On the morning of November 20, 1945, twenty-one men filed into the dock of Courtroom 600 inside the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg. Some had ruled most of Europe six months earlier. One had been head of the German state for a few weeks in May. Another had edited a newspaper that spent fifteen years calling for the elimination of Jews. A third was the architect who had run armaments production for an industrial war machine that consumed entire countries. They were charged with offenses, two of which had not existed as named international crimes when the acts were committed: crimes against humanity, and the planning and waging of aggressive war. The four-power tribunal hearing the charges had been assembled by the four governments whose armies had just defeated theirs. By the standard of pre-1945 international law, the proceedings should not have been possible. Twelve months later, ten of those men had been sentenced to hang, three had been acquitted, and a body of law that did not exist a year earlier had been written into the foundations of the post-war world.

The Nuremberg Trials, taken as a single legal-institutional event, refer to two distinct but linked sets of proceedings. The International Military Tribunal, or IMT, ran from October 1945 to October 1946 and tried the surviving senior leadership of the Third Reich under a four-power charter signed in London on August 8, 1945. The twelve subsequent Nuremberg Military Tribunals, or NMT, ran from 1946 to 1949 under United States jurisdiction and tried roughly two hundred additional defendants drawn from the medical profession, the judiciary, the diplomatic corps, the Wehrmacht high command, the SS, and the industrial conglomerates that had built the Reich’s economy. Together the proceedings produced not just a set of convictions but a workable legal architecture for holding individual state actors criminally responsible for what their states had done.

That architecture is the real subject of this article. The defendants and their sentences are the dramatic surface, but the durable contribution of Nuremberg lies in five legal principles that the proceedings forced into being. Individual criminal responsibility for state actors. Rejection of superior orders as a complete defense. Crimes against humanity as offenses cognizable in international law independent of war crimes. Aggressive war as a chargeable international crime. Conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing as a chargeable offense in its own right. These principles were codified in 1950 by the United Nations International Law Commission, woven into the 1948 Genocide Convention and the 1949 Geneva Conventions, applied through the ad hoc tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s, and embedded in the Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court in 2002. The line of descent runs unbroken from Robert Jackson’s opening statement on November 21, 1945, to the courtrooms in The Hague today.

This article walks through the prewar legal terrain that made Nuremberg necessary, the London Charter that made it possible, the proceedings themselves, the verdicts, the subsequent NMT cases, the five principles in detail, the Tokyo comparison, the victor’s-justice critique, and the long arc of consequence. The argument is that Nuremberg should be read as institutional biography: the birth of international criminal law as a practical body of rules rather than an aspirational doctrine. The competitor weakness this article exploits is the tendency of popular treatments to dwell on Hermann Göring’s cyanide capsule and the gallows at the gymnasium while skipping the legal innovations that explain why we still talk about the proceedings eight decades later. Following Telford Taylor’s The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials (1992), Kevin Jon Heller’s The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law (2011), Gary Jonathan Bass’s Stay the Hand of Vengeance (2000), and Francine Hirsch’s Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg (2020), the analysis foregrounds the legal-institutional contribution and adjudicates the long-running debate about whether the tribunal was justice or victors’ theater.

Background and Causes

International law in 1945 was not designed to hold individuals accountable for what governments did. The structure had been built over three centuries on the premise that states, not persons, were the subjects of international rules. Sovereignty doctrine, traceable to the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, treated state action as legally insulated from external review. A monarch who ordered massacres might be condemned diplomatically or fought militarily, but the idea that the monarch could be put on trial in a courtroom and convicted under international rules was outside the system. The idea did not even have settled vocabulary. There was no recognized international tribunal with jurisdiction over individuals. No rules of evidence existed for such a body. The defined catalog of offenses for which individuals could be charged simply did not exist.

What did exist was a developing set of rules governing the conduct of war itself. The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 had codified prohibitions on certain weapons, certain methods of attack, and certain treatments of prisoners and civilian populations in occupied territory. The Geneva Conventions of 1864, 1906, and 1929 had built protections for the wounded, the sick, and prisoners of war. The Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, signed by sixty-three states including Germany, Japan, and Italy, had renounced war as an instrument of national policy. None of these instruments specified what happened if a state’s officials violated them. The enforcement mechanism, where one was contemplated at all, was state-to-state pressure or military reprisal. Individual criminal liability was missing.

The First World War had forced a partial reckoning. Article 227 of the Treaty of Versailles arraigned Wilhelm II of Germany for “a supreme offence against international morality and the sanctity of treaties,” and Articles 228 through 230 contemplated trials of German military officers for war-crimes offenses. The arraignment of Wilhelm II went nowhere because the Netherlands refused to extradite him. The proposed Allied trials of German officers were displaced by the Leipzig Trials, conducted by Germany’s own Reichsgericht in 1921, which tried twelve defendants out of an Allied list of nearly nine hundred and convicted six with sentences as light as a few months. The Allied response was to recognize the inadequacy of leaving war-crimes prosecution to the defeated state’s own courts and to file the precedent away. The unprosecuted Armenian Genocide of 1915-1923 had reinforced the lesson: a draft Treaty of Sèvres clause providing for prosecution of Ottoman officials for atrocities against the Armenians had been replaced in the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne by an amnesty, and roughly 1.5 million dead Armenians had received no justice that any court delivered. The earlier 20th-century genocide whose lack of prosecution Nuremberg partly addressed sat in the background of every London Charter conversation, often unspoken, sometimes named explicitly, as in the case for prosecution that international jurists built across two decades.

Nazi Germany pushed every fragile rule in the prewar architecture past its breaking point and then kept going. The regime described in the longer history of how a marginal political party captured a major industrial democracy waged what was clearly aggressive war by any reading of Kellogg-Briand. It conducted the systematic genocide whose mechanics and arithmetic appear in the dedicated treatment of how six million Jews and several million others were killed. It killed roughly 3.3 million Soviet prisoners of war by deliberate policy, used civilian populations as forced labor on a continental scale, and organized the murder of Roma, the disabled, political prisoners, and clerical opponents. By the time the regime collapsed in May 1945, the Allied governments faced a question their predecessors after 1918 had ducked: what does the law do when state action of this scale and character ends?

The 1945 answer was not foreordained. Three options were on the table. Winston Churchill and members of the British Cabinet had argued through 1942-1944 for summary execution of senior Nazi leaders without trial, on the theory that any judicial proceeding would dignify the defendants and produce procedural opportunities for propaganda. The Morgenthau Plan, named after United States Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr., contemplated dismantling German industry and reducing Germany to an agrarian economy in addition to executing senior Nazis. The Stimson position, named after United States Secretary of War Henry Stimson, held that summary execution was incompatible with the rule of law that the Allies had supposedly fought to defend, and that genuine judicial proceedings would establish a documentary record that no propaganda could displace. Stimson won the argument inside the United States government during the spring of 1945, was backed by President Harry Truman after Roosevelt’s April death, and persuaded the British and Soviet governments through the summer. The Soviet government had its own preference for political show trials of the 1937-1938 Moscow type and accepted four-power judicial proceedings only when the alternative was being excluded from the prosecution of the Reich entirely.

What the four governments faced when they sat down in London in late June 1945 was therefore a problem with no template. They needed to design a tribunal, define its jurisdiction, write its procedure, draft a catalog of offenses, and reach agreement among four legal traditions whose differences ran deep. The Anglo-American common law tradition emphasized adversarial procedure, oral testimony, and stringent evidentiary rules. The continental civil law tradition that France used emphasized investigative procedure, documentary evidence, and a more inquisitorial role for the bench. The Soviet system was nominally adversarial but in practice was an instrument of state policy where verdicts were determined before trial. Reconciling these in a single working tribunal in six weeks was the first achievement of the London negotiations, and it required compromises that left every delegation dissatisfied with parts of the result.

The London Charter Negotiations

The London Conference convened on June 26, 1945, at Church House, Westminster. The four delegations were headed by Robert H Jackson for the United States, Lord Chancellor Sir David Maxwell Fyfe for the United Kingdom, General Iona Nikitchenko for the Soviet Union, and Robert Falco for France. Justice Jackson, an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court who had taken leave to lead the prosecution, drove the substantive agenda. His opening memorandum had laid out the core innovations the United States wanted in the Charter: individual criminal liability, four categories of offenses, rejection of state-of-act and superior-orders defenses, and a tribunal that operated under written rules of procedure rather than political instruction. Maxwell Fyfe was sympathetic. Nikitchenko and Falco brought objections that ran the gamut from doctrinal to political to logistical.

The aggressive-war charge was the most contested innovation. Jackson argued that the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 had already criminalized aggressive war as a matter of state policy, and that what the Charter did was simply attach individual criminal responsibility to a prohibition that already existed in international law. Falco, drawing on the French civil-law tradition’s strict reading of the principle of legality, was skeptical: criminal law required a specifically defined offense with specifically defined penalties, and Kellogg-Briand had specified neither. Nikitchenko’s objection was opposite: he wanted a much broader definition that would have embraced any war the Soviets considered unjust, and he wanted the tribunal effectively limited to convicting defendants the Soviets considered guilty. Jackson’s counterargument was that a tribunal whose verdicts were predetermined would have no legitimacy beyond the moment, while a tribunal that operated under genuine rules of evidence and procedure would build something durable. The compromise written into Article 6(a) of the Charter defined crimes against peace as the planning, preparation, initiation, or waging of aggressive war or war in violation of international treaties, with conspiracy to commit such acts also chargeable.

The crimes-against-humanity provision in Article 6(c) was the second major innovation. Existing war-crimes law applied to acts committed against enemy nationals or in occupied territory; it did not reach the German government’s actions against its own German Jewish citizens before September 1939, or against Reich-citizen Jewish populations in territories where Germany was the sovereign rather than the occupier. The Charter drafters wanted to reach those acts and faced the doctrinal problem that no existing international rule covered them. Hersch Lauterpacht, the Cambridge international lawyer who advised the British delegation and who had been writing about the need for such a category since the 1930s, supplied much of the conceptual framework. The eventual Article 6(c) defined crimes against humanity as murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population before or during the war, plus persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds. The provision was linked through a so-called nexus clause to the war crimes and crimes against peace charges, requiring that the inhumane acts be connected to the broader war or its planning. This linkage limited the reach of the provision in 1945 but established the category as a matter of international law for future expansion.

The superior-orders question generated comparable difficulty. Article 8 of the Charter rejected the proposition that an order from a superior fully exculpated a subordinate, while permitting the order to be considered in mitigation if the tribunal found justice required it. This was a compromise between the German legal tradition, which had recognized superior orders as a substantial defense, and the Anglo-American tradition, which had been narrowing the defense for decades. The compromise was important because the prosecution case against many defendants, particularly military officers like Wilhelm Keitel and Alfred Jodl, would rest on actions taken pursuant to Hitler’s specific orders. If superior orders had been a complete defense, the trial would have produced a long list of acquittals at the senior military level.

The act-of-state doctrine raised parallel issues. Article 7 of the Charter provided that the official position of any defendant, whether as head of state or as a senior government official, did not free him from responsibility or mitigate punishment. This rejected centuries of doctrine that had held high state officials immune from foreign or international prosecution for acts taken in their official capacities. The provision was essential to the proceedings as designed: without it, every defendant could have argued that his actions, however heinous, had been performed as agent of the German state and were not amenable to international prosecution. Sovereign immunity had been the wall behind which state criminality had hidden for centuries; Article 7 took down the wall, at least for the senior leadership of states defeated in war.

The Charter was signed on August 8, 1945, the day before the Nagasaki bombing and twenty-four hours before the Soviet declaration of war on Japan. Its eight pages contained the full architecture of the IMT: tribunal composition with four judges and four alternates drawn one each from the four powers, prosecution teams from each power, definitions of the four categories of offenses, rules of procedure, and the explicit rejection of statutory immunities. The text was supplemented by Allied Control Council Law No. 10 of December 20, 1945, which authorized the four occupation zones in Germany to conduct further trials under similar substantive law, and which became the legal basis for the subsequent Nuremberg Military Tribunals and for trials in the British and French zones. Together the Charter and Law No. 10 supplied the entire legal scaffolding on which the prosecutions of the next four years would rest.

The IMT Defendants

The original list of major-war-criminal defendants ran to twenty-four names. Three were never tried in the proceedings: Robert Ley, head of the German Labour Front, hanged himself in his cell on October 25, 1945, before arraignment; Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, the elderly head of the Krupp armaments empire, was found medically incapable and was severed from the case in November 1945; and Martin Bormann, Hitler’s last secretary, was tried in absentia after Allied investigators concluded he had not surfaced after May 1945. The remaining twenty-one defendants entered the dock at the Palace of Justice on November 20, 1945, and constituted the cast of the proceedings.

Hermann Göring was the senior surviving figure of the regime and effectively its acting head when he was captured in May 1945. As Reichsmarschall, head of the Luftwaffe, plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan, founder of the Gestapo, and a Nazi Party member from the early 1920s, Göring carried responsibility across the entire prosecution case. He was the dominant presence in the dock through the trial, mounting an aggressive defense that defended the regime’s foreign policy as legitimate state action and that contested every charge with vigor. Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy until his bizarre solo flight to Scotland in May 1941, had been held in British custody for the four years since and entered the proceedings already showing signs of the mental deterioration that would mark the rest of his life. Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Foreign Minister whose negotiation of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact had enabled the September 1939 invasion of Poland, brought no defense beyond a claim that he had been an instrument of Hitler’s policy with no independent will.

Wilhelm Keitel and Alfred Jodl, the chiefs of the OKW and its operations staff respectively, were the senior military defendants. Their cases turned on whether senior military officers who had drafted, transmitted, and executed orders for crimes against civilians, prisoners of war, and partisans could shelter behind their formal subordination to Hitler. The Commando Order of October 1942, which directed the immediate execution of Allied commando troops captured in any theater, was particularly damaging to both. Ernst Kaltenbrunner had succeeded Reinhard Heydrich as head of the Reich Main Security Office, the SS-RSHA, in January 1943, and his prosecution carried the weight of Holocaust evidence that the SS apparatus had compiled and that Allied investigators had recovered.

Alfred Rosenberg, the regime’s chief ideologist and the minister for the occupied Eastern territories, faced charges that ran from the persecution of churches to the cultural plunder of European art collections. Hans Frank had been Governor-General of occupied Poland from 1939 to 1945 and faced overwhelming evidence of the regime’s policies in the General Government, where roughly three million Polish Jews and roughly two million ethnic Polish civilians had been killed. Wilhelm Frick had been Interior Minister through the Nazi consolidation of power in 1933-1934 and into the war, and his prosecution carried the case for individual responsibility for the regime’s domestic suppression of opponents and its persecutions of Jewish citizens. Julius Streicher, the editor of the Nazi tabloid Der Stürmer, had spent fifteen years calling for the elimination of European Jews in print; his prosecution tested whether sustained genocidal incitement could itself constitute a crime against humanity even where the speaker had not personally administered the killing operations.

Walther Funk had succeeded Hjalmar Schacht as Reich Minister of Economics and as President of the Reichsbank, and his prosecution included the role the Reichsbank had played in receiving SS deposits of valuables looted from Holocaust victims, including dental gold. Schacht himself faced charges as the architect of German rearmament finance during the 1930s, before he had broken with the regime and ended up in a concentration camp himself in 1944. Karl Dönitz, who had served as commander-in-chief of the Kriegsmarine and had been Hitler’s designated successor as head of state for the eight days between Hitler’s suicide on April 30 and the German surrender on May 8, faced charges centered on the conduct of submarine warfare. Erich Raeder, his predecessor as Navy chief, faced parallel charges for the prewar planning and the early war.

Baldur von Schirach, Hitler Youth leader from 1931 to 1940 and Gauleiter of Vienna from 1940 onward, faced charges centered on the indoctrination of German youth and on the deportation of Vienna’s Jewish population. Fritz Sauckel had run the Reich’s slave-labor program from 1942 onward, presiding over the deportation of approximately five million civilians from occupied territories into German industry. Franz von Papen had been the Vice-Chancellor whose 1933 deal had brought Hitler to the chancellorship, and had served as ambassador in Vienna and Ankara across the war years. Arthur Seyss-Inquart had been the Austrian who facilitated the 1938 Anschluss and had served as Reich Commissioner in the occupied Netherlands, presiding over the deportation of Dutch Jewry to the death camps. Albert Speer, the architect who had become Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production in February 1942, faced charges for the use of slave labor and the prolongation of the war through industrial mobilization. Konstantin von Neurath had been Foreign Minister before Ribbentrop and had served as Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. Hans Fritzsche had run the radio division of Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry. Together the twenty-one constituted a representative cross-section of the regime’s civilian, military, ideological, economic, and propaganda leadership, with the obvious absence of Hitler himself, Goebbels, and Heinrich Himmler, all of whom had killed themselves before capture.

The Proceedings

The trial ran 218 court days from November 20, 1945, to October 1, 1946. The Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, whose courtroom and adjoining cellblock had been chosen partly for symbolic reasons (the city had been the site of the Nazi Party Rallies through the 1930s) and partly for practical reasons (it had survived the war intact and could be wired for the unprecedented technical demands of the proceedings), was equipped with a four-language simultaneous translation system that had been engineered for the trial by IBM. The system was the first large-scale deployment of simultaneous interpretation in any judicial setting and made the proceedings genuinely four-power rather than English-only with translation. The technical innovation alone became a model for subsequent international institutions, including the United Nations General Assembly and the European institutions.

The prosecution case was organized in four sections corresponding to the four counts: conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Robert Jackson opened for the United States on November 21, delivering an opening statement that has been quoted in international criminal law textbooks ever since. The opening framed the proceedings as a constitutional moment for international law: the wrongs the prosecution sought to condemn had been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating that civilization could not tolerate their being ignored because it could not survive their being repeated. Jackson named the alternative the Allies had rejected, which was the summary execution that Stalin had at one point proposed and Churchill had at one point endorsed, and argued that the Allies had voluntarily stayed their hand of vengeance and submitted their case to a court because they understood that future generations would judge the proceedings by the standard of the rule of law rather than by the satisfaction of the moment. The framing was rhetorically powerful and substantively important: it established the proceedings as a deliberate constraint on Allied power rather than as an exercise of it.

The evidentiary base was extraordinary. Allied forces had captured roughly eight million pages of German official documents during the closing months of the war and the immediate occupation. The prosecution introduced approximately one hundred thousand pages of those documents into evidence. Roughly two hundred forty witnesses testified live, and approximately three hundred thousand affidavits were submitted. Rudolf Höss, the former commandant of Auschwitz, testified to the operational details of the camp’s killing operations during cross-examination. Otto Ohlendorf, the former commander of Einsatzgruppe D, testified that his unit had killed approximately ninety thousand people during 1941-1942. Hermann Göring testified on his own behalf for a week in March 1946, performing well during direct examination by his counsel and being demolished during Robert Jackson’s cross-examination on documents that linked him directly to the persecution of Jews and the planning of aggressive war. The American documentary case became the working pattern for international criminal prosecutions thereafter: build the case from the regime’s own paper trail and confirm it with witness testimony rather than the reverse.

Defense counsel mounted vigorous representation despite the procedural compromises. Each defendant was represented by German counsel of his choice, with the four-power tribunal supplying counsel for the few defendants who could not arrange their own. The defense was provided with prosecution evidence in advance, was permitted to call its own witnesses, and was permitted full cross-examination of prosecution witnesses. The substantive defenses fell into recognizable categories. Tu quoque arguments tried to introduce evidence of Allied conduct that paralleled the German conduct charged. The tribunal generally rejected these, ruling that the criminality of Allied conduct, if any, was outside the tribunal’s jurisdiction and did not affect the criminality of the conduct charged. Superior-orders defenses tried to deflect responsibility upward to Hitler and his closest circle, all of whom were dead. The tribunal evaluated these case by case under the Article 8 standard, generally rejecting them as complete defenses for senior officials while occasionally giving them weight in mitigation. Ex-post-facto arguments contested the legitimacy of the crimes-against-peace and crimes-against-humanity charges as offenses that had not existed in international law when committed. The tribunal addressed these in its judgment by holding that aggressive war had been criminalized by Kellogg-Briand and that crimes against humanity had been recognized in principle by the Hague Conventions and other instruments.

The tribunal members themselves performed their roles with a seriousness that surprised observers. Lord Justice Geoffrey Lawrence, the British president of the tribunal, ran the courtroom firmly and with judicial restraint, refusing to let the proceedings become a propaganda exercise. Francis Biddle of the United States, Henri Donnedieu de Vabres of France, and Iona Nikitchenko of the Soviet Union sat with their respective alternates and produced a judgment that, while criticized in details, was genuinely the product of judicial deliberation rather than political instruction. Nikitchenko’s role has been the subject of subsequent revisionist work, particularly Francine Hirsch’s Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg, which has shown that the Soviet judicial team operated more independently of Moscow than earlier accounts assumed and that Soviet contributions to the tribunal’s substantive law were more significant than Anglo-American historiography long acknowledged.

The Verdicts

On October 1, 1946, the tribunal delivered judgment. The reading of the verdicts and sentences took most of the day. Twelve defendants were sentenced to death by hanging. Three were sentenced to life imprisonment. Four received determinate prison sentences ranging from ten to twenty years. Three were acquitted. The pattern of verdicts told the story of the prosecution’s strengths and the defense’s modest successes.

The twelve death sentences went to Hermann Göring, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Julius Streicher, Fritz Sauckel, Alfred Jodl, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, and Martin Bormann in absentia. The verdicts reflected the prosecution’s success in linking each defendant to specific orders, decisions, or systematic conduct that had produced large-scale criminality. Streicher’s conviction for crimes against humanity on the basis of his decades of antisemitic incitement was particularly important as an early articulation of the principle that systematic incitement to genocide can itself be criminal even where the speaker has not personally administered killing operations. The principle would be applied again at the Tokyo Tribunal and would become foundational at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda’s media case in the 2000s.

The three life sentences went to Rudolf Hess, Walther Funk, and Erich Raeder. Hess’s case has been the most enduringly contested. He had flown to Scotland in May 1941 and had been in British custody for the entire war, meaning his direct participation in the regime’s worst conduct ended before the major escalations of 1941-1945. The tribunal nevertheless convicted him on the conspiracy and crimes-against-peace counts on the theory that he had been a senior member of the Nazi leadership during the years when aggressive war had been planned and initiated. The dissenting view, articulated since 1946, has been that his pre-1941 role was insufficient to justify a life sentence given that he had not been involved in the conduct that produced the most serious charges. The tribunal majority’s reasoning was that the conspiracy and crimes-against-peace counts addressed precisely his pre-1941 role, and that conviction on those counts was independent of subsequent conduct. Hess served his sentence at Spandau Prison in Berlin until his death by suicide in 1987 at age 93, making him the longest-held prisoner of any of the Nuremberg defendants and the last surviving figure of the Nazi inner circle.

The four determinate sentences went to Karl Dönitz (ten years), Konstantin von Neurath (fifteen years), Baldur von Schirach (twenty years), and Albert Speer (twenty years). Dönitz’s relatively light sentence reflected the tribunal’s finding that German submarine warfare had been broadly comparable to Allied submarine warfare, with the result that the tu quoque argument operated implicitly in mitigation even where the tribunal had rejected it formally. Speer’s sentence was the most contested in subsequent historiography because his postwar memoirs, particularly Inside the Third Reich (1969), constructed a self-presentation as a technocrat who had not known about the Holocaust until the trial, a self-presentation that subsequent scholarship by Gitta Sereny and Adam Tooze has shown was substantially false. His twenty years at Spandau ended in October 1966; his postwar career as the regime’s most articulate apologist ran until his death in 1981.

The three acquittals went to Hjalmar Schacht, Franz von Papen, and Hans Fritzsche. The tribunal’s reasoning was that the prosecution had not established beyond reasonable doubt that each of these defendants had participated in the conspiracy or in specific crimes against peace at the level the indictment charged. The acquittals were controversial within the tribunal: the Soviet judge Nikitchenko filed a written dissent on each. They were also controversial outside it: subsequent denazification courts in Germany convicted Schacht, Papen, and Fritzsche on related charges, though the post-Nuremberg sentences were commuted relatively quickly during the 1950s. The acquittals nevertheless had legal significance because they demonstrated that the tribunal was capable of finding the prosecution had failed to meet its burden, which strengthened the legitimacy of the convictions in cases where the burden had been met.

On October 16, 1946, ten of the twelve death sentences were carried out by hanging in the gymnasium of Nuremberg Prison. Göring suicided with a smuggled cyanide capsule in his cell on the night of October 15, two hours before his scheduled execution. Bormann, tried in absentia, was never located in the immediate postwar period; his remains were eventually identified in Berlin in 1972 and DNA-confirmed in 1998, supporting the consensus that he had died during the breakout from the Führerbunker on May 2, 1945. The remaining ten condemned were hanged by United States Army Master Sergeant John C. Woods between 1:11 a.m. and 2:57 a.m. The executions were observed by representatives of the four powers, photographed by Allied authorities, and reported in the world press. The bodies were cremated at a Munich crematorium and the ashes were scattered into the Isar River, partly to prevent the creation of relics or shrines.

The Subsequent Nuremberg Military Tribunals

The IMT had tried twenty-four senior leaders. The subsequent Nuremberg Military Tribunals, conducted by United States military authorities under Allied Control Council Law No. 10, ran twelve more cases between October 1946 and April 1949 and addressed the broader middle and upper layers of the regime’s apparatus. The NMT cases prosecuted approximately one hundred eighty-five defendants, convicted approximately one hundred forty-two of them, and produced approximately twenty-five death sentences (most subsequently commuted). The cases extended Nuremberg’s principles into the medical profession, the judiciary, the economic and industrial leadership, the SS apparatus, the senior military command, and the diplomatic and ministerial bureaucracy. Kevin Heller’s The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law (2011) is the standard treatment.

The Medical Case, also called the Doctors’ Trial, ran from December 1946 to August 1947. Twenty-three defendants, twenty of them medical doctors, faced charges arising from the human experimentation programs at Auschwitz, Dachau, Ravensbrück, and other camps, and from the so-called euthanasia program that had killed approximately seventy thousand mentally ill, disabled, and chronically ill Germans during 1939-1941 and continued in modified form into 1945. Sixteen defendants were convicted; seven were sentenced to death and hanged. The case produced the Nuremberg Code on human experimentation, articulated by the tribunal in its judgment, which has remained the foundational document on informed consent in medical research ever since.

The Justice Case, December 1946 to December 1947, prosecuted sixteen defendants drawn from the senior ranks of the Nazi judiciary and Reich Ministry of Justice. The charges centered on the use of the legal apparatus for the persecution of Jews, the operation of special courts that produced summary executions on a large scale, and the legal facilitation of policies including the so-called Night and Fog decrees. The case is important in international criminal law for its development of the doctrine that lawyers and judges who participate in the operation of a criminal state apparatus can themselves be criminally responsible for the operation of that apparatus.

The Einsatzgruppen Case, July 1947 to April 1948, prosecuted twenty-four defendants drawn from the SS mobile killing unit commanders who had operated in the rear of the Wehrmacht’s eastern advance from June 1941 onward. The Einsatzgruppen had killed approximately 1.3 to 1.5 million Jews and other targets during 1941-1943, mostly by mass shooting at sites including Babi Yar, Ponary, Kamianets-Podilskyi, and hundreds of smaller locations. The prosecution case rested on the regime’s own operational reports, which had been recovered intact and which documented the killings in numbing detail. The tribunal convicted twenty-two of the twenty-four defendants and sentenced fourteen to death; four of the death sentences were carried out and the remainder were commuted in the political climate of the early Cold War. The case produced the most extensive judicial record of the so-called Holocaust by Bullets and supplied the framework that subsequent prosecutions of mass-shooting operations have relied on.

The IG Farben, Krupp, and Flick cases prosecuted senior figures from German industry. The IG Farben case, August 1947 to July 1948, addressed the chemical conglomerate’s role in slave labor, including its operation of a synthetic rubber and fuel plant adjacent to Auschwitz that worked tens of thousands of camp prisoners to death, and its production of Zyklon B for the gas chambers. Twenty-three defendants stood trial; thirteen were convicted with sentences ranging from eighteen months to eight years. The relative leniency of the sentences was criticized at the time and has been criticized since; the tribunal’s reasoning was that establishing individual responsibility for industrial figures whose decisions had been mediated through corporate structures and state policy required higher evidentiary thresholds than the tribunal felt the prosecution had met for several defendants. The Krupp case, December 1947 to July 1948, prosecuted twelve senior figures from the Krupp armaments empire and convicted eleven, with sentences up to twelve years for slave labor and plunder. The Flick case, April to December 1947, prosecuted six defendants from the Friedrich Flick industrial group and convicted three.

The Hostages, High Command, Pohl, RuSHA, Ministries, and Milch cases addressed the senior military commanders of the southern and eastern theaters, the SS economic-administrative office that had run the camp system, the SS Race and Settlement Main Office that had administered the Generalplan Ost colonization program, the senior officials of the Foreign Ministry and other ministries, and Field Marshal Erhard Milch of the Luftwaffe. Together the twelve NMT cases established that the regime’s criminality had not been the project of a small clique at the top but had required the active participation of broad professional, military, economic, and bureaucratic elites. The institutional reach of the prosecutions was the NMT’s distinctive contribution, and the legal principles developed across the twelve cases supplied much of the substantive content that the 1950 codification of the Nuremberg Principles by the United Nations International Law Commission would draw on.

The Five Nuremberg Principles

The five-principle matrix is the durable contribution of the proceedings to international law. Each principle has a Charter formulation, a subsequent doctrinal development, and a contemporary invocation. The matrix below traces each.

The first principle is individual criminal responsibility for state actors. The Charter formulation appears in Articles 6 and 7: persons committing the defined offenses were individually responsible; the official position of any defendant did not relieve him of responsibility or mitigate punishment. The subsequent development came through the 1950 ILC formulation (Principle I: any person who commits an act constituting a crime under international law is responsible therefor and liable to punishment), through the 1948 Genocide Convention (Article IV: persons committing genocide shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials, or private individuals), and through every subsequent international criminal instrument. Contemporary invocation runs through the indictments of Slobodan Milošević in 1999 (the first indictment of a sitting head of state by an international tribunal), Charles Taylor of Liberia in 2003, Omar al-Bashir of Sudan in 2009, and Vladimir Putin in 2023 by the International Criminal Court for the deportation of Ukrainian children. The principle that no office shields its holder from international criminal accountability is now formally embedded in the practice of international tribunals, even where political conditions prevent enforcement.

The second principle is the rejection of superior orders as a complete defense. The Charter formulation appears in Article 8: the fact that the defendant acted pursuant to order of his government or of a superior shall not free him from responsibility, but may be considered in mitigation if the tribunal determines that justice so requires. The subsequent development came through the 1950 ILC formulation (Principle IV), the 1949 Geneva Conventions, the 1977 Additional Protocols, and the Rome Statute Article 33. Contemporary invocation appears whenever military officers or government officials assert that they were acting on instructions from above; the standard developed since 1945 holds that orders to commit acts whose criminality is manifest do not shield the executor, while orders whose criminality was not apparent at the time may sometimes be considered in mitigation. The principle has been applied in war-crimes prosecutions arising from Vietnam, the Balkans, Rwanda, and recent conflicts.

The third principle is crimes against humanity as offenses cognizable in international law independent of the framework of war crimes. The Charter formulation appears in Article 6(c): murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, plus persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds. The subsequent development first came through the 1948 Genocide Convention, which carved off genocide as a distinct international crime, and through the gradual judicial expansion of crimes against humanity to apply outside the wartime context that the original Charter nexus had required. The Statutes of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (1993) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (1994) embraced crimes against humanity without the wartime nexus, and the Rome Statute (1998, operational 2002) treats them as offenses against international law in their own right. Contemporary invocation runs through every indictment of state-orchestrated atrocity since 1993, including the indictments arising from Bosnia, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cambodia, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Mali, and Ukraine.

The fourth principle is aggressive war as an international crime. The Charter formulation appears in Article 6(a): the planning, preparation, initiation, or waging of aggressive war or war in violation of international treaties, plus participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing. The subsequent development was the most contested. The 1950 ILC codification preserved the principle, but state practice during the Cold War undermined it: neither superpower wanted aggressive war to be litigated when their proxy conflicts began producing the questions, and the United Nations Charter’s prohibition on the use of force operated as a parallel framework that made the criminal-law version largely dormant. The Rome Statute included the crime of aggression as one of the four core crimes within the ICC’s jurisdiction, but the operative definition was not finalized until the 2010 Kampala Review Conference and was not activated until 2018, with sharply limited jurisdictional reach. Contemporary invocation has been thin precisely because the major-power coalition that would be needed to prosecute aggression at the international level has not formed since 1945. The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine has revived discussion of a special tribunal for the crime of aggression and has demonstrated that the Charter principle remains conceptually alive even where institutional implementation has been incomplete.

The fifth principle is conspiracy and common plan as chargeable offenses. The Charter formulation appears in Article 6 generally and in the linking language of each substantive offense: persons participating in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of the offenses defined by the Charter were responsible for all acts performed by any persons in execution of such plan. The subsequent development has been complex. Common-law systems have generally maintained robust conspiracy doctrines; civil-law systems have generally been more skeptical. The ad hoc tribunals and the ICC have moved toward joint criminal enterprise and co-perpetration doctrines that achieve similar ends through different doctrinal routes. Contemporary invocation appears in the modes-of-liability sections of every international criminal indictment, where the doctrinal framework for attributing criminal responsibility across organizations and chains of command continues to be developed.

The matrix is not a tidy success story. Each principle has been contested in its specifics, applied selectively for political reasons, and debated in scholarly literature. What the matrix demonstrates is that the Charter framework was not a one-off response to an extraordinary criminal regime but the foundation of a body of law that has continued to develop for eighty years. International criminal law as a working field exists because of the Charter; without the Charter, the field would either not exist at all or would have begun much later under different and probably less coherent conditions. The interactive World History Timeline at ReportMedic maps the legal milestones in the post-1945 development of international criminal law in chronological context, alongside the broader political history within which the principles operated.

The Tokyo Tribunal Comparison

The International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the Tokyo Tribunal, ran from May 3, 1946, to November 12, 1948, and prosecuted twenty-eight senior Japanese leaders for crimes parallel to those charged at Nuremberg. The tribunal was constituted by General Douglas MacArthur as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, and its eleven judges came from Australia, Canada, China, France, India, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the Philippines, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The proceedings produced seven death sentences (carried out December 1948), sixteen life sentences, two shorter terms, two deaths during trial, and one finding of unfitness to stand trial.

The Tokyo Tribunal differed from Nuremberg in several important respects, all of which illuminate Nuremberg by contrast. First, the Tokyo proceedings preserved Emperor Hirohito from prosecution as a deliberate political choice by MacArthur, who had concluded that prosecuting the Emperor would have made the United States occupation of Japan ungovernable. The choice has been criticized by historians since as a substantial compromise of the principle that no office shields its holder from international criminal accountability; defenders have argued that it was a pragmatic recognition of occupation realities and that it was offset by the prosecution of senior figures who had served as instruments of imperial policy. Second, the Tokyo charging instrument was less doctrinally tight than the Nuremberg Charter. The crimes-against-humanity count was barely used, partly because the most distinctive Japanese atrocities (the Nanking Massacre, biological warfare experiments by Unit 731, the Bataan Death March, the comfort-women system, the systematic mistreatment of Allied prisoners of war) fell more naturally within war-crimes categories. Third, the Tokyo prosecutorial team was less prepared and less unified than the Nuremberg team, and the proceedings sprawled over nearly three years compared to Nuremberg’s eleven months. Fourth, the dissenting opinions at Tokyo were more substantial than at Nuremberg. The Indian judge Radhabinod Pal filed a 1,235-page dissent that disputed the tribunal’s jurisdiction over crimes against peace, criticized the absence of any consideration of Allied conduct (particularly the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki), and would have acquitted all defendants. Pal’s dissent has been read by Indian and Asian commentators as a serious critique and by mainstream international-law scholarship as an outlier; both readings can be sustained from the text.

The Tokyo Tribunal’s substantive contribution to international criminal law was less systematic than Nuremberg’s. Where Nuremberg produced a sharp legal-doctrinal package, Tokyo produced a more diffuse set of precedents, and where Nuremberg’s principles were quickly codified by the ILC in 1950, Tokyo’s contributions were absorbed into the broader Nuremberg framework rather than being treated as a separate body of law. The relative quietness of Tokyo’s legal legacy reflects the political conditions of the early occupation years: the United States was preparing Japan as a Cold War ally by the late 1940s and had reasons to wind down war-crimes prosecutions rather than amplify them. Several Class A war criminals who had been imprisoned were released through the 1950s under the San Francisco Peace Treaty (1951) and the bilateral arrangements that followed, and Nobusuke Kishi, who had been arrested as a Class A suspect but never indicted, became Prime Minister of Japan from 1957 to 1960. The trajectory illustrates how international criminal-law principles can be applied with full vigor in one occupation context and substantially diluted in another, depending on the political objectives of the occupying powers. The atomic endgame in the Pacific, which Pal cited as an unprosecuted Allied act, sat behind the Tokyo proceedings as an awkward fact that shaped how some judges and observers received them.

The Victor’s Justice Question

The most enduring critique of Nuremberg is that the proceedings constituted victor’s justice rather than international justice. The argument has several components, each of which deserves engagement on its own terms.

The first component is the procedural critique. The tribunal had been constituted by the four governments whose armies had defeated Germany. The judges, the prosecutors, and the rules had all been supplied by the victorious powers. No neutral state had been represented on the bench. Defendants had been tried by a court that none of them had any role in choosing or that operated under rules that no German participant had helped to draft. By the standards of ordinary criminal procedure, this would be a serious defect. The defenders’ response is that no neutral state had the political weight, the documentary evidence, the security of the venue, or the institutional capacity to conduct such a tribunal in 1945-1946; that the alternative to a four-power tribunal was no tribunal at all (or, worse, summary execution); and that the tribunal nevertheless operated under genuine rules of evidence and procedure, acquitted three defendants, gave determinate sentences calibrated to evidence, and produced a documentary record that has held up under eighty years of scholarly examination. The procedural critique has weight; the defense against it has more.

The second component is the ex-post-facto critique. The crimes-against-peace and crimes-against-humanity counts addressed conduct that, at the time it was committed, had not been clearly defined as criminal in international law. The principle of legality (nullum crimen sine lege) is foundational in criminal procedure, and a tribunal that convicts defendants of offenses that did not exist when the conduct occurred faces a serious objection. The defenders’ response is twofold. First, the underlying conduct (mass murder of civilians, persecution of populations on racial and political grounds, planning of aggressive war in violation of treaty commitments) was unambiguously criminal under the laws of every state in 1939, including Germany; the only innovation was the international-law form of the prosecution. Second, the Kellogg-Briand Pact had renounced aggressive war as a matter of international law in 1928, the Hague Conventions had recognized in principle that civilian populations were protected, and the Geneva Conventions had built protections for prisoners and the wounded. The Charter’s offense definitions extended these existing instruments rather than inventing offenses from nothing. The ex-post-facto critique has some force on the aggressive-war count and considerably less on crimes against humanity and war crimes; the defense varies in strength across the four counts.

The third component is the comparative-conduct critique. The tribunal applied principles to German conduct that, if applied evenly, would have implicated Allied conduct as well. Soviet actions, including the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the 1940 Katyn Forest massacre of approximately twenty-two thousand Polish officers and intelligentsia (which Soviet authorities tried to introduce as a German crime at Nuremberg, with the tribunal eventually ruling the matter inconclusive), the deportation of populations from the Baltic states, the Caucasus, and other territories, and the postwar mass deportation of ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe under the Potsdam framework, were not subject to parallel prosecution. Allied strategic bombing, including the firebombing of Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killed hundreds of thousands of civilians under conditions that, on a strict reading of the laws of war, were at least debatable. The defenders’ response is that the moral and factual asymmetry between Allied and German conduct was real and substantial: the Allies had engaged in actions that were sometimes legally questionable in pursuit of legitimate war aims against an aggressor, while Germany had engaged in systematic genocide and aggressive war as state policy. The comparison was therefore not apples-to-apples, and a tribunal that had insisted on perfect symmetry would either have failed to prosecute Germany at all or would have prosecuted everyone for everything in a way that would have collapsed the proceedings into a non-discriminating recitation of grievance. The comparative-conduct critique is the strongest of the three, particularly with respect to the Soviet record, and it has motivated subsequent scholarship that examines Allied conduct without using that examination to relativize German criminality.

The fourth component is the legitimacy critique. Even if the procedural, ex-post-facto, and comparative-conduct critiques can each be answered, the deeper question is whether a tribunal can legitimately exist where one set of states tries another set of states’ officials for their official conduct. The defenders’ response is that legitimacy is not a binary but a matter of degree, that the tribunal’s legitimacy was contested in 1945 but has been progressively vindicated by the durability of the principles it produced, and that the alternative legal architectures that have been proposed since (universal jurisdiction in national courts, treaty-based international courts with universal subscription, ad hoc tribunals constituted by the United Nations Security Council) have all themselves faced legitimacy questions and have generally drawn on Nuremberg precedent in answering them.

The cumulative answer to the victor’s-justice critique is that all four components contain truths, that none of them defeats the proceedings as a whole, and that the legitimacy of the tribunal has been ratified by the subsequent development of international criminal law into a working body of practice. The proceedings operated under the conditions available in 1945-1946. Better conditions were not on offer. The tribunal that resulted was imperfect, the criticisms are real, and the criticisms do not undo the contribution. Gary Bass’s Stay the Hand of Vengeance (2000) offers the most balanced treatment of these questions; his conclusion is that war-crimes tribunals are politically constituted by their nature and that the political constitution does not itself disqualify them, provided they operate under genuine procedural constraint.

Hannah Arendt and the Banality of Evil

Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) drew on the Nuremberg legal framework while pushing it in directions the original Charter had not anticipated. Arendt covered the 1961 Jerusalem trial of Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer who had administered the deportation of Jews from across occupied Europe to the death camps, for The New Yorker, and her articles became one of the most influential books of postwar intellectual history.

Arendt’s central argument was that Eichmann was not the demonic figure his crimes might have suggested. He was, she argued, a thoughtless functionary, a careerist whose evil consisted not in monstrous depths of malice but in his refusal or inability to think about what he was doing. Her phrase “the banality of evil” captured the unsettling possibility that the perpetrators of mass atrocity could be ordinary bureaucrats whose ordinariness was itself the condition of their participation. The argument complicated the Nuremberg framework, which had implicitly treated the senior leadership of the Third Reich as exceptional figures whose decisions could be isolated and prosecuted. If Eichmann’s banality was representative rather than exceptional, then the locus of moral and legal responsibility extended much further down into the regime’s apparatus than the IMT’s twenty-four senior defendants suggested. The NMT cases had already pointed in this direction by prosecuting doctors, judges, industrialists, and middle-rank military officers; Arendt extended the analysis to argue that the bureaucratic machinery of the regime could not be understood as the product of a small criminal elite but had to be understood as the product of widespread thoughtlessness coordinated by institutional structures.

Arendt’s reading was contested when published and remains contested. Her account of Eichmann’s ordinariness was partly contradicted by the evidence that emerged later, including the so-called Sassen interviews conducted in Argentina in the 1950s, which showed Eichmann as more ideologically committed and more knowingly antisemitic than Arendt’s report had suggested. Bettina Stangneth’s Eichmann Before Jerusalem (2011) is the most thorough revisionist treatment. Arendt’s account of Jewish leadership cooperation with Nazi authorities, particularly her treatment of the Jewish Councils, was sharply criticized by Jewish intellectuals at the time and remains a flashpoint in historiography of the period. Her broader philosophical argument about thoughtlessness as the condition of bureaucratic evil has nevertheless persisted, even where her specific characterization of Eichmann has been revised. The persistent resonance of the argument owes something to the way it locates evil not in extraordinary persons but in ordinary institutions, which is precisely the locus that the NMT cases had begun to examine.

The intellectual relationship between Arendt and Nuremberg illustrates a broader pattern. The proceedings produced legal principles that have continued to develop. The proceedings also produced philosophical and historical questions that have continued to develop in their own register. Both developments draw on the original event without being limited by it. Literature has done parallel work on the structures of unaccountable power and the conditions under which ordinary people become participants in extraordinary harm; the comparative analysis of how classic novels treat power and corruption maps the literary tradition that runs in parallel to the political-historical tradition Arendt was writing into. The literary and historical conversations have informed each other across the postwar decades, and reading Nuremberg as institutional biography requires holding both registers in view.

Consequences and Impact

The line of consequence runs from the 1945 Charter forward through eight decades of international legal development. The 1948 Genocide Convention, drafted under the leadership of Raphael Lemkin (who had coined the term “genocide” in 1944 partly in response to the unprosecuted Armenian Genocide), defined genocide as a distinct international crime and obligated signatory states to prevent and punish it. The 1949 Geneva Conventions updated the laws of war with explicit provisions for grave breaches subject to universal jurisdiction. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the subsequent 1966 International Covenants articulated a parallel body of human-rights law that rested on premises the Charter had advanced. The 1968 Convention on the Non-Applicability of Statutory Limitations to War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity prevented the running of statutes of limitations on the crimes Nuremberg had prosecuted, ensuring that aging perpetrators could still be tried. The 1984 Convention Against Torture criminalized torture as a separate offense and obligated states to prosecute or extradite suspected torturers found in their territory.

The ad hoc international tribunals of the 1990s applied Nuremberg principles to the post-Cold War conflicts. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, established by United Nations Security Council Resolution 827 in May 1993, indicted one hundred sixty-one defendants and produced a substantial body of jurisprudence on crimes against humanity and war crimes. Slobodan Milošević became the first sitting head of state to be indicted by an international tribunal in 1999 and was on trial at The Hague when he died in 2006. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, established by Resolution 955 in November 1994, addressed the genocide of approximately 800,000 Rwandans (primarily Tutsis) over a hundred days in April-July 1994 and produced a series of foundational judgments on genocide, particularly the 1998 Akayesu judgment, which articulated for the first time that rape could constitute an act of genocide. The Special Court for Sierra Leone (2002), the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (2006), the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (2007), and the Kosovo Specialist Chambers (2015) extended the model into other contexts.

The Rome Statute, signed in 1998 and entering into force in 2002, established the International Criminal Court as a permanent treaty-based tribunal with jurisdiction over genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression (the last activated in 2018 with limited reach). One hundred twenty-four states have ratified the Statute as of 2024, with notable non-parties including the United States (signed but unratified), Russia (signed and unsigned), China, India, and Israel. The ICC has issued indictments in cases arising from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Central African Republic, Sudan (Darfur), Kenya, Côte d’Ivoire, Libya, Mali, Georgia, Bangladesh/Myanmar, Afghanistan, Palestine, the Philippines, Venezuela, and Ukraine. The court has produced convictions, acquittals, withdrawn cases, and ongoing proceedings; its track record is mixed, its institutional legitimacy is contested in particular jurisdictions, and its enforcement capacity is limited by the absence of an international police force. What the court demonstrably does is keep the Nuremberg framework operational eight decades after its founding.

National prosecutions under universal jurisdiction have provided a parallel track. German courts have prosecuted aging participants in the Holocaust and other Nazi crimes for decades, with cases continuing into the 2010s and 2020s under the Demjanjuk doctrine, which allows prosecution of camp guards on the basis of their participation in the operation of an extermination apparatus without requiring proof of specific killings. French, Italian, Belgian, Swedish, Dutch, Spanish, Argentine, and Chilean courts have prosecuted defendants for crimes against humanity, war crimes, and torture under universal-jurisdiction statutes, with cases arising from Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, Argentina’s Dirty War, the Spanish Civil War’s aftermath, and the Pinochet regime in Chile. The 1998 arrest of Augusto Pinochet in London on a Spanish extradition warrant for crimes against humanity, and the subsequent House of Lords ruling that he could not claim sovereign immunity for the offenses charged, was a watershed moment in the operationalization of Article 7 of the Charter at the national level.

The consequences extend beyond formal legal institutions. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights drew on the Charter’s premise that the treatment of populations is a matter of international concern. The various truth and reconciliation commissions of the 1980s and 1990s, including the South African TRC, drew on the Nuremberg framework while moving in a complementary direction (truth-telling rather than prosecution as the primary mechanism of accountability). The Responsibility to Protect doctrine articulated in the 2005 World Summit Outcome Document built on the premise that sovereignty does not shield states from accountability for genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, or crimes against humanity. The principles have moved from courtroom doctrine into the broader vocabulary of international politics, even where their operational implementation remains incomplete. The chronological mapping of these developments alongside the broader twentieth-century geopolitical context, available through the chronological map of the twentieth century at ReportMedic, is a useful supplement to the dense legal-doctrinal narrative.

The Wider Context

The Nuremberg proceedings cannot be isolated from the war they followed or the postwar order they helped shape. The aggressive war that produced the prosecution had killed approximately seventy to eighty-five million people across the European and Pacific theaters, displaced tens of millions more, destroyed industrial capacity and urban housing across the entire war zone, and exposed the inadequacy of the interwar international system to prevent or contain such conflict. The 1945 endgame within which Nuremberg occurred involved decisions by the Allied governments about the postwar political settlement, the partition of Germany into occupation zones, the boundaries of postwar Europe, the reparations regime, and the institutions (the United Nations, the Bretton Woods system, the Marshall Plan announced in 1947) that would govern the postwar order. The tribunal was one institutional component of that broader settlement.

The relationship between the trial and the broader settlement is not always straightforward. Nuremberg prosecuted senior Nazi leaders for crimes against peace, but the postwar settlement preserved several principles that Nuremberg’s logic might have called into question. The mass deportation of approximately twelve to fourteen million ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia, Poland, and other Eastern European territories under the Potsdam framework would, by the Charter’s definitions, have raised questions of crimes against humanity if the perpetrators had been Germans rather than Allied governments. The Soviet absorption of the Baltic states, the imposition of Soviet-style governments across Eastern Europe through 1948, and the displacement of populations on a continental scale during 1944-1948 operated in a register that the Charter’s logic did not address. The tribunal therefore sat uneasily within a postwar order that was itself only partially congruent with the principles the tribunal was articulating, and the awkwardness has been a recurring theme in subsequent reflection.

The German engagement with the Nuremberg legacy has gone through several phases. The immediate postwar period (1945-1949) saw the IMT and NMT proceedings within Germany conducted by Allied authorities, and a parallel set of denazification proceedings conducted by German tribunals under Allied supervision that processed millions of cases at the lower bureaucratic level. The Federal Republic of Germany under Konrad Adenauer (1949-1963) generally muted the engagement with Nuremberg in favor of integration into the Western alliance. The 1958 establishment of the Central Office for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes at Ludwigsburg, the 1963-1965 Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, the 1968 reform of the German Criminal Code that aligned it with international standards on Nazi-era crimes, and the long arc of subsequent prosecutions (continuing through the Demjanjuk trial in Munich in 2009-2011 and the prosecutions of camp guards in their nineties in the 2010s) constituted a German reckoning that drew on the Nuremberg precedent without simply replicating it. The German engagement is the most thoroughly developed national engagement with international criminal-law principles arising from the Holocaust; comparable engagements in other postwar transition contexts have been less complete.

The Soviet engagement was different. The USSR claimed Nuremberg as a vindication of Soviet contributions to the Allied victory, while sealing the records of its own internal repression and refusing to subject Soviet conduct to the scrutiny the tribunal had applied to German conduct. The Katyn massacre, attempted by Soviet prosecutors as a German crime at Nuremberg, was eventually acknowledged as a Soviet crime by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 and confirmed by Boris Yeltsin in 1992. The Soviet relationship with the Nuremberg legacy was therefore an instrumentalization rather than a reckoning, and the post-Soviet states have addressed that legacy with varying degrees of openness. Hirsch’s Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg (2020) draws on Russian archival sources to show that Soviet jurists genuinely believed in the international-criminal-law project at the time of the proceedings, even where their political masters were instrumentalizing the proceedings for narrower ends. The complexity of the Soviet engagement, recoverable now through archives that were closed for fifty years, is one of the recent additions to the historiography.

The Japanese engagement with the Tokyo legacy has been more contested than the German engagement with the Nuremberg legacy. The early postwar release of Class A war criminals, the integration of figures like Kishi into postwar Japanese politics, the controversial inclusion of fourteen Class A war criminals at Yasukuni Shrine in 1978, and the periodic visits to Yasukuni by senior Japanese politicians have all generated regional tensions, particularly with China and Korea, that have not been resolved. The Japanese textbook controversies, the disputes over the comfort-women system, and the ongoing debates about the Nanking Massacre all illustrate how the Tokyo legacy has been contested in ways that the Nuremberg legacy has been contested less. The contrast is partly a function of the different occupation policies, partly a function of the different domestic political configurations, and partly a function of the Cold War conditions that shaped how each occupation transitioned out.

Why It Still Matters

The Nuremberg Trials matter today because the legal framework they produced is the framework within which questions of state criminality are now framed. When the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin in March 2023, the warrant rested on Article 7 of the Rome Statute (crimes against humanity), which descends through the 1998 Rome Statute, the 1993 ICTY Statute, the 1950 ILC Nuremberg Principles, and the 1945 London Charter Article 6(c). The line is not metaphorical; it is the actual legal lineage. When prosecutors at the Karim Khan office investigate alleged crimes in Gaza, the West Bank, Ukraine, Sudan, or Myanmar, they apply doctrines whose foundations were laid at the Palace of Justice between November 1945 and October 1946. The framework can be criticized, can be selectively applied, can be politically contested, but it is the framework, and it descends from Nuremberg.

The proceedings matter also because they answered a question that had not been answered before. The question was whether senior officials of states that had committed mass atrocity could be held individually accountable through judicial proceedings under international rules. The pre-1945 answer had been no, in practice if not in principle. The post-1945 answer is yes, in principle if not always in practice. The shift from no to yes is the durable contribution. The shift has not been complete, the implementation has been uneven, the political constraints have been severe, and the gap between principle and practice has been substantial in particular cases. The answer has nevertheless changed, and the change has structured how subsequent generations think about state criminality.

The proceedings matter further because they demonstrated that the rule of law could constrain even the satisfaction of vengeance in the moment of greatest temptation. The Allied governments in spring 1945 had every political and emotional reason to summarily execute the senior Nazi leadership. The decision to conduct judicial proceedings instead, with rules of evidence, defense counsel, and the genuine possibility of acquittal, was a decision against the immediate impulse and for a longer-running principle. The decision was contested at the time, was implemented imperfectly, and produced outcomes that some defendants did not fully deserve and that other defendants escaped. The decision was nevertheless taken, and the precedent has shaped subsequent transitions out of conflict and atrocity. Truth and reconciliation commissions, transitional-justice processes, hybrid courts, and the broader transitional-justice field all draw on the Nuremberg model as one of their reference points.

The proceedings matter finally because they produced a documentary record that has been the foundation of Holocaust historiography and of the historiography of the Third Reich more broadly. The approximately one hundred thousand pages of documents introduced into evidence, plus the millions of additional pages of recovered German records that the prosecution did not introduce but that became available to scholars through the proceedings’ aftermath, constitute the largest body of evidence about a state’s criminal conduct ever assembled in a judicial setting. Holocaust deniers have been forced to deny not just the moral character of the events but the documentary record of the events, which has made the deniers’ position progressively less tenable as the documents have been digitized and made accessible. The David Irving libel case in 2000, in which Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books defeated Irving’s defamation claim by demonstrating that his Holocaust-denying writings were systematically dishonest, drew heavily on documents whose preservation and authentication were Nuremberg legacies.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What were the Nuremberg Trials?

The Nuremberg Trials were two linked sets of proceedings. The International Military Tribunal, an unprecedented four-power court constituted by the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and France under the London Charter of August 8, 1945, tried twenty-four senior Nazi leaders from November 1945 to October 1946 on four counts: conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The subsequent Nuremberg Military Tribunals, conducted by United States authorities under Allied Control Council Law No. 10, ran twelve more cases from 1946 to 1949 and prosecuted approximately one hundred eighty-five defendants drawn from the medical profession, judiciary, military command, SS apparatus, industry, and ministries. Together the proceedings produced both a set of convictions and the legal-institutional foundation for modern international criminal law.

Q: When did the Nuremberg Trials happen?

The IMT proceedings opened on November 20, 1945, with the arraignment of the defendants in Courtroom 600 of the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg. The trial ran for 218 court days and concluded with the judgment delivered on October 1, 1946. Ten of the twelve death sentences were carried out by hanging on October 16, 1946. The subsequent NMT cases ran from October 1946 (the Medical Case began in December 1946 with arraignment, with trial starting that month) through April 1949, with the last verdicts delivered in the High Command and Ministries cases. The full sequence of major proceedings at Nuremberg therefore spans November 1945 to April 1949, a period of roughly three and a half years.

Q: Who were the defendants at the IMT?

The twenty-one defendants who were tried in person at the IMT included Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Julius Streicher, Walther Funk, Hjalmar Schacht, Karl Dönitz, Erich Raeder, Baldur von Schirach, Fritz Sauckel, Alfred Jodl, Franz von Papen, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Albert Speer, Konstantin von Neurath, and Hans Fritzsche. Three additional defendants were on the original indictment but not tried: Robert Ley (suicided in October 1945 before arraignment), Gustav Krupp (medically incapacitated), and Martin Bormann (tried in absentia, almost certainly dead by then). The defendants represented the surviving senior leadership of the regime across civilian, military, ideological, economic, and propaganda functions.

Q: What were the verdicts at the IMT?

Twelve defendants were sentenced to death by hanging: Göring, Ribbentrop, Keitel, Kaltenbrunner, Rosenberg, Frank, Frick, Streicher, Sauckel, Jodl, Seyss-Inquart, and Bormann (in absentia). Three were sentenced to life imprisonment: Hess, Funk, and Raeder. Four received determinate prison sentences: Speer (twenty years), Schirach (twenty years), Neurath (fifteen years), and Dönitz (ten years). Three were acquitted: Schacht, Papen, and Fritzsche. Of the death sentences, ten were carried out on October 16, 1946; Göring suicided the night before with a smuggled cyanide capsule; Bormann’s sentence was never carried out because he had died in May 1945. The acquitted defendants were subsequently tried by German denazification courts and convicted, but the IMT acquittals themselves were not overturned.

Q: What were the Nuremberg Principles?

The Nuremberg Principles are seven principles that the United Nations International Law Commission codified in 1950 from the Charter and judgment of the IMT. The first establishes individual criminal responsibility under international law for any person who commits an act constituting a crime under international law. The second establishes that absence of national-law criminalization of an act does not relieve the actor of international responsibility. The third establishes that official position does not relieve responsibility. The fourth establishes that superior orders do not relieve responsibility, though they may mitigate punishment if justice so requires. The fifth guarantees fair-trial rights. The sixth catalogs the three categories of crimes (crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity). The seventh establishes that conspiracy or common plan to commit any of the foregoing is itself a crime. These principles have been the doctrinal foundation of every subsequent international criminal proceeding.

Q: What were crimes against humanity?

Crimes against humanity, as defined in Article 6(c) of the London Charter, are murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population before or during a war, plus persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds. The category was an innovation in 1945 because pre-existing war-crimes law applied only to acts committed against enemy nationals or in occupied territory and did not reach state action against the state’s own civilian population. The Charter’s nexus clause initially required that crimes against humanity be linked to the war or its planning, limiting their reach. Subsequent international criminal law (the ICTY and ICTR Statutes in the 1990s, the Rome Statute in 1998) removed the wartime nexus and established crimes against humanity as standalone international offenses applicable in peacetime as well as wartime.

Q: Why was Hess sentenced to life rather than death?

Rudolf Hess had flown solo to Scotland on May 10, 1941, in an apparent attempt to negotiate peace with Britain. He was held in British custody for the rest of the war, meaning his direct participation in the regime’s worst conduct ended before the major escalations of 1941-1945, including the Holocaust’s industrial phase and the war of annihilation in the east. The IMT convicted him on the conspiracy and crimes-against-peace counts on the theory that his pre-1941 role as Hitler’s deputy had made him substantially responsible for the planning and initiation of aggressive war, but acquitted him on the war-crimes and crimes-against-humanity counts because his post-1941 absence from Germany meant he had not participated in the worst conduct. The life sentence reflected the conviction on aggressive-war charges combined with the acquittal on Holocaust-related charges. Hess served his sentence at Spandau Prison until his death by suicide in August 1987 at age 93.

Q: Was Nuremberg victor’s justice?

The victor’s-justice critique has four components. Procedurally, the tribunal was constituted by the four governments whose armies had won the war, with judges, prosecutors, and rules supplied by the victors. Doctrinally, the crimes-against-peace and crimes-against-humanity counts addressed conduct that had not been clearly criminalized in international law before 1945. Comparatively, Allied conduct (the Soviet invasion of Poland, the Katyn massacre, strategic bombing, the atomic bombings) was not subject to parallel prosecution. Politically, the tribunal’s legitimacy rested on the political authority of the four powers rather than on any genuinely neutral foundation. The defenders’ response is that the procedural compromises were the price of any tribunal at all in 1945, that the doctrinal innovations extended existing instruments rather than inventing offenses from nothing, that the moral asymmetry between Allied and German conduct was real, and that the tribunal’s legitimacy has been progressively vindicated by the subsequent development of international criminal law. The fairest assessment is that the proceedings had real defects and produced a real and durable contribution.

Q: What were the Tokyo Trials?

The International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the Tokyo Tribunal, ran from May 3, 1946, to November 12, 1948. It was constituted by General Douglas MacArthur as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers and had eleven judges from Australia, Canada, China, France, India, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the Philippines, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Twenty-eight senior Japanese leaders stood trial on charges paralleling the IMT’s. The proceedings produced seven death sentences (carried out December 1948), sixteen life sentences, two shorter terms, two deaths during trial, and one finding of unfitness. The Tokyo Tribunal preserved Emperor Hirohito from prosecution as a deliberate political choice by MacArthur, was less doctrinally tight than the IMT, and produced more substantial dissents (particularly by Indian judge Radhabinod Pal). The Tokyo legacy has been more contested in postwar Japanese politics than the Nuremberg legacy has been in postwar German politics.

Q: How did Nuremberg change international law?

The Nuremberg framework introduced individual criminal responsibility for state actors, rejected superior orders as a complete defense, established crimes against humanity as offenses cognizable in international law, criminalized aggressive war, and made conspiracy to commit these offenses chargeable. The 1950 codification by the United Nations International Law Commission, the 1948 Genocide Convention, the 1949 Geneva Conventions and 1977 Additional Protocols, the 1984 Convention Against Torture, the 1993 ICTY Statute, the 1994 ICTR Statute, the 1998 Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court (operational 2002), and the various hybrid courts of the 2000s all descend from the Charter framework. The line is not metaphorical; the legal doctrines applied today by international tribunals trace through specific intermediate instruments back to the Charter and the IMT judgment.

Q: Who was Robert Jackson?

Robert H. Jackson was an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court who took leave from the Court to serve as the United States’ chief prosecutor at the IMT. He had previously served as United States Attorney General (1940-1941) before his Court appointment in July 1941. Jackson led the United States team in the London Conference negotiations of June-August 1945 that produced the Charter, delivered the opening statement on November 21, 1945, conducted the cross-examination of Hermann Göring in March 1946, and supervised the United States prosecution team throughout. His opening statement framed the proceedings as a constitutional moment for international law and remains one of the foundational documents of the field. Jackson returned to the Supreme Court after the IMT and served until his death in 1954. His role was disproportionate; the Charter and the proceedings would not have existed in their actual form without him.

Q: What was the role of the Soviet Union at Nuremberg?

The Soviet Union was one of the four constituting powers and supplied judges, prosecutors, and substantial documentary evidence. General Iona Nikitchenko served as the Soviet member of the tribunal, with Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Volchkov as alternate. The Soviet prosecution team was led by General Roman Rudenko. Documentary contributions from Moscow included captured German records from the Eastern Front and witness testimony from survivors of operations including the siege of Leningrad and the Belorussian Operation. The Soviet conduct during the proceedings was uneven: an attempt to introduce the Katyn massacre as a German crime collapsed when the evidence pointed to Soviet responsibility, and the Soviet judges filed dissenting opinions on the three acquittals and on what they considered insufficiently severe sentences. Francine Hirsch’s Soviet Judgment at Nuremberg (2020) has shown that Soviet contributions to the substantive law of the proceedings were more significant than Anglo-American historiography long acknowledged.

Q: Did the IMT establish a precedent for genocide prosecution?

The IMT did not specifically prosecute the offense of genocide, because the term “genocide” had been coined only in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin and was not yet a defined international crime in 1945. The conduct that would now be charged as genocide was prosecuted at the IMT under the war-crimes and crimes-against-humanity counts, and the IMT judgment used the term “genocide” in describing some of the conduct. The 1948 Genocide Convention, signed three years after the IMT, formally established genocide as a distinct international crime, drawing on the Charter framework and on Lemkin’s advocacy. The first conviction for genocide as a distinct international offense came at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in 1998 (the Akayesu judgment). The IMT therefore established the precedent for international criminal prosecution of mass atrocity, while the specific offense of genocide came shortly after through the 1948 Convention.

Q: How did the proceedings deal with the Holocaust?

The Holocaust was extensively documented at the IMT through the war-crimes and crimes-against-humanity counts, with evidence including German operational records, the testimony of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss during cross-examination, the testimony of Einsatzgruppe D commander Otto Ohlendorf, photographs, films, and survivor affidavits. The IMT judgment found that the systematic persecution and extermination of European Jewry had been a primary criminal undertaking of the regime. The subsequent NMT proceedings, particularly the Einsatzgruppen Case (1947-1948), the Justice Case, the Medical Case, and elements of the Pohl and RuSHA cases, addressed the Holocaust in greater operational detail. The proceedings together produced the foundational documentary record on which Holocaust historiography has rested ever since, even as scholarly understanding has continued to develop through subsequent archival work, witness accounts, and analytical frameworks.

Q: What was the Doctors’ Trial?

The Medical Case, also called the Doctors’ Trial, ran from December 1946 to August 1947 as the first of the twelve subsequent Nuremberg Military Tribunals. Twenty-three defendants, twenty of them medical doctors, faced charges arising from human experimentation programs at Auschwitz, Dachau, Ravensbrück, and other camps (including hypothermia experiments, high-altitude experiments, mustard-gas experiments, sulfanilamide tests, and sterilization experiments) and from the so-called euthanasia program that had killed approximately seventy thousand mentally ill, disabled, and chronically ill Germans during 1939-1941 and continued in modified form into 1945. Sixteen defendants were convicted; seven were sentenced to death and hanged. The case produced the Nuremberg Code, articulated in the tribunal’s judgment, which established ten principles for ethical human experimentation, with informed consent as the foundational requirement. The Code has remained the foundational document on medical research ethics ever since.

Q: What was the Einsatzgruppen Case?

The Einsatzgruppen Case ran from July 1947 to April 1948 as one of the twelve NMT proceedings. Twenty-four defendants drawn from the SS mobile killing unit commanders who had operated in the rear of the Wehrmacht’s eastern advance from June 1941 onward stood trial. The Einsatzgruppen and related units had killed approximately 1.3 to 1.5 million Jews, Roma, Soviet political officials, and other targets during 1941-1943, mostly by mass shooting at sites including Babi Yar (where roughly 33,000 Jews were killed in two days in September 1941), Ponary, Kamianets-Podilskyi, and hundreds of smaller locations. The prosecution case rested on the regime’s own operational reports (the so-called Ereignismeldungen), which had been recovered intact and which documented the killings in numbing arithmetic detail. Twenty-two of the twenty-four defendants were convicted; fourteen were sentenced to death; four of the death sentences were carried out and the remainder were commuted in the political climate of the early Cold War.

Q: How did Nuremberg connect to the broader 1945 settlement?

The proceedings sat within the broader 1945 Allied settlement that included the partition of Germany into four occupation zones, the establishment of the United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions, the postwar boundary changes in Eastern Europe, the population transfers under the Potsdam framework, and the early decisions about reparations and reconstruction. Nuremberg was one institutional component of the settlement. The relationship was not always congruent: the postwar deportation of approximately twelve to fourteen million ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe and the imposition of Soviet-style governments across Eastern Europe operated in registers that the Charter’s logic did not address. The tribunal therefore stood within a postwar order that was only partially aligned with the principles it was articulating, and the awkwardness has been a recurring theme in subsequent reflection on whether the proceedings achieved what their architects claimed.

Q: Who was Hannah Arendt and what did she add?

Hannah Arendt was a German-Jewish political theorist who had emigrated to the United States in 1941 after fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe. She covered the 1961 Jerusalem trial of Adolf Eichmann for The New Yorker and turned her articles into Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). Her central argument was that Eichmann was not a demonic figure but a thoughtless functionary, and her phrase “the banality of evil” captured the unsettling possibility that the perpetrators of mass atrocity could be ordinary bureaucrats whose ordinariness was the condition of their participation. The argument extended the Nuremberg framework into philosophical territory by locating the locus of moral and legal responsibility much further down into the regime’s apparatus than the IMT’s senior defendants suggested. Subsequent scholarship, particularly Bettina Stangneth’s Eichmann Before Jerusalem (2011), has revised Arendt’s specific characterization of Eichmann while preserving the broader philosophical insight about thoughtlessness as the condition of bureaucratic evil.

Q: What is the relationship between Nuremberg and the International Criminal Court?

The International Criminal Court, established by the 1998 Rome Statute and operational since 2002, is the institutional descendant of Nuremberg. The Rome Statute’s substantive provisions on genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression descend through specific intermediate instruments (the 1993 ICTY Statute, the 1994 ICTR Statute, the 1950 ILC Nuremberg Principles) back to the London Charter Article 6. The court’s procedural framework draws on the IMT’s procedural innovations, particularly the four-language simultaneous translation system and the documentary case methodology. The court’s jurisdictional reach is limited compared to what the Charter framework might have implied: one hundred twenty-four states are parties, with notable non-parties including the United States, Russia, China, India, and Israel. The court has produced indictments, convictions, acquittals, and ongoing proceedings since 2002. Its track record is mixed and its legitimacy is contested in particular jurisdictions; what it demonstrably does is keep the Nuremberg framework operational eight decades after its founding.

Q: Have the Nuremberg principles ever been formally repudiated?

No state has formally repudiated the Nuremberg Principles. The 1950 ILC codification has been treated as customary international law across subsequent decades, and the principles have been embedded in the substantive provisions of dozens of multilateral treaties to which most states are parties. What has happened instead is selective non-compliance: states have ratified instruments embodying the principles while resisting their application in particular cases, and the political conditions for prosecution have varied dramatically across cases. The pattern is that the principles are universally affirmed in principle and selectively applied in practice. The gap between principle and practice is the working space within which contemporary international criminal law operates, and the gap is the subject of much of the ongoing scholarly and political debate about the field’s effectiveness.

Q: Why does Nuremberg still matter today?

Nuremberg matters because the legal framework it produced is the framework within which questions of state criminality are now framed, because the proceedings demonstrated that the rule of law could constrain even the satisfaction of vengeance in the moment of greatest temptation, and because the documentary record produced by the proceedings is the foundation of Holocaust historiography and of the broader history of the Third Reich. The framework has been criticized, has been selectively applied, and has been politically contested, but it is the framework, and it descends from the Palace of Justice in November 1945. When the International Criminal Court issues an arrest warrant in 2023, when a German court convicts a former camp guard in 2022, when a national prosecutor invokes universal jurisdiction over a torturer in 2024, the doctrinal lineage runs back to Robert Jackson’s opening statement and to the Charter that authorized it. The proceedings did not solve the problem of state criminality. They created the framework within which the problem can now be addressed.