The Nuremberg Trials: The Real Story

By late 1942, with Nazi Germany's military fortunes collapsing at El Alamein and Stalingrad, the Allies began confronting an urgent question: how should the Nazis pay for their crimes? Stalin wanted thousands of Germans shot or worked to death. Churchill favored summary executions of the leadership only. But the Americans insisted on something unprecedented—a courtroom trial before the world's press. As historian Nigel Jones explains, "They wanted there to be an actual moral difference between their form of justice and what the Nazis had just perpetrated."

The Legal Innovation

The Allies faced a fundamental problem: Nazi criminality had far exceeded what existing international law could handle. The rules of war prohibited murdering prisoners and abusing civilians, but the Nazis had done something entirely new. No state had ever deliberately set out to exterminate an entire race, nor had any state waged aggressive war as a systematic atrocity. Additionally, many Nazi crimes had been committed against German citizens under Germany's own legal system—traditionally considered a state's internal affair.