Nuremberg trials

The Nuremberg trials were held by the Allies against representatives of the defeated Nazi Germany for plotting and carrying out invasions of other countries across Europe and atrocities against their citizens in World War II.[2] Between 1939 and 1945, Nazi Germany invaded many European countries, including Poland, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Yugoslavia, Greece, and the Soviet Union.[4] German aggression was accompanied by immense brutality in occupied areas;[5] war losses in the Soviet Union alone included 27 million dead, mostly civilians, which was one seventh of the prewar population.[38] The British proposal to define crimes against humanity was largely accepted, with the final wording being "murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population".[41][42] Both the United States—concerned that its "Jim Crow" system of racial segregation not be labeled a crime against humanity—and the Soviet Union wanted to avoid giving an international court jurisdiction over a government's treatment of its own citizens.[56][57] Jackson was appointed the United States' chief prosecutor, whom historian Kim Christian Priemel describes as "a versatile politician and a remarkable orator, if not a great legal thinker".[62][63][64] Although the chief British judge, Sir Geoffrey Lawrence (Lord Justice of Appeal), was the nominal president of the tribunal, in practice Biddle exercised more authority.[73] Requests by Chaim Weizmann, the president of the World Zionist Organization, as well as the Provisional Government of National Unity in Poland, for an active role in the trial justified by their representation of victims of Nazi crimes were rejected.[82] The charge, a brainchild of War Department lawyer Murray C. Bernays, and perhaps inspired by his previous work prosecuting securities fraud,[83][84] was spearheaded by the United States and less popular with the other delegations, particularly France.[85] The problem of translating the indictment and evidence into the three official languages of the tribunal—English, French, and Russian—as well as German was severe due to the scale of the task and difficulty of recruiting interpreters, especially in the Soviet Union.[97] The military leaders were Hermann Göring—the most infamous surviving Nazi and the main target of the trial[91]—Wilhelm Keitel, Alfred Jodl, Erich Raeder, and Karl Dönitz.[104] Initially, the Americans had planned to try fourteen organizations and their leaders, but this was narrowed to six: the Reich Cabinet, the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party, the Gestapo, the SA, the SS and the SD, and the General Staff and High Command of the German military (Wehrmacht).[125] According to Priemel, the conspiracy charge "invited apologetic interpretations: narratives of absolute, totalitarian dictatorship, run by society's lunatic fringe, of which the Germans had been the first victims rather than agents, collaborators, and fellow travellers".[132] Indiscriminate selection and disorganized presentation of documentary evidence without tying it to specific defendants hampered the American prosecutors' work on the conspiracy to commit crimes against humanity.[136][137] Unlike Jackson, Shawcross attempted to minimize the novelty of the aggression charges, elaborating its precursors in the conventions of Hague and Geneva, the League of Nations Covenant, the Locarno Treaty, and the Kellogg–Briand Pact.[147] The French prosecutors, more than their British or American counterparts, emphasized the complicity of many Germans;[148][81] they barely mentioned the charge of aggressive war and instead focused on forced labor, economic plunder, and massacres.[151] Unlike the British and American prosecution strategies, which focused on using German documents to make their cases, the French prosecutors took the perspective of the victims, submitting postwar police reports.[159] Although these aspects had already been covered by the American prosecution, Soviet prosecutors introduced new evidence from Extraordinary State Commission reports and interrogations of senior enemy officers.[160] Lev Smirnov presented evidence on the Lidice massacre in Czechoslovakia, adding that the German invaders had destroyed thousands of villages and murdered their inhabitants throughout eastern Europe.[161] The Soviet prosecution emphasized the racist aspect of policies such as the deportation of millions of civilians to Germany for forced labor,[150] the murder of children,[162] systematic looting of occupied territories, and theft or destruction of cultural heritage.[168] Soviet witnesses included several survivors of German crimes, including two civilians who lived through the siege of Leningrad, a peasant whose village was destroyed in anti-partisan warfare, a Red Army doctor who endured several prisoner-of-war camps[169] and two Holocaust survivors—Samuel Rajzman, a survivor of Treblinka extermination camp, and poet Abraham Sutzkever, who described the murder of tens of thousands of Jews from Vilna.[182] Although defense lawyers repeatedly equated the Nuremberg Laws to legislation found in other countries, Nazi concentration camps to Allied detention facilities, and the deportation of Jews to the expulsion of Germans, the judges rejected their arguments.[182] Alfred Seidl [de] repeatedly tried to disclose the secret protocols of the German–Soviet pact; although he was eventually successful, it was legally irrelevant and the judges rejected his attempt to bring up the Treaty of Versailles.[113][184] Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz testified that the United States Navy had also used unrestricted submarine warfare against Japan in the Pacific; Dönitz's counsel successfully argued that this meant that it could not be a crime.[189] Over the course of the trial, Western judges allowed the defendants additional leeway to denounce the Soviet Union, which was ultimately revealed to be a co-conspirator in the outbreak of World War II.[203] Despite the lingering doubts of some of the judges,[204][205] the official interpretation of the IMT held that all of the charges had a solid basis in customary international law and that the trial was procedurally fair.Twelve of the defendants were sentenced to death (Göring, Ribbentrop, Keitel, Kaltenbrunner, Rosenberg, Frank, Frick, Streicher, Sauckel, Jodl, Seyss-Inquart, and Bormann).Other generals were tried in the High Command Trial for plotting wars of aggression, issuing criminal orders, deporting civilians, using slave labor, and looting in the Soviet Union.[242] Legal historian Kevin Jon Heller argues that the trials' greatest achievement was "their inestimable contribution to the form and substance of international criminal law", which had been left underdeveloped by the IMT.Such actions as the German–Soviet pact,[268][269] the expulsion of millions of Germans from central and eastern Europe,[270] deportation of civilians for forced labor,[271] and violent suppression of anti-colonial uprisings would have been deemed illegal according to the definitions of international crimes in the Nuremberg charter.