The Road to the Nuremberg Trials

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The less good news: The page you are looking for has apparently been moved. The accusers were successful in unveiling the background of developments leading to the outbreak of World War II, which cost at least 55 million lives in Europe alone, [45] as well as the extent of the atrocities committed in the name of the Hitler regime. Twelve of the accused were sentenced to death, seven received prison sentences ranging from 10 years to life in prison , three were acquitted, and two were not charged. The death sentences were carried out on 16 October by hanging using the standard drop method instead of long drop.

Army denied claims that the drop length was too short which caused the condemned to die slowly from strangulation instead of quickly from a broken neck, [47] but evidence remains that some of the condemned men died agonizingly slowly, struggling for 14 to 28 minutes before finally choking to death. Woods had hanged 34 U. Although the rumor has long persisted that the bodies were taken to Dachau and burned there, they were actually incinerated in a crematorium in Munich, and the ashes scattered over the river Isar.

Of the 12 defendants sentenced to death by hanging, two were not hanged: The remaining 10 defendants sentenced to death were hanged. The definition of what constitutes a war crime is described by the Nuremberg principles , a set of guidelines document which was created as a result of the trial. The medical experiments conducted by German doctors and prosecuted in the so-called Doctors' Trial led to the creation of the Nuremberg Code to control future trials involving human subjects, a set of research ethics principles for human experimentation.

The American authorities conducted subsequent Nuremberg Trials in their occupied zone. While Sir Geoffrey Lawrence of Britain was the judge chosen as president of the court, the most prominent of the judges at trial arguably was his American counterpart, Francis Biddle.

Some accounts argue that Truman had appointed Biddle as the main American judge for the trial as an apology for asking for his resignation. Biddle soon changed his mind, as he approved a modified version of the plan on 21 January , likely due to time constraints, since the trial would be one of the main issues discussed at Yalta. Jackson played an important role in not only the trial itself, but also in the creation of the International Military Tribunal, as he led the American delegation to London that, in the summer of , argued in favour of prosecuting the Nazi leadership as a criminal conspiracy.

Thomas Dodd was a prosecutor for the United States. There was an immense amount of evidence backing the prosecutors' case, especially since meticulous records of the Nazis' actions had been kept. There were records taken in by the prosecutors that had signatures from specific Nazis signing for everything from stationery supplies to Zyklon B gas , which was used to kill the inmates of the deathcamps.

Thomas Dodd showed a series of pictures to the courtroom after reading through the documents of crimes committed by the defendants. The showing consisted of pictures displaying the atrocities performed by the defendants. The pictures had been gathered when the inmates were liberated from the concentration camps. Henry Gerecke, a Lutheran pastor, was sent to minister to the Nazi defendants.

The Tribunal is celebrated for establishing that "[c]rimes against international law are committed by men, not by abstract entities, and only by punishing individuals who commit such crimes can the provisions of international law be enforced. It served as the model for the International Military Tribunal for the Far East which tried Japanese officials for crimes against peace and against humanity.

It also served as the model [ citation needed ] for the Eichmann trial and for present-day courts at The Hague, for trying crimes committed during the Balkan wars of the early s, and at Arusha, for trying the people responsible for the genocide in Rwanda. The Nuremberg trials had a great influence on the development of international criminal law. The Conclusions of the Nuremberg trials served as models for:. The influence of the tribunal can also be seen in the proposals for a permanent international criminal court, and the drafting of international criminal codes, later prepared by the International Law Commission.

Tourists can visit courtroom on days when no trial is on. A permanent exhibition has been dedicated to the trials. The Nuremberg trials initiated a movement for the prompt establishment of a permanent international criminal court, eventually leading over fifty years later to the adoption of the Statute of the International Criminal Court. This movement was brought about because during the trials, there were conflicting court methods between the German court system and the U.

The crime of conspiracy was unheard of in the civil law systems of the Continent. Therefore, the German defense found it unfair to charge the defendants with conspiracy to commit crimes, while the judges from common-law countries were used to doing so. It [IMT] was the first successful international criminal court, and has since played a pivotal role in the development of international criminal law and international institutions. Critics of the Nuremberg trials argued that the charges against the defendants were only defined as "crimes" after they were committed and that therefore the trial was invalid, and thus seen as a form of " victor's justice ".

As Biddiss observed, "the Nuremberg Trial continues to haunt us. It is a question also of the weaknesses and strengths of the proceedings themselves. Quincy Wright , writing eighteen months after the conclusion of the IMT, explained the opposition to the Tribunal thus:. The assumptions underlying the Charter of the United Nations, the Statute of the International Court of Justice, and the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal are far removed from the positivistic assumptions which greatly influenced the thought of international jurists in the nineteenth century.

Consequently, the activities of those institutions have frequently been vigorously criticized by positivistic jurists How can principles enunciated by the Nuremberg Tribunal, to take it as an example, be of legal value until most of the states have agreed to a tribunal with jurisdiction to enforce those principles? How could the Nuremberg Tribunal have obtained jurisdiction to find Germany guilty of aggression, when Germany had not consented to the Tribunal?

How could the law, first explicitly accepted in the Nuremberg Charter of , have bound the defendants in the trial when they committed the acts for which they were indicted years earlier? I don't mind what he does to the Nazis, but I hate to see the pretense that he is running a court and proceeding according to common law. This is a little too sanctimonious a fraud to meet my old-fashioned ideas", Stone wrote. Jackson, in a letter discussing the weaknesses of the trial, in October told U.

Truman that the Allies themselves "have done or are doing some of the very things we are prosecuting the Germans for. The French are so violating the Geneva Convention in the treatment of prisoners of war that our command is taking back prisoners sent to them. We are prosecuting plunder and our Allies are practising it. We say aggressive war is a crime and one of our allies asserts sovereignty over the Baltic States based on no title except conquest. Douglas charged that the Allies were guilty of "substituting power for principle" at Nuremberg.

Deputy Chief Counsel Abraham Pomerantz resigned in protest at the low caliber of the judges assigned to try the industrial war criminals such as those at I. Taft , a US Senate Majority Leader from Ohio and son of William Howard Taft , criticized the Nuremberg Trials for trying Nazi war criminals under ex post facto laws which resulted in his failure to secure the Republican nomination for President in A number of Germans who agreed with the idea of punishment for war crimes admitted trepidation concerning the trials. A contemporary German jurist said:. That the defendants at Nuremberg were held responsible, condemned and punished, will seem to most of us initially as a kind of historical justice.

However, no one who takes the question of guilt seriously, above all no responsibly thoughtful jurist, will be content with this sensibility nor should they be allowed to be. Justice is not served when the guilty parties are punished in any old way, even if this seems appropriate with regard to their measure of guilt.

Justice is only served when the guilty are punished in a way that carefully and conscientiously considers their criminal errors according to the provisions of valid law under the jurisdiction of a legally appointed judge. The Tribunal shall not require proof of facts of common knowledge but shall take judicial notice thereof. It shall also take judicial notice of official governmental documents and reports of the United [Allied] Nations, including acts and documents of the committees set up in the various allied countries for the investigation of war crimes, and the records and findings of military and other Tribunals of any of the United [Allied] Nations.

Attractive as this argument may sound in theory, it ignores the fact that it runs counter to the administration of law in every country. If it were true then no spy could be given a legal trial, because his case is always heard by judges representing the enemy country.

The Nuremberg Trials

Yet no one has ever argued that in such cases it was necessary to call on neutral judges. The prisoner has the right to demand that his judges shall be fair, but not that they shall be neutral. As Lord Wright has pointed out, the same principle is applicable to ordinary criminal law because 'a burglar cannot complain that he is being tried by a jury of honest citizens'. One criticism that was made of the IMT was that some treaties were not binding on the Axis powers because they were not signatories.

This was addressed in the judgment relating to war crimes and crimes against humanity, [avalon 26] which contains an expansion of customary law: The Nuremberg Trials employed four official languages: English , French , German and Russian. In order to address the complex linguistic issues that clouded over the proceedings, interpretation and translation departments had to be established.

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However, it was feared that consecutive interpretation would slow down the proceedings significantly. What is therefore unique in both the Nuremberg tribunals and history of the interpretation profession was the introduction of an entirely new technique, extempore simultaneous interpretation. This technique of interpretation requires the interpreter to listen to a speaker in a source or passive language and orally translate that speech into another language in real time, that is, simultaneously, through headsets and microphones.

Interpreters were split into four sections, one for each official language, with three interpreters per section working from the other three languages into the fourth their mother tongue.

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For instance, the English booth consisted of three interpreters, one working from German into English, one working from French, and one from Russian, etc. Defendants who did not speak any of the four official languages were provided with consecutive court interpreters. Some of the languages heard over the course of the proceedings included Yiddish , Hungarian , Czech , Ukrainian , and Polish.


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The equipment used to establish this system was provided by IBM , and included an elaborate setup of cables which were hooked up to headsets and single earphones directly from the four interpreting booths often referred to as "the aquarium". Four channels existed for each working language, as well as a root channel for the proceedings without interpretation.

Switching of channels was controlled by a setup at each table in which the listener merely had to turn a dial in order to switch between languages. People tripping over the floor-laid cables often led to the headsets getting disconnected, with several hours at a time sometimes being taken in order to repair the problem and continue on with the trials. Interpreters were recruited and examined by the respective countries in which the official languages were spoken: Many were former translators , army personnel, and linguists , some were experienced consecutive interpreters, [97] others were ordinary individuals and even recent secondary school-graduates who led international lives in multilingual environments.


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  4. With the simultaneous technique being extremely new, interpreters practically trained themselves, but many could not handle the pressure or the psychological strain. Many often had to be replaced, many returned to the translation department, and many left. Serious doubts were given as to whether interpretation provided a fair trial for the defendants, particularly because of fears of mistranslation and errors made on transcripts. The translation department had to also deal with the overwhelming problem of being understaffed and overburdened with an influx of documents that could not be kept up with.

    More often than not, interpreters were stuck in a session without having proper documents in front of them and were relied upon to do sight translation or double translation of texts, causing further problems and extensive criticism. Other problems that arose included complaints from lawyers and other legal professionals with regard to questioning and cross-examination. Legal professionals were most often appalled at the slower speed at which they had to conduct their task because of the extended time required for interpreters to render an interpretation properly.

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    Also, a number of interpreters protested the idea of using vulgar language, especially if it referred to Jews or the conditions of the Nazi concentration camps. Yet, despite the extensive trial and error, without the interpretation system the trials would not have been possible and in turn revolutionized the way multilingual issues were addressed in tribunals and conferences.

    A number of the interpreters following the trials were immediately recruited into the newly formed United Nations , while others returned to their ordinary lives, pursued other careers, or worked freelance. Outside the boundaries of the trials, many interpreters continued their positions on weekends interpreting for dinners, private meetings between judges, and excursions between delegates.

    Others worked as investigators or editors, or aided the translation department when they could, often using it as an opportunity to sharpen their skills and to correct poor interpretations on transcripts before they were available for public record. For further reference, a book titled The Origins of Simultaneous Interpretation: Today, all major international organizations, as well as any conference or government that uses more than one official language , uses extempore simultaneous interpretation.

    Notable bodies include the Parliament of Kosovo with three official languages, the Parliament of Canada with two official languages, the Parliament of South Africa with eleven official languages, the European Union with twenty-four official languages, and the United Nations with six official working languages. Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For the Soviet film about the trials, see Nuremberg Trials film. Lieber Code Human shields Crimes against humanity Crime of apartheid.

    Jews on selection ramp at Auschwitz, May Joint Declaration by Members of the United Nations. Holocaust survivors Deportations of French Jews to death camps. Days of remembrance Memorials and museums Righteous Among the Nations. There were, I suppose, three possible courses: Which was it to be? Was it possible to let such atrocities go unpunished? It will be remembered that after the First World War alleged criminals were handed over to be tried by Germany , and what a farce that was!

    The majority got off and such sentences as were inflicted were derisory and were soon remitted. A few years from now the lawyers of the world will condemn this trial. You can't have a trial without law. The trials were conducted under their own rules of evidence. The Charter of the International Military Tribunal permitted the use of normally inadmissible "evidence". Article 19 specified that "The Tribunal shall not be bound by technical rules of evidence The defendants were not allowed to appeal or affect the selection of judges. Goodhart , Professor at Oxford , opposed the view that, because the judges were appointed by the victors, the Tribunal was not impartial and could not be regarded as a court in the true sense.

    This section does not cite any sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. July Learn how and when to remove this template message. This speech by Lawrence is reprinted in Mettraux , pp. The Nuremberg option wasn't apple pie either". Archived from the original on Retrieved 21 April Archived from the original on 11 March Retrieved 23 November Foreign relations of the United States. Conferences at Malta and Yalta, Museen der Stadt Nuernberg CS1 maint: The New York Times.

    Kaplan, 76, prosecutor at Nuremberg trials". From Nuremberg to the Hague: The tribunal's eventual decision was that Gustav Krupp could not be tried because of his condition but that 'the charges against him in the Indictment should be retained for trial thereafter if the physical and mental condition of the defendant should permit'. Gilbert does not provide Ley's IQ, presumably because Ley committed suicide before the tests were done, though Gilbert is not explicit on this point.

    Sereny , p. Coincidentally, Brunner , p.

    Moreover, in some cases no verbatim notes were taken, whereas other protocols were recorded by a psychologist who seems to have had no previous experience with the Rorschach. Nuremberg Defendants at ukmc. Retrieved 21 November Nuremberg Diary , p. Report of Commission to Examine Defendant Hess". Retrieved 11 September Government leaders, military rulers, and political activists. Library of Congress Country Studies. Archived at the Wayback Machine. Archived from the original PDF on 30 April The trial removed 11 of the most despicable Nazis from life itself.

    In the early morning hours of Wednesday, October 16, , ten men died in the courthouse gymnasium in a botched hanging that left some strangled to death for as long as 25 minutes. Archived from the original on 2 March Woods, botched the execution. A number of the hanged Nazis died, not quickly from a broken neck as intended, but agonizingly from slow strangulation. Ribbentrop and Sauckel each took 14 minutes to choke to death, while Keitel, whose death was the most painful, struggled for 28 minutes at the end of the rope before expiring. MacLean, The Fifth Field: Arcturus Publishing Limited, Antony's College, Oxford, that "[t]he Nuremberg trials have not had a very good press.

    They are often depicted as a form of victor's justice in which people were tried for crimes which did not exist in law when they committed them, such as conspiring to start a war. Richard Overy Archived at the Wayback Machine. There was no precedent. No other civilian government had ever been put on trial by the authorities of other states What the Allied powers had in mind was a tribunal that would make the waging of aggressive war, the violation of sovereignty and the perpetration of what came to be known in as 'crimes against humanity' internationally recognized offences.

    Pendas, Boston College, Massachusetts.