The Nuremberg trials and international justice
History · Key Stage 3 · The School
A trial like no other
From November 1945 to October 1946, a court in Nuremberg tried twenty-two top Nazi leaders who were still alive. The judges came from the USA, Britain, France and the USSR — four countries that had just been at war with Germany. No court had ever tried a state's own leaders for what they did as leaders. Some lawyers worried it would just look like the winners punishing the losers. So the court gave each man a real trial: charges, evidence, and a lawyer to defend him. Nobody was simply shot without a hearing.
New crimes, made for this case
Old law had no proper charge for what the Nazis had done. So the court used three new ones. CRIMES AGAINST PEACE meant planning and starting a war of conquest. WAR CRIMES meant breaking the rules of war itself. CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY meant the mass murder of civilians — this charge covered the Holocaust. That third charge mattered most. Much of what the Nazis did to Jewish people had been "legal" under German law at the time. Nuremberg said: some acts are crimes no matter what a country's own law says.
The verdicts
Twelve men were sentenced to death. Seven went to prison. Three were found not guilty. Those three acquittals mattered too. They showed the judges were weighing real evidence, not just punishing every man in the room. More, smaller trials followed at Nuremberg into the late 1940s. They tried doctors who had experimented on prisoners, judges who had enforced Nazi race laws, and factory owners who had used slave labour.
Nuremberg set a rule: even a head of state can be tried for crimes committed in a country's name. That rule did not exist before 1945. It later shaped the Genocide Convention of 1948. It shaped the war-crimes courts set up for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. It shaped the International Criminal Court, a permanent world court set up in 2002. One trial, held to deal with one defeated regime, became the start of a whole body of law. That law is still used today. It is still argued about today, too.