Nuremberg trials

After the defeat of Nazi Germany, the four leading Allied powers, the United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union, put its surviving leaders on trial before an International Military Tribunal in the German city of Nuremberg. The main trial ran from 20 November 1945 to 1 October 1946 and was followed by twelve American trials of lesser figures. By holding individuals personally responsible under international law for aggression and mass atrocities, the trials are widely regarded as the real starting point of international criminal law.

During the Second World War Germany invaded much of Europe and committed crimes on an enormous scale, above all the killing of millions of Jews in the Holocaust. In the Moscow Declaration of 1 November 1943, the Soviet Union, Britain and the United States warned that Nazi leaders would be pursued and brought to justice. But the Allies disagreed on the method. The British government long preferred simply to execute the leading Nazis, while the Soviet Union wanted a trial whose outcome was settled in advance. The United States insisted on a fair trial whose legitimacy would be accepted.

At a conference in London from 26 June to 2 August 1945, the four powers agreed a charter for the tribunal. It defined three main crimes: crimes against peace, meaning the planning and waging of aggressive war; war crimes; and crimes against humanity, a new category covering murder, extermination, enslavement and deportation of civilians. Neither high office nor superior orders could serve as a defence. Nuremberg was chosen because its Palace of Justice had survived the bombing relatively intact, it lay in the American zone, and the city had been the scene of Nazi rallies.

Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels had killed themselves and could not be tried. Of the 24 men indicted, the party official Martin Bormann was tried in absentia, the industrialist Gustav Krupp was judged too ill to stand trial, and Robert Ley killed himself before the trial began. The most prominent of the 22 who were tried was Hermann Göring. Others included the foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, the armaments minister Albert Speer, the military commanders Wilhelm Keitel, Alfred Jodl, Erich Raeder and Karl Dönitz, and Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess, who flew to Britain in 1941. Six Nazi organisations, among them the SS and the Gestapo, were also accused.

Each power supplied two judges and a prosecution team. The British judge Sir Geoffrey Lawrence was the nominal president, and the American chief prosecutor was the Supreme Court justice Robert H. Jackson. The American and British prosecutors relied mainly on documents and sworn statements rather than survivors' testimony. The prosecution called 37 witnesses and the defence 83.

The tribunal declared that starting a war of aggression was the supreme international crime. Twelve defendants were sentenced to death, among them Göring, Ribbentrop and Keitel. Ten were hanged on 16 October 1946; Göring had killed himself the day before, and Bormann, who had in fact already died, was sentenced in his absence. Seven, including Hess, Speer and Dönitz, received prison terms and were held at Spandau. Three were acquitted. The tribunal ruled that the Nazi Party leadership corps, the SS, the Gestapo and the SD were criminal organisations, but not the SA, the cabinet or the military high command.

In the twelve later American trials, which focused more closely on the Holocaust, doctors, judges, industrialists, SS officers and generals faced the court. Of the 177 accused, 142 were found guilty and 25 received death sentences.

The trials were criticised as victors' justice, since only the defeated side was prosecuted and the Allies themselves had committed acts, such as the Soviet pact with Germany in 1939, that could have fallen under the charter. Others objected that aggression had not been a crime at the time. Over time, however, opinion has grown more favourable, and the trials' central innovation, that individuals can answer in court for breaches of international law, has endured.

Our 1938 map shows Nazi Germany before the war, and the 1945 map shows Europe in the year the tribunal was established.