Nuremberg trials

In 1945, the Allied powers were far from a consensus on how to handle defeated Nazi leadership. The United Kingdom, citing the failure of post-WWI prosecutions, initially favored the summary execution of high-ranking Nazis. Conversely, the Soviet Union pushed for "show trials" with predetermined guilty verdicts to justify war reparations and demonstrate Nazi guilt.

The United States, led by Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson and President Harry Truman, insisted on a legitimate judicial process. They argued that a fair trial was the only way to reform Germany and prove the moral superiority of Western democracy. This legalistic approach eventually won out, resulting in the London Charter and the establishment of the International Military Tribunal (IMT).

Before 1945, international law generally governed the behavior of nations, not specific people. The Nuremberg Charter upended this tradition by establishing that individuals could be prosecuted for state-sponsored crimes. It stripped away "sovereign immunity," ensuring that heads of state could not hide behind their titles, and invalidated the "superior orders" defense—ruling that "just following orders" did not absolve a person of criminal responsibility.

The tribunal also codified three specific categories of crime: war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against peace (aggression). The latter was particularly revolutionary; it labeled the act of plotting and waging an invasion as the "supreme international crime" because it contained the "accumulated evil" of everything that followed.

The four prosecuting nations—the US, UK, USSR, and France—were often at odds. The Soviet delegation, used to the scripted nature of the Moscow trials, was frequently paralyzed by the need to consult Moscow for every decision. Meanwhile, both the US and the USSR sought to narrow the definition of "crimes against humanity" to avoid setting precedents that could be used against them—specifically regarding the American Jim Crow laws and the Soviet government’s treatment of its own citizens.

The indictment was further complicated by the "conspiracy" charge, an American legal concept designed to link bureaucrats and propagandists to the actual killings. While the French were skeptical of this approach, it allowed the court to prosecute "desk murderers" who never personally pulled a trigger but provided the ideological or logistical framework for the Holocaust.

The IMT was not merely a criminal proceeding; it was an educational project intended to delegitimize the German elite and prevent future denials of Nazi crimes. Prosecutors moved away from relying solely on witness testimony, which could be dismissed as biased, and instead assembled a massive archive of the Nazis' own meticulously kept records, films, and photographs.

By choosing Nuremberg—the symbolic heart of Nazi rallies—as the venue, the Allies performed a ritualistic dismantling of the regime. The trial forced the German public to confront the brutality of the Eastern Front and the Holocaust, turning the Palace of Justice into a global classroom that documented 27 million Soviet deaths and the systematic murder of millions of Jews.