Assignment task:
Based on the reading, in October 1945, the Allies selected Nuremberg to host the trial of the main Nazi war criminals and later for the follow-up trials. Why did they select Nuremberg? What advantages did the city have?
Why Nuremberg? Nuremberg was considered by the Nazis to be the most German of German cities. It had a long history in the Protestant Reformation and in the Holy Roman Empire, as being a leadership city, and Hitler had used it to great effect, both for his rallies and for his propaganda videos. In addition, Nuremberg also had an intact courtroom, the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, and in particular Courtroom 600 had an attached prison that were unscathed by allied bombing. It also happened to be in Bavaria which was in the American zone of occupation in West Germany. The Nuremberg trials took place over a period of about four years. The trial of the main war criminals occurred beginning in October 1945, right at the end of the war. It was during the investigations for those trials that the enormity of The Holocaust first came to light. As the allies were occupying Germany, they discovered the evidence on the ground. For instance, the number that nine million Jews had died in The Holocaust. That number first came out of the Nuremberg Trials. The uprising at the Warsaw Ghetto, that was not known by the Western media during the war, that came out at the Nuremberg trials. The trial of the main war criminals, which put on trial in the end 23 war criminals, tried all the people that you would expect, the Reichsmarschall, Hermann Goring, the propaganda minister Gerbils, the senior leadership of the military. In total, there were 12 death sentences that came out of those trials, but they didn't end there. Nuremberg also saw the follow-up trials for the next level down of Nazi leadership organized into the doctors' trial, the lawyers' trial, the trial of the government ministers, the industrialist trial for the principles of Flick, ego Farben, and crop. Those businesses that had formed alliances with the Nazi state. The trial of the Einsatzgruppen, that's the trial of the roving death squads in Eastern Europe. The Wehrmacht High Command, and the trials of other senior military leaders, the very marked being the Air Force. Then the trials for the concentration camp administrators and the administrators of the eugenics program. Those follow-up trials added many more names and faces to the crimes that were committed by the Nazis. These trials who were pioneered by the American prosecutors; Robert Jackson, the Supreme Court Justice in the United States, who was the prosecutor of the main war trial, and then Telford Taylor at the follow-up trials. The prosecutors had laid down a new philosophy that there were some crimes that were so heinous, that they were illegal no matter when they were committed by anyone. No matter how much the Nazis perverted the Nazi legal system, these crimes were still unlawful, and therefore they could be prosecuted. Even if they weren't technically crimes in Nazi Germany, the Nazis should have known that these crimes were unlawful. We call those today jus cogens offenses and we'll talk much more about those. In addition, the Nuremberg trials helped to find some of the early principles of international criminal law, command responsibility that the person at the top is responsible for acts committed by subordinates. It's a very important principle in international criminal law because we're dealing with mass atrocity. Another thing that came out of the Nurnberg Trials, the definition of crimes against humanity. This was the first time that that term had been used. Victims do not play a prominent role in the Nuremberg trials, except as witnesses. Although they did play a role in later trials, like the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. The interests of victims are represented by the Jewish Material Claims Conference, which negotiated over decades with the German government and with other access and occupied powers. Compensation to victims over the decades and it has taken decades, has taken many forms. I'll say that since the end of the Cold War, this process is accelerated because it was so difficult to get the Soviet Union and Eastern European governments to agree to settlements.