The trials begin
The accused (left to right, middle bench): Hermann Goering (leaning forward), Rudolf Hess and Joachim von Ribbentrop in the defendants' box on the second day of the war crimes trial.
AP/EMPICS
Vanquished Germany had been divided into four sectors: British, American, Soviet and French. Between 1945 and 1949, a series of trials were held in the Palace of Justice at Nuremberg, which was in the American sector.
The first trial began in November 1945 and concluded in October 1946. During it, 23 of the most important captured leaders of Nazi Germany were prosecuted, plus Nazi party secretary Martin Bormann – who had disappeared in the chaos of the war's aftermath – in absentia.
The trial was presided over by an International Military Tribunal (IMT), the judges and prosecutors being provided by each of the four countries occupying Germany. Subsequent trials over the next three years, which collectively involved 177 defendants, took place solely under American judicial control.
US chief prosecutor Robert Jackson opened the first Nuremberg trial with an appropriately solemn address:
The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating that civilisation cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated … That four great nations … stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to judgement of the law is one of the most significant tributes that power has ever paid to reason.
Why Nuremberg?
Not only was Nuremberg in the American sector, but the Palace of Justice there was spacious and largely undamaged by bombing and had a prison complex attached. Nuremberg also had symbolic importance. It had been where the most prominent Nazi party rallies had taken place, and had given its name to the infamous laws that discriminated against and isolated, first, German Jews and, later, Gypsies.
The Soviets, who had lost 20 million people in the war, wanted the trials to take place in Berlin, within their sector. The US had entered the war only after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor – the only significant attack on American territory for the entire war – and had been extremely reluctant to take in Jewish refugees escaping from Nazi oppression. Consequently, its assumption of international moral and political leadership was certainly questionable. By holding out for Nuremberg, though, it gave a clear signal that it intended to expand its post-war influence in Europe.
The Tokyo trials
A parallel set of trials – the International Military Tribunal for the Far East – took place in Tokyo from May 1946 to November 1948. In these, 28 men – including military, political and financial leaders – faced a prosecution team representing 11 Allied nations.
While Hitler escaped justice by taking his own life, Japan's wartime leader Hirohito was exempted from trial on the United States' insistence, seemingly for political reasons. He remained emperor of Japan until his death in 1989. Other top figures, though, were tried for actions that they had carried out in his name as they spearheaded Japan's brutal colonial and military expansion between 1931 and 1945.
Because Japan consented to the jurisdiction of the IMT, the tribunal avoided the appeals to international law that the defendants at Nuremberg continually used. However, to this day, those convicted at the Tokyo trials are not, under Japanese law, regarded as criminals.