An unprecedented legal framework
The Nuremberg trials, which ran from November 1945 to October 1946, were the first international tribunal in history to prosecute individuals for crimes committed in the service of a state. Twenty-four senior figures of the former German administration faced charges across four counts: conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, crimes against peace, war crimes, and — in a phrase entering international law for the first time — crimes against humanity.
The legal framework was constructed under significant time pressure and without precedent, and scholars since have raised legitimate questions about the concept of victor’s justice. But the proceedings also established something durable: that individuals could be held criminally responsible for actions carried out on state orders, and that following official instructions could not constitute an absolute defence.
The proceedings
The tribunal sat for nearly a year, hearing testimony from hundreds of witnesses and examining tens of thousands of documents gathered from captured German archives. The documentary record produced at Nuremberg — far more complete than investigators had anticipated — became foundational to subsequent historical understanding of how the German state had functioned during the war.
The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated and so devastating that civilisation cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.
The verdicts
Of the twenty-two defendants who stood trial, twelve were sentenced to death, three to life imprisonment, four to terms between ten and twenty years, and three were acquitted. The executions were carried out in October 1946. Martin Bormann was tried and convicted in absentia. Robert Ley died by suicide before the trial began. Hermann Göring died by suicide the night before his scheduled execution.
Legal legacy
The principles established at Nuremberg were incorporated into international law and became the foundation for subsequent international tribunals — at Tokyo, for the former Yugoslavia, for Rwanda, and ultimately for the permanent International Criminal Court established by the Rome Statute in 2002. The concept of individual criminal responsibility for state-directed atrocity, however imperfectly realised in subsequent practice, traces a direct line back to a courthouse in Bavaria in the autumn of 1945.