The Holocaust was an unprecedented crime-a crime composed of millions of murders, wrongful imprisonments, and tortures, of rape, theft, and destruction during the Second World War. In the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, the world was faced with a challenge-how to seek justice for an almost unimaginable scale of criminal behavior.
This was decided at the Yalta conference.
The Nuremberg Trials were a series of military tribunals, held by the Allied forces of World War II, most notable for the prosecution of prominent members of the political, military, and economic leadership of the Nazi Germany.
Described as “the greatest trial in history” by one of the British judges who presided over it, it was the Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal (IMT). The trials were held in the city of Nuremberg, Bavaria, Germany, between November 1945 and October 1946. The Tribunal was given the task of trying 22 of the most important political and military leaders of the Third Reich. The Holocaust was, in the legal language of the Tribunal, “a crime against humanity.”
The IMT formally indicted the Nuremberg defendants on four counts:
- crimes against peace
- war crimes
- crimes against humanity
- conspiracy to commit these crimes
When the verdict was read, the court acquitted members of the General Staff and High Command and, as groups, the SA and members of Hitler’s cabinet. However, units within the Nazi secret police were declared criminal groups.
Of the 22 defendants, 11 were given the death penalty, 3 were acquitted, 3 were given life imprisonment and 4 were given imprisonment ranging from 10 to 20 years.
The Nuremberg trials were not the last war crimes trials to be conducted in Germany. For years afterward, numerous “de-Nazification” trials were conducted in an effort to hold all war criminals accountable for their actions. From 1963 to 1965, a West German court in Frankfurt tried twenty-one former SS officers at the Auschwitz death camp. The men were charged with complicity in thousands of murders; nineteen of them were found guilty and received sentences ranging from three years to life in prison.
From Nuremberg to The Hague
The tribunal at Nuremberg set precedents: in international law, in documentation of the historical record-in seeking some beginning, however inadequate, in the search for justice. Nuremberg was little more than a beginning. Its progress will be paralyzed by cold-war antagonisms.
However, after the end of USSR in 1991, on May 25, 1993 the United Nations established a war crimes tribunal at The Hague (Holland) for the former Yugoslavia – the first such institution since the Nuremberg tribunal.
Despite some differences, the Hague Tribunal proceedings are building on the Nuremberg precedent. Just as Nuremberg formed a milestone in the fusing of international law with fundamental moral principles, the Hague Tribunal will likely take this process a step further with the establishment of a permanent international criminal court, thereby creating some measure of deterrence for war crimes in the future.
More at From Nuremberg to The Hague: The Road to the International Criminal Court (pdf)
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