The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated. That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to reason.
Opening Statement of Justice Robert H. Jackson, 21 November 1945 - Day Two of the Nuremberg Trials
With these words, in Courtroom 600 in the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, the most historic and perhaps significant trial of the twentieth century began. As Justice Jackson, Chief Prosecutor for the United States spoke, 21 men, leading figures and officers in the Nazi regime accused of atrocities that the world had never experienced, sat in the prisoners’ dock, stone-faced, listening through headphones that relayed the words into their own tongue. For the next 11 months, prosecutors would methodically reveal to the court (and the world) the heinous crimes that these men perpetrated and permitted in the years leading up to and during World War II.
On October 18, 1945, an indictment was issued against 24 war criminals and seven organizations, accusing them of Crimes against Peace, Crimes against Humanity, War Crimes, and conspiracy to commit the aforementioned crimes. Eighty years ago today, on November 20, 1945, prosecutors representing each International Military Tribunal (IMT) signatory each read publicly a count of the indictment and the accompanying appendices, each count detailing the numerous criminal acts alleged to have been committed by the defendants. Day Two afforded each defendant the opportunity to enter his plea. One by one, they declared “not guilty,” with some defendants like Alfred Jodl responding, “Not guilty. For what I have done or had to do, I have a pure conscience before God, before history and my people.” Thereafter, Justice Jackson, Chief Prosecutor for the United States, launched into his opening statement, outlining the case for Count One, the Common Plan or conspiracy and detailing the crimes committed, such as restrictions on personal liberty, expropriation of property, suppression of religion, and persecution of the Jews, supported by staggering numbers and documentary evidence of the German’s own making. The court adjourned for the day, allowing Justice Jackson’s closing words to linger in the courtroom:
The real complaining party at your bar is Civilization…Civilization asks whether law is so laggard as to be utterly helpless to deal with crimes of this magnitude by criminals of this order of importance. It does not expect that you can make war impossible. It does expect that your juridical action will put the forces of international law, its precepts, its prohibitions and, most of all, its sanctions, on the side of peace, so that men and women of good will, in all countries, may have "leave to live by no man's leave, underneath the law."
From this day, 217 more days would pass before the defendants learned of the judgment rendered by civilization.
The Evidence
The evidence against the defendants was damning and overwhelming. Ironically, the hubris of the Nazi party and its widely distributed propaganda contributed to the sizable amount of evidence presented against them, despite the deliberate, and sometimes unintentional, destruction of much of the files and documents maintained by the party and its members and officers. Still, the IMT had gathered enough evidence from other sources to reconstruct events, policies, actions, and operations to support the allegations contained in the indictment. The evidence was not limited to documents; eyewitness testimony was given and film footage and still photographs produced by both the Germans and the Allies were introduced. Some key documents that were received in evidence at trial included, but were not limited to:
Articles printed in Der Stürmer, a racist and antisemitic newspaper;
Official report of Jürgen Stroop, SS and Police Leader of Warsaw on destruction of Warsaw Ghetto, 1943, entitled “The Warsaw Ghetto Is No More” (Document 1061-PS) and Official report, Katzmann to General of Police Krueger, 30 June 1943, concerning “Solution of Jewish Question in Galicia” (Document L-18);
Excerpts from the Reichsgesetzblatt, the government gazette, which documents laws, decrees, regulations, and orders;
Orders relating to the seizure and disposition of property, such as Goering Order 5 November 1940, concerning seizure of Jewish art treasures (Document 141-PS) and Instruction for internal use on application of law concerning property of Poles of 17 September 1940 (Document R-92);
Public reports of War Refuge Board, Washington, on German Extermination Camps Auschwitz and Birkenau, April 1944 (Document L-22);
Wannsee Protocol, which reported the discussion about the final solution of the Jewish Question; and
Eyewitness testimony from survivors and the perpetrators, such as Otto Ohlendorf, Rudolf Hess, and Mademoiselle Marie Claude Vaillant-Couturier.
The evidence with the greatest impact, though, was the footage of Nazi concentration camps taken by Allied military photographers during liberation. In a darkened courtroom, prosecutors presented Nazi Concentration and Prison Camps, a graphic and chilling film detailing the liberation of 12 concentration camps, including Buchenwald, Mauthausen, and Bergen-Belsen. The film stunned the courtroom into silence. There was also a showing of The Nazi Plan, a documentary film using captured German film, propaganda, and newsreels.
Documentary evidence prepared by the American and British prosecutorial staff have been collected and compiled in the multi-volume Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression. These volumes are accessible through HeinOnline’s World Trials Library database available onsite at the Law Library and through The Avalon Project, a digital collection of documents related to law, history, and diplomacy maintained by Yale Law School’s Lillian Goldman Law Library. As stated in the preface to Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, it is more and less than the American case: less because it does not contain the motion picture and still photographs and more because it does not contain all of the evidence presented as proof of the allegations in Count One and contains documents that were not offered as evidence. (Preface, p. viii). As readers of these volumes can attest, the sheer volume of the evidence against these defendants was astounding and remains as a grim reminder of the evil that these men wrought.
Stay tuned for another post, but in the meantime, if you want to learn more, check out the following resources.
Additional Reading
Holocaust Encyclopedia: Combating Holocaust Denial: Evidence of the Holocaust Presented at Nuremberg
National Archives: The Nuremberg Laws
Harry S. Truman Library and Museum: The War Crimes Trials at Nuremberg
Harvard Law School Library: Nuremberg Trials Project
Stanford University Libraries: Taube Archive of the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg, 1945‑46
Cornell University Library: Donovan Nuremberg Trials Collection