The Nuremberg trials, which opened on November 20, 1945, marked a turning point for international criminal law: for the first time, not low-level perpetrators but top Nazi party officials, military leaders, and propagandists were brought before a court.
As the publication notes, until 1945 the Allies had no common understanding of how, or on what legal basis, the leadership of the Third Reich should be tried. The 1943 Moscow Declaration provided for war criminals to be prosecuted where their crimes had been committed, but left open the question of senior political leaders.
In the Soviet Union, the idea of an international tribunal was publicly endorsed as early as 1942, but, according to the author, Stalin viewed the future trial more as a staged political spectacle with a predetermined ending. The Soviet role in preparing the proceedings was led by Andrei Vyshinsky, Iona Nikitchenko, and Roman Rudenko, all of whom had biographies tied to Stalinist repression.
In the summer of 1945, the framework of the International Military Tribunal was agreed in London. The defendants were to be charged with conspiracy, planning aggressive war, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. On August 8, 1945, the United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and France signed the agreement establishing the tribunal.
The trial lasted nearly a year and included 403 hearings. The accused had defense lawyers, could call witnesses, and were allowed to submit documents, while proceedings were translated into four languages. The author argues that this makes it difficult to reduce Nuremberg to a purely political show trial, even if the image of “victors’ justice” never fully disappeared.
The central contradiction of Nuremberg was that the victorious powers themselves also had vulnerable points: from colonial policies and bombing campaigns to Soviet repression and secret wartime arrangements. Even so, the trial became a major precedent that helped pave the way for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Genocide Convention of 1948, and the Geneva Conventions of 1949.