Setting the scene
When, at the end of World War II, victory was in sight for the Allied powers, they faced the dilemma of how to deal with the Nazi leaders when peace came.
Atrocities had certainly taken place in previous wars. However, the protagonists then had, in theory at least, adhered to conventions to avoid harming civilians and to treat prisoners of war respectfully. The Nazis' war had been different. Supported by the other Axis powers – Italy, Japan, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria – they had sought to gain territory and plunder economic resources through military invasion.
Industrialised mass slaughter of civilian populations in a network of death camps
Mass slaughter
However, the Nazis had had another goal beyond this military strategy: to ghettoise and then exterminate whole populations of Jews and Gypsies and enslave others in central and eastern Europe. They had mobilised financiers, scientists, engineers, architects and civil servants to devise and implement the industrialised mass slaughter of these civilian populations in a network of death camps.
They were not alone in committing war crimes. The Japanese had carried out murder and rape on an awesome scale throughout China, treated POWs cruelly and had created so-called scientific 'units' where terrible experiments were carried out on Chinese civilians and prisoners of many nationalities.
A judicial process
Existing judicial processes for punishment and restitution were hopelessly inadequate to deal with the nature and scale of the crimes committed at such places as Auschwitz, Treblinka and Belsen, as well as at Nanking and in the POW camps of south-east Asia.
In a series of meetings – at Tehran in 1943 and at Yalta and Potsdam in 1945 – Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt, representing Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States, respectively, agreed a plan to prosecute the Nazi leadership. The Americans initially leaned towards shooting them upon capture, as did Churchill. The latter's foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, said that the guilt of the Nazi leaders was 'so black that they fall outside the scope of any judicial process'. Stalin proposed capital punishment too, but wanted a political show-trial first.
However, aware of their responsibility to succeeding generations, the Allied leadership eventually agreed on a judicial process to expose the Nazis' crimes and establish new laws to deter future Hitlers. A Japanese counterpart was also eventually agreed.
The Nuremberg trials were born – and today's International Criminal Court is its offspring.