INTERNATIONAL MILITARY TRIBUNAL AT NUREMBERG

Background

Beginning in the winter of 1942, the governments of the Allied powers announced their intent to punish Nazi war criminals.

In October 1943, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin
signed the Moscow Declaration of German Atrocities. The declaration stated that at the time of an armistice, Germans deemed
responsible for atrocities, massacres, or executions would be sent back to those countries where they had committed the crimes.
There, they would be judged and punished according to the laws of the nation concerned. Major war criminals, whose crimes
affected more than one country, would be punished by joint decision of the Allied governments.

Though some Allied political leaders advocated summary executions of Nazi Germany’s leaders, the United States proposed to try
them instead. In the words of US Secretary of State Cordell Hull, "a condemnation after such a proceeding will meet the judgment of
history, so that the Germans will not be able to claim that an admission of war guilt was extracted from them under duress."

On August 8, 1945, the French Republic, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the United Kingdom of Great Britain and
Northern Ireland, and the United States of America signed the London Agreement and Charter, also referred to as the Nuremberg
Charter. The Charter created an International Military Tribunal to try German leaders.

Each of the four countries that created the International Military Tribunal (IMT) supplied one judge, one alternate judge, and a
prosecution team. The alternate judges participated in the Tribunal’s deliberations but did not have a vote in its decisions.

The Nuremberg Charter charged the IMT to conduct a fair trial and to afford the defendants certain rights. These included the right
to speak and present evidence and witnesses in their own defense. It also included the right to cross-examine witnesses for the
prosecution.

The Judges

Lord Justice Geoffrey Lawrence of Great Britain served as the court's president. This position gave him the tie-breaking vote, even
though convictions and sentences required a majority vote by the four judges who heard the case. Norman Birkett was Britain’s
alternate judge.

For the United States, former US Attorney General Francis Biddle served as judge. John J. Parker served as alternate judge.

France appointed Henri Donnedieu de Vabres as judge and Robert Falco as alternate judge.

Major General I.T. Nikitchenko served as the Soviet judge. Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Volchkov served as his alternate.

The Prosecution Team

US Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson played a decisive role in negotiating the Nuremberg Charter. He then served as chief
prosecutor for the United States before the IMT. He also gave the opening and closing statements in the trial.

The chief prosecutors appointed by the other three countries that created the IMT were:

François de Menthon and then Auguste Champetier de Ribes for France;

Sir Hartley Shawcross for Great Britain;

Lieutenant General Roman Andreyevich Rudenko for the Soviet Union.

The four chief prosecutors worked as a committee to decide upon the defendants to be charged and to draw up the indictment.
The Charges

The Nuremberg Charter defined three crimes to be tried by the IMT: crimes against peace; war crimes; and crimes against humanity.
In its definition of crimes against peace, the Charter included "participation in a common plan or conspiracy" to commit crimes
against peace.

On October 18, 1945, the chief prosecutors of the IMT indicted 24 leading Nazi officials on four charges related to the three crimes
originally defined in the Nuremberg Charter:

 Conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity
 Crimes against peace
 War crimes
 Crimes against humanity

The Nuremberg prosecutors decided to make conspiracy to commit crimes against peace a separate charge from commiting crimes
against peace. They also expanded this conspiracy charge to include conspiracy to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Following the definition of the crimes laid out in the Charter, however, the IMT rejected the prosecutors’ charges of conspiracy to
commit war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The indictment used a new legal term: genocide. The word had been coined just one year earlier by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish
international law expert. Under the charge of war crimes, the indictment described the "murder and ill-treatment of civilians"
committed by the defendants as "deliberate and systematic genocide, viz., the extermination of racial and national groups." The IMT
prosecutors repeatedly employed the term genocide during the trial, but the judges did not adopt it in their verdict.

The Defendants

After much debate, 24 defendants were chosen to represent a cross-section of Nazi diplomatic, economic, political, and military
leadership. Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Joseph Goebbels could not be tried because they committed suicide at the end of the
war or soon afterwards. Hermann Göring was the highest ranking Nazi official among the defendants.

In the end, only 21 defendants appeared in court. German industrialist Gustav Krupp was included in the original indictment, but he
was elderly and in failing health. The Tribunal decided in preliminary hearings to exclude him from the proceedings. Nazi Party
secretary Martin Bormann could not be located. Borman was thus tried in absentia. Head of the German Labor Front Robert
Ley committed suicide on the eve of the trial.

The indictment also charged certain Nazi Party organizations and German state and military agencies with committing crimes
against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. These were:

 the Reich Cabinet;

 the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party;
 the Schutzstaffel (referred to as the SS, literally "protection squadron");
 the SS intelligence service, called the Sicherheitsdienst (often referred to as the SD or the Security Service of the
Reichsfȕhrer SS);
 the Geheime Staatspolizei (known as the Gestapo View This Term in the Glossary or Secret State Police);
 the Sturmabteilungen (referred to as the SA or Stormtroopers);
 the General Staff and High Command of the German Armed Forces.

The Trial

The trial began on November 20, 1945, in the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, Germany.

Over 400 visitors attended the proceedings each day. In addition, 325 correspondents representing 23 different countries were in
attendance.
A team of translators provided simultaneous translations of all proceedings in four languages: English, French, German, and Russian.

Except for Martin Bormann, who could not be located, the defendants attended the proceedings. All the defendants, including
Bormann and the indicted organizations, were represented by counsel.

The Evidence

The prosecutors sought to prove Nazi Germany’s crimes through the Germans' own words and testimony. They based the case
primarily on thousands of German documents seized by the Allies. Most of the witnesses they called to testify had been members of
the Nazi Party, SS, or German state or military.

The prosecution also presented films as evidence. One film produced by the United States showed the liberation of the
concentration camps. Another film produced by the Soviets showed evidence of Nazi atrocities and the liberation of Majdanek and
Auschwitz concentration camps. The Holocaust was not the main focus of the trial, but considerable evidence was presented about
the "Final Solution," the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jewish people. This information included the mass murder operations
at Auschwitz, the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto, and the estimate of six million Jewish victims.

The defendants did not deny the authenticity of the documentary evidence. Most acknowledged that the crimes charged did occur.
However, they denied that they bore any personal responsibility for them. Under the IMT's charter, the defendants could not claim
innocence on the grounds that they had simply followed orders.

The Verdict

The trial hearings ended on September 1, 1946. On October 1, 1946, the judges delivered their verdict. They convicted 19 of the
defendants and acquitted three.

The judges of the IMT sentenced twelve defendants to death, including Hermann Göring and Martin Bormann.

On October 16, 1946, ten of the condemned were hanged, cremated in Dachau, and their ashes dropped in the Isar River. Hermann
Göring escaped the hangman's noose by committing suicide the night before. Martin Bormann, who was convicted in absentia, was
much later proved to have died in Berlin during the final days of the war.

The IMT also declared the following Nazi party organizations to be criminal organizations:

 the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party;

 the Gestapo;
 the SS;
 the SD (SS intelligence service).

The court concluded that the criminality of SS membership did not apply to persons whose membership ceased before the start of
World War II or to persons who were drafted into the SS and did not participate in its crimes.

The Nuremberg Charter's definition of crimes against humanity specified that they included acts committed "before or during the
war." The IMT judges decided, however, that they could only consider crimes against humanity committed during the war. Although
the judges acknowledged that Nazi Germany committed terrible crimes before the war, including the persecution of Jews, they did
not judge the defendants for their role in prewar crimes.

An important legacy of the Nuremberg Charter and the IMT is that they established crimes against humanity as crimes under
international law. The IMT judgment addressed the evidence proving war crimes and crimes against humanity together and did not
differentiate between the two. Consequently, the judgment provided no precedent for distinguishing crimes against humanity from
war crimes.