Each of the four Allied powers supplied two judges—a main judge and an alternate. One of the indicted men was deemed medically unfit to stand trial, while a second man killed himself before the trial began. Hitler and two of his top associates, Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels , had each committed suicide in the spring of before they could be brought to trial.
The defendants were allowed to choose their own lawyers, and the most common defense strategy was that the crimes defined in the London Charter were examples of ex post facto law; that is, they were laws that criminalized actions committed before the laws were drafted.
As the accused men and judges spoke four different languages, the trial saw the introduction of a technological innovation taken for granted today: instantaneous translation. IBM provided the technology and recruited men and women from international telephone exchanges to provide on-the-spot translations through headphones in English, French, German and Russian.
In the end, the international tribunal found all but three of the defendants guilty. Twelve were sentenced to death, one in absentia, and the rest were given prison sentences ranging from 10 years to life behind bars.
Ten of the condemned were executed by hanging on October 16, These proceedings, lasting from December to April , are grouped together as the Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings. They differed from the first trial in that they were conducted before U. The reason for the change was that growing differences among the four Allied powers had made other joint trials impossible.
The subsequent trials were held in the same location at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg. These proceedings included the Doctors Trial December 9, August 20, , in which 23 defendants were accused of crimes against humanity, including medical experiments on prisoners of war. In the Judges Trial March 5-December 4, , 16 lawyers and judges were charged with furthering the Nazi plan for racial purity by implementing the eugenics laws of the Third Reich. Other subsequent trials dealt with German industrialists accused of using slave labor and plundering occupied countries; high-ranking army officers accused of atrocities against prisoners of war; and SS officers accused of violence against concentration-camp inmates.
Of the people indicted in the subsequent Nuremberg trials, 12 defendants received death sentences, 8 others were given life in prison and an additional 77 people received prison terms of varying lengths, according to the USHMM. Authorities later reduced a number of the sentences. The Nuremberg trials were controversial even among those who wanted the major criminals punished.
Harlan Stone , chief justice of the U. Douglas , then an associate U. Nonetheless, most observers considered the trials a step forward for the establishment of international law. In addition, the International Military Tribunal supplied a useful precedent for the trials of Japanese war criminals in Tokyo ; the trial of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann ; and the establishment of tribunals for war crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda A question may be raised whether the United Nations are prepared to submit to scrutiny the attack of Russia on Poland, or on Finland or the American encouragement to the Russians to break their treaty with Japan.
Every one of these actions may have been proper, but we hardly admit that they are subject to international judgment. These considerations make the second count of the Nuremberg indictment look to be of uncertain foundation and uncertain limits. To some the count may appear as nothing more than the ancient rule that the vanquished are at the mercy of the victor.
To others it may appear as the mere declaration of an always latent doctrine that the leaders of a nation are subject to outside judgment as to their motives in waging war. The other feature of the Nuremberg indictment is Count 1, charging a "conspiracy.
In international as well as in national law there may be for almost any crime what the older lawyers would have called principal offenders and accessories.
If Adolph is determined to kill Sam, and talks the matter over with Berthold, Carl, and Dietrich, and Berthold agrees to borrow the money to buy a pistol, and Carl agrees to make a holster for the pistol, and all of them proceed as planned and then Adolph gives the pistol and holster to Dietrich, who goes out alone and actually shoots Sam without excuse, then, of course, Adolph, Berthold, Carl, and Dietrich are all guilty of murder.
They should not be allowed to escape with the plea Macbeth offered for Banquo's murder, "Thou canst not say I did it. If the conspiracy charge in Count 1 meant no more than that those are guilty who plan a murder and with knowledge finance and equip the murderer, no one would quarrel with the count.
But it would appear that Count 1 meant to establish some additional separate substantive offense of conspiracy. That is, it asserts that there is in international law a wrong which consists in acting together for an unlawful end, and that he who joins in that action is liable not only for what he planned, or participated in, or could reasonably have foreseen would happen, but is liable for what every one of his fellows did in the course of the conspiracy.
Almost as broad a doctrine of conspiracy exists in municipal law. But what is the basis for asserting so broad a substantive crime exists in the international law? Where is the treaty, the custom, the academic learning on which it is based? Is this not a type of "crime" which was first described and defined either in London or in Nuremberg sometime in the year ? Aside from the fact that the notion is new, is it not fundamentally unjust?
The crime of conspiracy was originally developed by the Court of Star Chamber on the theory that any unlicensed joint action of private persons was a threat to the public, and so if the action was in any part unlawful it was all unlawful.
The analogies of the municipal law of conspiracy therefore seem out of place in considering for international purposes the effect of joint political action. After all, in a government or other large social community there exists among the top officials, civilian and military, together with their financial and industrial collaborators, a kind of over-all working arrangement which may always be looked upon, if its invidious connotation be disregarded, as a "conspiracy.
To take a case which is perhaps not so obvious, is everyone who joins a political party, even one with some illegal purposes, to be held liable to the world for the action that every member takes, even if that action is not declared in the party platform an was not known to or consented to by the person charged as a wrongdoer?
To put upon any individual such responsibility for action of the group seems literally to step back in history to a point before the prophet Ezekiel and to reject the more recent religious and democratic teachings that guilt is personal. Turning now from the legal basis of the indictment, I propose briefly to consider whether, quite apart from legal technicalities, the procedure of an international military tribunal on the Nuremberg pattern is a politically acceptable way of dealing with the offenders in the dock and those others whom we may legitimately feel should be punished.
The chief arguments usually given for this quasi-judicial trial are that it gives the culprits a chance to say anything that can be said on their behalf, that it gives both the world today and the world tomorrow a chance to see the justice of the Allied cause and the wickedness of the Nazis', and that it sets a firm foundation for a future world order wherein individuals will know that if they embark on schemes of aggression or murder or torture or persecution they will be severely dealt with by the world.
The first argument has some merit. The defendants, after hearing and seeing the evidence against them, will have an opportunity without torture and with the aid of counsel to make statements on their own behalf.
For us and for them this opportunity will make the proceeding more convincing. Yet the defendants will not have the right to make the type of presentation that at least English-speaking persons have thought the indispensable concomitant of a fair trial. No one expects that Ribbentrop will be allowed to summon Molotov to disprove the charge that in invading Poland Germany started an aggressive war.
No one anticipates that the defense, if it has the evidence, will be given as long a time to present its evidence as the prosecution takes. And there is nothing more foreign to those proceedings than either the presumption that the defendants are innocent until proved guilty or the doctrine that any adverse public comment on the defendants before the verdict is prejudicial to their receiving a fair trial. The basic approach is that these men should not have a chance to go free.
And that being so, they ought not to be tried in a court of law. As to the second point, one objection is purely pragmatic. There is a reasonable doubt whether this kind of trial, despite the voluminous and accessible record it makes, persuades anyone.
It brings out new evidence, but does it change men's minds? Most reporters say that the Germans are neither interested in nor persuaded by these proceedings, which they regard as partisan. They regard the proceedings not as marking a rebirth of law in Central Europe but as a political judgment on their former leaders. The same attitude may prevail in future because of the departure from accepted legal standards.
A more profound objection to the second point is that to regard a trial as a propaganda device is to debase justice. To be sure, most trials do and should incidentally educate the public. Yet any judge knows that if he, or counsel, or the parties regard a trial primarily as a public demonstration, or even as a general inquest, then there enter considerations which would otherwise be regarded as improper. In a political inquiry and even more in the spread of propaganda, the appeal is likely to be to the unreflecting thought and the deep-seated emotions of the crowd untrammeled by any fixed standards.
The objective is to create outside the courtroom a desired state of affairs. In a trial the appeal is to the disinterested judgment of reasonable men guided by established precepts. The objective is to make inside the courtroom a sound disposition of a pending case according to settled principles.
The argument that these trials set a firm foundation for a future world legal structure is perhaps debatable. The spectacle of individual liability for a world wrong may lead to future treaties and agreements specifying individual liability. If this were the outcome and if, for example, with respect to wars of aggression, war crimes, and use of atomic energy the nations should agree upon world rules establishing individual liability, then this would be a great gain. But it is by no means clear that this trial will further any such program.
At the moment, the world is most impressed by the undeniable dignity and efficiency of the proceedings and by the horrible events recited in the testimony. But, upon reflection, the informed public may be disturbed by the repudiation of widely accepted concepts of legal justice.
It may see too great a resemblance between this proceeding and others which we ourselves have condemned. If in the end there is a generally accepted view that Nuremberg was an example of high politics masquerading as law, then the trial instead of promoting may retard the coming of the day of world law.
Quite apart form the effect of the Nuremberg trial upon the particular defendants involved, there is the disturbing effect of the trial upon domestic justice here and abroad. They had no political rights. According to the Nazis, these children and their descendants undermined the purity of the German race. According to the Nuremberg Laws, a person with three or four Jewish grandparents was a Jew.
A grandparent was considered Jewish if they belonged to the Jewish religious community. Thus, the Nazis defined Jews by their religion Judaism , and not by the supposed racial traits that Nazism attributed to Jews. According to law, Mischlinge were neither German nor Jewish. These were people who had one or two Jewish grandparents. To do so, people used religious records. These included baptism records, Jewish community records, and gravestones.
While initially focused on Jews, the Nazi government clarified that the Nuremberg Laws also applied to Roma also called Gypsies , Black people, and their descendants.
They could not be full citizens of Germany. The Nuremberg Laws changed the everyday lives of Jews in Germany by making Jews legally different from their non-Jewish neighbors. In the years that followed, the Nazi regime enacted more and more anti-Jewish laws and decrees.
Examples of these other laws or decrees include:. This law states that Jews can only be given specific Jewish first names. New Jewish parents must choose a name from a government-approved list.
Individuals have to report their new names to government offices. They also have to use both their given and added first names for business transactions.
The Nazi regime invalidates the German passports of all German Jews. September 1, Police Regulation on the Marking of Jews.
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