The room was small. Honestly, if you look at the photos of Courtroom 600 in the Palace of Justice, it feels cramped for a moment that basically reshaped the entire moral compass of the modern world. It wasn't just about punishing the men in the dock. It was about proving that "just following orders" is a garbage excuse when you’re complicit in the industrial-scale slaughter of millions. The Nuremberg war crimes trial didn't just happen; it was a desperate, messy, and unprecedented legal gamble that almost didn't work.
History books make it sound like an inevitable victory for justice. It wasn't. The British actually wanted to just line up the top Nazis and shoot them without a trial. Churchill thought a legal proceeding would be a farce. Stalin, ever the pragmatist, famously suggested at the Tehran Conference that they should just execute 50,000 German officers and call it a day. But the Americans, specifically Secretary of War Henry Stimson and later Justice Robert Jackson, insisted on a trial. They wanted a record. They wanted the world to see the evidence so clearly that nobody could ever claim the Holocaust was "fake news" or a "strategic exaggeration."
The Legal Chaos Behind the Scenes
When the Nuremberg war crimes trial kicked off in November 1945, the lawyers were basically building the airplane while flying it. There was no precedent for this. You had four different legal systems—American, British, Soviet, and French—trying to agree on how to define "crimes against humanity." That term? It was basically brand new. Before 1945, international law was mostly about how states treated each other, not how a government treated its own citizens.
The defense had a point that still makes law students uncomfortable today: nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege. It’s Latin for "no crime, no punishment without a law." Basically, the Nazis argued they were being tried for things that weren't technically illegal under international law when they did them. It was "victor's justice," they said. Robert Jackson, the lead U.S. prosecutor, had to pivot hard. He argued that some things are so inherently evil that they violate the "common sense of mankind," whether a specific treaty mentions them or not.
Hermann Göring and the Battle of Wits
Göring was the prize catch. He’d lost weight in captivity, his drug addiction (he was a heavy paracodine user) had been forced into a cold-turkey end, and he was surprisingly sharp. For the first few days of his testimony, he was actually winning. He was charismatic, aggressive, and knew the nuances of European politics better than the American prosecutors. He made Jackson look unprepared.
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Then the films started playing.
The prosecution stopped talking and let the footage from the liberated camps do the work. The flickering black-and-white images of bulldozers pushing piles of emaciated bodies into pits changed the energy of the room instantly. You can read the transcripts; the defendants' bravado just evaporated. Even the ones who claimed they didn't know the extent of the "Final Solution" couldn't look away. This was the moment the Nuremberg war crimes trial shifted from a political debate to a forensic autopsy of a regime's soul.
The Crimes We Didn't See Coming
We usually think about the "Big Nuremberg" trial—the one with the 22 major war criminals like Hess, Ribbentrop, and Keitel. But there were actually 12 subsequent trials. These are arguably more interesting because they targeted the "respectable" people. The Doctors' Trial. The Judges' Trial. The IG Farben Trial.
This is where things get really muddy. When you put a doctor on trial for performing "medical experiments" that involve freezing people to death, you’re not just talking about war; you’re talking about the total collapse of professional ethics. The Nuremberg Code, which is the foundation of modern medical ethics (you know, the reason you have to sign a bunch of consent forms at the doctor's office?), came directly out of these proceedings.
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- The IG Farben Trial: This focused on the industrialists. The guys who built the factories at Auschwitz. It asked a terrifying question: How much profit is too much when it's built on slave labor?
- The Einsatzgruppen Trial: This dealt with the mobile killing squads. Benjamin Ferencz, who was only 27 at the time and had never tried a case, prosecuted this one. He secured convictions for 22 commanders who had personally overseen the murder of over a million people. Ferencz stayed active until he passed away recently, always reminding people that "law, not war" should be the default.
- The Ministries Trial: This went after the bureaucrats. The paper-pushers. The guys who signed the memos that made the trains run on time to the death camps.
Why the Soviet Presence Was Awkward
We can't talk about the Nuremberg war crimes trial without acknowledging the massive elephant in the room: Katyn. The Soviets tried to blame the Nazis for the Katyn Forest massacre, where thousands of Polish officers were executed. The problem? The Soviets actually did it.
The German defense lawyers, who were surprisingly gutsy, tried to bring up "Tu Quoque"—the "you did it too" defense. They wanted to talk about the Allied firebombing of Dresden or the Soviet atrocities in the East. The judges shut that down fast. They ruled that the defendants were on trial for their actions, and the alleged crimes of the prosecutors were irrelevant to the specific charges of the indictment. It was a necessary legal maneuver to keep the trial from spiraling into a 50-year-long argument, but it left a lingering scent of hypocrisy that critics still point to today.
The Verdicts That Shocked People
On October 1, 1946, the judgments came down. It wasn't a clean sweep. Three of the high-profile defendants—Hjalmar Schacht, Franz von Papen, and Hans Fritzsche—were actually acquitted. This was a huge blow to the "victor's justice" narrative. If it were a kangaroo court, everyone would have been hanged. The fact that the judges (particularly the British and French ones) were willing to say "we don't have enough evidence for a conviction here" gave the Nuremberg war crimes trial its lasting legitimacy.
But for the others, the end was grim. Eleven were sentenced to death by hanging. Göring cheated the hangman by swallowing a cyanide capsule the night before his execution, a final act of defiance that infuriated the Allied guards. The others were hanged in the prison gymnasium. No flashy public execution. Just a grim, professional end to a grim, professional evil.
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The Lasting Legacy (and the Holes in it)
The Nuremberg war crimes trial gave birth to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. It established the principle of individual responsibility. You can't hide behind a flag anymore. If you commit a war crime, you are personally liable. That’s a massive shift in human history.
However, it's not a perfect system. Why hasn't there been a "Nuremberg" for other major conflicts? The reality is that international law usually only applies to the losers or those from smaller, less powerful nations. The "Big Five" on the UN Security Council have a way of shielding themselves. It's a frustrating reality, but that doesn't mean the Nuremberg principles are useless. They provide a benchmark. A standard that we use to judge leaders, even if we can't always drag them into a courtroom.
Actionable Insights for History Buffs and Law Students
If you want to actually understand this period beyond the surface-level Wikipedia summaries, you've got to look at the primary sources.
- Read the Robert Jackson Opening Statement: It is arguably the greatest piece of legal oratory in the 20th century. He doesn't just list crimes; he builds a philosophical case for the existence of a global conscience.
- Watch the footage: The Harvard Law School Library has an incredible digital archive of the Nuremberg trials. Seeing the body language of the defendants—the way they whispered to each other or stared at the floor—tells a story that the transcripts miss.
- Study the Nuremberg Code: If you work in tech, bioethics, or medicine, this isn't just history. It's the literal rulebook for your career. Understand the ten points of the code; they are the shield against another era of "science" without humanity.
- Visit the Memorium Nuremberg Trials: If you're ever in Germany, go to Courtroom 600. It's still a working courtroom, but there's a museum above it. Standing in that space makes the abstract concept of "international law" feel heavy and real.
The Nuremberg war crimes trial didn't end evil. It didn't stop wars. But it did something arguably more important: it took the mask off of tyranny and showed that, under the uniforms and the medals, it's just men making choices. And for those choices, eventually, there is a reckoning.