The trials of Nazi war criminals, beginning at Nuremberg in 1945 and continuing into the present day, did more than punish individual perpetrators. They created an entirely new branch of law, established the principle that those who commit atrocities cannot hide behind the authority of a state, and provided the first systematic public accounting of what had been done in the camps and the killing fields of occupied Europe. The trials are the moral and legal foundation on which the present-day understanding of the Holocaust rests.
What this section covers
This section is divided into five main areas. The Nuremberg Trials covers the International Military Tribunal of 1945 to 1946 and the twelve subsequent trials that ran until 1949, including the prosecutors, the defendants, the verdicts, and the questions the trials raised. Subsequent Trials and Prosecutions covers the later individual prosecutions, from Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961 through Klaus Barbie, John Demjanjuk, and the camp guards still being prosecuted in German courts. The Ratlines covers the escape networks that took senior Nazis to South America and the Middle East, and the agencies that helped them. Nazi Hunters covers the people who refused to let the perpetrators die quietly: Simon Wiesenthal, the Klarsfelds, Tuvia Friedman, and the Office 06 unit that captured Eichmann. Holocaust Law and Legacy covers the legal innovations that came out of Nuremberg and shape international criminal law to this day, from the Genocide Convention of 1948 to the International Criminal Court.
Why the trials matter now
The legal record produced by these trials is the most authoritative documentation of what the Holocaust was. The Nuremberg trials alone generated 42 volumes of evidence, including the testimony of senior perpetrators given under oath. When deniers claim there is no proof, the trials are part of the answer. The trials also established the principle that giving lawful orders is not a defence against international criminal law, and that heads of state are not immune from prosecution, principles that shape every international criminal proceeding today.
What the trials did not do
The trials were not, and were never going to be, a complete accounting. Many of the senior figures of the regime escaped them. Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels killed themselves before they could be tried. Bormann was tried in absentia and may already have been dead. The Soviet Union sat as a judge at Nuremberg while concealing its own massacre of Polish officers at Katyn. Many perpetrators were never prosecuted, escaped to comfortable lives in South America or West Germany, or died before they could be brought to court. The men who built and ran the gas chambers at Auschwitz were not among the defendants in Courtroom 600 in 1945. What the trials achieved, nonetheless, was the construction of a public, documented, legally tested record of the Holocaust at a moment when the alternative was silence and impunity. That record has stood.
Sources
- International Military Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, 42 vols, Nuremberg, 1947 to 1949
- Telford Taylor, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials, Knopf, 1992
- Ann Tusa and John Tusa, The Nuremberg Trial, Macmillan, 1983
- Bradley F. Smith, Reaching Judgment at Nuremberg, Basic Books, 1977
- Deborah Lipstadt, The Eichmann Trial, Schocken, 2011
- Philippe Sands, East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2016