Nuremberg trials



The Nuremberg trials is the collective description for a series of military tribunals which prosecuted multiple high-ranking Nazi officials for war crimes and crimes against humanity planned and committed during World War II. They are named after the German city of Nuremberg, which was chosen as the site for the trials because of its symbolic importance as a center of Nazi propaganda and the site of major party rallies.

The trials
In 1942, the four major Allied powers (the USSR, USA, UK, and France) had already reached an agreement to eventually punish Nazi war criminals, and after the end of the war, they jointly established the International Military Tribunal (IMT) as a body to conduct the trials, with each providing judges and prosecutors. They eventually settled for trying a total of 24 members of the Nazi leadership, of whom 21 actually appeared in court, with the most prominent being Hermann Göring. Several other members of the highest tier of Nazi leadership, among them Adolf Hitler himself, Heinrich Himmler, and Joseph Goebbels, could not be tried because they had already committed suicide before or shortly after the end of the war. Charges brought by the prosecution centered around four main points:


 * Conspiracy to commit one or more of the following acts
 * Crimes against peace, the planning and waging of wars of aggression
 * War crimes
 * Crimes against humanity, most notably the Holocaust

This allowed the tribunal to indict the Nazi leadership for the full range of German atrocities, including starting numerous separate unprovoked wars, the systematic extermination of civilians both on and off the battlefield, and the mistreatment of POWs. The conspiracy charge allowed for the trial of persons who had not directly issued orders that led to these crimes, but had participated in pre-war planning to commit them. A total of twelve defendants were sentenced to death (including one tried in absentia), with seven receiving prison sentences of varying lengths, and three being acquitted. Göring committed suicide before his actual execution. This only covers the main trial; numerous other proceedings were brought against lower-ranking Nazi officials and a much greater number of civilians and military officers who were complicit in Nazi crimes.

Impact
The so-called Nuremberg Principles, the basis for the charges against the defendants, established a concrete catalog of acts that are forbidden under international law. The notion of crimes against peace was subsequently codified into the United Nations charter as the prohibition against wars of aggression. The trials themselves set an important precedent for the actual conviction of war criminals and the leadership of aggressor states, and the introduction of extempore simultaneous translation (translation into multiple languages while the original is being spoken, which was necessary to run an affair with four official languages and several others heard in testimony) was revolutionary. Today, it is used at the meetings of the UN, the EU, the Canadian parliament, and various other governments, international organizations, etc.

Criticism
The British Royal Air Force and United States Army Air Force killed an estimated 600,000 to 900,000 German non-combatants in the fire-bombing of German cities during the Second World War (e.g. Hamburg and Dresden). Despite that, Britain joined the United States, the Soviet Union, and France in prosecuting senior German officials in the Nuremberg Trials at the end of the war. On the other hand, no charges were brought with regards to similar German tactics during their bombing campaign over Britain, in recognition of the fact that Britain had committed such atrocities too. Charges relating to the German policy of unrestricted submarine warfare were dropped in recognition of the fact that such a policy was also utilized by the Allies. And let's just not talk about The Bomb.

This does not mean that the moral authority and precedent established by the Nuremberg Trials have any less validity — it was truly a virtuous development in international relations to hold the leadership of a country responsible for heinous war crimes rather than collectively punishing the people. The western two-thirds of Germany was occupied by the three Western Allies following the Second World War and received direct humanitarian assistance and sovereign debts were canceled. Compare this with the treatment of the defeated Germans following the First World War, where the German people were collectively punished in the form of reparations payments whilst their military leaders got off scot-free (and this punishment of the people helped the Nazis get into power in the first place). On the other hand, beyond de-Nazification, many lower-level German war criminals escaped punishment. Business executives, bureaucrats, academics, police officers, and soldiers with a lot of blood on their hands got to die in their beds rather than at the end of a rope. This was made worse by the fact that many of these same people ended up in positions of power to deny victims of the Nazi era a fair compensation or even just their old job back. In one particularly glaring example, the widow of Roland Freisler successfully managed to get a widow's pension, arguing he would have carried on as a judge had he lived. Given the many "unbroken biographies" of quite high-ranking Nazis, this assertion is most likely true. The protests of 1967/68 that happened in most of Europe, including West Germany, were in part fueled by the young generation protesting against the Nazi involvement of their parents.

Another line of criticism calls into question the integrity of the Soviet Union's main judge for the trials, Iona Nikitchenko, who had presided over some of the most notorious of Joseph Stalin's show trials during the Great Purges of 1936 to 1938. In the lead-up to the trial, Nikitchenko had said that "The whole idea is to secure quick and just punishment for the crime", as well as that "If... the judge is supposed to be impartial, it would only lead to unnecessary delays".

Film evidence
As part of the proceedings, two documentaries were produced and exhibited as evidence. English language versions of these films still survive and are available for viewing and download. WARNING: The footage from the then-recently liberated concentration camps is incredibly graphic.

Footage from the Internet Archive

 * Nazi Concentration Camps - Directed by George Stevens
 * The Nazi Plan - Directed by Edgar Ray Kellogg
 * Another film, Death Mills (German title: Todesmuehlen) directed by Billy Wilder, would be widely shown throughout Germany and Austria after the war

Other World War II trials
Many other war trials happened after the war, and the exact number is hard to arrive at. Some of the other prominent trials were:
 * Singapore trials conducted by the British in 1946
 * Tokyo war crimes trials in 1946
 * The Soviet trials in 1949 of Japanese soldiers involved in biological weapons and human experimentation
 * The trial of fugitive SS Obersturmbahnfuehrer Adolf Eichmann in Israel in 1961