On This Day: Nuremberg Trials Begin

In the aftermath of World War II, judges from the United States, United Kingdom, Soviet Union and France convened to draft a body of laws under which former Nazis could be tried. Those laws formed what came to be known as the London Charter.

Twenty-four men were indicted under the legislation, though industrialist Gustav Krupp was ruled too ill to face trial and labor leader Robert Ley committed suicide before trial. The tribunal began proceedings against the remaining 22 men—including with Hitler’s deputy Martin Bormann, who was tried in absentia—on Nov. 20, 1945 in Nuremberg’s Palace of Justice.

The first day was spent reading the 24,000-word indictment against the defendants, broadcast through headphones in four different languages. The defendants sat together in a two-level dock, guarded by a row of white steel-helmeted American military personnel. The following day each defendant pleaded not guilty and the prosecution, headed by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, began its case.

Over the next month, the prosecution presented evidence of Nazi atrocities, including a film with footage from concentration camps and the Warsaw ghetto. In a 1992 interview, interrogator Henry Kellermann, a Jew who emigrated from Germany 1937, spoke of the defendants’ reactions to the film. “It was amazing how they fell apart,” he said. “[Hermann] Goering never looked at it, neither did [Rudolf] Hess. [Hans] Frank, the ‘Butcher of Poland,’ broke into tears.”

The prosecution began their cases against each individual defendant in January and, from March to June, most of the defendants would testify. Final statements were made Aug. 31 and the justices reached their verdicts on Oct. 1.

Twelve of the defendants were sentenced to death, including Bormann. Seven were given prison sentences and three were acquitted. Hermann Goering, the highest-ranking surviving member of the Nazi Party, evaded the hangman by swallowing a poison capsule the day before his scheduled execution.

Between Jan. 30, 1933, and May 8, 1945, the end of World War II in Europe, Jews living in areas under Nazi occupation were subject to persecution and genocide at the hands of the Nazis. During the Holocaust, an estimated six million Jews were slaughtered under Hitler’s “ Final Solution.”

World War II is generally said to have begun in September 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland and Polish allies France and England declared war on Germany. Over the next several years, Germany would seize much of continental Europe.

Germany would wage war against Britain and, beginning in 1941, the United States and Soviet Union until May 8, 1945. more than 62 million people would die fighting in the many theatres of the war, making it the bloodiest war in history.

At the end of World War II, the Allied powers sought to bring those responsible for the Holocaust and World War II atrocities to justice. However, many of those most responsible—Chancellor Adolf Hitler, SS head Heinrich Himmler and propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels—had committed suicide to avoid being captured.

The Allied countries chose 24 men to face trial before the International Military Tribunal, most notably Hermann Goering, the former head of the Luftwaffe, president of the Reichstag and Hitler’s chosen successor. Goering held no remorse for his actions and thought he committed no crimes. His testimony was one of the most well-known moments of the trial; “Göring obviously enjoyed himself as he kept the courtroom spellbound for days,” wrote Life magazine. “Göring was anxious, whatever his fate, that history record him as an important world figure and as a German hero.”

He was sentenced to death, but swallow a cyanide pill and died the day before his execution date. Ten of his fellow defendants would be executed and seven others received prison sentences. Three were acquitted and Bormann would die before he could be captured and executed.

The Nuremberg Trials were based on a brand-new concept: international law. It was the first time that world leaders were held responsible for violating the terms of the 1864 Geneva Convention. The three categories of crime addressed—crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity—had to be defined and codified in the military tribunal’s constitution to enable the full prosecution of those responsible for the atrocities of the Holocaust.

The principles have served as a model for later international tribunals such as those at The Hague. Journalist Helena Cobban writes in The Christian Science Monitor that the efficiency of the Nuremberg courts and the groundwork they laid for the establishment of a democratic Germany contrast sadly with today’s Hague.

“The entire docket of trials was completed in less than a year. And throughout that year, there was enough political consensus among the four principal Allied powers … that their leaders were able to decide on a single, broad-reaching strategy for the prosecutions,” she says. “All those things—access to people and records, timeliness, and the existence of a strong and unified strategy for the prosecutions—are missing from today's international courts.”