Nuremberg Trials
The 1945 tribunal that tried Nazi leaders for aggression and atrocity, inventing the idea that losing a war can be a crime.
Winston Churchill's initial preference was to shoot the senior Nazis on identification, without trial. Stalin proposed trying fifty thousand German officers and shooting them too, and possibly meant it as a joke. It was the Americans, principally Secretary of War Henry Stimson and the Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson, who insisted on a court, on the argument that summary execution would look like vengeance and leave no record that could not later be denied. That decision is the origin of modern international criminal law.
The charges
The International Military Tribunal opened in Nuremberg on 20 November 1945, in a courthouse chosen because it had survived the bombing and had a prison attached. Four powers supplied judges and prosecutors. Twenty-four men were indicted, twenty-two actually tried; Robert Ley hanged himself in his cell and Gustav Krupp was ruled too ill.
There were four counts: conspiracy, crimes against peace meaning the planning and waging of aggressive war, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The third was long-established law. The other three were essentially new, and that was the trial's central vulnerability. Jackson met it head on in his opening statement, saying that four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, were staying the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submitting their captive enemies to the judgment of the law, and calling this one of the most significant tributes that power has ever paid to reason.
The prosecution's method mattered as much as its charges. Rather than rely on survivor testimony, which the defense could contest, Jackson built the case on the Germans' own documents, of which they had produced an enormous and meticulous quantity. It made the record close to unassailable.
Verdicts
On 1 October 1946 twelve defendants were sentenced to death, three acquitted, and the rest given prison terms from ten years to life. The acquittals of Hjalmar Schacht, Franz von Papen, and Hans Fritzsche were the tribunal's answer to the charge that it was a show trial. Hermann Goering took cyanide hours before his execution. Martin Bormann was condemned in absentia and was already dead.
The objection
The strongest criticism is that this was victors' justice, and it is not baseless. The judges came only from the victorious powers. The law under which the men were convicted did not clearly exist when they acted. And the Allies' own conduct was outside the court's reach: the firebombing of German cities, the atomic bombings, and above all the Soviet presence on the bench while the Katyn massacre of Polish officers, committed by the Soviets, was actually charged against the Germans in the indictment. The tribunal quietly dropped it.
What survived
The tribunal established three principles that outlived it. Individual officials can be held criminally liable for acts of state. Following superior orders is not a defense, though it may mitigate. And some crimes are offenses against humanity as such, prosecutable regardless of whether the state committing them had made them legal.
Those principles sat mostly dormant through the Cold War and were revived in the 1990s with the tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and then made permanent in the International Criminal Court, which opened in 2002 and which the United States, Russia, and China have all declined to join. Nuremberg is therefore both the foundation of the system and a standing reminder of its limit: the law reaches the leaders of defeated states far more reliably than it reaches anyone else.