Transcription
It's 1945, and World War Two is over. Adolf Hitler is dead. So are his top lieutenants, Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels. But dozens of high-level Nazis are still alive and in prison. What do the Allied powers do with them? They take them to court, in their own backyard.
The Nuremberg trials were a series of international prosecutions that decided the fates of Nazi war criminals. Why hold these trials in the German city of Nuremberg? Well, for one, unlike a lot of German towns, Nuremberg was relatively undamaged by the war. And just as importantly, the city had been the site of several infamous Nazi rallies. Prosecuting Nazi leaders there brought a symbolic closure to the Third Reich.
The trials were administered by the four principal nations of the Allied powers: the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and France. However, each of these countries had their own laws and legal system and had to settle on a common framework of justice. They couldn't try each defendant for different ways. So, in August of 1945, they all sat down and hammered out the London Charter of the International Military Tribunal.
With the London Charter, the Allies agreed that the defendants would stand trial and be allowed to have their own defense attorneys. Instead of a single judge, there would be a Tribunal of judges, one from each allied country. The London Charter also defined the three major charges each criminal would face: crimes against peace, like planning and starting a war; war crimes, such as killing POWs; and crimes against humanity, in other words, killing civilians, as the Nazis did during the Holocaust.
The trials lasted at Nuremberg from 1945 to 1949. But the highest-profile cases were brought to court between 1945 and 1946. This period was known as the Trial of the Major War Criminals. Among the 22 Nazi leaders on trial at Nuremberg were Gestapo founder Hermann Goering, deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess, Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, and the German architect Albert Speer. Two additional Nazis had been indicted, but one, Labor Chief Robert Ley, killed himself before the trials. The other, weapons manufacturer Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, was declared mentally unfit; he was senile.
Starting in November of 1945, the tribunal heard testimony and reviewed evidence for 216 court sessions. The horrors and crimes of the Nazis were put on display for all the world to see. In October of 1946, the Court handed down its verdicts: 12 death sentences, including those for Goering and Ribbentrop; 3 got life in prison; 4 got lengthy jail terms; and 3 were acquitted.
Nothing could undo the devastation of the war. Nothing could bring back the millions of lives lost in the Holocaust and the millions more lost in battle. But the Nuremberg trials were an important step towards rebuilding an international system of justice. They established important legal precedents for future international trials, including those for Japanese war criminals and for trials decades later in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. The Nuremberg trials officially entered the crimes of the Third Reich in today, so that there would be no doubt about what the regime had done.
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Young people, in large numbers, came out and joined what became known as the Red Guards. These largely terroristic organizations were used to publicly humiliate, assault, and in some cases, even murder political enemies of Mao and the Communist Party.