# Nuremberg Trials The **Nuremberg Trials** (1945–1949) — the International Military Tribunal of November 1945–October 1946 and the twelve "subsequent proceedings" that followed — were the Allied prosecution of the surviving leadership of Nazi Germany, held symbolically in the city of the [[Nuremberg Laws]] and the party rallies. They established the architecture of modern atrocity law: **individual criminal responsibility for state crime**, the category of **crimes against humanity**, the rejection of the superior-orders defense, and the documentary method of proving atrocity from the perpetrator state's own files. For the KB, Nuremberg is both the founding precedent of the accountability through-line — running to the Genocide Convention, the ICTY/ICTR, and the ICC (tracked at [[Genocide]]) — and the founding exhibit of its limits. ## The Trial of the Major War Criminals Twenty-one defendants sat in the dock (Hitler, Himmler, and [[Joseph Goebbels]] were dead by suicide; Bormann was tried in absentia), charged on four counts: conspiracy, crimes against peace (waging aggressive war), war crimes, and **crimes against humanity** — the new charge, drafted to reach a state's atrocities against *its own* citizens, which existing war-crimes law could not. U.S. chief prosecutor Robert H. Jackson, on leave from the Supreme Court, set the frame in an opening address that remains the canonical statement of the enterprise: "That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason." The prosecution's strategic choice shaped everything after: the case was built on the regime's **own paperwork** — tons of captured documents, the Wannsee protocol among them (located 1947, used in the subsequent trials), film from the liberated camps, and perpetrator testimony — precisely so that no future generation could dismiss the record as victors' fabrication. The judgment (September–October 1946): twelve death sentences, seven prison terms, three acquittals; the SS, Gestapo, and party leadership corps declared criminal organizations. **The word "genocide" entered international legal proceedings here.** [[Raphael Lemkin]], advising Jackson's team, got his year-old coinage into the indictment (under war crimes); the judgment, however, did not use it — genocide was not yet a distinct crime in law. The gap between indictment and judgment is what Lemkin spent 1946–1948 closing: the UN Genocide Convention was, in direct lineage, Nuremberg's missing count. The twelve subsequent proceedings (1946–1949, American tribunals) tried the machinery: the doctors (the trial that produced the Nuremberg Code on human experimentation), the judges, the Einsatzgruppen commanders, the industrialists (IG Farben, Krupp), the ministries. They documented, case by case, the professional classes' ownership of the [[Holocaust]] — the pattern the [[Wannsee Conference]] roster had already implied. ## The Precedents — and the Limits **What Nuremberg established.** Acts of state are acts of *individuals*, and "I was following orders" mitigates at most, excuses never; aggressive war is a crime, not a policy instrument; a state's treatment of its own population is justiciable; and atrocity can be proven to documentary standard. Every later accountability institution — Genocide Convention, Universal Declaration, the ad hoc tribunals, the ICC, the Eichmann trial's legal frame — builds on these holdings. **What it could not escape.** The "victors' justice" objection had real content: the tribunal's bench included the Soviet Union, then conducting its own mass deportations, and the indictment was drafted to exclude Allied conduct (area bombing, Katyn — which the Soviets brazenly tried to pin on the defendants). *Tu quoque* was barred as a defense. The KB records the critique not to relativize the convictions — the evidence was overwhelming and the procedure, for its moment, remarkably fair (three acquittals) — but because **selective enforcement remains the structural weakness of international justice**, exactly as Lemkin's watered-down Convention story (see [[Raphael Lemkin]]) and the modern ICC's politics show. **The aftershock fade.** Denazification collapsed within years under Cold War priorities: sentences commuted (the Krupp restoration the emblem), industrialists re-enthroned, intelligence and rocketry talent recruited ([[Operation Paperclip]]), and [[the West]] German civil service and judiciary restaffed with the professionals the subsequent trials had implicated. Impunity, deferred prosecution, and strategic amnesty are part of the Nuremberg record too — the half of the precedent that perpetrators study. ## Why It Matters for the KB **The accountability baseline.** Nuremberg is the proof-of-concept that leadership-level accountability for state atrocity is *possible* — the standing rebuttal to sovereignty-as-shield, and the precedent invoked in every contemporary debate about trying heads of state. **The documentary method.** Prosecute from the regime's own records. The principle — build the archive, because the archive convicts — underwrites the KB's receipts-first approach to documentation. **The enforcement gap.** Indictment-without-judgment for genocide, victors'-justice selectivity, and the denazification fade together form the realist half of the lesson: legal architecture without sustained political will produces commemorative justice, not deterrence. ## See Also - [[Raphael Lemkin]] — genocide's path from this indictment to the 1948 Convention - [[Genocide]] — the legal architecture built on this precedent - [[Holocaust]] — the crime being adjudicated - [[Wannsee Conference]] — the key documentary exhibit's provenance - [[Adolf Eichmann]] — the accountability sequel, fifteen years late - [[Night of the Long Knives]] — the regime's founding demonstration that law had no purchase on it