The Nuremberg Trials

NOV 20 1945 · 12:00

Defendants in the dock at the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 1945. Goering, Hess, Ribbentrop and Keitel in the front row. Place: Palace of Justice, Nuremberg, Bavaria Figures: Robert H. Jackson, US chief prosecutor (on leave from the Supreme Court) · Geoffrey Lawrence, British presiding judge · Hartley Shawcross, British chief prosecutor · Roman Rudenko, Soviet chief prosecutor · François de Menthon, French chief prosecutor · 24 defendants including Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Albert Speer The London Charter Four governments (the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and the Provisional Government of France) sign the London Charter on 8 August 1945, six weeks after Germany's unconditional surrender and two days after Hiroshima. The Charter constitutes an International Military Tribunal and defines three categories of indictable offense: crimes against peace (the planning and waging of aggressive war), war crimes (the established Hague and Geneva violations), and a new category drafted at London, crimes against humanity (murder, extermination, enslavement, and persecution on political, racial, or religious grounds, whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated). The last category is the load-bearing one. War crimes had been prosecutable since the late nineteenth century. Crimes against humanity reach inside the sovereign frontier of the perpetrating state and apply international law to acts a government commits against its own citizens. The Westphalian wall of domaine réservé has, by treaty, been breached. The Defendant Cannot Hide Behind the Office The trial of the 24 major defendants runs for 218 court days. The IMT delivers verdicts on 1 October 1946: twelve sentenced to death (ten hanged, Göring suicides the night before, Bormann tried in absentia), three to life, four to long prison terms, three acquitted. The judgment's enduring contribution is Article 7 of the Charter, applied as binding law: the official position of defendants, whether as Heads of State or responsible officials in Government Departments, shall not be considered as freeing them from responsibility or mitigating punishment. Sovereign immunity, the doctrine that an officeholder cannot be tried in another jurisdiction for acts of state, is, by precedent, pierced. The principle propagates. The UN General Assembly affirms the Nuremberg Principles in Resolution 95(I) on 11 December 1946. The 1948 Genocide Convention codifies a sub-category of crimes against humanity. The ICTY (1993), ICTR (1994), and ICC (2002) all build on the Nuremberg architecture. The arc from Nuremberg runs through Pinochet's 1998 arrest in London and to the ICC arrest warrants issued for sitting heads of state in the 2020s. Westphalia's cuius regio survives in the UN Charter (see [[un-c Video: British Pathé coverage of the opening of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, November 1945. Lord Justice Lawrence presides; the principal Nazi defendants stand in the dock.