war of aggression.\nBoth the United States (concerned that its\nJim Crow\nsystem of\nracial segregation\nnot be labeled a crime against humanity) and the Soviet Union wanted to avoid giving an international court jurisdiction over a government's treatment of its own citizens.\nThe charter upended the traditional view of\ninternational law\nby holding individuals,\nrather than states\n, responsible for breaches.\nThe other three Allies' proposal to limit the definition of the crimes to acts committed by the defeated Axis was rejected by Jackson. Instead, the charter limited the jurisdiction of the court to Germany's actions.\nArticle 7 prevented the defendants from claiming\nsovereign immunity\n,\nand Article 8 meant that the plea of acting under\nsuperior orders\nwas not a valid defence, although it might be treated in mitigation.\nThe trial was held under modified\ncommon law\n.\nThe negotiators decided that the tribunal's permanent seat would be in Berlin, while the trial would be held at the\nPalace of Justice\nin\nNuremberg\n.\nLocated in the\nAmerican occupation zone\n, Nuremberg was a symbolic location as the site of\nNazi rallies\n. The Palace of Justice was relatively intact but needed to be renovated for the trial due to\nbomb damage\n; it had an attached prison where the defendants could be held.\nOn 8 August, the Nuremberg Charter was signed in London.\nJudges and prosecutors\nIn early 1946, there were a thousand employees from the four countries' delegations in Nuremberg, of which about two thirds were from the United States.\nBesides legal professionals, there were many social-science researchers, psychologists, translators, interpreters, and\ngraphic designers\n, the last to make the many charts used during the trial.\nEach state appointed a prosecution team and two judges, one being a deputy without voting rights.\nJackson (whom historian\nKim Christian Priemel\ndescribed as \"a versatile politician and a remarkable orator, if not a great legal thinker\") was appointed the United States' chief prosecutor.\nThe United States prosecution believed\nNazism\nwas the product of a German deviation from the West (the\nSonderweg\nthesis) and sought to correct this deviation with a trial that would serve both retributive and educational purposes.\nAs the largest delegation, it would take on the bulk of the prosecutorial effort.\nAt Jackson's recommendation, the United States appointed judges\nFrancis Biddle\nand\nJohn Parker\n.\nThe British chief prosecutor was\nHartley Shawcross\n,\nAttorney General for England and Wales\n, assisted by his predecessor\nDavid Maxwell Fyfe\n.\nAlthough the chief British judge,\nSir Geoffrey Lawrence\n(\nLord Justice of Appeal\n), was the nominal president of the tribunal, in practice Biddle exercised more authority.\nThe French prosecutor,\nFrançois de Menthon\n, had just overseen trials of the leaders of\nVichy France\n;\nhe resigned in January 1946 and was replaced by\nAuguste Champetier de Ribes\n.\nThe French judges were\nHenri Donnedieu de Vabres\n, a professor of criminal law, and deputy\nRobert Falco\n, a judge of the\nCour de Cassation\nwho had represented France at the London Conference.\nThe French government tried to appoint staff untainted by collaboration with the Vichy regime; some appointments, including Champetier de Ribes, were of those who had been in the\nFrench resistance\n.\nExpecting a show trial, the Soviet Union\ninitially appointed as chief prosecutor\nIona Nikitchenko\n, who had presided over the Moscow trials, but he was made a judge and replaced by\nRoman Rudenko\n, a show trial prosecutor\nchosen for his skill as an orator.\nThe Soviet judges and prosecutors were not permitted to make any major decisions without consulting a commission in Moscow led by Soviet politician\nAndrei Vyshinsky\n; the resulting delays hampered the Soviet effort to set the agenda.\nThe influence of the Soviet delegation was also constrained by limited English proficiency, lack of interpreters, and unfamiliarity with diplomacy and international institutions.\nRequests by\nChaim Weizmann\n, the president of the\nWorld Zionist Organization\n, as well as the\nProvisional Government of National Unity\nin Poland, for an active role in the trial justified by their representation of victims of Nazi crimes were rejected.\nThe Soviet Union invited prosecutors from its allies, including Poland,\nCzechoslovakia\n, and\nYugoslavia\n; Denmark and Norway also sent a delegation.\nAlthough the Polish delegation was not empowered to intervene in the proceedings, it submitted evidence and an indictment, succeeding at drawing some attention to crimes committed against Polish Jews and non-Jews.\nIndictment\nHanding over the indictment to the tribunal, 18 October 1945\nThe work of drafting the indictment was divided up by the national delegations. The British worked on aggressive war; the other delegations were assigned the task of covering crimes against humanity and war crimes committed on the\nWestern Front\n(France) and the\nEastern Front\n(the Soviet Union). The United States delegation outlined the overall Nazi conspiracy and criminality of Nazi organizations.\nThe British and American delegations decided to work jointly in drafting the charges of conspiracy to wage aggressive war. On 17 September, the various delegations met to discuss the indictment.\nThe charge of\nconspiracy\n, absent from the charter, held together the wide array of charges and defendants\nand was used to charge the top Nazi leaders, as well as bureaucrats who had never killed anyone or perhaps even directly ordered killing. It was also an end run on the charter's limits on charging crimes committed before the beginning of World War II.\nConspiracy charges were central to the cases against propagandists and industrialists: the former were charged with providing the ideological justification for war and other crimes, while the latter were accused of enabling Germany's war effort.\nThe charge, a brainchild of\nWar Department\nlawyer\nMurray C. Bernays\n, and perhaps inspired by his previous work prosecuting\nsecurities fraud\n,\nwas spearheaded by the United States and less popular with the other delegations, particularly France.\nThe problem of translating the indictment and evidence into the three official languages of the tribunal—English, French, and Russian—as well as German was severe due to the scale of the task and difficulty of recruiting interpreters, especially in the Soviet Union.\nVyshinsky demanded extensive corrections to the charges of crimes against peace, especially regarding the role of the\nGerman–Soviet pact\nin starting World War II.\nJackson also separated out an overall conspiracy charge from the other three charges, aiming that the American prosecution would cover the overall Nazi conspiracy while the other delegations would flesh out the details of Nazi crimes.\nThe division of labor, and the haste with which the indictment was prepared, resulted in duplication, imprecise language, and lack of attribution of specific charges to individual defendants.\nDefendants\nMain article:\nList of defendants at the International Military Tribunal\nThe defendants in the dock\nSome of the most prominent Nazis—\nAdolf Hitler\n,\nHeinrich Himmler\n, and\nJoseph Goebbels\n—had died by suicide and therefore could not be tried.\nThe prosecutors aimed to prosecute key leaders in German politics, business, and the military.\nMost of the defendants had surrendered to the United States or United Kingdom.\nThe defendants, who were largely unrepentant,\nincluded former cabinet ministers:\nFranz von Papen\n(who had\nbrought Hitler to power\n),\nJoachim von Ribbentrop\n(\nforeign minister\n),\nKonstantin von Neurath\n(\nforeign minister\n),\nWilhelm Frick\n(\ninterior minister\n), and\nAlfred Rosenberg\n, minister for the occupied eastern territories.\nAlso prosecuted were leaders of the German economy, such as\nGustav Krupp\nof the\nKrupp AG\nconglomerate, former\nReichsbank\npresident\nHjalmar Schacht\n, and economic planners\nAlbert Speer\nand\nWalther Funk\n, along with Speer's subordinate and head of the\nforced labor program\n,\nFritz Sauckel\n.\nWhile the British were skeptical of prosecuting economic leaders, the French had a strong interest in highlighting German\neconomic imperialism\n.\nThe military leaders were\nHermann Göring\n—the most infamous surviving Nazi and the main target of the trial\n—\nWilhelm Keitel\n,\nAlfred Jodl\n,\nErich Raeder\n, and\nKarl Dönitz\n.\nAlso on trial were propagandists\nJulius Streicher\nand\nHans Fritzsche\n;\nRudolf Hess\n, Hitler's deputy who had flown to Britain in 1941;\nHans Frank\n, governor-general of the\nGeneral Governorate\nof Poland;\nHitler Youth\nleader\nBaldur von Schirach\n;\nArthur Seyss-Inquart\n,\nReich Commissioner for the Netherlands\n; and\nErnst Kaltenbrunner\n, leader of Himmler's\nReich Security Main Office\n.\nObservers of the trial found the defendants mediocre and contemptible.\nAlthough the list of defendants was finalized on 29 August,\nas late as October, Jackson demanded the addition of new names, but was denied.\nOf the 24 men indicted,\nMartin Bormann\nwas\ntried\nin absentia\n, as the Allies were unaware of his death; Krupp was too ill to stand trial; and\nRobert Ley\nhad died by suicide before the start of the trial.\nFormer Nazis were allowed to serve as counsel\nand by mid-November all defendants had lawyers. The defendants' lawyers jointly appealed to the court, claiming it did not have jurisdiction against the accused, but this motion was rejected. Defense lawyers saw themselves as acting on behalf of their clients and the German nation.\nInitially, the Americans had planned to try fourteen organizations and their leaders, but this was narrowed to six: the\nReich Cabinet\n, the Leadership Corps of the\nNazi Party\n, the\nGestapo\n, the\nSA\n, the\nSS\nand the\nSD\n, and the\nGeneral Staff\nand\nHigh Command\nof the\nGerman military\n(Wehrmacht).\nThe aim was to have these organizations declared criminal, so that their members could be tried expeditiously for membership in a criminal organization.\nSenior American officials believed that convicting organizations was a good way of showing that not just the top German leaders were responsible for crimes, without condemning the entire German people.\nEvidence\nUnited States Army\nclerks with evidence\nOver the summer, all of the national delegations struggled to gather evidence for the upcoming trial.\nThe American and British prosecutors focused on documentary evidence and affidavits rather than testimony from survivors. This strategy increased the credibility of their case, since survivor testimony was considered less reliable and more vulnerable to accusations of bias, but reduced public interest in the proceedings.\nThe American prosecution drew on reports of the\nOffice of Strategic Services\n, an American intelligence agency, and information provided by the\nYIVO Institute for Jewish Research\nand the\nAmerican Jewish Committee\n,\nwhile the French prosecution presented many documents that it had obtained from the\nCenter of Contemporary Jewish Documentation\n.\nThe prosecution called 37 witnesses compared to the defense's 83\n, not including 19 defendants who testified on their own behalf.\nThe prosecution examined 110,000 captured German documents\nand entered 4,600 into evidence,\nalong with\n30 kilometres (19\nmi)\nof film and 25,000 photographs.\nThe charter allowed the\nadmissibility\nof any evidence deemed to have\nprobative\nvalue, including\ndepositions\n.\nBecause of the loose evidentiary rules, photographs, charts, maps, and films played an important role in making incredible crimes believable.\nAfter the American prosecution submitted many documents at the beginning of the trial, the judges insisted that all of the evidence be read into the record, which slowed the trial.\nThe structure of the charges also caused delays as the same evidence ended up being read out multiple times, when it was relevant to both conspiracy and the other charges.\nCourse of the trial\nThe International Military Tribunal began trial on 20 November 1945,\nafter postponement requests from the Soviet prosecution, who wanted more time to prepare its case, were rejected.\nAll defendants\npleaded\nnot guilty.\nJackson made clear that the trial's purpose extended beyond convicting the defendants. Prosecutors wanted to assemble irrefutable evidence of Nazi crimes, establish individual responsibility and the crime of aggression in international law, provide a history lesson to the defeated Germans, delegitimize the traditional German elite,\nand allow the Allies to distance themselves from\nappeasement\n.\nJackson maintained that while the United States did \"not seek to convict the whole German people of crime\", neither did the trial \"serve to absolve the whole German people except 21 men in the dock\".\nNevertheless, defense lawyers (although not most of the defendants) often argued that the prosecution was trying to promote\nGerman collective guilt\nand forcefully countered this\nstrawman\n.\nAccording to Priemel, the conspiracy charge \"invited apologetic interpretations: narratives of absolute,\ntotalitarian\ndictatorship, run by society's lunatic fringe, of which the Germans had been the first victims rather than agents, collaborators, and\nfellow travellers\n\".\nIn contrast, the evidence presented on the Holocaust convinced some observers that\nGermans must have been aware of this crime\nwhile it was ongoing.\nAmerican and British prosecution\nNazi Concentration and Prison Camps\n(1945)\nPresenting information on German aggression, 4 December\nOn 21 November, Jackson gave the opening speech for the prosecution.\nHe described the fact that the defeated Nazis received a trial as \"one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason\".\nFocusing on aggressive war, which he described as the root of the other crimes, Jackson promoted an\nintentionalist\nview of the Nazi state and its overall criminal conspiracy. The speech was favorably received by the prosecution, the tribunal, the audience, historians, and even the defendants.\nMuch of the American case focused on the development of the Nazi conspiracy before the outbreak of war.\nThe American prosecution became derailed during attempts to provide evidence on the first act of aggression,\nagainst Austria\n.\nOn 29 November, the prosecution was unprepared to continue presenting on the\ninvasion of Czechoslovakia\n, and instead screened\nNazi Concentration and Prison Camps\n. The film, compiled from footage of the\nliberation of Nazi concentration camps\n, shocked both the defendants and the judges, who adjourned the trial.\nIndiscriminate selection and disorganized presentation of documentary evidence without tying it to specific defendants hampered the American prosecutors' work on the conspiracy to commit crimes against humanity.\nThe Americans summoned\nEinsatzgruppen\ncommander\nOtto Ohlendorf\n, who testified about the murder of 80,000 people by those under his command, and SS general\nErich von dem Bach-Zelewski\n, who admitted that German\nanti-partisan warfare\nwas little more than a cover for the mass murder of Jews.\nEvidence about\nErnst Kaltenbrunner\n's crimes is presented, 2 January 1946.\nThe British prosecution covered the charge of crimes against peace, which was largely redundant to the American conspiracy case.\nOn 4 December, Shawcross gave the opening speech, much of which had been written by Cambridge professor\nHersch Lauterpacht\n.\nUnlike Jackson, Shawcross attempted to minimize the novelty of the aggression charges, elaborating its precursors in the conventions of\nHague\nand\nGeneva\n, the\nLeague of Nations Covenant\n, the\nLocarno Treaty\n, and the\nKellogg–Briand Pact\n.\nThe British took four days to make their case,\nwith Maxwell Fyfe detailing treaties broken by Germany.\nIn mid-December the Americans switched to presenting the case against the indicted organizations,\nwhile in January both the British and Americans presented evidence against individual defendants.\nBesides the organizations mentioned in the indictment, American, and British prosecutors also mentioned the complicity of the German\nForeign Office\n,\narmy\n, and\nnavy\n.\nFrench prosecution\nFrom 17 January to 7 February 1946, France presented its charges and supporting evidence.\nIn contrast to the other prosecution teams, the French prosecution delved into Germany's development in the nineteenth century, arguing that it had diverged from the West due to\npan-Germanism\nand imperialism. They argued that Nazi ideology, which derived from these earlier ideas, was the\nmens rea\n—criminal intent—of the crimes on trial.\nThe French prosecutors, more than their British or American counterparts, emphasized the complicity of many Germans;\nthey barely mentioned the charge of aggressive war and instead focused on forced labor, economic plunder, and massacres.\nProsecutor\nEdgar Faure\ngrouped together various German policies, such as the annexation of\nAlsace–Lorraine\n, under the label of\nGermanization\n, which he argued was a crime against humanity.\nUnlike the British and American prosecution strategies, which focused on using German documents, French prosecutors took the perspective of the victims, submitting postwar police reports.\nEleven witnesses, including victims of Nazi persecution, were called; resistance fighter and\nAuschwitz\nsurvivor\nMarie Claude Vaillant-Couturier\ntestified about crimes she had witnessed.\nThe French charges of war crimes were accepted by the tribunal, except for the execution of hostages.\nDue to the narrow definition of crimes against humanity in the charter, the only part of the Germanization charges accepted by the judges was the\ndeportation of Jews from France\nand other parts of Western Europe.\nSoviet prosecution\nRoman Rudenko\nopens the Soviet case.\nOn 8 February, the Soviet prosecution opened its case with a speech by Rudenko that covered all four prosecution charges, highlighting a wide variety of crimes committed by the German occupiers as part of their destructive and unprovoked invasion.\nRudenko tried to emphasize common ground with the other Allies while rejecting any similarity between Nazi and Soviet rule.\nThe next week, the Soviet prosecution produced\nFriedrich Paulus\n—a German\nfield marshal\ncaptured after the\nBattle of Stalingrad\n—as a witness and questioned him about the preparations for the invasion of the Soviet Union.\nPaulus incriminated his former associates, pointing to Keitel, Jodl, and Göring as the defendants most responsible for the war.\nMore so than other delegations, Soviet prosecutors showed the gruesome details of German atrocities, especially the death by starvation of 3 million\nSoviet prisoners of war\nand several hundred thousand\nresidents of Leningrad\n.\nAlthough Soviet prosecutors dealt most extensively with the\nsystematic murder of Jews in eastern Europe\n, at times they blurred the fate of Jews with that of other Soviet nationalities.\nAlthough these aspects had already been covered by the American prosecution, Soviet prosecutors introduced new evidence from\nExtraordinary State Commission\nreports and interrogations of senior enemy officers.\nLev Smirnov\npresented evidence on the\nLidice massacre\nin Czechoslovakia, adding that German invaders had\ndestroyed thousands of villages and murdered their inhabitants\nthroughout eastern Europe.\nThe Soviet prosecution emphasized the racist aspect of policies such as the deportation of millions of civilians to Germany for\nforced labor\n,\nthe murder of children,\nsystematic looting of occupied territories, and theft or destruction of\ncultural heritage\n.\nThe Soviet prosecution also attempted to fabricate German responsibility for the\nKatyn massacre\n, which had in fact been committed by the\nNKVD\n. Although Western prosecutors never publicly rejected the Katyn charge for fear of casting doubt on the entire proceedings, they were skeptical.\nThe defense presented evidence of Soviet responsibility,\nand Katyn was not mentioned in the verdict.\nInspired by the films shown by the American prosecution, the Soviet Union commissioned three films for the trial:\nThe German Fascist Destruction of the Cultural Treasures of the Peoples of the USSR\n,\nAtrocities Committed by the German Fascist Invaders in the USSR\n, and\nThe German Fascist Destruction of Soviet Cities\n, using footage from Soviet filmmakers as well as shots from German newsreels.\nThe second included footage of the liberations of\nMajdanek\nand\nAuschwitz\nand was considered even more disturbing than the American concentration camp film.\nSoviet witnesses included several survivors of German crimes, including two civilians who lived through the siege of Leningrad, a peasant whose village was destroyed in anti-partisan warfare, a Red Army doctor who endured several prisoner-of-war camps\nand two Holocaust survivors—\nSamuel Rajzman\n, a survivor of\nTreblinka extermination camp\n, and poet\nAbraham Sutzkever\n, who described the murder of tens of thousands of Jews from\nVilna\n.\nThe Soviet prosecution case was generally well received and presented compelling evidence for the suffering of the Soviet people and the Soviet contributions to victory.\nDefense\nHermann Göring\nunder cross-examination\nA member of the Soviet delegation addresses the tribunal.\nFrom March to July 1946, the defense presented its counterarguments.\nBefore the prosecution finished, it was clear that their general case was proven, but it remained to determine the individual guilt of each defendant.\nNone of the defendants tried to assert that the Nazis' crimes had not occurred.\nSome defendants denied involvement in certain crimes or implausibly claimed ignorance of them, especially the Holocaust.\nA few defense lawyers inverted the arguments of the prosecution to assert that the Germans' authoritarian mindset and obedience to the state exonerated them from any personal guilt.\nMost rejected that Germany had deviated from Western civilization, arguing that few Germans could have supported Hitler because Germany was a civilized country.\nThe defendants tried to blame their crimes on Hitler, who was mentioned 12,000 times during the trial—more than the top five defendants combined. Other absent and dead men, including Himmler,\nReinhard Heydrich\n,\nAdolf Eichmann\n, and Bormann, were also blamed.\nTo counter claims that conservative defendants had enabled the\nNazi rise to power\n, defense lawyers blamed the\nSocial Democratic Party of Germany\n, trade unions, and other countries that maintained diplomatic relations with Germany.\nIn contrast, most defendants avoided incriminating each other.\nMost defendants argued their own insignificance within the Nazi system,\nthough Göring took the opposite approach, expecting to be executed but vindicated in the eyes of the German people.\nThe charter did not recognize a\ntu quoque\ndefense\n—asking for exoneration on the grounds that the Allies had committed the same crimes with which the defendants were charged.\nAlthough defense lawyers repeatedly equated the\nNuremberg Laws\nto legislation found in other countries, Nazi concentration camps to Allied detention facilities, and the deportation of Jews to the\nexpulsion of Germans\n, the judges rejected their arguments.\nAlfred Seidl\n(\nde\n)\nrepeatedly tried to disclose the secret protocols of the German–Soviet pact; although he was eventually successful, it was legally irrelevant and the judges rejected his attempt to bring up the\nTreaty of Versailles\n.\nSix defendants were charged with the\nGerman invasion of Norway\n, and their lawyers argued that this invasion was undertaken to prevent a\nBritish invasion of that country\n; a cover-up prevented the defense from capitalizing on this argument.\nFleet admiral\nChester Nimitz\ntestified that the\nUnited States Navy\nhad also used\nunrestricted submarine warfare\nagainst\nJapan\nin the Pacific\n; Dönitz's counsel successfully argued that this meant that it could not be a crime.\nThe judges barred most evidence on Allied misdeeds from being heard in court.\nMany defense lawyers complained about various aspects of the trial procedure and attempted to discredit the entire proceedings.\nIn order to appease them, the defendants were allowed a free hand with their witnesses and a great deal of irrelevant testimony was heard.\nThe defendants' witnesses sometimes managed to exculpate them, but other witnesses—including\nRudolf Höss\n, the former commandant of Auschwitz, and\nHans Bernd Gisevius\n, a member of the\nGerman resistance\n—bolstered the prosecution's case.\nIn the context of the brewing\nCold War\n—for example, in early March 1946,\nWinston Churchill\ndelivered the\nIron Curtain speech\n—the trial became a means of condemning not only Germany but also the Soviet Union.\nClosing\nOn 31 August, closing arguments were presented.\nOver the course of the trial, crimes against humanity and especially against Jews (who were mentioned as victims of Nazi atrocities far more than any other group) came to upstage the aggressive war charge.\nIn contrast to the opening prosecution statements, all eight closing statements highlighted the Holocaust. The French and British prosecutors made this the main charge, as opposed to that of aggression. All prosecutors except the Americans mentioned the concept of\ngenocide\n, which had been recently invented by the Polish-Jewish jurist\nRaphael Lemkin\n.\nBritish prosecutor Shawcross quoted from witness testimony about a murdered Jewish family from\nDubno\n, Ukraine.\nDuring the closing statements, most defendants disappointed the judges with lies and denials. Speer managed to give the impression of apologizing without assuming personal guilt or naming any victims other than the German people.\nOn 2 September, the court recessed, and the judges retreated into seclusion to decide the verdict and sentences, which had been under discussion since June. The verdict was drafted by British deputy judge\nNorman Birkett\n. All eight judges participated in the deliberations, but the deputies could not vote.\nVerdict\nThe International Military Tribunal agreed with the prosecution that aggression was the gravest charge, stating in its judgment that because \"war is essentially an evil thing\", \"to initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole\".\nThe work of the judges was made more difficult due to the broadness of the crimes listed in the Nuremberg Charter.\nThe judges did not attempt to define the crime of aggression\nand did not mention the retroactivity of the charges in the verdict.\nDespite the lingering doubts of some of the judges,\nthe official interpretation of the IMT held that all of the charges had a solid basis in customary international law and that the trial was procedurally fair.\nThe judges were aware that both the Allies and the Axis had planned or committed acts of aggression, writing the verdict carefully to avoid discrediting either the Allied governments or the tribunal.\nThe judges ruled that there had been a premeditated conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, whose goals were \"the disruption of the European order\" and \"the creation of a\nGreater Germany\nbeyond\nthe frontiers of 1914\n\".\nContrary to Jackson's argument that the conspiracy began with the founding of the Nazi Party in 1920, the verdict dated the planning of aggression to the 1937\nHossbach Memorandum\n.\nThe conspiracy charge caused significant dissent on the bench; Donnedieu de Vabres wanted to scrap it. Through a compromise proposed by the British judges, the charge of conspiracy was narrowed to a conspiracy to wage aggressive war.\nOnly eight defendants were convicted on that charge, all of whom were also found guilty of crimes against peace.\nAll 22 defendants were charged with crimes against peace, and 12 were convicted.\nThe war crimes and crimes against humanity charges held up the best, with only two defendants charged on those grounds being acquitted.\nThe judges determined that crimes against humanity concerning German Jews before 1939 were not under the court's jurisdiction because the prosecution had not proven a connection to aggressive war.\nNewsreel of the sentencing\nFour organizations were ruled to be criminal: the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party, the SS, the Gestapo, and the SD, although some lower ranks and subgroups were excluded.\nThe verdict only allowed for individual criminal responsibility if willing membership and knowledge of the criminal purpose could be proved, complicating\ndenazification\nefforts.\nThe SA, Reich Cabinet, General Staff and High Command were not ruled to be criminal organizations.\nAlthough the Wehrmacht leadership was not considered an organization within the meaning of the charter,\nmisrepresentation of the verdict as an exoneration would become one of the foundations of the\nclean Wehrmacht myth\n.\nThe trial had nevertheless resulted in the coverage of\nits systematic criminality\nin the German press.\nSentences were debated at length by the judges. Twelve defendants were sentenced to death: Göring, Ribbentrop, Keitel, Kaltenbrunner, Rosenberg, Frank, Frick, Streicher, Sauckel, Jodl, Seyss-Inquart, and Bormann.\nOn 16 October,\nten were hanged\n, with Göring killing himself the day before. Seven defendants (Hess, Funk, Raeder, Dönitz, Schirach, Speer, and Neurath) were sent to\nSpandau Prison\nto serve their sentences.\nAll three acquittals (Papen, Schacht, and Fritzsche) were based on a deadlock between the judges; these acquittals surprised observers. Despite being accused of the same crimes, Sauckel was sentenced to death, while Speer was given a prison sentence because the judges considered that he could reform.\nNikichenko released a dissent approved by Moscow that rejected all the acquittals, called for a death sentence for Hess, and convicted all the organizations.\nSubsequent Nuremberg trials\nMain article:\nSubsequent Nuremberg trials\nTelford Taylor\nopens for the prosecution in the\nMinistries trial\n, 6 January 1948.\nMonowitz\nprisoners unload cement from trains for\nIG Farben\n, presented as evidence at the\nIG Farben trial\n.\nInitially, it was planned to hold a second international tribunal for German industrialists, but this was never held because of differences between the Allies.\nTwelve military trials\nwere convened solely by the United States in the same courtroom that had hosted the International Military Tribunal.\nPursuant to\nLaw No. 10\nadopted by the\nAllied Control Council\n, United States forces arrested almost 100,000 Germans as war criminals.\nThe\nOffice of Chief Counsel for War Crimes\nidentified 2,500 major war criminals, of whom 177 were tried. Many of the worst offenders were not prosecuted, for logistical or financial reasons.\nOne set of trials focused on the actions of German professionals: the\nDoctors' trial\nfocused on\nhuman experimentation\nand\neuthanasia murders\n, the\nJudges' trial\non the\nrole of the judiciary in Nazi crimes\n, and the\nMinistries trial\non the culpability of bureaucrats of German government ministries, especially the\nForeign Office\n.\nAlso on trial were industrialists\n—in the\nFlick trial\n, the\nIG Farben trial\n, and the\nKrupp trial\n—for using forced labor, looting property from Nazi victims, and funding SS atrocities.\nMembers of the SS were tried in the\nPohl trial\n, which focused on members of the\nSS Main Economic and Administrative Office\nthat oversaw SS economic activity, including the\nNazi concentration camps\n;\nthe\nRuSHA trial\nof\nNazi racial policies\n; and the\nEinsatzgruppen\ntrial\n, in which members of the\nmobile killing squads\nwere tried for the murder of more than one million people behind the Eastern Front.\nLuftwaffe\ngeneral\nErhard Milch\nwas tried\nfor using slave labor and deporting civilians. In the\nHostages case\n, several generals were tried for executing thousands of hostages and prisoners of war, looting, using forced labor, and deporting civilians in the\nBalkans\n. Other generals were tried in the\nHigh Command Trial\nfor plotting wars of aggression, issuing\ncriminal orders\n, deporting civilians, using slave labor, and looting in the Soviet Union.\nThese trials emphasized the crimes committed during the Holocaust.\nThe trials heard 1,300 witnesses, entered more than 30,000 documents into evidence, and generated 132,855 pages of transcripts, with the judgments totaling 3,828 pages.\nOf 177 defendants, 142 were convicted and 25 sentenced to death;\nthe severity of sentencing was related to the defendant's proximity to mass murder.\nLegal historian\nKevin Jon Heller\nargues that the trials' greatest achievement was \"their inestimable contribution to the form and substance of international criminal law\", which had been left underdeveloped by the IMT.\nContemporary reactions\nPress at the International Military Tribunal\nGermans read\nSüddeutsche Zeitung\nreporting the verdict, 1 October 1946\nIn all, 249 journalists were accredited to cover the IMT\nand 61,854 visitor tickets were issued.\nIn France, the sentence for Rudolf Hess and acquittal of organizations were met with outrage from the media and especially from organizations for deportees and resistance fighters, as they were perceived as too lenient.\nIn the United Kingdom, although a variety of responses were reported, it was difficult to sustain interest in a long trial.\nWhere the prosecution was disappointed by some of the verdicts, the defense could take satisfaction.\nMany Germans at the time of the trials focused on finding food and shelter.\nDespite this, a majority read press reports about the trial.\nIn a 1946 poll, 78 percent of Germans assessed the trial as fair, but four years later that had fallen to 38 percent, with 30 percent considering it unfair.\nAs time went on, more Germans considered the trials illegitimate\nvictor's justice\nand an imposition of collective guilt, which they rejected—instead considering themselves victims of the war.\nAs the Cold War began, the rapidly changing political environment began to affect the effectiveness of the trials.\nThe educational purpose of the Nuremberg Military Tribunals was a failure, in part because of the resistance to war crimes trials in German society, but also because of the United States Army's refusal to publish the trial record in German for fear it would undermine the fight against communism.\nThe German churches, both Catholic and Protestant, were vocal proponents of amnesty.\nThe pardon of convicted war criminals also had cross-party support in\nWest Germany\n, which was established in 1949.\nThe Americans satisfied these wishes to bind West Germany to the\nWestern Bloc\n,\nbeginning early releases of Nuremberg Military Tribunal convicts in 1949.\nIn 1951,\nHigh Commissioner\nJohn J. McCloy\noverturned most of the sentences\nand the last three prisoners, all convicted at the\nEinsatzgruppen\ntrial, were released in 1958.\nThe German public took the early releases as confirmation of what they saw as the illegitimacy of the trials.\nThe IMT defendants required Soviet permission for release; Speer was not successful in obtaining early release, and Hess remained in prison until his death in 1987.\nBy the late 1950s, the West German consensus on release began to erode, due to greater openness in\npolitical culture\nand new revelations of Nazi criminality, including the first trials of Nazi perpetrators in West German courts.\nLegacy\nBenjamin Ferencz\n, chief prosecutor of the\nEinsatzgruppen\ntrial\n, in the\nPalace of Justice\ncourtroom, 2012\nThe International Military Tribunal, and its charter, \"marked the true beginning of\ninternational criminal law\n\".\nThe trial has met a mixed reception ranging from glorification to condemnation.\nThe reaction was initially predominantly negative, but has become more positive over time.\nThe selective prosecution exclusively of the defeated Axis and hypocrisy of all four Allied powers has garnered the most persistent criticism. Such actions as the German–Soviet pact,\nthe\nexpulsion of millions of Germans from central and eastern Europe\n,\ndeportation of civilians for forced labor,\nand violent suppression of anti-colonial uprisings would have been deemed illegal according to the definitions of international crimes in the Nuremberg charter.\nAnother controversy resulted from trying defendants for acts that were not criminal at the time,\nparticularly crimes against peace.\nEqually novel but less controversial were crimes against humanity, the conspiracy charge, and criminal penalties on individuals for breaches of international law.\nBesides these criticisms, the trials have been taken to task for the distortion that comes from fitting historical events into legal categories.\nThe\nInternational Military Tribunal for the Far East\n(Tokyo Trial) borrowed many of its ideas from the IMT, including all four charges, and was intended by the\nTruman Administration\nto shore up the IMT's legal legacy.\nOn 11 December 1946, the\nUnited Nations General Assembly\nunanimously passed a resolution affirming \"the principles of international law recognized by the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and the judgment of the Tribunal\".\nIn 1950, the\nInternational Law Commission\ndrafted the\nNuremberg principles\nto codify international criminal law, although the Cold War prevented the adoption of these principles until the 1990s.\nThe 1948\nGenocide Convention\nwas much more restricted than Lemkin's original concept and its effectiveness was further limited by Cold War politics.\nIn the 1990s, a revival of international criminal law included the establishment of\nad hoc\ninternational criminal tribunals\nfor\nYugoslavia\n(ICTY) and\nRwanda\n(ICTR), which were widely viewed as part of the legacy of the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials. A permanent\nInternational Criminal Court\n(ICC), proposed in 1953, was established in 2002.\nThe trials were the first use of\nsimultaneous interpretation\n, which stimulated technical advances in translation methods.\nThe Palace of Justice houses a museum on the trial and the courtroom became a tourist attraction, drawing 13,138 visitors in 2005.\nThe IMT is one of the most well-studied trials in history, and it has also been the subject of an abundance of books and scholarly publications, along with motion pictures such as\nJudgment at Nuremberg\n(1961),\nThe Memory of Justice\n(1976)\nand\nNuremberg\n(2025).\nNotes\n↑\nFrench\n:\nTribunal militaire international\n;\nGerman\n:\nInternationaler Militärgerichtshof\n;\nRussian\n:\nМеждународный военный трибунал\n,\nromanized\n:\nMezhdunarodnyy voyennyy tribunal\n.\n↑\nAlexander Volchkov\n(Soviet Union),\nNorman Birkett\n(UK),\nJohn J. Parker\n(US) and\nRobert Falco\n(France).\nReferences\n1\n2\nSellars 2013\n, p.\n165.\n1\n2\nSayapin 2014\n, p.\n148.\n1\n2\nSellars 2010\n, p.\n1092.\n↑\nSayapin 2014\n, pp.\n151–159.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n27–28.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n56.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n22.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n32, 64.\n1\n2\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n64.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n30–31.\n1\n2\nHeller 2011\n, p.\n9.\n↑\nGemählich 2019\n, paragraph 4.\n1\n2\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n8.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, pp.\n49–50.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n31, 36, 54.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n63.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n4, 107.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n3.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n26–27, 31.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, pp.\n67, 74–75.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n70.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n40.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n45–46.\n↑\nHeller 2011\n, p.\n10.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, p.\n84.\n1\n2\nSellars 2013\n, pp.\n85–86.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, pp.\n87–88.\n↑\nTomuschat 2006\n, pp.\n832–833.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, pp.\n84–85, 88–89.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, pp.\n98–100.\n1\n2\nTomuschat 2006\n, p.\n834.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n30, 34.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n34.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n68, 73.\n↑\nBassiouni 2011\n, pp.\nxxx–xxxi, 94.\n↑\nBassiouni 2011\n, pp.\nxxxi, 33.\n↑\nMusa 2016\n, p.\n373.\n1\n2\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n73.\n↑\nAcquaviva 2011\n, pp.\n884–885.\n↑\nMouralis 2019\n, pp.\n102–103, 114, 120, 135.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n70.\n↑\nTomuschat 2006\n, pp.\n839–840.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n9–10.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, p.\n101.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, p.\n87.\n↑\nHeller 2011\n, p.\n11.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, p.\n85.\n1\n2\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n76.\n↑\nWeinke 2006\n, p.\n31.\n1\n2\n3\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n74.\n↑\nMouralis 2019\n, p.\n21.\n1\n2\n3\nMouralis 2019\n, p.\n22.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n2, 112.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n100.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n71, 90.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n3, 6.\n1\n2\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n91.\n1\n2\n3\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n90.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n53, 73–74.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n88.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, p.\n115.\n1\n2\nGemählich 2019\n, paragraph 10.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n75, 89.\n↑\nGemählich 2019\n, paragraphs 11–12.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n87.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n204.\n1\n2\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n9.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n9, 78.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n217.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n88–89.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n117.\n↑\nFleming 2022\n, p.\n209.\n↑\nFleming 2022\n, pp.\n209, 220.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n80.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n101.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n80–81.\n1\n2\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n102.\n1\n2\n3\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n111.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n112–113.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n18, 69, 111.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, p.\n69.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n99.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n82–83.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n84–86.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n87.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n100–101.\n↑\nWeinke 2006\n, p.\n27.\n1\n2\n3\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n81.\n↑\nWeinke 2006\n, pp.\n28–29.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n81–82.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n5.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n76.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n82, 139.\n1\n2\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n82.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n82, 127.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n121–122.\n↑\nWeinke 2006\n, p.\n29.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n83–84.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n83, 106, 133.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n92–93.\n↑\nWeinke 2006\n, pp.\n27–28.\n1\n2\nTomuschat 2006\n, p.\n841.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n205.\n↑\nWeinke 2006\n, pp.\n24–26.\n↑\nSharples 2013\n, p.\n39.\n1\n2\n3\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n105.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n116–117.\n↑\nGemählich 2019\n, paragraph 19.\n1\n2\n3\n4\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n148.\n↑\nMouralis 2016\n, fn 82.\n↑\nDouglas 2001\n, p.\n30.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n104.\n↑\nDouglas 2001\n, p.\n18.\n↑\nDouglas 2001\n, p.\n16.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n138.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n124.\n1\n2\nMouralis 2019\n, p.\n23.\n↑\nWeinke 2006\n, p.\n40.\n↑\nMouralis 2016\n, paragraph 3.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, p.\n159.\n1\n2\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n133.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n149.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n150.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n106.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n107.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n107–108.\n↑\nDouglas 2001\n, pp.\n20–21.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n104–105.\n1\n2\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n116.\n↑\nDouglas 2001\n, pp.\n69–70.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n118–119.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n89, 108.\n↑\nMusa 2016\n, p.\n384.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n108.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, pp.\n121–122.\n↑\nMusa 2016\n, pp.\n380–381.\n↑\nMusa 2016\n, p.\n382.\n↑\nMusa 2016\n, p.\n383.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n185.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n199–200.\n1\n2\n3\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n119.\n↑\nGemählich 2019\n, paragraph 15.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n110–111.\n↑\nGemählich 2019\n, paragraph 16.\n↑\nGemählich 2019\n, paragraph 17.\n1\n2\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n115.\n1\n2\nGemählich 2019\n, paragraph 18.\n1\n2\nGemählich 2019\n, paragraphs 20–21.\n↑\nDouglas 2001\n, p.\n70.\n↑\nGemählich 2019\n, paragraphs 17–18.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n216–218.\n1\n2\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n109.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n221–222.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n223.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n116, 118.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n225.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n230.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n230–231.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n232.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n225–226, 335.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n247, 329.\n1\n2\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n372.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n180, 202, 233.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n231–232.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n233, 236–237, 239.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n237, 239.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n240, 242.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n121.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n125.\n1\n2\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n126.\n↑\nDouglas 2001\n, p.\n20.\n1\n2\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n132.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n127–128.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n130–131.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n135.\n1\n2\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n133–134.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n287.\n1\n2\n3\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n131.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, p.\n148.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, pp.\n149–150.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n131–132.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, p.\n178.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, p.\n144.\n↑\nDouglas 2001\n, p.\n15.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n129–130.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n14.\n↑\nMouralis 2019\n, pp.\n23–24.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, p.\n171.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n119, 150.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n62, 120.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n120.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n138, 141.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n370, 372.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, pp.\n160–161.\n1\n2\nSayapin 2014\n, p.\n150.\n↑\nMusa 2016\n, p.\n375.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, p.\n161.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n142.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n371.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n142–143.\n↑\nTomuschat 2006\n, pp.\n840–841.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, pp.\n164–165.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n109, 144.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n144.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n371–372, 387.\n↑\nMusa 2016\n, p.\n378.\n1\n2\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n387.\n↑\nSayapin 2014\n, pp.\n150–151.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n386.\n↑\nMouralis 2019\n, p.\n25.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n383.\n1\n2\n3\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n383–384.\n1\n2\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n147.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n143–144.\n↑\nBrüggemann 2018\n, p.\n405.\n↑\nBrüggemann 2018\n, pp.\n405–406, 447–448.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n147–148.\n↑\nEchternkamp 2020\n, pp.\n163–164.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n145.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n387, 390–391.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n146.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n380.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n353, 400.\n↑\nHeller 2011\n, p.\n1.\n↑\nHeller 2011\n, pp.\n11–12.\n↑\nHeller 2011\n, p.\n370.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n273, 308.\n↑\nHeller 2011\n, pp.\n85, 89.\n↑\nHeller 2011\n, pp.\n3, 4, 92–94, 100–101.\n↑\nHeller 2011\n, p.\n90.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n294–296, 298.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n247, 310, 315.\n↑\nHeller 2011\n, pp.\n87, 96, 104.\n↑\nHeller 2011\n, pp.\n1, 4.\n↑\nHeller 2011\n, p.\n4.\n↑\nHeller 2011\n, pp.\n1–2.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n306.\n↑\nHeller 2011\n, pp.\n400–401.\n↑\nGemählich 2019\n, paragraphs 27, 34.\n↑\nSharples 2013\n, pp.\n46–47.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n146–147.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n149.\n1\n2\nSafferling 2020\n, p.\n42.\n↑\nEchternkamp 2020\n, p.\n167.\n↑\nWeinke 2006\n, p.\n99.\n↑\nWeinke 2006\n, p.\n100.\n↑\nEchternkamp 2020\n, pp.\n172–173.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n353–354.\n↑\nHeller 2011\n, pp.\n372–373.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n356–357.\n↑\nWeinke 2006\n, pp.\n105–107.\n↑\nWeinke 2006\n, p.\n105.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n365.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n366.\n↑\nHeller 2011\n, p.\n351.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n367.\n↑\nHeller 2011\n, pp.\n366–367.\n↑\nHeller 2011\n, p.\n360.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n368.\n↑\nWeinke 2006\n, pp.\n111–112.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\nvi.\n↑\nSellars 2010\n, p.\n1091.\n1\n2\nSellars 2013\n, p.\n172.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n148, 343, 402.\n↑\nTomuschat 2006\n, pp.\n833–834.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n205, 348.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n343.\n1\n2\nSellars 2010\n, p.\n1089.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, p.\n137.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n402, 417.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n412.\n↑\nTomuschat 2006\n, p.\n837.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, p.\n175.\n1\n2\nWeinke 2006\n, p.\n117.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n411.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n7.\n↑\nMouralis 2019\n, p.\n207.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, p.\n290.\n↑\nAcquaviva 2011\n, p.\n896.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n114.\n↑\nSharples 2013\n, p.\n31.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n16.\n↑\nSharples 2013\n, pp.\n31–32.\nSources\nFurther information:\nNuremberg Trials bibliography\nAcquaviva, Guido (2011).\n\"At the Origins of Crimes Against Humanity: Clues to a Proper Understanding of the\nNullum Crimen\nPrinciple in the Nuremberg Judgment\"\n.\nJournal of International Criminal Justice\n.\n9\n(4):\n881–\n903.\ndoi\n:\n10.1093/jicj/mqr010\n.\nBassiouni, M. Cherif\n(2011).\nCrimes against Humanity: Historical Evolution and Contemporary Application\n.\nCambridge University Press\n.\nISBN\n978-1-139-49893-7\n.\nBrüggemann, Jens (2018).\nMänner von Ehre?: die Wehrmachtgeneralität im Nürnberger Prozess 1945/46\n: zur Entstehung einer Legende\n[\nMen of honor?: the Wehrmacht generals in the Nuremberg trial 1945/46: the emergence of a legend\n]\n(in German).\nFerdinand Schöningh\n.\nISBN\n978-3-506-79259-4\n.\nDouglas, Lawrence\n(2001).\nThe Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust\n.\nYale University Press\n.\nISBN\n978-0-300-10984-9\n.\nEchternkamp, Jörg\n(2020).\nPostwar Soldiers: Historical Controversies and West German Democratization, 1945–1955\n.\nBerghahn Books\n.\nISBN\n978-1-78920-558-9\n.\nFleming, Michael\n(2022).\nIn the Shadow of the Holocaust: Poland, the United Nations War Crimes Commission, and the Search for Justice\n. Cambridge University Press.\nISBN\n978-1-009-11660-2\n.\nGemählich, Matthias (2019).\n\"«\nNotre combat pour la paix\n»\n: la France et le procès de Nuremberg (1945–1946)\"\n[\n\"Our fight for peace\": France and the Nuremberg trial (1945–1946)\n]\n.\nRevue d'Allemagne et des pays de langue allemande\n(in French).\n51\n(2):\n507–\n525.\ndoi\n:\n10.4000/allemagne.2053\n.\nISSN\n0035-0974\n.\nHeller, Kevin Jon\n(2011).\nThe Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law\n.\nOxford University Press\n.\nISBN\n978-0-19-923233-8\n.\nHirsch, Francine\n(2020).\nSoviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal after World War II\n. Oxford University Press.\nISBN\n978-0-19-937795-4\n.\nMouralis, Guillaume\n[in French]\n(2016).\n\"Le procès de Nuremberg: retour sur soixante-dix ans de recherche\"\n[\nThe Nuremberg trial: a look back at seventy years of research\n]\n.\nCritique Internationale\n(in French).\n73\n(4): 159.\ndoi\n:\n10.3917/crii.073.0159\n.\nMouralis, Guillaume (2019).\nLe moment Nuremberg: Le procès international, les lawyers et la question raciale\n[\nThe Nuremberg moment: The international trial, the lawyers and the racial question\n]\n(in French).\nPresses de Sciences Po\n.\nISBN\n978-2-7246-2422-9\n.\nMusa, Shavana (2016). \"The British and the Nuremberg Trial\".\nBritish Influences on International Law, 1915–2015\n.\nBrill Nijhoff\n. pp.\n367–\n386.\nISBN\n978-90-04-28417-3\n.\nPriemel, Kim Christian\n(2016).\nThe Betrayal: The Nuremberg Trials and German Divergence\n. Oxford University Press.\nISBN\n978-0-19-256374-3\n.\nSafferling, Christoph J. M.\n[in German]\n(2020).\n\"German Participation in the Nuremberg Trials and Its Implications for Today\"\n.\nThe Nuremberg War Crimes Trial and its Policy Consequences Today\n.\nNomos\n. pp.\n41–\n54.\ndoi\n:\n10.5771/9783845280400-41\n.\nISBN\n978-3-8487-3688-1\n.\nSayapin, Sergey (2014).\nThe Crime of Aggression in International Criminal Law: Historical Development, Comparative Analysis and Present State\n.\nT.M.C. Asser Press\n.\nISBN\n978-90-6704-927-6\n.\nSellars, Kirsten (2010).\n\"Imperfect Justice at Nuremberg and Tokyo\"\n.\nEuropean Journal of International Law\n.\n21\n(4):\n1085–\n1102.\ndoi\n:\n10.1093/ejil/chq070\n.\nSellars, Kirsten (2013).\n'Crimes Against Peace' and International Law\n. Cambridge University Press.\nISBN\n978-1-107-02884-5\n.\nSharples, Caroline (2013). \"Holocaust on Trial: Mass Observation and British Media Responses to the Nuremberg Tribunal, 1945–1946\".\nBritain and the Holocaust: Remembering and Representing War and Genocide\n.\nPalgrave Macmillan UK\n. pp.\n31–\n50.\nISBN\n978-1-137-35077-0\n.\nTomuschat, Christian (2006).\n\"The Legacy of Nuremberg\"\n.\nJournal of International Criminal Justice\n.\n4\n(4):\n830–\n844.\ndoi\n:\n10.1093/jicj/mql051\n.\nWeinke, Annette (2006).\nDie Nürnberger Prozesse\n[\nThe Nuremberg trials\n]\n(in German).\nC.H.Beck\n.\nISBN\n978-3-406-53604-5\n.\nExternal links\nWikimedia Commons has media related to\nNuremberg Trials\n.\nTranscript\nand other documents from the\nAvalon Project\nby\nYale Law School\nLillian Goldman Law Library\nNuremberg: Army Television – Release Version\n—\nA documentary produced in 1950, available online in the\nNational Archives\nCatalog\nConsists of footage from German films documenting Nazi personalities and activities interwoven with film shot during the trials\n—\nincluding testimony and statements from defendants, prosecuting attorneys, judges, and witnesses. It also contains flashbacks of a variety of Nazi crimes against humanity.\n49°27′16″N\n11°02′54″E\n\n/\n\n49.45444°N 11.04833°E\n\n/\n49.45444; 11.04833",
    "infobox": {
      "indictment": "Conspiracy,crimes against peace,war crimes,crimes against humanity,mass murder,unethical human experimentation,false imprisonment,hate crimes",
      "started": "20 November 1945",
      "decided": "1 October 1946",
      "defendants": "24 (see list)",
      "witnesses": "37 prosecution, 83 defense",
      "transcripts": "Harvard Law SchoolYale Law School",
      "related_actions": "Subsequent Nuremberg trialsInternational Military Tribunal for the Far East",
      "judges_sitting": "Iona Nikitchenko(Soviet Union)Geoffrey Lawrence(UK)Francis Biddle(US)Donnedieu de Vabres(France)and deputies[b]"
    },
    "char_count": 58559
  },
  {
    "page_title": "Nuremberg_principles",
    "name": "Nuremberg principles",
    "type": "trial",
    "summary": "The Nuremberg principles are a set of guidelines for determining what constitutes a war crime. The document was created by the International Law Commission of the United Nations to codify the legal principles underlying the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi party members following World War II.",
    "description": "Guidelines for determining what constitutes a war crime",
    "full_text": "Nuremberg principles\nGuidelines for determining what constitutes a war crime\nFor the denaturalization of German Jews, see\nNuremberg Laws\n. For the set of research ethics principles for human experimentation, see\nNuremberg Code\n.\nThe\nNuremberg principles\nare a set of guidelines for determining what constitutes a\nwar crime\n. The document was created by the\nInternational Law Commission\nof the\nUnited Nations\nto\ncodify\nthe legal principles underlying the\nNuremberg Trials\nof\nNazi\nparty members following\nWorld War II\n.\nGroup of defendants at the Nuremberg trials, from which the Nuremberg principles were established\nThe principles\nPrinciple I\nAny person who commits an act which constitutes a\ncrime under international law\nis responsible therefor and liable to punishment.\nPrinciple II\nThe fact that\ninternal law\ndoes not impose a penalty for an act which constitutes a crime under\ninternational law\ndoes not relieve the person who committed the act from responsibility under international law.\nPrinciple III\nThe fact that a person who committed an act which constitutes a crime under international law, acted as\nHead of State\nor\nresponsible government\nofficial\n, does not relieve him from responsibility under international law.\nPrinciple IV\nMain article:\nSuperior orders\nThe fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.\nThis principle could be paraphrased as follows: \"It is not an acceptable excuse to say 'I was just following my superior's orders'\".\nPrevious to the time of the\nNuremberg Trials\n, this excuse was known in common parlance as \"\nsuperior orders\n\".\nAfter the prominent, high-profile event of the Nuremberg Trials, that excuse is now referred to by many as the \"\nNuremberg Defense\n\".  In recent times, a third term, \"\nlawful orders\n\" has become common parlance for some people.\nAll three terms are in use today, and they all have slightly different nuances of meaning, depending on the context in which they are used.\nNuremberg Principle IV is legally supported by the\njurisprudence\nfound in\ncertain articles in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which deal indirectly with conscientious objection\n.\nIt is also supported by\nthe principles found in paragraph 171 of the Handbook on Procedures and Criteria for Determining Refugee Status\nwhich was issued by the Office of the\nUnited Nations High Commissioner for Refugees\n(UNHCR). Those principles deal with the conditions under which\nconscientious objectors\ncan apply for refugee status in another country if they face persecution in their own country for refusing to participate in an illegal war.\nPrinciple V\nAny person charged with a crime under international law has the\nright to a fair trial\non the facts and law.\nPrinciple VI\nThe crimes hereinafter set out are punishable as crimes under international law:\n(a)\nCrimes against peace\n:\n(i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a\nwar of aggression\nor a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances;\n(ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i).\n(b)\nWar crimes\n:\nViolations of the\nlaws or customs of war\nwhich include, but are not limited to,\nmurder\n, ill-treatment or\ndeportation\nto\nslave labor\nor for any other purpose of\ncivilian\npopulation\nof or in\noccupied territory\n; murder or ill-treatment of\nprisoners of war\nor\npersons on the Seas\n, killing of\nhostages\n,\nplunder\nof\npublic\nor\nprivate property\n, wanton destruction of\ncities\n,\ntowns\n, or\nvillages\n, or devastation not justified by\nmilitary necessity\n.\n(c)\nCrimes against humanity\n:\nMurder, extermination, enslavement,\ndeportation\nand other inhumane acts done against any civilian population, or\npersecutions\non political, racial, or religious grounds, when such acts are done or such persecutions are carried on in execution of or in connection with any crime against peace or any war crime.\nLeaders, organizers, instigators and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a common plan or conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing crimes are responsible for all acts performed by any persons in execution of such plan.\nPrinciple VII\nComplicity in the commission of a crime against peace, a war crime, or a crime against humanity as set forth in Principle VI is a crime under international law.\nThe principles' power or lack of power\nSee also:\nSources of international law\nand\nInternational legal theory\nIn the period just prior to the June 26, 1945 signing of the\nCharter of the United Nations\n, the\ngovernments\nparticipating in its drafting were opposed to conferring on the\nUnited Nations\nlegislative power\nto enact binding\nrules\nof\ninternational law\n. As a corollary, they also rejected proposals to confer on the\nGeneral Assembly\nthe power to impose certain general conventions on states by some form of majority vote. There was, however, strong support for conferring on the General Assembly the more limited powers of study and recommendation, which led to the adoption of Article 13 in\nChapter IV of the Charter\n.\nIt obliges the\nUnited Nations General Assembly\nto initiate studies and to make recommendations that encourage the progressive development of international law and its\ncodification\n. The Nuremberg Principles were developed by UN organs under that limited mandate.\nUnlike treaty law,\ncustomary international law\nis not written. To prove that a certain rule is customary one has to show that it is reflected in state practice and that there exists a conviction in the\ninternational community\nthat such practice is required as a matter of law. (For example, the\nNuremberg Trials\nwere a \"practice\" of the \"international law\" of the Nuremberg Principles; and that \"practice\" was supported by the international community.) In this context, \"practice\" relates to official state practice and therefore includes formal statements by states. A contrary practice by some states is possible. If this contrary practice is condemned by other states then the rule is confirmed.\nIn 1947, under\nUN General Assembly\nResolution 177 (II), paragraph (a), the\nInternational Law Commission\nwas directed to \"formulate the principles of international law recognized in the Charter of the\nNuremberg Tribunal\nand in the judgment of the Tribunal.\" In the course of the consideration of this subject, the question arose as to whether or not the commission should ascertain to what extent the principles contained in the Charter and judgment constituted principles of international law. The conclusion was that since the Nuremberg Principles had been affirmed by the General Assembly, the task entrusted to the commission was not to express any appreciation of these principles as principles of international law but merely to formulate them. The text above was adopted by the Commission at its second session. The Report of the commission also contains commentaries on the principles (see Yearbook of the International Law Commission, 1950, Vol. II, pp.\n374–378).\nExamples of the principles supported and not supported\nFor examples relating to Principle VI, see\nList of war crimes\n.\nFor examples relating to Principle IV (from before, during, and after the Nuremberg Trials), see\nSuperior Orders\n.\nThe 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court\nConcerning Nuremberg Principle IV, and its reference to an individual's responsibility, it could be argued that a version of the\nSuperior Orders\ndefense can be found as a defense to international crimes in the\nRome Statute\nof the\nInternational Criminal Court\n. (The Rome Statute was agreed upon in 1998 as the foundational document of the International Criminal Court, established to try those individuals accused of serious international crimes.)  Article 33, titled \"Superior Orders and prescription of law,\"\nstates:\n1. The fact that a crime within the jurisdiction of the Court has been committed by a person pursuant to an order of a Government or of a superior, whether military or civilian, shall not relieve that person of criminal responsibility unless:\n(a) The person was under a legal obligation to obey orders of the Government or the superior in question;\n(b) The person did not know that the order was unlawful; and\n(c) The order was not manifestly unlawful.\n2. For the purposes of this article, orders to commit genocide or crimes against humanity are manifestly unlawful.\nThere are two interpretations of this Article:\nThis formulation, especially (1)(a), whilst effectively prohibiting the use of the Nuremberg Defense in relation to charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, does however, appear to allow the Nuremberg Defense to be used as a protection against charges of war crimes, provided the relevant criteria are met.\nNevertheless, this interpretation of ICC Article 33 is open to debate: For example, Article 33 (1)(c) protects the defendant only if \"the order was not manifestly unlawful.\" The \"order\" could be considered \"unlawful\" if we consider\nNuremberg Principle IV\nto be the applicable \"law\"  in this case.  If so, then the defendant is not protected.  Discussion as to whether or not Nuremberg Principle IV is the applicable law in this case is found in\na discussion of the Nuremberg Principles' power or lack of power\n.\nSee also:\nStates Parties to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court\nCanada\nMain article:\nJeremy Hinzman\nNuremberg Principle IV, and its reference to an individual's responsibility, was also at issue in\nCanada\nin the case of\nHinzman v. Canada.\nJeremy Hinzman\nwas a\nU.S. Army\ndeserter\nwho claimed\nrefugee\nstatus in Canada as a\nconscientious objector\n, one of\nmany Iraq War resisters\n. Hinzman's lawyer,\nJeffry House\n, had previously raised the issue of the\nlegality of the Iraq War\nas having a bearing on their case. The\nFederal Court\nruling was released on March 31, 2006, and denied the refugee status claim.\nIn the decision, Justice\nAnne L. Mactavish\naddressed the issue of personal responsibility:\nAn individual must be involved at the policy-making level to be culpable for a crime against peace ... the ordinary foot soldier is not expected to make his or her own personal assessment as to the legality of a conflict. Similarly, such an individual cannot be held criminally responsible for fighting in support of an illegal war, assuming that his or her personal war-time conduct is otherwise proper.\nOn Nov 15, 2007, a quorum  of the\nSupreme Court of Canada\nconsisting of Justices\nMichel Bastarache\n,\nRosalie Abella\n, and\nLouise Charron\nrefused an application to have the Court hear the case on appeal, without giving reasons.\nSee also\nCommand responsibility\nGeneva Conventions\nInternational Criminal Court\nInternational legal theory\nLaws of war\nLondon Charter of the International Military Tribunal\nNuremberg Code\nNuremberg Trials\nRule of Law in Armed Conflicts Project\nRule of law\nRule According to Higher Law\nSources of international law\nFootnotes\n↑\n\"Charter of the United Nations, Chapter IV: The General Assembly\"\n. United Nations. June 26, 1945.\nArchived\nfrom the original on November 28, 2010\n. Retrieved\nDecember 23,\n2010\n.\n↑\n\"International Law Commission\"\n.\nlegal.un.org\n.\nArchived\nfrom the original on 2021-05-06\n. Retrieved\n2021-05-09\n.\n↑\nInternational Committee of the Red Cross\n(ICRC)\nCustomary international humanitarian law\nArchived\n2009-06-28 at the\nWayback Machine\n↑\nInternational Committee of the Red Cross\n(ICRC)\nReferences\nPrinciples of International Law Recognized in the Charter of the Nüremberg Tribunal and in the Judgment of the Tribunal, 1950: Introduction\nArchived\n2016-03-14 at the\nWayback Machine\n↑\nRome Statute of the International Criminal Court (16 January 2002) [10 November 1998].\n\"Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court; Part 3: General Principles of Criminal Law; Article 33: Superior orders and prescription of law\"\n. Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.\nArchived\nfrom the original on 19 October 2013\n. Retrieved\n21 March\n2010\n.\n↑\nMernagh, M. (2006-05-18).\n\"AWOL GIs Dealt Legal Blow\"\n. Toronto's Now Magazine. Archived from\nthe original\non 2007-03-24\n. Retrieved\n2008-06-02\n.\n↑\n\"Hinzman v. Canada (Minister of Citizenship and Immigration) (F.C.), 2006 FC 420\"\n. Office of the Commissioner for Federal Judicial Affairs. pp.\n(see\nHeld,\nPara. (1)). Archived from\nthe original\non 2009-02-16\n. Retrieved\n2008-06-16\n.\n↑\nMernagh, M. (2006-05-18).\n\"AWOL GIs Dealt Legal Blow\"\n. Toronto's Now Magazine. Archived from\nthe original\non 2011-06-05\n. Retrieved\n2008-06-02\n.\n↑\nHinzman v. Canada\nArchived\n2013-06-28 at the\nWayback Machine\nFederal Court decision. Paras (157) and (158). Accessed 2008-06-18\n↑\nRoman Goergen (February 23, 2011).\n\"Sanctuary Denied\"\n.\nIn These Times\n.\nArchived\nfrom the original on 11 March 2011\n. Retrieved\n6 March\n2011\n.\n↑\nCBC News (2007-11-15).\n\"Top court refuses to hear cases of U.S. deserters\"\n. CBC News.\nArchived\nfrom the original on 2008-06-05\n. Retrieved\n2008-06-02\n.\n↑\n\"Supreme Court of Canada – Decisions – Bulletin of November 16, 2007, (See Sections 32111 and 32112)\"\n. Archived from\nthe original\non July 21, 2011.\nReferences\nPrinciples of International Law Recognized in the Charter of the Nürnberg Tribunal and in the Judgment of the Tribunal, 1950.\nArchived\n2012-09-12 at the\nWayback Machine\non the website of the\nInternational Committee of the Red Cross\n(ICRC)\nPrinciples of International Law Recognized in the Charter of the Nürnberg Tribunal and in the Judgment of the Tribunal, 1950.\nArchived\n2018-02-19 at the\nWayback Machine\non the website of the\nUnited Nations\n(\nUN\n)\nFurther reading\nIntroductory note by Antonio Cassese\nArchived\n2014-04-10 at the\nWayback Machine\nfor General Assembly resolution 95(I) of 11 December 1946 (Affirmation of the Principles of International Law recognized by the Charter of the Nürnberg Tribunal) on the website of the\nUN Audiovisual Library of International Law\nArchived\n2013-09-11 at the\nWayback Machine\nNuremberg Trial Proceedings Vol. 1 Charter of the International Military Tribunal\nArchived\n2014-02-14 at the\nWayback Machine\ncontained in the\nAvalon Project\narchive at\nYale Law School\nJudgment\n: The Law Relating to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity\nArchived\n2011-07-20 at the\nWayback Machine\ncontained in the\nAvalon Project\narchive at\nYale Law School\nExternal links\nIstván Deák, Retribution against Heads of State and Prime Ministers",
    "infobox": {},
    "char_count": 14452
  },
  {
    "page_title": "London_Charter_of_the_International_Military_Tribunal",
    "name": "London Charter of the International Military Tribunal",
    "type": "trial",
    "summary": "The Nuremberg trials were international criminal trials held by France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States against leaders of the defeated Nazi Germany for plotting and carrying out invasions of several countries across Europe and committing atrocities against their citizens in the Second World War.",
    "description": "Trials of Nazi German leaders",
    "full_text": "Nuremberg trials\nTrials of Nazi German leaders\n\"International Military Tribunal\" redirects here. For the Tokyo Trial, see\nInternational Military Tribunal for the Far East\n. For the 1947 film, see\nNuremberg Trials\n(film)\n.\nThe\nNuremberg trials\nwere\ninternational criminal trials\nheld by\nFrance\n, the\nSoviet Union\n, the\nUnited Kingdom\n, and the\nUnited States\nagainst leaders of the defeated\nNazi Germany\nfor plotting and carrying out\ninvasions\nof several countries across\nEurope\nand committing\natrocities\nagainst their citizens in the\nSecond World War\n.\nBetween 1939 and 1945, Nazi Germany invaded many countries across Europe, inflicting 27 million deaths in the\nSoviet Union\nalone. Proposals for how to punish the defeated Nazi leaders ranged from a\nshow trial\n(the Soviet Union) to\nsummary executions\n(the\nUnited Kingdom\n). In mid-1945,\nFrance\n, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the\nUnited States\nagreed to convene a joint tribunal in\nNuremberg\n,\noccupied Germany\n, with the\nNuremberg Charter\nas its legal instrument. Between 20 November 1945 and 1 October 1946, the\nInternational Military Tribunal\n(\nIMT\n) tried 22 of the most important surviving leaders of Nazi Germany in the\npolitical\n,\nmilitary\n, and economic spheres, as well as six German organizations. The purpose of the trial was not only to try the defendants but also to assemble irrefutable evidence of\nNazi war crimes\n, offer a history lesson to the defeated Germans, and delegitimize the traditional German elite.\nThe IMT verdict followed the prosecution in declaring the\ncrime\nof plotting and waging\naggressive war\n\"the supreme international crime\" because \"it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole\".\nMost defendants were also charged with\nwar crimes\nand\ncrimes against humanity\n,\nthe Holocaust\nsignificantly contributing to the trials.\nTwelve further trials\nwere conducted by the United States against lower-level perpetrators and focused more on the Holocaust. Controversial at the time for their\nretroactive criminalization\nof aggression, the trials' innovation of holding individuals responsible for violations of international law is considered \"the true beginning of\ninternational criminal law\n\".\nOrigin\nJews arriving at\nAuschwitz concentration camp\n, 1944. According to legal historian\nKirsten Sellars\n, the\nextermination camps\n\"formed the moral core of the Allies' case against the Nazi leaders\".\nBetween 1939 and 1945,\nNazi Germany\ninvaded many European countries\n, including\nPoland\n,\nDenmark\n,\nNorway\n,\nthe Netherlands\n,\nBelgium\n,\nLuxembourg\n,\nFrance\n,\nYugoslavia\n,\nGreece\n, and the\nSoviet Union\n.\nGerman\naggression\nwas accompanied by immense brutality in occupied areas;\nwar losses in the Soviet Union alone\nincluded 27 million dead\n, mostly civilians, which was one seventh of the prewar population.\nThe legal reckoning was premised on the extraordinary nature of Nazi criminality, particularly the\nperceived singularity\nof\nthe systematic murder of millions of Jews\n.\nIn early 1942, representatives of nine\ngovernments-in-exile\nfrom German-occupied Europe issued\na declaration\nto demand an international court to try the German crimes committed in occupied countries. The United States and United Kingdom refused to endorse this proposal, citing the failure of\nwar crimes prosecutions\nfollowing\nWorld War I\n.\nThe London-based\nUnited Nations War Crimes Commission\n—without Soviet participation—first met in October 1943 and became bogged down in the scope of its mandate, with Belgian jurist\nMarcel de Baer\nand Czech legal scholar\nBohuslav Ečer\narguing for a broader definition of\nwar crimes\nthat would include \"the crime of war\".\nOn 1 November 1943, the Soviet Union, United Kingdom, and United States issued the\nMoscow Declaration\n, warning Nazi leadership of the signatories' intent to \"pursue them to the uttermost ends of the earth ... in order that justice may be done\".\nThe declaration stated high-ranking Nazis who had committed crimes in several countries would be dealt with jointly, while others would be tried where they had committed their crimes.\nSoviet jurist\nAron Trainin\ndeveloped the concept of\ncrimes against peace\n(waging\naggressive war\n) which would later be central to the proceedings at Nuremberg.\nTrainin's ideas were reprinted in the West and widely adopted.\nOf all the\nAllies\n, the Soviet Union lobbied most intensely for trying the defeated German leaders for aggression in addition to war crimes.\nThe Soviet Union wanted to hold a\ntrial with a predetermined outcome\nsimilar to the 1930s\nMoscow trials\n, in order to demonstrate the Nazi leaders' guilt and build a case for\nwar reparations\nto rebuild the\nSoviet economy\n, which had been devastated by the war.\nThe United States insisted on a trial that would be seen as legitimate as a means of reforming Germany and demonstrating the superiority of the Western system.\nThe\nUnited States Department of War\nwas drawing up plans for an international tribunal in late 1944 and early 1945. The\nBritish government\nstill preferred the\nsummary execution\nof Nazi leaders, citing the failure of trials following World War I and qualms about\nretroactive criminality\n.\nThe form that retribution would take was left unresolved at the\nYalta Conference\nin February 1945.\nOn 2 May, at the\nSan Francisco Conference\n, United States president\nHarry S. Truman\nannounced the formation of an international military tribunal.\nOn 8 May,\nGermany surrendered unconditionally\n, bringing\nan end to the war in Europe\n.\nEstablishment\nNuremberg charter\nAron Trainin\n(center, with moustache) speaks at the London Conference.\nAerial view of the Palace of Justice in 1945, with the prison attached behind it\nRuins of\nNuremberg\n,\nc.\n1945\nAt the London Conference, held from 26 June to 2 August 1945, representatives of\nFrance\n, the\nSoviet Union\n, the\nUnited Kingdom\n, and the\nUnited States\nnegotiated the form that the trial would take. Until the end of the negotiations, it was not clear that any trial would be held at all.\nThe offences that would be prosecuted were crimes against peace,\ncrimes against humanity\n, and war crimes.\nAt the conference, it was debated whether wars of aggression were prohibited in existing\ncustomary international law\n; regardless, before the charter was adopted there was no law providing for criminal responsibility for aggression.\nDespite misgivings from other Allies, American negotiator and\nSupreme Court\njustice\nRobert H. Jackson\nthreatened the United States' withdrawal if aggression was not prosecuted because it had been the rationale for\nAmerican entry into World War II\n.\nHowever, Jackson conceded on defining crimes against peace; the other three Allies were opposed because it would undermine the freedom of action of the\nUnited Nations Security Council\n.\nWar crimes already existed in international law as criminal violations of the\nlaws and customs of war\n, but these did not apply to a government's treatment of its own citizens.\nLegal experts sought a way to try crimes against German citizens, such as the\nGerman Jews\n.\nA Soviet proposal for a charge of \"crimes against civilians\" was renamed \"crimes against humanity\" at Jackson's suggestion\nafter previous uses of the term in the\npost-World War I\nCommission of Responsibilities\nand in failed efforts to prosecute the perpetrators of the\nArmenian genocide\n.\nThe British proposal to define crimes against humanity was largely accepted, with the final wording being \"murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population\".\nThe final version of the charter limited the tribunal's jurisdiction over crimes against humanity to those committed as part of a war of aggression.\nBoth the United States (concerned that its\nJim Crow\nsystem of\nracial segregation\nnot be labeled a crime against humanity) and the Soviet Union wanted to avoid giving an international court jurisdiction over a government's treatment of its own citizens.\nThe charter upended the traditional view of\ninternational law\nby holding individuals,\nrather than states\n, responsible for breaches.\nThe other three Allies' proposal to limit the definition of the crimes to acts committed by the defeated Axis was rejected by Jackson. Instead, the charter limited the jurisdiction of the court to Germany's actions.\nArticle 7 prevented the defendants from claiming\nsovereign immunity\n,\nand Article 8 meant that the plea of acting under\nsuperior orders\nwas not a valid defence, although it might be treated in mitigation.\nThe trial was held under modified\ncommon law\n.\nThe negotiators decided that the tribunal's permanent seat would be in Berlin, while the trial would be held at the\nPalace of Justice\nin\nNuremberg\n.\nLocated in the\nAmerican occupation zone\n, Nuremberg was a symbolic location as the site of\nNazi rallies\n. The Palace of Justice was relatively intact but needed to be renovated for the trial due to\nbomb damage\n; it had an attached prison where the defendants could be held.\nOn 8 August, the Nuremberg Charter was signed in London.\nJudges and prosecutors\nIn early 1946, there were a thousand employees from the four countries' delegations in Nuremberg, of which about two thirds were from the United States.\nBesides legal professionals, there were many social-science researchers, psychologists, translators, interpreters, and\ngraphic designers\n, the last to make the many charts used during the trial.\nEach state appointed a prosecution team and two judges, one being a deputy without voting rights.\nJackson (whom historian\nKim Christian Priemel\ndescribed as \"a versatile politician and a remarkable orator, if not a great legal thinker\") was appointed the United States' chief prosecutor.\nThe United States prosecution believed\nNazism\nwas the product of a German deviation from the West (the\nSonderweg\nthesis) and sought to correct this deviation with a trial that would serve both retributive and educational purposes.\nAs the largest delegation, it would take on the bulk of the prosecutorial effort.\nAt Jackson's recommendation, the United States appointed judges\nFrancis Biddle\nand\nJohn Parker\n.\nThe British chief prosecutor was\nHartley Shawcross\n,\nAttorney General for England and Wales\n, assisted by his predecessor\nDavid Maxwell Fyfe\n.\nAlthough the chief British judge,\nSir Geoffrey Lawrence\n(\nLord Justice of Appeal\n), was the nominal president of the tribunal, in practice Biddle exercised more authority.\nThe French prosecutor,\nFrançois de Menthon\n, had just overseen trials of the leaders of\nVichy France\n;\nhe resigned in January 1946 and was replaced by\nAuguste Champetier de Ribes\n.\nThe French judges were\nHenri Donnedieu de Vabres\n, a professor of criminal law, and deputy\nRobert Falco\n, a judge of the\nCour de Cassation\nwho had represented France at the London Conference.\nThe French government tried to appoint staff untainted by collaboration with the Vichy regime; some appointments, including Champetier de Ribes, were of those who had been in the\nFrench resistance\n.\nExpecting a show trial, the Soviet Union\ninitially appointed as chief prosecutor\nIona Nikitchenko\n, who had presided over the Moscow trials, but he was made a judge and replaced by\nRoman Rudenko\n, a show trial prosecutor\nchosen for his skill as an orator.\nThe Soviet judges and prosecutors were not permitted to make any major decisions without consulting a commission in Moscow led by Soviet politician\nAndrei Vyshinsky\n; the resulting delays hampered the Soviet effort to set the agenda.\nThe influence of the Soviet delegation was also constrained by limited English proficiency, lack of interpreters, and unfamiliarity with diplomacy and international institutions.\nRequests by\nChaim Weizmann\n, the president of the\nWorld Zionist Organization\n, as well as the\nProvisional Government of National Unity\nin Poland, for an active role in the trial justified by their representation of victims of Nazi crimes were rejected.\nThe Soviet Union invited prosecutors from its allies, including Poland,\nCzechoslovakia\n, and\nYugoslavia\n; Denmark and Norway also sent a delegation.\nAlthough the Polish delegation was not empowered to intervene in the proceedings, it submitted evidence and an indictment, succeeding at drawing some attention to crimes committed against Polish Jews and non-Jews.\nIndictment\nHanding over the indictment to the tribunal, 18 October 1945\nThe work of drafting the indictment was divided up by the national delegations. The British worked on aggressive war; the other delegations were assigned the task of covering crimes against humanity and war crimes committed on the\nWestern Front\n(France) and the\nEastern Front\n(the Soviet Union). The United States delegation outlined the overall Nazi conspiracy and criminality of Nazi organizations.\nThe British and American delegations decided to work jointly in drafting the charges of conspiracy to wage aggressive war. On 17 September, the various delegations met to discuss the indictment.\nThe charge of\nconspiracy\n, absent from the charter, held together the wide array of charges and defendants\nand was used to charge the top Nazi leaders, as well as bureaucrats who had never killed anyone or perhaps even directly ordered killing. It was also an end run on the charter's limits on charging crimes committed before the beginning of World War II.\nConspiracy charges were central to the cases against propagandists and industrialists: the former were charged with providing the ideological justification for war and other crimes, while the latter were accused of enabling Germany's war effort.\nThe charge, a brainchild of\nWar Department\nlawyer\nMurray C. Bernays\n, and perhaps inspired by his previous work prosecuting\nsecurities fraud\n,\nwas spearheaded by the United States and less popular with the other delegations, particularly France.\nThe problem of translating the indictment and evidence into the three official languages of the tribunal—English, French, and Russian—as well as German was severe due to the scale of the task and difficulty of recruiting interpreters, especially in the Soviet Union.\nVyshinsky demanded extensive corrections to the charges of crimes against peace, especially regarding the role of the\nGerman–Soviet pact\nin starting World War II.\nJackson also separated out an overall conspiracy charge from the other three charges, aiming that the American prosecution would cover the overall Nazi conspiracy while the other delegations would flesh out the details of Nazi crimes.\nThe division of labor, and the haste with which the indictment was prepared, resulted in duplication, imprecise language, and lack of attribution of specific charges to individual defendants.\nDefendants\nMain article:\nList of defendants at the International Military Tribunal\nThe defendants in the dock\nSome of the most prominent Nazis—\nAdolf Hitler\n,\nHeinrich Himmler\n, and\nJoseph Goebbels\n—had died by suicide and therefore could not be tried.\nThe prosecutors aimed to prosecute key leaders in German politics, business, and the military.\nMost of the defendants had surrendered to the United States or United Kingdom.\nThe defendants, who were largely unrepentant,\nincluded former cabinet ministers:\nFranz von Papen\n(who had\nbrought Hitler to power\n),\nJoachim von Ribbentrop\n(\nforeign minister\n),\nKonstantin von Neurath\n(\nforeign minister\n),\nWilhelm Frick\n(\ninterior minister\n), and\nAlfred Rosenberg\n, minister for the occupied eastern territories.\nAlso prosecuted were leaders of the German economy, such as\nGustav Krupp\nof the\nKrupp AG\nconglomerate, former\nReichsbank\npresident\nHjalmar Schacht\n, and economic planners\nAlbert Speer\nand\nWalther Funk\n, along with Speer's subordinate and head of the\nforced labor program\n,\nFritz Sauckel\n.\nWhile the British were skeptical of prosecuting economic leaders, the French had a strong interest in highlighting German\neconomic imperialism\n.\nThe military leaders were\nHermann Göring\n—the most infamous surviving Nazi and the main target of the trial\n—\nWilhelm Keitel\n,\nAlfred Jodl\n,\nErich Raeder\n, and\nKarl Dönitz\n.\nAlso on trial were propagandists\nJulius Streicher\nand\nHans Fritzsche\n;\nRudolf Hess\n, Hitler's deputy who had flown to Britain in 1941;\nHans Frank\n, governor-general of the\nGeneral Governorate\nof Poland;\nHitler Youth\nleader\nBaldur von Schirach\n;\nArthur Seyss-Inquart\n,\nReich Commissioner for the Netherlands\n; and\nErnst Kaltenbrunner\n, leader of Himmler's\nReich Security Main Office\n.\nObservers of the trial found the defendants mediocre and contemptible.\nAlthough the list of defendants was finalized on 29 August,\nas late as October, Jackson demanded the addition of new names, but was denied.\nOf the 24 men indicted,\nMartin Bormann\nwas\ntried\nin absentia\n, as the Allies were unaware of his death; Krupp was too ill to stand trial; and\nRobert Ley\nhad died by suicide before the start of the trial.\nFormer Nazis were allowed to serve as counsel\nand by mid-November all defendants had lawyers. The defendants' lawyers jointly appealed to the court, claiming it did not have jurisdiction against the accused, but this motion was rejected. Defense lawyers saw themselves as acting on behalf of their clients and the German nation.\nInitially, the Americans had planned to try fourteen organizations and their leaders, but this was narrowed to six: the\nReich Cabinet\n, the Leadership Corps of the\nNazi Party\n, the\nGestapo\n, the\nSA\n, the\nSS\nand the\nSD\n, and the\nGeneral Staff\nand\nHigh Command\nof the\nGerman military\n(Wehrmacht).\nThe aim was to have these organizations declared criminal, so that their members could be tried expeditiously for membership in a criminal organization.\nSenior American officials believed that convicting organizations was a good way of showing that not just the top German leaders were responsible for crimes, without condemning the entire German people.\nEvidence\nUnited States Army\nclerks with evidence\nOver the summer, all of the national delegations struggled to gather evidence for the upcoming trial.\nThe American and British prosecutors focused on documentary evidence and affidavits rather than testimony from survivors. This strategy increased the credibility of their case, since survivor testimony was considered less reliable and more vulnerable to accusations of bias, but reduced public interest in the proceedings.\nThe American prosecution drew on reports of the\nOffice of Strategic Services\n, an American intelligence agency, and information provided by the\nYIVO Institute for Jewish Research\nand the\nAmerican Jewish Committee\n,\nwhile the French prosecution presented many documents that it had obtained from the\nCenter of Contemporary Jewish Documentation\n.\nThe prosecution called 37 witnesses compared to the defense's 83\n, not including 19 defendants who testified on their own behalf.\nThe prosecution examined 110,000 captured German documents\nand entered 4,600 into evidence,\nalong with\n30 kilometres (19\nmi)\nof film and 25,000 photographs.\nThe charter allowed the\nadmissibility\nof any evidence deemed to have\nprobative\nvalue, including\ndepositions\n.\nBecause of the loose evidentiary rules, photographs, charts, maps, and films played an important role in making incredible crimes believable.\nAfter the American prosecution submitted many documents at the beginning of the trial, the judges insisted that all of the evidence be read into the record, which slowed the trial.\nThe structure of the charges also caused delays as the same evidence ended up being read out multiple times, when it was relevant to both conspiracy and the other charges.\nCourse of the trial\nThe International Military Tribunal began trial on 20 November 1945,\nafter postponement requests from the Soviet prosecution, who wanted more time to prepare its case, were rejected.\nAll defendants\npleaded\nnot guilty.\nJackson made clear that the trial's purpose extended beyond convicting the defendants. Prosecutors wanted to assemble irrefutable evidence of Nazi crimes, establish individual responsibility and the crime of aggression in international law, provide a history lesson to the defeated Germans, delegitimize the traditional German elite,\nand allow the Allies to distance themselves from\nappeasement\n.\nJackson maintained that while the United States did \"not seek to convict the whole German people of crime\", neither did the trial \"serve to absolve the whole German people except 21 men in the dock\".\nNevertheless, defense lawyers (although not most of the defendants) often argued that the prosecution was trying to promote\nGerman collective guilt\nand forcefully countered this\nstrawman\n.\nAccording to Priemel, the conspiracy charge \"invited apologetic interpretations: narratives of absolute,\ntotalitarian\ndictatorship, run by society's lunatic fringe, of which the Germans had been the first victims rather than agents, collaborators, and\nfellow travellers\n\".\nIn contrast, the evidence presented on the Holocaust convinced some observers that\nGermans must have been aware of this crime\nwhile it was ongoing.\nAmerican and British prosecution\nNazi Concentration and Prison Camps\n(1945)\nPresenting information on German aggression, 4 December\nOn 21 November, Jackson gave the opening speech for the prosecution.\nHe described the fact that the defeated Nazis received a trial as \"one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason\".\nFocusing on aggressive war, which he described as the root of the other crimes, Jackson promoted an\nintentionalist\nview of the Nazi state and its overall criminal conspiracy. The speech was favorably received by the prosecution, the tribunal, the audience, historians, and even the defendants.\nMuch of the American case focused on the development of the Nazi conspiracy before the outbreak of war.\nThe American prosecution became derailed during attempts to provide evidence on the first act of aggression,\nagainst Austria\n.\nOn 29 November, the prosecution was unprepared to continue presenting on the\ninvasion of Czechoslovakia\n, and instead screened\nNazi Concentration and Prison Camps\n. The film, compiled from footage of the\nliberation of Nazi concentration camps\n, shocked both the defendants and the judges, who adjourned the trial.\nIndiscriminate selection and disorganized presentation of documentary evidence without tying it to specific defendants hampered the American prosecutors' work on the conspiracy to commit crimes against humanity.\nThe Americans summoned\nEinsatzgruppen\ncommander\nOtto Ohlendorf\n, who testified about the murder of 80,000 people by those under his command, and SS general\nErich von dem Bach-Zelewski\n, who admitted that German\nanti-partisan warfare\nwas little more than a cover for the mass murder of Jews.\nEvidence about\nErnst Kaltenbrunner\n's crimes is presented, 2 January 1946.\nThe British prosecution covered the charge of crimes against peace, which was largely redundant to the American conspiracy case.\nOn 4 December, Shawcross gave the opening speech, much of which had been written by Cambridge professor\nHersch Lauterpacht\n.\nUnlike Jackson, Shawcross attempted to minimize the novelty of the aggression charges, elaborating its precursors in the conventions of\nHague\nand\nGeneva\n, the\nLeague of Nations Covenant\n, the\nLocarno Treaty\n, and the\nKellogg–Briand Pact\n.\nThe British took four days to make their case,\nwith Maxwell Fyfe detailing treaties broken by Germany.\nIn mid-December the Americans switched to presenting the case against the indicted organizations,\nwhile in January both the British and Americans presented evidence against individual defendants.\nBesides the organizations mentioned in the indictment, American, and British prosecutors also mentioned the complicity of the German\nForeign Office\n,\narmy\n, and\nnavy\n.\nFrench prosecution\nFrom 17 January to 7 February 1946, France presented its charges and supporting evidence.\nIn contrast to the other prosecution teams, the French prosecution delved into Germany's development in the nineteenth century, arguing that it had diverged from the West due to\npan-Germanism\nand imperialism. They argued that Nazi ideology, which derived from these earlier ideas, was the\nmens rea\n—criminal intent—of the crimes on trial.\nThe French prosecutors, more than their British or American counterparts, emphasized the complicity of many Germans;\nthey barely mentioned the charge of aggressive war and instead focused on forced labor, economic plunder, and massacres.\nProsecutor\nEdgar Faure\ngrouped together various German policies, such as the annexation of\nAlsace–Lorraine\n, under the label of\nGermanization\n, which he argued was a crime against humanity.\nUnlike the British and American prosecution strategies, which focused on using German documents, French prosecutors took the perspective of the victims, submitting postwar police reports.\nEleven witnesses, including victims of Nazi persecution, were called; resistance fighter and\nAuschwitz\nsurvivor\nMarie Claude Vaillant-Couturier\ntestified about crimes she had witnessed.\nThe French charges of war crimes were accepted by the tribunal, except for the execution of hostages.\nDue to the narrow definition of crimes against humanity in the charter, the only part of the Germanization charges accepted by the judges was the\ndeportation of Jews from France\nand other parts of Western Europe.\nSoviet prosecution\nRoman Rudenko\nopens the Soviet case.\nOn 8 February, the Soviet prosecution opened its case with a speech by Rudenko that covered all four prosecution charges, highlighting a wide variety of crimes committed by the German occupiers as part of their destructive and unprovoked invasion.\nRudenko tried to emphasize common ground with the other Allies while rejecting any similarity between Nazi and Soviet rule.\nThe next week, the Soviet prosecution produced\nFriedrich Paulus\n—a German\nfield marshal\ncaptured after the\nBattle of Stalingrad\n—as a witness and questioned him about the preparations for the invasion of the Soviet Union.\nPaulus incriminated his former associates, pointing to Keitel, Jodl, and Göring as the defendants most responsible for the war.\nMore so than other delegations, Soviet prosecutors showed the gruesome details of German atrocities, especially the death by starvation of 3 million\nSoviet prisoners of war\nand several hundred thousand\nresidents of Leningrad\n.\nAlthough Soviet prosecutors dealt most extensively with the\nsystematic murder of Jews in eastern Europe\n, at times they blurred the fate of Jews with that of other Soviet nationalities.\nAlthough these aspects had already been covered by the American prosecution, Soviet prosecutors introduced new evidence from\nExtraordinary State Commission\nreports and interrogations of senior enemy officers.\nLev Smirnov\npresented evidence on the\nLidice massacre\nin Czechoslovakia, adding that German invaders had\ndestroyed thousands of villages and murdered their inhabitants\nthroughout eastern Europe.\nThe Soviet prosecution emphasized the racist aspect of policies such as the deportation of millions of civilians to Germany for\nforced labor\n,\nthe murder of children,\nsystematic looting of occupied territories, and theft or destruction of\ncultural heritage\n.\nThe Soviet prosecution also attempted to fabricate German responsibility for the\nKatyn massacre\n, which had in fact been committed by the\nNKVD\n. Although Western prosecutors never publicly rejected the Katyn charge for fear of casting doubt on the entire proceedings, they were skeptical.\nThe defense presented evidence of Soviet responsibility,\nand Katyn was not mentioned in the verdict.\nInspired by the films shown by the American prosecution, the Soviet Union commissioned three films for the trial:\nThe German Fascist Destruction of the Cultural Treasures of the Peoples of the USSR\n,\nAtrocities Committed by the German Fascist Invaders in the USSR\n, and\nThe German Fascist Destruction of Soviet Cities\n, using footage from Soviet filmmakers as well as shots from German newsreels.\nThe second included footage of the liberations of\nMajdanek\nand\nAuschwitz\nand was considered even more disturbing than the American concentration camp film.\nSoviet witnesses included several survivors of German crimes, including two civilians who lived through the siege of Leningrad, a peasant whose village was destroyed in anti-partisan warfare, a Red Army doctor who endured several prisoner-of-war camps\nand two Holocaust survivors—\nSamuel Rajzman\n, a survivor of\nTreblinka extermination camp\n, and poet\nAbraham Sutzkever\n, who described the murder of tens of thousands of Jews from\nVilna\n.\nThe Soviet prosecution case was generally well received and presented compelling evidence for the suffering of the Soviet people and the Soviet contributions to victory.\nDefense\nHermann Göring\nunder cross-examination\nA member of the Soviet delegation addresses the tribunal.\nFrom March to July 1946, the defense presented its counterarguments.\nBefore the prosecution finished, it was clear that their general case was proven, but it remained to determine the individual guilt of each defendant.\nNone of the defendants tried to assert that the Nazis' crimes had not occurred.\nSome defendants denied involvement in certain crimes or implausibly claimed ignorance of them, especially the Holocaust.\nA few defense lawyers inverted the arguments of the prosecution to assert that the Germans' authoritarian mindset and obedience to the state exonerated them from any personal guilt.\nMost rejected that Germany had deviated from Western civilization, arguing that few Germans could have supported Hitler because Germany was a civilized country.\nThe defendants tried to blame their crimes on Hitler, who was mentioned 12,000 times during the trial—more than the top five defendants combined. Other absent and dead men, including Himmler,\nReinhard Heydrich\n,\nAdolf Eichmann\n, and Bormann, were also blamed.\nTo counter claims that conservative defendants had enabled the\nNazi rise to power\n, defense lawyers blamed the\nSocial Democratic Party of Germany\n, trade unions, and other countries that maintained diplomatic relations with Germany.\nIn contrast, most defendants avoided incriminating each other.\nMost defendants argued their own insignificance within the Nazi system,\nthough Göring took the opposite approach, expecting to be executed but vindicated in the eyes of the German people.\nThe charter did not recognize a\ntu quoque\ndefense\n—asking for exoneration on the grounds that the Allies had committed the same crimes with which the defendants were charged.\nAlthough defense lawyers repeatedly equated the\nNuremberg Laws\nto legislation found in other countries, Nazi concentration camps to Allied detention facilities, and the deportation of Jews to the\nexpulsion of Germans\n, the judges rejected their arguments.\nAlfred Seidl\n(\nde\n)\nrepeatedly tried to disclose the secret protocols of the German–Soviet pact; although he was eventually successful, it was legally irrelevant and the judges rejected his attempt to bring up the\nTreaty of Versailles\n.\nSix defendants were charged with the\nGerman invasion of Norway\n, and their lawyers argued that this invasion was undertaken to prevent a\nBritish invasion of that country\n; a cover-up prevented the defense from capitalizing on this argument.\nFleet admiral\nChester Nimitz\ntestified that the\nUnited States Navy\nhad also used\nunrestricted submarine warfare\nagainst\nJapan\nin the Pacific\n; Dönitz's counsel successfully argued that this meant that it could not be a crime.\nThe judges barred most evidence on Allied misdeeds from being heard in court.\nMany defense lawyers complained about various aspects of the trial procedure and attempted to discredit the entire proceedings.\nIn order to appease them, the defendants were allowed a free hand with their witnesses and a great deal of irrelevant testimony was heard.\nThe defendants' witnesses sometimes managed to exculpate them, but other witnesses—including\nRudolf Höss\n, the former commandant of Auschwitz, and\nHans Bernd Gisevius\n, a member of the\nGerman resistance\n—bolstered the prosecution's case.\nIn the context of the brewing\nCold War\n—for example, in early March 1946,\nWinston Churchill\ndelivered the\nIron Curtain speech\n—the trial became a means of condemning not only Germany but also the Soviet Union.\nClosing\nOn 31 August, closing arguments were presented.\nOver the course of the trial, crimes against humanity and especially against Jews (who were mentioned as victims of Nazi atrocities far more than any other group) came to upstage the aggressive war charge.\nIn contrast to the opening prosecution statements, all eight closing statements highlighted the Holocaust. The French and British prosecutors made this the main charge, as opposed to that of aggression. All prosecutors except the Americans mentioned the concept of\ngenocide\n, which had been recently invented by the Polish-Jewish jurist\nRaphael Lemkin\n.\nBritish prosecutor Shawcross quoted from witness testimony about a murdered Jewish family from\nDubno\n, Ukraine.\nDuring the closing statements, most defendants disappointed the judges with lies and denials. Speer managed to give the impression of apologizing without assuming personal guilt or naming any victims other than the German people.\nOn 2 September, the court recessed, and the judges retreated into seclusion to decide the verdict and sentences, which had been under discussion since June. The verdict was drafted by British deputy judge\nNorman Birkett\n. All eight judges participated in the deliberations, but the deputies could not vote.\nVerdict\nThe International Military Tribunal agreed with the prosecution that aggression was the gravest charge, stating in its judgment that because \"war is essentially an evil thing\", \"to initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole\".\nThe work of the judges was made more difficult due to the broadness of the crimes listed in the Nuremberg Charter.\nThe judges did not attempt to define the crime of aggression\nand did not mention the retroactivity of the charges in the verdict.\nDespite the lingering doubts of some of the judges,\nthe official interpretation of the IMT held that all of the charges had a solid basis in customary international law and that the trial was procedurally fair.\nThe judges were aware that both the Allies and the Axis had planned or committed acts of aggression, writing the verdict carefully to avoid discrediting either the Allied governments or the tribunal.\nThe judges ruled that there had been a premeditated conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, whose goals were \"the disruption of the European order\" and \"the creation of a\nGreater Germany\nbeyond\nthe frontiers of 1914\n\".\nContrary to Jackson's argument that the conspiracy began with the founding of the Nazi Party in 1920, the verdict dated the planning of aggression to the 1937\nHossbach Memorandum\n.\nThe conspiracy charge caused significant dissent on the bench; Donnedieu de Vabres wanted to scrap it. Through a compromise proposed by the British judges, the charge of conspiracy was narrowed to a conspiracy to wage aggressive war.\nOnly eight defendants were convicted on that charge, all of whom were also found guilty of crimes against peace.\nAll 22 defendants were charged with crimes against peace, and 12 were convicted.\nThe war crimes and crimes against humanity charges held up the best, with only two defendants charged on those grounds being acquitted.\nThe judges determined that crimes against humanity concerning German Jews before 1939 were not under the court's jurisdiction because the prosecution had not proven a connection to aggressive war.\nNewsreel of the sentencing\nFour organizations were ruled to be criminal: the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party, the SS, the Gestapo, and the SD, although some lower ranks and subgroups were excluded.\nThe verdict only allowed for individual criminal responsibility if willing membership and knowledge of the criminal purpose could be proved, complicating\ndenazification\nefforts.\nThe SA, Reich Cabinet, General Staff and High Command were not ruled to be criminal organizations.\nAlthough the Wehrmacht leadership was not considered an organization within the meaning of the charter,\nmisrepresentation of the verdict as an exoneration would become one of the foundations of the\nclean Wehrmacht myth\n.\nThe trial had nevertheless resulted in the coverage of\nits systematic criminality\nin the German press.\nSentences were debated at length by the judges. Twelve defendants were sentenced to death: Göring, Ribbentrop, Keitel, Kaltenbrunner, Rosenberg, Frank, Frick, Streicher, Sauckel, Jodl, Seyss-Inquart, and Bormann.\nOn 16 October,\nten were hanged\n, with Göring killing himself the day before. Seven defendants (Hess, Funk, Raeder, Dönitz, Schirach, Speer, and Neurath) were sent to\nSpandau Prison\nto serve their sentences.\nAll three acquittals (Papen, Schacht, and Fritzsche) were based on a deadlock between the judges; these acquittals surprised observers. Despite being accused of the same crimes, Sauckel was sentenced to death, while Speer was given a prison sentence because the judges considered that he could reform.\nNikichenko released a dissent approved by Moscow that rejected all the acquittals, called for a death sentence for Hess, and convicted all the organizations.\nSubsequent Nuremberg trials\nMain article:\nSubsequent Nuremberg trials\nTelford Taylor\nopens for the prosecution in the\nMinistries trial\n, 6 January 1948.\nMonowitz\nprisoners unload cement from trains for\nIG Farben\n, presented as evidence at the\nIG Farben trial\n.\nInitially, it was planned to hold a second international tribunal for German industrialists, but this was never held because of differences between the Allies.\nTwelve military trials\nwere convened solely by the United States in the same courtroom that had hosted the International Military Tribunal.\nPursuant to\nLaw No. 10\nadopted by the\nAllied Control Council\n, United States forces arrested almost 100,000 Germans as war criminals.\nThe\nOffice of Chief Counsel for War Crimes\nidentified 2,500 major war criminals, of whom 177 were tried. Many of the worst offenders were not prosecuted, for logistical or financial reasons.\nOne set of trials focused on the actions of German professionals: the\nDoctors' trial\nfocused on\nhuman experimentation\nand\neuthanasia murders\n, the\nJudges' trial\non the\nrole of the judiciary in Nazi crimes\n, and the\nMinistries trial\non the culpability of bureaucrats of German government ministries, especially the\nForeign Office\n.\nAlso on trial were industrialists\n—in the\nFlick trial\n, the\nIG Farben trial\n, and the\nKrupp trial\n—for using forced labor, looting property from Nazi victims, and funding SS atrocities.\nMembers of the SS were tried in the\nPohl trial\n, which focused on members of the\nSS Main Economic and Administrative Office\nthat oversaw SS economic activity, including the\nNazi concentration camps\n;\nthe\nRuSHA trial\nof\nNazi racial policies\n; and the\nEinsatzgruppen\ntrial\n, in which members of the\nmobile killing squads\nwere tried for the murder of more than one million people behind the Eastern Front.\nLuftwaffe\ngeneral\nErhard Milch\nwas tried\nfor using slave labor and deporting civilians. In the\nHostages case\n, several generals were tried for executing thousands of hostages and prisoners of war, looting, using forced labor, and deporting civilians in the\nBalkans\n. Other generals were tried in the\nHigh Command Trial\nfor plotting wars of aggression, issuing\ncriminal orders\n, deporting civilians, using slave labor, and looting in the Soviet Union.\nThese trials emphasized the crimes committed during the Holocaust.\nThe trials heard 1,300 witnesses, entered more than 30,000 documents into evidence, and generated 132,855 pages of transcripts, with the judgments totaling 3,828 pages.\nOf 177 defendants, 142 were convicted and 25 sentenced to death;\nthe severity of sentencing was related to the defendant's proximity to mass murder.\nLegal historian\nKevin Jon Heller\nargues that the trials' greatest achievement was \"their inestimable contribution to the form and substance of international criminal law\", which had been left underdeveloped by the IMT.\nContemporary reactions\nPress at the International Military Tribunal\nGermans read\nSüddeutsche Zeitung\nreporting the verdict, 1 October 1946\nIn all, 249 journalists were accredited to cover the IMT\nand 61,854 visitor tickets were issued.\nIn France, the sentence for Rudolf Hess and acquittal of organizations were met with outrage from the media and especially from organizations for deportees and resistance fighters, as they were perceived as too lenient.\nIn the United Kingdom, although a variety of responses were reported, it was difficult to sustain interest in a long trial.\nWhere the prosecution was disappointed by some of the verdicts, the defense could take satisfaction.\nMany Germans at the time of the trials focused on finding food and shelter.\nDespite this, a majority read press reports about the trial.\nIn a 1946 poll, 78 percent of Germans assessed the trial as fair, but four years later that had fallen to 38 percent, with 30 percent considering it unfair.\nAs time went on, more Germans considered the trials illegitimate\nvictor's justice\nand an imposition of collective guilt, which they rejected—instead considering themselves victims of the war.\nAs the Cold War began, the rapidly changing political environment began to affect the effectiveness of the trials.\nThe educational purpose of the Nuremberg Military Tribunals was a failure, in part because of the resistance to war crimes trials in German society, but also because of the United States Army's refusal to publish the trial record in German for fear it would undermine the fight against communism.\nThe German churches, both Catholic and Protestant, were vocal proponents of amnesty.\nThe pardon of convicted war criminals also had cross-party support in\nWest Germany\n, which was established in 1949.\nThe Americans satisfied these wishes to bind West Germany to the\nWestern Bloc\n,\nbeginning early releases of Nuremberg Military Tribunal convicts in 1949.\nIn 1951,\nHigh Commissioner\nJohn J. McCloy\noverturned most of the sentences\nand the last three prisoners, all convicted at the\nEinsatzgruppen\ntrial, were released in 1958.\nThe German public took the early releases as confirmation of what they saw as the illegitimacy of the trials.\nThe IMT defendants required Soviet permission for release; Speer was not successful in obtaining early release, and Hess remained in prison until his death in 1987.\nBy the late 1950s, the West German consensus on release began to erode, due to greater openness in\npolitical culture\nand new revelations of Nazi criminality, including the first trials of Nazi perpetrators in West German courts.\nLegacy\nBenjamin Ferencz\n, chief prosecutor of the\nEinsatzgruppen\ntrial\n, in the\nPalace of Justice\ncourtroom, 2012\nThe International Military Tribunal, and its charter, \"marked the true beginning of\ninternational criminal law\n\".\nThe trial has met a mixed reception ranging from glorification to condemnation.\nThe reaction was initially predominantly negative, but has become more positive over time.\nThe selective prosecution exclusively of the defeated Axis and hypocrisy of all four Allied powers has garnered the most persistent criticism. Such actions as the German–Soviet pact,\nthe\nexpulsion of millions of Germans from central and eastern Europe\n,\ndeportation of civilians for forced labor,\nand violent suppression of anti-colonial uprisings would have been deemed illegal according to the definitions of international crimes in the Nuremberg charter.\nAnother controversy resulted from trying defendants for acts that were not criminal at the time,\nparticularly crimes against peace.\nEqually novel but less controversial were crimes against humanity, the conspiracy charge, and criminal penalties on individuals for breaches of international law.\nBesides these criticisms, the trials have been taken to task for the distortion that comes from fitting historical events into legal categories.\nThe\nInternational Military Tribunal for the Far East\n(Tokyo Trial) borrowed many of its ideas from the IMT, including all four charges, and was intended by the\nTruman Administration\nto shore up the IMT's legal legacy.\nOn 11 December 1946, the\nUnited Nations General Assembly\nunanimously passed a resolution affirming \"the principles of international law recognized by the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and the judgment of the Tribunal\".\nIn 1950, the\nInternational Law Commission\ndrafted the\nNuremberg principles\nto codify international criminal law, although the Cold War prevented the adoption of these principles until the 1990s.\nThe 1948\nGenocide Convention\nwas much more restricted than Lemkin's original concept and its effectiveness was further limited by Cold War politics.\nIn the 1990s, a revival of international criminal law included the establishment of\nad hoc\ninternational criminal tribunals\nfor\nYugoslavia\n(ICTY) and\nRwanda\n(ICTR), which were widely viewed as part of the legacy of the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials. A permanent\nInternational Criminal Court\n(ICC), proposed in 1953, was established in 2002.\nThe trials were the first use of\nsimultaneous interpretation\n, which stimulated technical advances in translation methods.\nThe Palace of Justice houses a museum on the trial and the courtroom became a tourist attraction, drawing 13,138 visitors in 2005.\nThe IMT is one of the most well-studied trials in history, and it has also been the subject of an abundance of books and scholarly publications, along with motion pictures such as\nJudgment at Nuremberg\n(1961),\nThe Memory of Justice\n(1976)\nand\nNuremberg\n(2025).\nNotes\n↑\nFrench\n:\nTribunal militaire international\n;\nGerman\n:\nInternationaler Militärgerichtshof\n;\nRussian\n:\nМеждународный военный трибунал\n,\nromanized\n:\nMezhdunarodnyy voyennyy tribunal\n.\n↑\nAlexander Volchkov\n(Soviet Union),\nNorman Birkett\n(UK),\nJohn J. Parker\n(US) and\nRobert Falco\n(France).\nReferences\n1\n2\nSellars 2013\n, p.\n165.\n1\n2\nSayapin 2014\n, p.\n148.\n1\n2\nSellars 2010\n, p.\n1092.\n↑\nSayapin 2014\n, pp.\n151–159.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n27–28.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n56.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n22.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n32, 64.\n1\n2\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n64.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n30–31.\n1\n2\nHeller 2011\n, p.\n9.\n↑\nGemählich 2019\n, paragraph 4.\n1\n2\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n8.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, pp.\n49–50.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n31, 36, 54.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n63.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n4, 107.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n3.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n26–27, 31.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, pp.\n67, 74–75.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n70.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n40.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n45–46.\n↑\nHeller 2011\n, p.\n10.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, p.\n84.\n1\n2\nSellars 2013\n, pp.\n85–86.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, pp.\n87–88.\n↑\nTomuschat 2006\n, pp.\n832–833.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, pp.\n84–85, 88–89.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, pp.\n98–100.\n1\n2\nTomuschat 2006\n, p.\n834.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n30, 34.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n34.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n68, 73.\n↑\nBassiouni 2011\n, pp.\nxxx–xxxi, 94.\n↑\nBassiouni 2011\n, pp.\nxxxi, 33.\n↑\nMusa 2016\n, p.\n373.\n1\n2\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n73.\n↑\nAcquaviva 2011\n, pp.\n884–885.\n↑\nMouralis 2019\n, pp.\n102–103, 114, 120, 135.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n70.\n↑\nTomuschat 2006\n, pp.\n839–840.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n9–10.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, p.\n101.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, p.\n87.\n↑\nHeller 2011\n, p.\n11.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, p.\n85.\n1\n2\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n76.\n↑\nWeinke 2006\n, p.\n31.\n1\n2\n3\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n74.\n↑\nMouralis 2019\n, p.\n21.\n1\n2\n3\nMouralis 2019\n, p.\n22.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n2, 112.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n100.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n71, 90.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n3, 6.\n1\n2\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n91.\n1\n2\n3\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n90.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n53, 73–74.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n88.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, p.\n115.\n1\n2\nGemählich 2019\n, paragraph 10.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n75, 89.\n↑\nGemählich 2019\n, paragraphs 11–12.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n87.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n204.\n1\n2\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n9.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n9, 78.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n217.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n88–89.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n117.\n↑\nFleming 2022\n, p.\n209.\n↑\nFleming 2022\n, pp.\n209, 220.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n80.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n101.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n80–81.\n1\n2\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n102.\n1\n2\n3\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n111.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n112–113.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n18, 69, 111.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, p.\n69.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n99.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n82–83.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n84–86.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n87.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n100–101.\n↑\nWeinke 2006\n, p.\n27.\n1\n2\n3\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n81.\n↑\nWeinke 2006\n, pp.\n28–29.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n81–82.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n5.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n76.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n82, 139.\n1\n2\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n82.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n82, 127.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n121–122.\n↑\nWeinke 2006\n, p.\n29.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n83–84.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n83, 106, 133.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n92–93.\n↑\nWeinke 2006\n, pp.\n27–28.\n1\n2\nTomuschat 2006\n, p.\n841.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n205.\n↑\nWeinke 2006\n, pp.\n24–26.\n↑\nSharples 2013\n, p.\n39.\n1\n2\n3\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n105.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n116–117.\n↑\nGemählich 2019\n, paragraph 19.\n1\n2\n3\n4\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n148.\n↑\nMouralis 2016\n, fn 82.\n↑\nDouglas 2001\n, p.\n30.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n104.\n↑\nDouglas 2001\n, p.\n18.\n↑\nDouglas 2001\n, p.\n16.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n138.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n124.\n1\n2\nMouralis 2019\n, p.\n23.\n↑\nWeinke 2006\n, p.\n40.\n↑\nMouralis 2016\n, paragraph 3.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, p.\n159.\n1\n2\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n133.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n149.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n150.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n106.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n107.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n107–108.\n↑\nDouglas 2001\n, pp.\n20–21.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n104–105.\n1\n2\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n116.\n↑\nDouglas 2001\n, pp.\n69–70.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n118–119.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n89, 108.\n↑\nMusa 2016\n, p.\n384.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n108.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, pp.\n121–122.\n↑\nMusa 2016\n, pp.\n380–381.\n↑\nMusa 2016\n, p.\n382.\n↑\nMusa 2016\n, p.\n383.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n185.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n199–200.\n1\n2\n3\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n119.\n↑\nGemählich 2019\n, paragraph 15.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n110–111.\n↑\nGemählich 2019\n, paragraph 16.\n↑\nGemählich 2019\n, paragraph 17.\n1\n2\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n115.\n1\n2\nGemählich 2019\n, paragraph 18.\n1\n2\nGemählich 2019\n, paragraphs 20–21.\n↑\nDouglas 2001\n, p.\n70.\n↑\nGemählich 2019\n, paragraphs 17–18.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n216–218.\n1\n2\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n109.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n221–222.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n223.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n116, 118.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n225.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n230.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n230–231.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n232.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n225–226, 335.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n247, 329.\n1\n2\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n372.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n180, 202, 233.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n231–232.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n233, 236–237, 239.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n237, 239.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n240, 242.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n121.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n125.\n1\n2\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n126.\n↑\nDouglas 2001\n, p.\n20.\n1\n2\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n132.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n127–128.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n130–131.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n135.\n1\n2\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n133–134.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n287.\n1\n2\n3\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n131.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, p.\n148.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, pp.\n149–150.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n131–132.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, p.\n178.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, p.\n144.\n↑\nDouglas 2001\n, p.\n15.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n129–130.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n14.\n↑\nMouralis 2019\n, pp.\n23–24.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, p.\n171.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n119, 150.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n62, 120.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n120.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n138, 141.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n370, 372.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, pp.\n160–161.\n1\n2\nSayapin 2014\n, p.\n150.\n↑\nMusa 2016\n, p.\n375.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, p.\n161.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n142.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n371.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n142–143.\n↑\nTomuschat 2006\n, pp.\n840–841.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, pp.\n164–165.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n109, 144.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n144.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n371–372, 387.\n↑\nMusa 2016\n, p.\n378.\n1\n2\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n387.\n↑\nSayapin 2014\n, pp.\n150–151.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n386.\n↑\nMouralis 2019\n, p.\n25.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n383.\n1\n2\n3\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n383–384.\n1\n2\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n147.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n143–144.\n↑\nBrüggemann 2018\n, p.\n405.\n↑\nBrüggemann 2018\n, pp.\n405–406, 447–448.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n147–148.\n↑\nEchternkamp 2020\n, pp.\n163–164.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n145.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n387, 390–391.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n146.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n380.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n353, 400.\n↑\nHeller 2011\n, p.\n1.\n↑\nHeller 2011\n, pp.\n11–12.\n↑\nHeller 2011\n, p.\n370.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n273, 308.\n↑\nHeller 2011\n, pp.\n85, 89.\n↑\nHeller 2011\n, pp.\n3, 4, 92–94, 100–101.\n↑\nHeller 2011\n, p.\n90.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n294–296, 298.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n247, 310, 315.\n↑\nHeller 2011\n, pp.\n87, 96, 104.\n↑\nHeller 2011\n, pp.\n1, 4.\n↑\nHeller 2011\n, p.\n4.\n↑\nHeller 2011\n, pp.\n1–2.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n306.\n↑\nHeller 2011\n, pp.\n400–401.\n↑\nGemählich 2019\n, paragraphs 27, 34.\n↑\nSharples 2013\n, pp.\n46–47.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n146–147.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n149.\n1\n2\nSafferling 2020\n, p.\n42.\n↑\nEchternkamp 2020\n, p.\n167.\n↑\nWeinke 2006\n, p.\n99.\n↑\nWeinke 2006\n, p.\n100.\n↑\nEchternkamp 2020\n, pp.\n172–173.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n353–354.\n↑\nHeller 2011\n, pp.\n372–373.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n356–357.\n↑\nWeinke 2006\n, pp.\n105–107.\n↑\nWeinke 2006\n, p.\n105.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n365.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n366.\n↑\nHeller 2011\n, p.\n351.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n367.\n↑\nHeller 2011\n, pp.\n366–367.\n↑\nHeller 2011\n, p.\n360.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n368.\n↑\nWeinke 2006\n, pp.\n111–112.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\nvi.\n↑\nSellars 2010\n, p.\n1091.\n1\n2\nSellars 2013\n, p.\n172.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n148, 343, 402.\n↑\nTomuschat 2006\n, pp.\n833–834.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, pp.\n205, 348.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n343.\n1\n2\nSellars 2010\n, p.\n1089.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, p.\n137.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, pp.\n402, 417.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n412.\n↑\nTomuschat 2006\n, p.\n837.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, p.\n175.\n1\n2\nWeinke 2006\n, p.\n117.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n411.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n7.\n↑\nMouralis 2019\n, p.\n207.\n↑\nSellars 2013\n, p.\n290.\n↑\nAcquaviva 2011\n, p.\n896.\n↑\nHirsch 2020\n, p.\n114.\n↑\nSharples 2013\n, p.\n31.\n↑\nPriemel 2016\n, p.\n16.\n↑\nSharples 2013\n, pp.\n31–32.\nSources\nFurther information:\nNuremberg Trials bibliography\nAcquaviva, Guido (2011).\n\"At the Origins of Crimes Against Humanity: Clues to a Proper Understanding of the\nNullum Crimen\nPrinciple in the Nuremberg Judgment\"\n.\nJournal of International Criminal Justice\n.\n9\n(4):\n881–\n903.\ndoi\n:\n10.1093/jicj/mqr010\n.\nBassiouni, M. Cherif\n(2011).\nCrimes against Humanity: Historical Evolution and Contemporary Application\n.\nCambridge University Press\n.\nISBN\n978-1-139-49893-7\n.\nBrüggemann, Jens (2018).\nMänner von Ehre?: die Wehrmachtgeneralität im Nürnberger Prozess 1945/46\n: zur Entstehung einer Legende\n[\nMen of honor?: the Wehrmacht generals in the Nuremberg trial 1945/46: the emergence of a legend\n]\n(in German).\nFerdinand Schöningh\n.\nISBN\n978-3-506-79259-4\n.\nDouglas, Lawrence\n(2001).\nThe Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust\n.\nYale University Press\n.\nISBN\n978-0-300-10984-9\n.\nEchternkamp, Jörg\n(2020).\nPostwar Soldiers: Historical Controversies and West German Democratization, 1945–1955\n.\nBerghahn Books\n.\nISBN\n978-1-78920-558-9\n.\nFleming, Michael\n(2022).\nIn the Shadow of the Holocaust: Poland, the United Nations War Crimes Commission, and the Search for Justice\n. Cambridge University Press.\nISBN\n978-1-009-11660-2\n.\nGemählich, Matthias (2019).\n\"«\nNotre combat pour la paix\n»\n: la France et le procès de Nuremberg (1945–1946)\"\n[\n\"Our fight for peace\": France and the Nuremberg trial (1945–1946)\n]\n.\nRevue d'Allemagne et des pays de langue allemande\n(in French).\n51\n(2):\n507–\n525.\ndoi\n:\n10.4000/allemagne.2053\n.\nISSN\n0035-0974\n.\nHeller, Kevin Jon\n(2011).\nThe Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law\n.\nOxford University Press\n.\nISBN\n978-0-19-923233-8\n.\nHirsch, Francine\n(2020).\nSoviet Judgment at Nuremberg: A New History of the International Military Tribunal after World War II\n. Oxford University Press.\nISBN\n978-0-19-937795-4\n.\nMouralis, Guillaume\n[in French]\n(2016).\n\"Le procès de Nuremberg: retour sur soixante-dix ans de recherche\"\n[\nThe Nuremberg trial: a look back at seventy years of research\n]\n.\nCritique Internationale\n(in French).\n73\n(4): 159.\ndoi\n:\n10.3917/crii.073.0159\n.\nMouralis, Guillaume (2019).\nLe moment Nuremberg: Le procès international, les lawyers et la question raciale\n[\nThe Nuremberg moment: The international trial, the lawyers and the racial question\n]\n(in French).\nPresses de Sciences Po\n.\nISBN\n978-2-7246-2422-9\n.\nMusa, Shavana (2016). \"The British and the Nuremberg Trial\".\nBritish Influences on International Law, 1915–2015\n.\nBrill Nijhoff\n. pp.\n367–\n386.\nISBN\n978-90-04-28417-3\n.\nPriemel, Kim Christian\n(2016).\nThe Betrayal: The Nuremberg Trials and German Divergence\n. Oxford University Press.\nISBN\n978-0-19-256374-3\n.\nSafferling, Christoph J. M.\n[in German]\n(2020).\n\"German Participation in the Nuremberg Trials and Its Implications for Today\"\n.\nThe Nuremberg War Crimes Trial and its Policy Consequences Today\n.\nNomos\n. pp.\n41–\n54.\ndoi\n:\n10.5771/9783845280400-41\n.\nISBN\n978-3-8487-3688-1\n.\nSayapin, Sergey (2014).\nThe Crime of Aggression in International Criminal Law: Historical Development, Comparative Analysis and Present State\n.\nT.M.C. Asser Press\n.\nISBN\n978-90-6704-927-6\n.\nSellars, Kirsten (2010).\n\"Imperfect Justice at Nuremberg and Tokyo\"\n.\nEuropean Journal of International Law\n.\n21\n(4):\n1085–\n1102.\ndoi\n:\n10.1093/ejil/chq070\n.\nSellars, Kirsten (2013).\n'Crimes Against Peace' and International Law\n. Cambridge University Press.\nISBN\n978-1-107-02884-5\n.\nSharples, Caroline (2013). \"Holocaust on Trial: Mass Observation and British Media Responses to the Nuremberg Tribunal, 1945–1946\".\nBritain and the Holocaust: Remembering and Representing War and Genocide\n.\nPalgrave Macmillan UK\n. pp.\n31–\n50.\nISBN\n978-1-137-35077-0\n.\nTomuschat, Christian (2006).\n\"The Legacy of Nuremberg\"\n.\nJournal of International Criminal Justice\n.\n4\n(4):\n830–\n844.\ndoi\n:\n10.1093/jicj/mql051\n.\nWeinke, Annette (2006).\nDie Nürnberger Prozesse\n[\nThe Nuremberg trials\n]\n(in German).\nC.H.Beck\n.\nISBN\n978-3-406-53604-5\n.\nExternal links\nWikimedia Commons has media related to\nNuremberg Trials\n.\nTranscript\nand other documents from the\nAvalon Project\nby\nYale Law School\nLillian Goldman Law Library\nNuremberg: Army Television – Release Version\n—\nA documentary produced in 1950, available online in the\nNational Archives\nCatalog\nConsists of footage from German films documenting Nazi personalities and activities interwoven with film shot during the trials\n—\nincluding testimony and statements from defendants, prosecuting attorneys, judges, and witnesses. It also contains flashbacks of a variety of Nazi crimes against humanity.\n49°27′16″N\n11°02′54″E\n\n/\n\n49.45444°N 11.04833°E\n\n/\n49.45444; 11.04833",
    "infobox": {
      "indictment": "Conspiracy,crimes against peace,war crimes,crimes against humanity,mass murder,unethical human experimentation,false imprisonment,hate crimes",
      "started": "20 November 1945",
      "decided": "1 October 1946",
      "defendants": "24 (see list)",
      "witnesses": "37 prosecution, 83 defense",
      "transcripts": "Harvard Law SchoolYale Law School",
      "related_actions": "Subsequent Nuremberg trialsInternational Military Tribunal for the Far East",
      "judges_sitting": "Iona Nikitchenko(Soviet Union)Geoffrey Lawrence(UK)Francis Biddle(US)Donnedieu de Vabres(France)and deputies[b]"
    },
    "char_count": 58559
  },
  {
    "page_title": "Subsequent_Nuremberg_trials",
    "name": "Subsequent Nuremberg trials",
    "type": "trial",
    "summary": "The subsequent Nuremberg trials were twelve military tribunals for war crimes committed by the leaders of Nazi Germany (1933–1945). The Nuremberg Military Tribunals occurred after the Nuremberg trials, held by the International Military Tribunal, which concluded in October 1946. The subsequent Nuremberg trials were held by U.S. military courts and dealt with the cases of crimes against humanity committed by the business community of Nazi Germany, specifically the crimes of using slave labor and plundering occupied countries, and the war-crime cases of Wehrmacht officers who committed atrocities against Allied prisoners of war, partisans, and guerrillas.",
    "description": "1946–1949 trials of Nazi leadership",
    "full_text": "Subsequent Nuremberg trials\n1946–1949 trials of Nazi leadership\nJudges of the Nuremberg Military Tribunals pose for a group photo.\nAuschwitz survivor\nPhilipp Auerbach\n(\nde\n)\ntestifies for the prosecution in the\nMinistries Trial\n.\nThe\nsubsequent Nuremberg trials\n(also\nNuremberg Military Tribunals\n; 1946–1949) were twelve\nmilitary tribunals\nfor\nwar crimes\ncommitted by the leaders of\nNazi Germany\n(1933–1945). The Nuremberg Military Tribunals occurred after the\nNuremberg trials\n, held by the International Military Tribunal, which concluded in October 1946. The subsequent Nuremberg trials were held by U.S. military courts and dealt with the cases of\ncrimes against humanity\ncommitted by the business community of Nazi Germany, specifically the crimes of using\nslave labor\nand\nplundering occupied countries\n, and the war-crime cases of\nWehrmacht\nofficers who committed atrocities against Allied prisoners of war,\npartisans\n, and\nguerrillas\n.\nBackground\nThe Allies had initially planned to convene several international trials for war crimes at the International Military Tribunal, but failed because the Allies could not agree upon the proper legal management and disposition of military and civilian war criminals; however, the Control Council Law No. 10 (20 December 1945) of the\nAllied Control Council\nempowered the military authorities of every occupation zone in Germany to place on trial people and soldiers suspected of being war criminals. Based on this law, the U.S. authorities proceeded after the end of the initial Nuremberg Trial against the major war criminals to hold another twelve trials in Nuremberg. The judges in all these trials were American, and so were the prosecutors; the chief of counsel for the prosecution was Brigadier General\nTelford Taylor\n. In the other occupation zones, similar trials took place.\nTrials\nThe twelve U.S. trials after the Nuremberg Military Tribunals (NMT) took place from 9 December 1946 to 13 April 1949.\nThe trials were as follows:\nResult\nThe Nuremberg process initiated 3,887 cases of which about 3,400 were dropped. 489 cases went to trial, involving 1,672 defendants. A total of 1,416 of them were found guilty; fewer than 200 were executed, and another 279 defendants were sentenced to life in prison. By the 1950s almost all of them had been released.\nMany of the longer prison sentences were reduced substantially by an amnesty under the decree of high commissioner\nJohn J. McCloy\nin 1951, after intense political pressure. Ten outstanding death sentences from the\nEinsatzgruppen\nTrial were converted to prison terms. Many others who had received prison sentences were released outright.\nCriticism\nSome of the Nuremberg Military Tribunals have been criticised for their conclusion that \"morale bombing\" of civilians, including its\nnuclear variety\n, was legal, and for their judgment that, in certain situations, executing civilians in reprisal was permissible.\nJudges\nSee also\nAuschwitz Trial\nheld in\nKraków\n, Poland in 1947 against 40 SS-staff of the\nAuschwitz concentration camp\ndeath factory\nFrankfurt Auschwitz Trials\n, 1963–1965\nMajdanek Trials\n, held against\nMajdanek extermination camp\nofficials. Longest Nazi war crimes trial in history, spanning over 30 years\nChełmno Trials\nof the\nChełmno extermination camp\npersonnel, held in Poland and Germany. The cases were decided almost twenty years apart\nSobibor Trial\nheld in\nHagen\n, Germany in 1965, concerning the\nSobibor extermination camp\nBelzec Trial\nbefore the 1st\nMunich\nDistrict Court in the mid-1960s, eight SS-men of the\nBelzec extermination camp\nBelsen Trial\nin Lüneburg, 1945\nCommand responsibility\ndoctrine of hierarchical accountability\nDachau Trials\nheld within the walls of the former\nDachau concentration camp\n, 1945–1948\nMauthausen-Gusen camp trials\n, 1946–1947\nRavensbrück Trial\nResearch Materials: Max Planck Society Archive\nReferences\n↑\n\"Nuremberg Trials\"\n.\nHistory\n. A&E Television Networks\n. Retrieved\n25 November\n2019\n.\n1\n2\nKevin Jon Heller\n(2011).\nThe Trials. Introduction: the indictments, biographical information, and the verdicts\n. The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law. Oxford University Press. pp.\n85–.\nISBN\n9780199554317\n. Retrieved\n10 January\n2015\n.\n↑\nNelson, Anne (April 2009).\nRed Orchestra: The Story of the Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler\n. Random House. pp.\n305\n–6.\nISBN\n9781588367990\n.\nsubsequent nuremberg trials 200 nazi.\n↑\nHeller, Kevin Jon (2011).\nThe Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law\n. Oxford:\nOxford University Press\n. p.\n3\n.\nFurther reading\nBaars, Grietje (2013).\n\"Capitalism's Victor's Justice? The Hidden Stories Behind the Prosecution of Industrialists Post-WWII\"\n. In Heller, Kevin; Simpson, Gerry (eds.).\nThe Hidden Histories of War Crimes Trials\n. Oxford University Press.\nISBN\n978-0-19-967114-4\n.\nDubois, Josiah E.\n(1952).\nThe Devil's Chemists\n(PDF)\n. Boston, MA:\nBeacon Press\n.\nASIN\nB000ENNDV6\n. Archived from\nthe original\n(PDF)\non 2012-06-17.\nPriemel, Kim C.; Stiller, Alexa, eds. (2012).\nReassessing the Nuremberg Military Tribunals\n: Transitional Justice, Trial Narratives, and Historiography\n. Berghahn Books.\nISBN\n978-0-85745-532-1\n.\nHeller, Kevin Jon (2012).\nThe Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law\n. Oxford University Press.\nISBN\n978-0-19-165286-8\n.\nExternal links\nThe NMT proceedings\nat the Mazal Library.\nAn overview\n.",
    "infobox": {},
    "char_count": 5449
  },
  {
    "page_title": "Doctors%27_trial",
    "name": "Doctors' trial",
    "type": "trial",
    "summary": "United States of America v. Karl Brandt, et al., commonly known as the Doctors' Trial, was the first of the twelve \"Subsequent Nuremberg trials\" for war crimes and crimes against humanity after the end of World War II between 1946 and 1947. The accused were 20 physicians and 3 SS officials charged for their involvement in the Aktion T4 programme and Nazi human experimentation.",
    "description": "Post-World War II trial of German doctors for war crimes",
    "full_text": "Doctors' Trial\nNot to be confused with\nDoctors' plot\nor\nclinical trial\n.\nFor a list of Nazi doctors, see\nList of Nazi doctors\n.\nPost-World War II trial of German doctors for war crimes\nUnited States of America v. Karl Brandt, et al.\n, commonly known as the\nDoctors' Trial\n, was the first of the twelve \"\nSubsequent Nuremberg trials\n\" for\nwar crimes\nand\ncrimes against humanity\nafter the end of\nWorld War II\nbetween 1946 and 1947. The accused were 20\nphysicians\nand 3\nSS\nofficials charged for their involvement in the\nAktion T4\nprogramme and\nNazi human experimentation\n.\nThe Doctors' Trial was held by\nUnited States\nauthorities at the\nPalace of Justice\nin\nNuremberg\nin the\nAmerican occupation zone\nbefore US\nmilitary courts\n, not before the\nInternational Military Tribunal\n.\nSeven of the accused were sentenced to\ndeath by hanging\n, five were sentenced to\nlife imprisonment\n, four were given prison sentences from 10 to 20 years, and seven were\nacquitted\n.\nThe judges, heard before Military Tribunal I, were\nWalter B. Beals\n(presiding judge) from\nWashington\n,\nHarold L. Sebring\nfrom\nFlorida\n, and\nJohnson T. Crawford\nfrom\nOklahoma\n, with Victor C. Swearingen, a former special assistant to the\nAttorney General of the United States\n, as an alternate judge. The Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution was\nTelford Taylor\n, and the chief prosecutor was James M. McHaney. The\nindictment\nwas filed on 25 October 1946; the trial lasted from 9 December that year until 20 August 1947.\nCase\nWitnesses at the Doctors' Trial.\nTwenty of the defendants were\nphysicians\nand three were\nSS\nofficials (\nViktor Brack\n,\nRudolf Brandt\n, and\nWolfram Sievers\n), all of whom were accused of being involved in\nNazi human experimentation\nand the\nAktion T4\nprogramme of\ninvoluntary euthanasia\n. The physicians came from a variety of civilian and military backgrounds, and some were members of the SS. Other Nazi physicians such as\nPhilipp Bouhler\n,\nErnst-Robert Grawitz\n,\nLeonardo Conti\n, and\nEnno Lolling\nhad died by suicide, while\nJosef Mengele\n, one of the leading Nazi doctors, had evaded capture.\nIn his opening statement, Taylor summarized the crimes of the defendants.\n\"The defendants in this case are charged with murders, tortures, and other atrocities committed in the name of\nmedical science\n. The victims of these crimes numbered in the hundreds of thousands. A handful only are still alive; a few of the survivors will appear in this courtroom. But most of these miserable victims were slaughtered outright or died in the course of the tortures to which they were subjected. For the most part, they are nameless, dead. To their murderers, these wretched people were not individuals at all. They came in wholesale lots and were treated worse than animals.\"\nIndictment\nThe accused faced four charges, including:\nConspiracy to commit\nwar crimes\nand\ncrimes against humanity\nas described in counts 2 and 3;\nWar crimes: performing medical experiments, without the subjects' consent, on\nprisoners of war\nand\ncivilians\nof\noccupied countries\n, in the course of which experiments the defendants committed\nmurders\n, brutalities, cruelties,\ntortures\n, atrocities, and other inhuman acts. Also planning and performing the\nmass murder\nof prisoners of war and civilians of occupied countries, stigmatized as aged, insane, incurably ill, deformed, and so on, by gas, lethal injections, and diverse other means in nursing homes, hospitals, and asylums during the\nEuthanasia Program\nand participating in the mass murder of\nconcentration camp\ninmates.\nCrimes against humanity: committing crimes described under count 2 also on German nationals.\nMembership in a criminal organization, the\nSS\n.\nThe tribunal largely dropped count 1, stating that the charge was beyond its jurisdiction.\nI\n— Indicted\nG\n— Indicted and found guilty\nAll of the criminals sentenced to death were\nhanged\non 2 June 1948 at\nLandsberg Prison\n.\nFor some, the difference between receiving a prison term and the death sentence was membership in the\nSS\n, \"an organization declared criminal by the judgement of the International Military Tribunal\". However, some SS medical personnel received prison sentences. The degree of personal involvement and/or presiding over groups involved was a factor in others.\nSee also\nCommand responsibility\nDeclaration of Geneva\nDeclaration of Helsinki\nEuthanasia trials\nMedical ethics\nMedical torture\nNazi eugenics\nNuremberg Code\nNuremberg principles\nNuremberg trials\nBruno Beger\nHans Conrad Julius Reiter\nClaus Schilling\nHermann Stieve\nList of medical ethics cases\nReferences\n1\n2\nHolocaust Encyclopedia\nDoctors' trial\n.\n↑\n\"The Doctors Trial: From the Indictment\"\n.\nUnited States Holocaust Memorial Museum\n. Archived from\nthe original\non 2007-10-13\n. Retrieved\n2007-10-11\n.\n↑\nHamilton 1984\n, p.\n138.\n↑\nRuff, Siegfried, et al.\nSicherheit und Rettung in der Luftfahrt\n. Koblenz\n: Bernard & Graefe, c1989.\n↑\nLifton 1986\n, p.\n275.\n↑\nSpitz, Vivien (2005).\nDoctors from Hell: The Horrific Account of Nazi Experiments on Humans\n. Boulder, Colorado: Sentient Publications. p.\n265.\nISBN\n978-1-59181-032-2\n.\n↑\nFulbrook, Mary (2018).\nReckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice\n. Oxford:\nOxford University Press\n. pp.\n266–\n267.\nISBN\n978-0-19-881123-7\n.\n↑\nHeathcote, Gina; Bertotti, Sara; Jones, Emily; Labenski, Sheri A. (2022-08-25).\nThe Law of War and Peace: A Gender Analysis: Volume One\n.\nBloomsbury Academic\n. p.\n194.\nISBN\n978-1-78699-669-5\n.\n↑\nMikaberidze, Alexander (2013-06-25).\nAtrocities, Massacres, and War Crimes: An Encyclopedia\n[\n2 Volumes\n]\n: An Encyclopedia\n.\nABC-CLIO\n.\nISBN\n9781598849264\n.\nWorks cited\nHamilton, Charles (1984).\nLeaders & Personalities of the Third Reich\n. Vol.\n1. R. James Bender Publishing.\nISBN\n0-912138-27-0\n.\n\"The Doctors Trial: The Medical Case of the Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings\"\n.\nHolocaust Encyclopedia\n.\nUnited States Holocaust Memorial Museum\n.\nArchived\nfrom the original on 13 May 2025\n. Retrieved\n13 May\n2025\n.\nLifton, Robert Jay (1986).\nThe Nazi doctors: medical killing and the psychology of genocide\n.\nBasic Books\n.\nFurther reading\nTrials of War Criminals Before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals - Vol. I - The Medical Case\n. US National Archives: U.S. Government Printing Office. 1950\n. Retrieved\n6 September\n2025\n.\nTrials of War Criminals Before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals - Vol. II - The Medical Case (continued)\n. US National Archives: U.S. Government Printing Office. 1950\n. Retrieved\n6 September\n2025\n.\nHanauske-Abel, H. (1996).\n\"Not a slippery slope or sudden subversion: German medicine and National Socialism in 1933\"\n.\nBritish Medical Journal\n.\n313\n(7070):\n1453–\n1463.\ndoi\n:\n10.1136/bmj.313.7070.1453\n.\nISSN\n0959-8138\n.\nPMC\n2352969\n.\nPMID\n8973235\n.\n(subscription required)\nHeller, Kevin Jon (2011).\nThe Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law\n. Oxford University Press.\nISBN\n978-0-19-955431-7\n.\nLifton-Robert, Robert J. (2000) [1st. Pub. 1986 London:Macmillan].\nThe Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide\n. Basic Books.\nISBN\n978-0-465-04905-9\n.\nPellegrino, E. (15 August 1997). \"The Nazi Doctors and Nuremberg: Some Moral Lessons Revisited\".\nAnnals of Internal Medicine\n.\n127\n(4):\n307–\n308.\nCiteSeerX\n10.1.1.694.9894\n.\ndoi\n:\n10.7326/0003-4819-127-4-199708150-00010\n.\nPMID\n9265432\n.\nS2CID\n30547329\n.\n(subscription required)\nSeidelman, W. (1996).\n\"Nuremberg lamentation: for the forgotten victims of medical science\"\n.\nBritish Medical Journal\n.\n313\n(7070):\n1463–\n1467.\ndoi\n:\n10.1136/bmj.313.7070.1463\n.\nISSN\n0959-8138\n.\nPMC\n2352986\n.\nPMID\n8973236\n.\n(subscription required)\nSpitz, Vivien (2005).\nDoctors from Hell\n. Sentient Publications.\nISBN\n978-1-59181-032-2\n.\nWeindling, P.J. (2005).\nNazi Medicine and the Nuremberg Trials: From Medical War Crimes to Informed Consent\n. Palgrave Macmillan.\nISBN\n978-1-4039-3911-1\n.\nExternal links\nMedia related to\nDoctors' Trial\nat Wikimedia Commons\n\"Transcripts\"\n.\nThe Nuremberg Trials Project\n. Harvard Law School Library. Archived from\nthe original\non 2011-04-15.\n– Partial transcript from the trial\nCohen, Baruch C.\n\"The Ethics Of Using Medical Data From Nazi Experiments\"\n. Jewish Law.\nBiddiss, M (June 1997).\n\"Disease and dictatorship: the case of Hitler's Reich\"\n.\nJournal of the Royal Society of Medicine\n.\n90\n(6):\n342–\n346.\ndoi\n:\n10.1177/014107689709000616\n.\nPMC\n1296317\n.\nPMID\n9227388\n.",
    "infobox": {
      "court": "Palace of Justice, Nuremberg",
      "full_case_name": "United States of America v.Karl Brandtet al.",
      "started": "9December1946(1946-12-09)",
      "decided": "20 August 1947",
      "judges_sitting": "Walter B. Beals(presiding)Harold L. SebringJohnson T. CrawfordVictor C. Swearingen (alternate)"
    },
    "char_count": 8337
  },
  {
    "page_title": "Judges%27_Trial",
    "name": "Judges' Trial",
    "type": "trial",
    "summary": "The Judges' Trial was the third of the 12 trials for war crimes the U.S. authorities held in their occupation zone in Germany in Nuremberg after the end of World War II. These twelve trials were all held before U.S. military courts, not before the International Military Tribunal, but took place in the same rooms at the Palace of Justice. The twelve U.S. trials are collectively known as the \"Subsequent Nuremberg Trials\" or, more formally, as the \"Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals\" (NMT).",
    "description": "Post-WWII war crimes trial",
    "full_text": "Judges' Trial\nPost-WWII war crimes trial\nA witness testifies in the Judges' Trial\nView of Judges' trial from visitors' gallery\n49°27.2603′N\n11°02.9103′E\n\n/\n\n49.4543383°N 11.0485050°E\n\n/\n49.4543383; 11.0485050\nThe\nJudges' Trial\n(\nGerman\n:\nJuristenprozess\n; or, the\nJustice Trial\n, or, officially,\nThe United States of America vs. Josef Altstötter, et al.\n) was the third of the 12 trials for\nwar crimes\nthe\nU.S.\nauthorities held in their occupation zone in\nGermany\nin\nNuremberg\nafter the end of\nWorld War II\n. These twelve trials were all held before U.S. military courts, not before the\nInternational Military Tribunal\n, but took place in the same rooms at the\nPalace of Justice\n. The twelve U.S. trials are collectively known as the \"\nSubsequent Nuremberg Trials\n\" or, more formally, as the \"Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals\" (NMT).\nThe defendants in this case were 16 German jurists and lawyers. Nine had been officials of the\nReich Ministry of Justice\n, the others were prosecutors and judges of the\nSpecial Courts\nand\nPeople's Courts\nof\nNazi Germany\n. They were—among other charges—held responsible for implementing and furthering the Nazi \"racial purity\" program through the eugenic and racial laws.\nThe judges in this case, held in Military Tribunal III, were\nCarrington T. Marshall\n(presiding judge), former Chief Justice of the\nSupreme Court of Ohio\n;\nJames T. Brand\n, Associate Justice of the\nSupreme Court of Oregon\n; Mallory B. Blair, formerly judge of the\nThird Court of Appeals of Texas\n; and\nJustin Woodward Harding\nof the Bar of the State of Ohio as an alternate judge. Marshall had to retire because of illness on June 19, 1947, at which point Brand became president and Harding a full member of the tribunal. The Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution was\nTelford Taylor\n; his deputy was\nCharles M. La Follette\n. The\nindictment\nwas presented on January 4, 1947; the trial lasted from March 5 to December 4, 1947. Ten of the defendants were found guilty; four received sentences of lifetime imprisonment (all four were released by 1957), and six received prison sentences of varying lengths (five, seven or 10 years; all but one, who died in 1950, were released by 1951). Four persons were acquitted of all charges.\nIndictment\nParticipating in a common plan or conspiracy to commit\nwar crimes\nand\ncrimes against humanity\n;\nWar crimes through the abuse of the judicial and penal process, resulting in\nmass murder\n,\ntorture\n,\nplunder\nof\nprivate property\n.\nCrimes against humanity on the same grounds, including\nslave labor\ncharges.\nMembership in a criminal organization, the\nNSDAP\nor\nSS\nleadership corps.\nCount 4 applied only to Altstötter, Cuhorst, Engert, Joel (with respect to the SS) and to Cuhorst, Oeschy, Nebelung, and Rothaug concerning the NSDAP leadership. Both organizations had been found criminal previously by the\nIMT\n.\nCount 1 was dropped: the court declared the charge to be outside its jurisdiction. Judge Blair filed a dissenting opinion that stated that the court should have made a statement that the Military Tribunals of the NMT in fact\ndid\nhave jurisdiction over charges of \"conspiracy to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity\".\nAll defendants pleaded \"not guilty\".\nDefendants\nThe highest-ranking officials of the Nazi judicial system could not be tried:\nFranz Gürtner\n, Minister of Justice, died in 1941;\nOtto Georg Thierack\n, Minister of Justice since 1942, had committed suicide, as had\nReichsgericht\nPresident\nErwin Bumke\n;\nRoland Freisler\n, the President of the\nPeople's Court\nsince 1942, was killed in a 1945\nbombing raid on Berlin\n;\nGünther Vollmer\n, the\nGauführer\nof Nazi jurists, had been killed in 1945. One who was alive but not tried was\nHans Globke\n, who played a significant role in drafting and interpreting the infamous\nNuremberg Laws\nand worked at the Reich Ministry of the Interior for the duration of the war.\nAfter the war ended Globke served as Chief of Staff for Adenauer in the West German Government from 1953 to 1963. He was still under scrutiny for his involvement with the Nazi Party when in 1963 East Germany held a show trial where he was convicted in absentia of War Crimes and sentenced to life in prison. However, East German law was not recognized in West Germany where Globke lived, so he ended up not serving any time. He died at age 74 in February 1973 at his home in the city of\nBonn\n.\nAll convicts were found guilty on all charges brought before them, except Rothaug, who was found guilty only on count 3 of the indictment, while he was found not guilty on counts 2 and 4. However, the court commented in its judgment that:\nBy his manner and methods he made his court an instrumentality of terror and won the fear and hatred of the population. From the evidence of his closest associates as well as his victims, we find that Oswald Rothaug represented in Germany the personification of the secret Nazi intrigue and cruelty. He was and is a sadistic and evil man. Under any civilized judicial system he could have been impeached and removed from office or convicted of malfeasance in office on account of the scheming malevolence with which he administered injustice.\nThe public considered the sentences generally too low.\nMost of the convicts were released already in the early 1950s; some (Lautz, Rothenberger, Schlegelberger) even received retirement pensions in\nWest Germany\n. The guide to German law entitled\nDas Recht der Gegenwart\nis still being published under the name Franz Schlegelberger (\nISBN\n3-8006-2260-2\n).\nIn popular culture\nThe Judges' Trial was the inspiration for the 1959 teleplay\nJudgment at Nuremberg\n, and the 1961 movie adaptation,\nJudgment at Nuremberg\n, starring\nSpencer Tracy\n,\nBurt Lancaster\n,\nRichard Widmark\n,\nMarlene Dietrich\n,\nMaximilian Schell\n,\nJudy Garland\n,\nMontgomery Clift\n,\nWerner Klemperer\nand\nWilliam Shatner\n.\nReferences\n↑\n\"Death register of the registry office Starnberg No. 60/1963\"\n. Retrieved\nJanuary 28,\n2024\n.\n↑\nSchott, Susanne (2001).\nCurt Rothenberger – eine politische Biographie\n(in German)\n. Retrieved\n25 November\n2023\n.\n↑\nHunt, Richard M. (June 1968). \"\nNazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural and Social Life in the Third Reich\n. George L. Mosse , Salvator Attanasio\".\nThe Journal of Modern History\n.\n40\n(2):\n295–\n297.\ndoi\n:\n10.1086/240203\n.\nISSN\n0022-2801\n.\n↑\nBourhis, Eric Le; Tcherneva, Irina; Voisin, Vanessa (2022-10-25). Bourhis, Eric le (ed.).\nSeeking Accountability for Nazi and War Crimes in East and Central Europe\n. Boydell & Brewer, University of Rochester Press.\ndoi\n:\n10.1017/9781800108028\n.\nISBN\n978-1-80010-802-8\n.\n↑\nMazal\n.\nExternal links\nDescription of the trial\nfrom the\nU.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum\n.\nThe Justice Trial\narchived by the University of Missouri, Kansas City",
    "infobox": {},
    "char_count": 6759
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  {
    "page_title": "Einsatzgruppen_trial",
    "name": "Einsatzgruppen trial",
    "type": "trial",
    "summary": "The United States of America vs. Otto Ohlendorf, et al., commonly known as the Einsatzgruppen trial, was the ninth of the twelve \"subsequent Nuremberg trials\" for war crimes and crimes against humanity after the end of World War II between 1947 and 1948. The accused were 24 former SS leaders who, as commanders of the Einsatzgruppen, were responsible for the mass killing of more than a million victims in the Eastern Front.",
    "description": "Ninth of the 12 trials for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the Nazis",
    "full_text": "Einsatzgruppen trial\nNinth of the 12 trials for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the Nazis\nThe United States of America vs. Otto Ohlendorf, et al.\n, commonly known as the\nEinsatzgruppen\ntrial\n, was the ninth of the twelve \"\nsubsequent Nuremberg trials\n\" for\nwar crimes\nand\ncrimes against humanity\nafter the end of\nWorld War II\nbetween 1947 and 1948. The accused were 24 former\nSS\nleaders who, as commanders of the\nEinsatzgruppen\n, were responsible for the\nmass killing\nof more than a million victims in the\nEastern Front\n.\nThe\nEinsatzgruppen\ntrial was held by\nUnited States\nauthorities at the\nPalace of Justice\nin\nNuremberg\nin the\nAmerican occupation zone\nbefore US\nmilitary courts\n, not before the\nInternational Military Tribunal\n. All of the accused were found guilty: fourteen were sentenced to\ndeath by hanging\nand eight received prison sentences ranging from\nlife imprisonment\nto\ntime served\n. Two were only convicted of being a member of an illegal organization, one committed\nsuicide\nbefore the\narraignment\n, and one was removed from the trial for medical reasons.\nOtto Ohlendorf\n,\nErich Naumann\n,\nPaul Blobel\n, and\nWerner Braune\nwere executed in 1951 while the others sentenced to death had their sentences\ncommuted\n.\nThe trial marked the first use of the term\ngenocide\nin legal context, being used by both the\nprosecution\nand by the judges in the verdict.\nThe case\nThe\nEinsatzgruppen\nwere\nSS\nmobile\ndeath squads\n, operating behind the front line in\nNazi-occupied Eastern Europe\n. From 1941 to 1945, they murdered around 2 million people; 1.3 million\nJews\n, up to 250,000\nRomani\n, and around 500,000 so-called \"\npartisans\n\",\npeople with disabilities\n, political\ncommissars\n,\nSlavs\n, homosexuals and others.\nThe 24 defendants in this trial were all commanders of these\nEinsatzgruppen\nunits and faced charges of\nwar crimes\nand\ncrimes against humanity\n. The tribunal stated in its judgment:\n... in this case the defendants are not simply accused of planning or directing wholesale killings through channels. They are not charged with sitting in an office hundreds and thousands of miles away from the slaughter. It is asserted with particularity that these men were in the field actively superintending, controlling, directing, and taking an active part in the bloody harvest.\nThe judges in this case, heard before Military Tribunal II-A, were\nMichael Musmanno\n(presiding judge and naval officer) from\nPennsylvania\n, John J. Speight from\nAlabama\n, and Richard D. Dixon from\nNorth Carolina\n. The chief of counsel for the prosecution was\nTelford Taylor\n; the chief prosecutor for this case was\nBenjamin B. Ferencz\n. The\nindictment\nwas filed initially on July 3 and then amended on July 29, 1947, to also include the defendants Steimle, Braune, Haensch, Strauch, Klingelhöfer, and von Radetzky. The trial lasted from September 29, 1947, until April 10, 1948.\nIndictment\nCrimes against humanity\nthrough persecutions on political, racial, and religious grounds,\nmurder\n, extermination,\nimprisonment\n, and other inhumane acts committed against\ncivilian\npopulations\n, including German nationals and nationals of other countries, as part of an organized scheme of\ngenocide\n.\nWar crimes\nfor the same reasons, and for wanton destruction and devastation not justified by\nmilitary necessity\n.\nMembership of criminal organizations, the SS, the\nSicherheitsdienst\n(SD), or the\nGestapo\n, which had been declared criminal organizations previously in the international\nNuremberg Military Tribunals\n.\nAll defendants were charged on all counts. All defendants pleaded \"not guilty\". The tribunal found all of them guilty on all counts, except Rühl and Graf, who were found guilty only on count 3. Fourteen defendants were sentenced to death. However, only four of them were executed. Nine of those condemned had their sentences reduced. Another, Eduard Strauch, couldn't be executed since he had been transferred to Belgian custody after his conviction.\nDefendants\nThe presiding judge, Michael Musmanno, explained his rationale for sentencing while testifying at the\nFrankfurt Auschwitz trials\nin the 1960s. He had chosen to impose death sentences in all cases where the defendant had actively participated in murder and failed to present mitigating circumstances. For example, although\nErwin Schulz\nconfessed to presiding over the execution of 90 to 100 men in Ukraine, he received a 20-year sentence since he had protested an order to exterminate all Jewish women and children, and immediately resigned when he was unable to get the order retracted.\nSuperior orders\nwas rejected as a defense.\nOf the 14 death sentences, only four were carried out; the others were commuted to prison terms of varying lengths in 1951. In 1958, all convicts were released from prison.\nQuotes from the judgment\nThe Last Jew in Vinnitsa\n. A member of\nEinsatzgruppe D\nshoots a person kneeling before a filled mass grave.\nThe Nuremberg Military Tribunal in its judgement stated the following:\n[The facts] are so beyond the experience of normal man and the range of man-made phenomena that only the most complete judicial inquiry, and the most exhaustive trial, could verify and confirm them. Although the principal accusation is murder,\n... the charge of purposeful homicide in this case reaches such fantastic proportions and surpasses such credible limits that believability must be bolstered with assurance a hundred times repeated.\n...\na crime of such unprecedented brutality and of such inconceivable savagery that the mind rebels against its own thought image and the imagination staggers in the contemplation of a human degradation beyond the power of language to adequately portray.\nThe number of deaths resulting from the activities with which these defendants have been connected and which the prosecution has set at one million is but an abstract number. One cannot grasp the full cumulative terror of murder one million times repeated.\nIt is only when this grotesque total is broken down into units capable of mental assimilation that one can understand the monstrousness of the things we are in this trial contemplating. One must visualize not one million people but only ten persons – men, women, and children, perhaps all of one family – falling before the executioner's guns. If one million is divided by ten, this scene must happen one hundred thousand times, and as one visualizes the repetitious horror, one begins to understand the meaning of the prosecution's words, \"It is with sorrow and with hope that we here disclose the deliberate slaughter of more than a million innocent and defenseless men, women, and children.\"\nSee also\nCommissar Order\n, an order stating that\nSoviet\npolitical commissars were to be shot on the battlefield.\nList of\nEinsatzgruppen\nwith all known\nEinsatzgruppen\nNuremberg executions\nNotes\n↑\nBenjamin Ferencz\n:\nOpening Statement of the Prosecution\n, vorgetragen am 29.\nSeptember 1947. In:\nTrials of War Criminals Before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals Under Control Council Law No. 10.\nVol. 4. District of Columbia 1950, S. 30.\n↑\n\"Ben Ferencz recalls his work on the Einsatzgruppen Trial\"\n.\njudicature.duke.edu\n. 2021-12-28\n. Retrieved\n2023-10-20\n.\n↑\nRhodes 2002\n, p.\n257.\n↑\n\"Extermination camp\"\n.\nEncyclopaedia Britannica\n.\nArchived\nfrom the original on 2015-06-23\n. Retrieved\nAugust 6,\n2021\n.\n1\n2\nNuremberg Military Tribunal,\nUnited States of America vs. Otto Ohlendorf, et al.\n(Einsatzgruppen trial), Judgement (via Internet Archive).\n1\n2\n3\n4\n\"Five death sentences were confirmed: the sentence against Oswald Pohl, as well as those passed against the leaders of the Mobile Killing Units, Paul Blobel, Werner Braune, Erich Naumann, and Otto Ohrlendorf. . . . In the early morning hours of 7 June, the Nazi criminals were hanged in the Landesburg prison courtyard.\"  Norbert Frei,\nAdenauer's Germany and the Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration\n.  Columbia University Press, 2002.\np. 165\nand\np. 173\n1\n2\n3\nNuremberg Military Tribunal,\nUnited States of America vs. Otto Ohlendorf, et al.\n(Einsatzgruppen trial), Judgment, pages 585-586. Internet Archive.\n↑\n\"Tonbandmitschnitt des 1. Frankfurter Auschwitz-Prozesses\"\n.\nwww.auschwitz-prozess.de\n. Retrieved\n2023-01-24\n.\nReferences\nTrials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, Nürnberg, October 1946 – April 1949\n, Volume IV, (\"Green Series) (the \"Einsatzgruppen case\")\nDescription\nfrom the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.\nEinsatzgruppen trials.\nAnother description.\nFerencz, Benjamin\n, “A Prosecutor's Personal Account: From Nuremberg to Rome\",\nJournal of International Affairs,\n52: No. 2, Columbia University, Spring 1999\nBenjamin Ferencz,\nMémoires de Ben, procureur à Nuremberg et avocat de la Paix mondiale\n, Michalon, Paris, 2012 (French).\nHeller, Kevin Jon (2011).\nThe Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law\n. Oxford University Press.\nISBN\n978-0-19-955431-7\n.\nRhodes, Richard\n(2002).\nMasters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust\n. New York:\nVintage Books\n.\nISBN\n978-0-375-70822-0\n.\nExternal links\nMedia related to\nEinsatzgruppen trial\nat Wikimedia Commons",
    "infobox": {},
    "char_count": 9169
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  {
    "page_title": "IG_Farben_trial",
    "name": "IG Farben trial",
    "type": "trial",
    "summary": "The United States of America vs. Carl Krauch, et al., also known as the IG Farben Trial, was the sixth of the twelve trials for war crimes the U.S. authorities held in their occupation zone in Germany after the end of World War II. IG Farben was the private German chemicals company allied with the Nazis that manufactured the Zyklon B gas used to commit genocide against millions of European Jews, Roma, homosexuals, socialists and other innocent civilians in the Holocaust.",
    "description": "Post-WWII war crimes trial",
    "full_text": "IG Farben Trial\nPost-WWII war crimes trial\nTelford Taylor\nopens the case against the defendants.\nThe United States of America vs. Carl Krauch, et al.\n, also known as the\nIG Farben Trial\n, was the sixth of the\ntwelve trials\nfor\nwar crimes\nthe U.S. authorities held in their occupation zone in Germany after the end of\nWorld War II\n.\nIG Farben\nwas the private German chemicals company allied with the Nazis that manufactured the\nZyklon B\ngas used to commit genocide against millions of\nEuropean Jews\n,\nRoma\n, homosexuals, socialists and\nother innocent civilians\nin the\nHolocaust\n.\nThe twelve trials were all held before U.S. military courts, not before the\nInternational Military Tribunal\n, but took place in the same rooms at the\nPalace of Justice\n. The twelve U.S. trials are collectively known as the \"\nSubsequent Nuremberg Trials\n\" or, more formally, as the \"Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals\" (NMT). The IG Farben Trial was the second of three trials of leading industrialists of\nNazi Germany\nfor their conduct during the Nazi regime. (The two other industrialist trials were the\nFlick Trial\nand the\nKrupp Trial\n.)\nThe defendants in this case had all been directors of IG Farben, a large German conglomerate of chemical firms. The company had been a major factor already in\nWorld War I\n, when their development of the\nHaber–Bosch process\nfor nitrogen fixation compensated for Germany's being cut off from the Chilean nitrate trade and allowed IG Farben to produce synthetic nitrate and extract and process nitrogen for use in agricultural fertilizer. (Nitrate is an important component for the fabrication of explosives such as\ngunpowder\n,\ndynamite\nor\nTNT\n.) In World War II,\nDegesch\n(42.5 per cent owned by IG Farben) was the trademark holder of\nZyklon B\n, the poison gas used at some Nazi extermination camps.\nIG Farben also developed\nprocesses\nfor synthesizing\ngasoline\nand\nrubber\nfrom\ncoal\n, and thereby contributed much to Germany's ability to wage a war despite having been cut off from all major\noil fields\n. The charges consequently centered on preparing to wage an aggressive war, but also on\nslave labor\nand plundering.\nThe judges in this case, heard before Military Tribunal VI, were\nCurtis Grover Shake\n(presiding judge), former Chief Judge of the\nIndiana Supreme Court\n;\nJames Morris\nfrom\nNorth Dakota\n;\nPaul M. Hebert\n,\ndean\nof the Law School of\nLouisiana State University\n; and\nClarence F. Merrell\n, a lawyer from\nIndiana\n, and friend of Judge Shake, as an alternate judge. The Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution was\nTelford Taylor\n. The\nindictment\nwas filed on May 3, 1947; the trial lasted from August 27, 1947, until July 30, 1948. Of the 24 defendants\narraigned\n, 13 were found guilty on one or the other counts of the indictment and sentenced to prison terms ranging from one and one half to eight years, including time already served; 10 defendants were acquitted of all charges. Max Brüggemann (Farben's chief legal advisor) was removed from the trial and his case discontinued on September 9, 1947, for medical reasons.\nIndictment\nIG Farben defendants read indictments\nMonowitz prisoners unload cement from trains for IG Farben. Photograph entered into evidence at the trial.\nPlanning, preparation, initiation, and waging of wars of aggression and invasions of other countries.\nWar crimes\nand\ncrimes against humanity\nthrough the\nplundering\nand spoliation of\noccupied territories\n, and the seizure of plants in Austria,\nCzechoslovakia\n, Poland, Norway, France, and Russia.\nWar crimes and crimes against humanity through participation in the\nenslavement\nand\ndeportation\nto\nslave labor\non a gigantic scale of concentration camp inmates and\ncivilians\nin occupied countries, and of\nprisoners of war\n, and the mistreatment,\nterrorization\n,\ntorture\n, and\nmurder\nof enslaved persons.\nMembership in a criminal organization, the\nSS\n.\nActing as leaders in a conspiracy to commit the crimes mentioned under counts 1, 2, and 3.\nAll defendants were indicted on counts 1, 2, 3, and 5. Only\nChristian Schneider\n,\nHeinrich Bütefisch\n, and\nErich von der Heyde\nwere charged on count 4, \"Membership in the SS\". The SS had been declared a criminal organization previously by the IMT.\nDespite the extensive evidence presented by the prosecution that showed that the company had been deeply involved in Germany's rearmament after World War I from the onset, the tribunal rejected the charges for preparing an aggressive war and for conspiracy to that end. On count three (\"slave labor\"), the judgement \"allowed the defendants the benefit of the defense of 'necessity\n'\n\"\n(Telford Taylor, \"The Nuremberg War Crimes Trials\";\nInternational Conciliation\n, No. 450, April 1949). Only in the case of\nAuschwitz\n, where IG Farben had constructed a plant next to the concentration camp with the clear intent to use inmates as slave workers, did the tribunal consider the evidence sufficient to prove that IG Farben acted on its own initiative. The tribunal concluded that the defendants could be held responsible only for this one case.\nJudge Hebert filed a dissenting opinion, in which he argued that the defense of \"necessity\" did not apply and that\nall\ndefendants should have been found guilty on count 3 of the indictment. He stated that:\n...\nthe record shows that Farben willingly cooperated and gladly utilized each new source of manpower as it developed. Disregard of basic human rights did not deter these defendants.\nWilling cooperation with the slave labor utilization of the Third Reich was a matter of corporate policy that permeated the whole Farben organization\n... For this reason, criminal responsibility goes beyond the actual immediate participants at Auschwitz. It includes other Farben Vorstand plant-managers and embraces all who knowingly participated in the shaping of the corporate policy.\nJudge Hebert filed his statement on December 28, 1948, nearly 5 months after the judgement.\nDefendants\nI\n— Indicted\nG\n— Indicted and found guilty\nThe defendants Ilgner and Kugler were released immediately after the judgement since they had already been in custody longer than their sentence.\nBibliography\nGrietje Baars:\nCapitalism´s Victor´s Justice? The Hidden Stories Behind the Prosecution of Industrialists Post-WWII\n. In:\nThe Hidden Histories of War Crime Trials\n. Heller and Simpson, Oxford University Press 2013,\nISBN\n978-0-19-967114-4\n.\nKevin Jon Heller\n:\nThe Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law.\nOxford University Press, 2011,\nISBN\n978-0-19-955431-7\n.\nFlorian Jeßberger:\nVon den Ursprüngen eines „Wirtschaftsvölkerstrafrechts“: Die I.G. Farben vor Gericht.\nIn:\nJuristenzeitung.\n2009.\nStefan H. Lindner:\nDas Urteil im I.G.-Farben-Prozess\n. In:\nNMT – Die Nürnberger Militärtribunale zwischen  Geschichte, Gerechtigkeit und Rechtschöpfung\n. Priemel und Stiller, Hamburger Edition 2013,\nISBN\n978-3-86854-577-7\nReferences\n↑\nHayes, Peter (2004).\nFrom Cooperation to Complicity: Degussa in the Third Reich\n. Cambridge; New York; Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. p.\n279\n.\nISBN\n0-521-78227-9\n.\n↑\n\"The Mazal Library\"\n. Mazal.org. Archived from\nthe original\non 2012-07-17\n. Retrieved\n2013-01-05\n.\n↑\n\"The Mazal Library\"\n. Mazal.org. Archived from\nthe original\non 2012-07-17\n. Retrieved\n2013-01-05\n.\n↑\n\"The Mazal Library\"\n. Mazal.org. Archived from\nthe original\non 2012-07-17\n. Retrieved\n2013-01-05\n.\nExternal links\nTrial proceedings\nfrom the Mazal Library.\n\"The I. G. Farben Case\"\n(PDF)\n.\nTrials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, October 1946\n– April 1949\n.\nVIII\n. Washington, D.C.: Nuernberg Military Tribunals, United States Government Printing Office. 1952. Archived from\nthe original\n(PDF)\non February 7, 2010.\nAnother description\nThe Authentic Records from the Nuremberg Tribunal Against the Oil and Drug Cartel\nArchived\n2019-07-03 at the\nWayback Machine\nThe “relay of life” to the next generation - IG Farben connection",
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    "page_title": "Krupp_trial",
    "name": "Krupp trial",
    "type": "trial",
    "summary": "The United States of America vs. Alfried Krupp, et al., commonly known as the Krupp trial, was the tenth of twelve trials for war crimes that U.S. authorities held in their occupation zone at Nuremberg, Germany, after the end of World War II. It concerned the forced labor enterprises of the Krupp Group and other crimes committed by the company.",
    "description": "Post WWII war crimes trial",
    "full_text": "Krupp trial\nPost WWII war crimes trial\nProsecutor\nTelford Taylor\n(standing, center) opens the case against the defendants\nThe United States of America vs. Alfried Krupp, et al.\n, commonly known as the\nKrupp trial\n, was the tenth of twelve trials for\nwar crimes\nthat U.S. authorities held in their occupation zone at\nNuremberg\n, Germany, after the end of\nWorld War II\n. It concerned the forced labor enterprises of the\nKrupp\nGroup and other crimes committed by the company.\nThese twelve trials were all held before U.S. military courts, not before the\nInternational Military Tribunal\n, but took place in the same rooms at the\nPalace of Justice\n. The twelve U.S. trials are collectively known as the \"\nsubsequent Nuremberg Trials\n\" or, more formally, as the \"Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals\" (NMT). The Krupp Trial was the third of three trials of German\nindustrialists\n; the other two were the\nFlick Trial\nand the\nIG Farben Trial\n.\nThe case\nIn the Krupp Trial, twelve former directors of the\nKrupp\nGroup were accused of having enabled the armament of the German military forces and thus having actively participated in the\nNazis\n' preparations for an aggressive war, and also for having used\nslave laborers\nin their companies. The main defendant was\nAlfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach\n, CEO of the Krupp Holding since 1943 and son of\nGustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach\nwho had been a defendant in the main\nTrial of the Major War Criminals\nbefore the IMT (where he was considered medically unfit for trial).\nThe judges in this case, heard before Military Tribunal III-A, were\nHu C. Anderson\n(presiding judge), president of the\ncourt of appeals\nof\nTennessee\n,\nEdward J. Daly\nfrom\nConnecticut\n, and\nWilliam J. Wilkins\nfrom\nSeattle, Washington\n. The Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution was\nTelford Taylor\n; the Chief Trial Counsel was\nH. Russell Thayer\n, and\nBenjamin B. Ferencz\nparticipated as a Special Counsel. The\nindictment\nwas presented on November 17, 1947; the trial lasted from December 8, 1947, until July 31, 1948. One defendant (Pfirsch) was acquitted, the others received prison sentences between three and twelve years, and the main defendant Alfried Krupp was ordered to sell all his possessions.\nDefendants at the Krupp Trial, from left; Alfried Krupp,\nEwald Löser\n, Eduard Houdremont, Erich Müller, Friedrich Janssen, Karl Pfirsch, and Karl Eberhardt\nKrupp Punishement Cage for slave laborers\nKrupp Punishement Cage for slave laborers\nThe main defendant Alfried Krupp always denied any guilt. In 1947, he stated:\nThe economy needed a steady or growing development. Because of the rivalries between the many political parties in Germany and the general disorder there was no opportunity for prosperity. ... We thought that Hitler would give us such a healthy environment. Indeed he did do that. ... We Krupps never cared much about [political] ideas. We only wanted a system that worked well and allowed us to work unhindered. Politics is not our business.\n—\nAlfried Krupp, in\nGolo Mann\n's manuscript first published in (\nFriz 1988\n).\nIndeed, the Krupp holding did flourish under the Nazi regime. According to conservative estimates, the Krupp enterprises used nearly 100,000 persons in the\nslave labour programme\n, about 23,000 of which were prisoners of war.\nIndictment\nCrimes against peace\nby participating in the planning and waging of wars of aggression and wars in violation of international treaties;\nCrimes against humanity\nby participating in the plundering, devastation, and exploitation of occupied countries;\nCrimes against humanity by participating in the murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, imprisonment, torture, and use for slave labor of civilians who came under German control, German nationals, and prisoners of war;\nParticipating in a common plan or conspiracy to commit crimes against peace.\nAll defendants were charged under counts 1, 3, and 4; count 2 excluded the defendants Lehmann and Kupke. Counts 1 and 4 were soon dropped due to lack of evidence.\nDefendants\nAll eleven defendants found guilty were convicted on the forced labor charge (count 3), and of the ten charged on count 2 (economic spoliation), six were convicted. On January 31, 1951, two and a half years after the sentences, ten (all except Löser) were released from prison. Since no buyer for the Krupp Holding had been found, Alfried Krupp resumed control of the firm in 1953.\nReferences\nTrial proceedings\n(partial).\nDescription of the trial\nfrom the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.\nTranscript\nof a German radio broadcast from 1999 on the Krupp trial and the\nIG Farben Trial\n(in German, with English quotations).\nKrupp Trial transcript\nKrupp Trial exhibit D-382\nFriz, D. M. (1988).\nAlfried Krupp und Berthold Beitz\n—\nder Erbe und sein Statthalter\n(in German). Zürich: Orell-Füssli.\nISBN\n3-280-01852-8\n.",
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    "page_title": "Ministries_Trial",
    "name": "Ministries Trial",
    "type": "trial",
    "summary": "The Ministries Trial was the eleventh of the twelve trials for war crimes the U.S. authorities held in their occupation zone in Germany in Nuremberg after the end of World War II. These twelve trials were all held before U.S. military courts, not before the International Military Tribunal, but took place in the same rooms at the Palace of Justice. The twelve U.S. trials are collectively known as the \"subsequent Nuremberg trials\" or, more formally, as the \"Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals\" (NMT).",
    "description": "Trial",
    "full_text": "Ministries Trial\nTrial\nTheodor von Hornbostel testifies for the prosecution during the Ministries Trial\nThe\nMinistries Trial\n(or, officially, the\nUnited States of America vs. Ernst von Weizsäcker, et al.\n) was the eleventh of the twelve trials for\nwar crimes\nthe U.S. authorities held in their occupation zone in Germany in\nNuremberg\nafter the end of\nWorld War II\n. These twelve trials were all held before U.S. military courts, not before the\nInternational Military Tribunal\n, but took place in the same rooms at the\nPalace of Justice\n. The twelve U.S. trials are collectively known as the \"\nsubsequent Nuremberg trials\n\" or, more formally, as the \"Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals\" (NMT).\nThis case is also known as the\nWilhelmstrasse Trial\n, so-named because both the\nReich Chancellery\nand the\nGerman Foreign Office\nwere located at the\nWilhelmstrasse\n, a street in Berlin that was often used as a\nmetonym\nfor overall German governmental administration. The defendants in this case were officials of various\nReich\nministries, facing various charges for their roles in\nNazi Germany\nand thus their participation in or\nresponsibility\nfor the numerous atrocities committed both in Germany and in occupied countries during the war.\nThe judges in this case, heard before Military Tribunal VI, were\nWilliam C. Christianson\n(presiding judge) from\nMinnesota\n, Robert F. Maguire from\nOregon\nand\nLeon W. Powers\nfrom\nIowa\n. The Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution was\nTelford Taylor\n; the chief prosecutor was\nRobert Kempner\n. The\nindictment\nwas filed on 15 November 1947; the hearings lasted from 6 January 1948 until 18 November that year. Five months later, on 11 April 1949, the judges presented their 833-page judgment. Sentences were handed down on 13 April 1949. Of all the twelve trials, this was the one that lasted longest and ended last. Of the 21 defendants\narraigned\n, two were acquitted, and 18 others were found guilty on at least one count of their indictments and received prison sentences ranging from three years to 25 years. In addition, one defendant,\nErnst Wilhelm Bohle\n, pleaded guilty, becoming the only defendant to do so in the\nsubsequent Nuremberg trials\n.\nIndictment\nTelford Taylor\ndelivers the prosecution's opening statement.\nThe defendants were all indicted on at least one of seven counts:\nCount 1:\nCrime against peace\nCount 2: Taking part in a common plan or conspiracy to commit the aforementioned crimes (later dropped by the NMT in all trials)\nCount 3:\nWar crimes\nagainst\nprisoners of war\nCount 4:\nCrimes against humanity\nthrough atrocities against German nationals on political, racial, and religious grounds between 1933 and 1939 (count dropped)\nCount 5: War crimes and crimes against humanity through atrocities against civilian population\nCount 6: War crimes and crimes against humanity through the plundering and spoliation of the\noccupied territories\nCount 7: War crimes and crimes against humanity through the enslavement and deportation of concentration camp prisoners and civilians in the occupied countries for slave labor\nCount 8: Membership in a criminal organization, the NSDAP and the SS\nDefendants\n^1\nStuckart was tried again in 1950 before a\ndenazification\ncourt and sentenced as a\nMitläufer\n(follower) a fine of\nDM\n50,000.\nHerbert Backe\n, the former minister for agriculture who should also have been tried, committed suicide on 6 April 1947 while in custody awaiting the trial.\nReferences\nWikimedia Commons has media related to\nMinistries trial\n.\nDescription\nfrom the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.\nAnother description\nTranscript\nof a German radio broadcast from 1999 (in German).\nHeller, Kevin Jon (2011).\nThe Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law\n. Oxford University Press.\nISBN\n978-0-19-955431-7\n.",
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    "page_title": "High_Command_Trial",
    "name": "High Command Trial",
    "type": "trial",
    "summary": "The High Command Trial, also known initially as Case No. 12, and later as Case No. 72, was the last of the twelve trials for war crimes the U.S. authorities held in their occupation zone of Germany in Nuremberg after the end of World War II. These twelve trials were all held before U.S. military courts, not before the International Military Tribunal, but took place in the same rooms at the Palace of Justice. The twelve U.S. trials are collectively known as the \"subsequent Nuremberg trials\" or, more formally, as the \"Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals\" (NMT).",
    "description": "War crimes trial",
    "full_text": "High Command Trial\nWar crimes trial\nThe\nHigh Command Trial\n(officially,\nThe United States of America vs. Wilhelm von Leeb, et al.\n), also known initially as\nCase No. 12\n(the 13 Generals' Trial),\nand later as\nCase No. 72\n(the German high command trial: Trial of\nWilhelm von Leeb\nand thirteen others),\nwas the last of the twelve trials for\nwar crimes\nthe\nU.S.\nauthorities held in their occupation zone of\nGermany\nin\nNuremberg\nafter the end of\nWorld War II\n.\nThese twelve trials were all held before U.S. military courts, not before the\nInternational Military Tribunal\n, but took place in the same rooms at the\nPalace of Justice\n. The twelve U.S. trials are collectively known as the \"\nsubsequent Nuremberg trials\n\" or, more formally, as the \"Trials of War Criminals before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals\" (NMT).\nBackground\nHigh Command Trial courtroom\nThe accused in this trial were high-ranking generals of the German\nWehrmacht\n(including two\nfield marshals\nof the Army, one field marshal of the air force and one\ngeneral admiral\n), some of whom had been members of the\nHigh Command\nof\nNazi Germany\n's military forces. They were charged with having participated in or planned or facilitated the execution of the numerous war crimes and atrocities committed in countries occupied by the German forces during the war.\nThe judges in this case, heard before Military Tribunal V-A, were the American John C. Young (presiding judge), Winfield B. Hale, and Justin W. Harding. The Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution was\nTelford Taylor\n. The\nindictment\nwas filed on November 28, 1947; the trial lasted from December 30 that year until October 28, 1948.\nIndictment\nThe accused faced four charges of having committed\nwar crimes\nand\ncrimes against humanity\n:\nCrimes against peace\nby waging aggressive war against other nations and violating international treaties.\nWar crimes by being responsible for murder, ill-treatment and other crimes against\nprisoners of war\nand enemy belligerents.\nCrimes against humanity by participating or ordering the murder, torture, deportation,\nhostage\n-taking, etc. of civilians .\nParticipating and organizing the formulations and execution of a common plan and conspiracy to commit aforementioned crimes.\nAll defendants were indicted on all counts and pleaded \"not guilty\". Count 4 of the indictment, the conspiracy charge, was soon dropped by the tribunal because it was already covered by the other charges. On count 1, the tribunal considered all of the accused not guilty and stated that they were not the policy-makers and that preparing for war and fighting a war 'on orders' was not a criminal offense under the applicable international law of the time.\nDefendants and judgments\nOf the 14 defendants indicted,\nOtto Schniewind\nand\nHugo Sperrle\nwere acquitted on all counts.\nJohannes Blaskowitz\ncommitted suicide during the trial and the 11 remaining defendants received prison sentences ranging from three years to lifetime imprisonment. All sentences included time already served in custody since 7 April 1945. The table below shows, with respect to each charge, whether the accused were either indicted but not convicted (I) or indicted and found guilty (G) and is listed by defendant, charge and outcome.\nAftermath\nPublic opinion in Germany was against the trial. Many denied the facts found by the U.S. judges, extolled the defense of obedience to\nsuperior orders\nand praised the soldierly qualities of the defendants. Particularly active were the\nProtestant\nand\nCatholic\nChurches.\nAfter the emergence of the\nFederal Republic\n,\nGerman Chancellor\nKonrad Adenauer\nand the\nBundestag\nweighed in on the side of the defendants. German leverage increased as the urgency of\nrearming Germany\ngrew. Under these intense pressures, in 1950, U.S. High Commissioner John McCloy established a review panel chaired by Judge David Peck of New York and, on its recommendation, reduced the sentences of three of the six High Command defendants who were still in prison. After further proceedings by mixed commissions composed of Allied and German members, the last of the High Command defendants returned home in 1954.\nSee also\nCommand responsibility\nSubsequent Nuremberg trials\nNotes\n↑\nWeb Genocide Documentation Centre,\nCase No. 12\nArchived\n2012-04-01 at the\nWayback Machine\n(the 13 Generals' trial); euRathlon, UWE Bristol.\n↑\nWeb Genocide Documentation Centre,\nCase No. 72\nArchived\n2005-02-21 at the\nWayback Machine\n(The German high command trial: Trial of Wilhelm von Leeb and thirteen others), UWE Bristol.\n↑\nThere was also a \"High Command Case\" in the\ntrial of the major war criminals before the International Military Tribunal\n. In\nthat\ncase, the German supreme command of the armed forces (\nOKW\n–\nOberkommando Wehrmacht\n) was acquitted of the charge of having been a criminal organization.\n1\n2\nHebert 2010\n, p.\n150.\n↑\nHebert 2010\n, p.\n95.\n1\n2\n3\n4\nHebert 2010\n, p.\n218.\n1\n2\nHebert 2010\n, p.\n219.\n↑\nHeiber 2004\n, p.\n938.\n↑\nBurleigh 1997\n, p.\n69.\n↑\nHebert 2010\n, pp.\n216–217.\n1\n2\n3\nHebert 2010\n, p.\n3.\n1\n2\nHebert 2010\n, p.\n151.\n↑\nHebert 2010\n, p.\n90.\n↑\nHebert 2010\n, pp.\n185–186.\n↑\nSee Detlev F. Vagts, Book Review, American Journal of International Law vol. 104 (2010), p. 548, at 549; reviewing Valerie Geneviève Hébert,\nHitler's Generals on Trial: The Last War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg\n. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2010.\nReferences\nLaw Reports of Trials of War Criminals, Vol.\nXII, 1949\nof the\nUnited Nations War Crimes Commission\n.\nBurleigh, Michael\n(1997).\nEthics and Extermination: Reflections on Nazi Genocide\n. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.\ndoi\n:\n10.1017/CBO9780511806162\n.\nISBN\n978-0-521-58816-4\n.\nHebert, Valerie (2010).\nHitler's Generals on Trial: The Last War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg\n. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas.\nISBN\n978-0-7006-1698-5\n.\nHeiber, Helmut;\nWeinberg, Gerhard L.\n;\nGlantz, David\n(2004).\nHitler and His Generals: Military Conferences 1942–1945\n. Enigma Books.\nISBN\n978-1929631285\n.\nHeller, Kevin Jon (2011).\nThe Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law\n. Oxford University Press.\nISBN\n978-0-19-955431-7\n.",
    "infobox": {
      "court": "Nuremberg",
      "full_case_name": "The United States of America vs. Wilhelm von Leeb, et al",
      "indictment": "28 November 1947",
      "decided": "28 October 1948,Nuremberg"
    },
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