On this date: November 20, 1945

On November 20, 1945, the judges at the first of the Nuremberg War Trials (known as the 'Trial Of The Major War Criminals') took their seats to hear the charges read out.

Twenty-two of the leading figures of the Nazi regime were on trial. Martin Bormann had not been located, and was tried in absentia. The remaining twenty-one are shown in the photograph below. Front row, left to right: Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Julius Streicher, Walther Funk, Hjalmar Schacht. Back row, left to right: Karl Dönitz, Erich Raeder, Baldur von Schirach, Fritz Sauckel, Alfred Jodl, Franz von Papen, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Albert Speer, Konstantin von Neurath, Hans Fritzsche.




The trials themselves are far too large a subject to be covered in a brief blog article. Wikipedia has a good summary of them. Vast archives of legal material and other information may be found in the collections of the University of Missouri at Kansas City and the Yale Law Library.

After a lengthy trial, the Nuremberg court sentenced eleven of the defendants to death, plus Martin Bormann in absentia. Three received sentences of life imprisonment, four lesser terms of imprisonment, and three were acquitted. The death sentences were carried out on October 16, 1946, by hanging - except for Hermann Göring, who took poison and committed suicide shortly before his scheduled execution.

After the first trial, a further twelve Nuremberg Trials were held, in the form of US military tribunals. A total of 185 defendants were charged, of whom 142 were found guilty. 24 were sentenced to death, although the sentences of 11 were subsequently commuted to life imprisonment. 20 were sentenced to life imprisonment, 98 received shorter prison sentences, and 35 were acquitted. Four defendants had to be excused from their trials due to illness, and four more committed suicide before their trials ended.

The real importance of the Nuremberg Trials is that they broke new ground in international criminal law, establishing several new principles, treaties, agreements and institutions that have continued to evolve, and which influence both international and national law to this day. Fundamental among these are:

• The Nuremberg Principles of 1950, a set of guidelines for determining whether an action constitutes a war crime.
• A number of international agreements, including the Genocide Convention of 1948; the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, also in 1948; the Convention on the Abolition of the Statute of Limitations on War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity, 1968; and the Geneva Convention on the Laws and Customs of War, 1949, and its supplementary protocols of 1977 and 2005.
• The establishment of the International Criminal Court in 2002.

I've sometimes wondered whether, after their deaths, those executed had to face the shades of the millions upon millions of victims whose deaths they had ordered, or implemented, or overseen, during their evil lives. If so, it must have been an interesting meeting . . .

Peter