In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Nuremberg Trials

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International Law Nuremberg Trials
by
Kevin Jon Heller, Catherine E. Gascoigne
  • LAST REVIEWED: 26 October 2015
  • LAST MODIFIED: 26 October 2015
  • DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199796953-0126

Introduction

The “Nuremberg trials” generally refers to a series of thirteen trials held in the immediate aftermath of World War II. The first—and by far the most celebrated—trial was conducted by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (IMT) between 20 November 1945 and 1 October 1946. The IMT was created by the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union pursuant to an agreement signed by the four Allies on 8 August 1945. Twenty-four high-ranking Nazi leaders were initially charged, including Hermann Goering, Rudolf Hess, Arthur Seyss-Inquart (the architect of the Final Solution), and Albert Speer, but Robert Ley committed suicide and Gustav Krupp was found mentally unfit to stand trial. Martin Bormann, Hitler’s secretary, was tried in absentia. The indictment contained four counts: (1) common plan or conspiracy (later limited by the Tribunal to crimes against peace); (2) crimes against peace; (3) war crimes; and (4) crimes against humanity. Eighteen defendants were convicted on at least one count, with 12 being sentenced to death and three to life in prison. Three defendants—Hans Fritzsche, Franz von Papen, and Hjalmar Schacht—were completely acquitted. The next twelve trials were held by the Americans between 1946 and 1949 pursuant to Law No. 10, which the Allied Control Council—the de facto government in Germany—adopted after the four Allies responsible for the IMT failed to agree to hold a second international trial. The twelve trials, collectively known as the Nuremberg Military Tribunals (NMTs) or the “Subsequent Proceedings,” generally followed the substantive and procedural law of the IMT. The NMTs prosecuted 177 defendants representing, in the words of chief prosecutor Telford Taylor, “all the important segments of the Third Reich”: doctors; Nazi judges and prosecutors; SS officers; military leaders; German industrialists and financiers; members of mobile killing squads, the Einsatzgruppen; and Nazi ministers and diplomats. One hundred forty-two defendants were convicted; twenty-five were sentenced to death, twenty were sentenced to life imprisonment, and ninety-seven received terms of imprisonment. One convicted defendant—Alfried Krupp—was also required to forfeit his property. Nevertheless, because of Cold War pressures on the United States to enlist Germany in the nascent fight against Communism, no convicted NMT defendant remained incarcerated by the end of 1958.

The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg

Scholarly literature on the IMT is voluminous, consisting of dozens of books and hundreds of journal articles. That literature can be roughly divided into three categories: (1) accounts of the trial written by its participants; (2) accounts of the trial written by historians and legal scholars; and (3) works discussing either legal aspects of the trial or the trial’s contributions to the development of contemporary international criminal law. This bibliography limits itself to book-length works, although three of the selected works focusing on the legal issues are collections of essays.

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