For anyone who wants to understand the nature and scope of the horrors wrought by the Third Reich, there is no better place to start than with the evidence presented by U. S., French, British, and Russian prosecutors in the Nuremberg Trials. In twelve trials over four years–through documentary evidence and eyewitness testimony–the world came to understand the rise and awful consequences of Nazi ideology.

Much of the attention given to the Nuremberg Trials has focused on the confrontation between two of the most compelling characters in the Major War Criminals Trial, Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering and U. S. Prosecutor (and Supreme Court Justice) Robert Jackson. Although Jackson’s three-day cross-examination of Goering is often thought of as the dramatic high point of the trial, it is the testimony of the victims that cannot be easily forgotten.

Who would not be moved by the testimony of Auchwitz inmate Marie Claude Vaillant-Couturier, who described the cries of children in the night as they were hurled alive into furnaces because the camp had run out of gas for its chambers? Who would not feel the pain of Abram Suzkever, as he described his wife giving birth to a child, only to have a German soldier in the hospital take the child, kill it, and then laughingly toss the newborn infant across the room–all as his wife looked on helplessly? Equally shocking, perhaps, is the photographic evidence introduced in Nuremberg. What is one to make of an image of German soldiers, smiling for the photographer, as they shoot naked women in a ditch?

Study the Nuremberg Trials. Understand the worst years of our just-ended century. Look evil in the eye–then go hug a child.

Douglas Linder
University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law
linderd@umkc.edu
December, 2000

No trial provides a better basis for understanding
the nature and causes of evil than do the Nuremberg trials from 1945 to
1949.  Those who come to the trials expecting to find sadistic monsters
are generally disappointed.  What is shocking about Nuremberg is 
the ordinariness of the defendants: men who may be good fathers, kind to
animals, even unassuming–yet who committed unspeakable crimes.  Years
later, reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt wrote of
“the banality of evil.”  Like Eichmann, most Nuremberg defendants
never aspired to be villains.  Rather, they over-identified with an
ideological cause and suffered from a lack of imagination or empathy: they
couldn’t fully appreciate the human consequences of their career-motivated
decisions.

Twelve trials, involving over a hundred defendants
and several different courts, took place in Nuremberg from 1945 to 1949. 
By far the most attention–not surprisingly, given the figures involved–has
focused on the first Nuremberg trial of twenty-one major war criminals. 
Several of the eleven subsequent Nuremberg trials, however, involved conduct
no less troubling–and issues at least as interesting–as the Major War
Criminals Trial.  For example, the trial of sixteen German judges
and officials of the Reich Ministry (The
Justice Trial) considered the criminal responsibility of judges who
enforce immoral laws.  (The Justice Trial became the inspiration for
the acclaimed Hollywood movie,
Judgment
at Nuremberg.)  Other subsequent trials, such as the Doctors
Trial and the Einsatzgruppen
Trial, are especially compelling because of the horrific events described
by prosecution witnesses.  (These three subsequent trials each receive
separate coverage elsewhere in this website.)

In 1944, when eventual victory over the Axis
powers seemed likely, President Franklin Roosevelt asked the War Department
to devise a plan for bringing war criminals to justice.  Before the
War Department could come up with a plan, however, Treasury Secretary Henry
Morgenthau sent his own ideas on the subject to the President’s desk. 
Morgenthau’s eye-for-an-eye proposal suggested summarily shooting many
prominent Nazi leaders at the time of capture and banishing others to far
off corners of the world.  Under the Morgenthau plan, German POWs
would be forced to rebuild Europe.  The Treasury Secretary’s aim was
to destroy Germany’s remaining industrial base and turn Germany into a
weak, agricultural country.

Secretary of War Henry Stimson saw things differently
than Morgenthau.  The counter-proposal Stimson endorsed, drafted primarily
by Colonel Murray Bernays of the Special Projects Branch, would try responsible
Nazi leaders in court.  The War Department plan labeled atrocities
and waging a war of aggression as war crimes.  Moreover, it proposed
treating the Nazi regime as a criminal conspiracy.

Roosevelt eventually chose to support the War
Department’s plan.  Other Allied leaders had their own ideas, however. 
Churchill reportedly told Stalin that he favored execution of captured
Nazi leaders.  Stalin answered, “In the Soviet Union, we never execute
anyone without a trial.”  Churchill agreed saying, “Of course, of
course.  We should give them a trial first.”  All three leaders
issued a statement in Yalta in February, 1945 favoring some sort of judicial
process for captured enemy leaders.

In April, 1945, two weeks after the sudden
death of President Roosevelt, Supreme Court Justice Robert
Jackson received Samuel Rosenman at his Washington home.  Rosenman
asked Jackson, on behalf of President Truman, to become the chief prosecutor
for the United States at a war-crimes trial to be held in Europe soon after
the war ended.  Truman wanted a respected figure, a man of unquestioned
integrity, and a first-rate public speaker, to represent the United States. 
Justice Jackson, Rosenman said, was that person.  Three days later,
Jackson accepted.  On May 2, Harry Truman formally appointed him chief
prosecutor.  But prosecutor of whom, and under what authority? Many
questions remained unanswered.

Several Nazi leaders would escape trial and
punishment. Two days before Jackson’s appointment, in a bunker twenty feet
below the Berlin sewer system, Adolf Hitler shot himself.  Soon thereafter,
Heinrich Himmler–perhaps the most terrifying figure in the Nazi regime–took
a cyanide crystal while being examined by a British doctor and died within
minutes.  Also unavailable for trial were Joseph Goebbels (dead) and
Martin Bormann (missing).

Still, many important Axis leaders had fell
into Allied hands, either through surrender or capture.  Deputy Fuhrer
Rudolph
Hess had been held in England since 1941, when he had parachuted into
the English sky in a solo effort to convince British leaders to make peace
with the Nazi government. Reischsmarschall Hermann
Goering surrendered to Americans on May 6, 1945.  He spent his
first evening in captivity happily drinking and singing with American officers–officers
who later were reprimanded by General Eisenhower for the special treatment
they conferred.  Hans
Frank, “the Jew Butcher of Cracow,” received less hospitable treatment
from American soldiers in Bavaria, who forced him to run through a seventy-foot
line of soldiers, getting kicked and punched the whole way.  Other
suspected war criminals were rounded up on May 23 by British forces in
Flensburg, site of the last Nazi government.  The Flensburg group
included Karl Doenitz (Hitler’s successor as fuhrer), Field Marshall Wilhelm
Keitel, Nazi Party philosopher Alfred
Rosenberg, General Alfred
Jodl, and Armaments Minister Albert
Speer.  Eventually, twenty-two of these captured major Nazi figures
would be indicted.

On June 26, Robert Jackson flew to London to
meet with delegates from the other three Allied powers for a discussion
of what to do with the captured Nazi leaders.  Every nation had its
own criminal statutes and its own views as to how the trials should proceed. 
Jackson devoting considerable time to explaining why the criminal statutes
relating to wars of aggression and crimes against humanity that he proposed
drafting would not be ex post facto laws.  Jackson told negotiators
from the other nations, “What we propose is to punish acts which have been
regarded as criminal since the time of Cain and have been so written in
every civilized code.” The delegates also debated whether to proceed using
the Anglo-American adversarial system with defense lawyers for the defendants,
or whether instead to use the judge-centered inquisitive system favored
by the French and Soviets.

After ten days of discussion, the shape of
the proceedings to come became clearer.  The trying court would be
called the International Military Tribunal, and it would consist of one
primary and one alternate judge from each country.  The adversarial
system preferred by the Americans and British would be used.  The
indictments against the defendants would prohibit defenses based on superior
orders, as well as tu quoque (the “so-did-you” defense). Delegates were
determined not to let the defendants and their German lawyers turn the
trial into one that would expose questionable war conduct by Allied forces.

Jackson believed that the war crimes trials
should be held in Germany.  Few German cities in 1945, however, had
a standing courthouse in which a major trial could be held.  One of
the few cities that did was Nuremberg, site of Zeppelin Field and some
of Hitler’s most spectacular rallies.  It was also in Nuremberg that
the infamous Nuremberg Laws, stripping Jews of their property and basic
rights, were proclaimed.  Jackson liked that connection.  The
city was 91% destroyed, but in addition to the Palace
of Justice, the best hotel in town–the Grand Hotel–was miraculously
spared and would serve as an operating base for court officers and the
world press.  Over the objection of the Soviets (who preferred Berlin),
the decision was made to conduct the trial in Nuremberg.

On August 6, representatives of the Allied
nations signed the Charter
of the International Military Tribunal, establishing the laws and procedures
that would govern the Nuremberg trials.  Six days later, a cargo plane
carrying most of major war trial defendants landed in Nuremberg. 
The prisoners were loaded into ambulances and taken to a secure cell block
of the Palace of Justice, where they next fourteen months.

Judges for the IMT met for the first time on October 13.  The
American judge was Francis
Biddle, who was appointed to the job by Harry Truman–perhaps out of
a feeling of guilt after the President’s dismissed as Attorney General. 
Robert Jackson pressured Biddle, who desperately wanted the position of
chief judge, to support instead the British judge, Sir Geoffrey Lawrence. 
Jackson thought the selection of a British as president of the IMT would
ease criticism that the Americans were playing too large a role in the
trials.  Lawrence was elected chief judge with votes from the Americans,
British, and French.

With a November 20 opening trial date approaching, Nuremberg began
to fill with visitors.  A prosecutorial staff of over 600 Americans
plus additional hundreds from the other three powers assembled and began
interviewing potential witnesses and identifying documents from among the
100,000 captured for the prosecution case.  German lawyers, some of
whom were themselves Nazis, arrived to interview their clients and began
trial preparation.  Members of the world press moved into the Grand
Hotel and whatever other quarters they could find and began writing background
features on the upcoming trial.  Nearly a thousand workers rushed
to complete restoration of the Palace of Justice.

On the opening day of the trial, the twenty-one indicted war trial
defendants took their seats in the dock at the rear of the sage-green draped
and dark paneled room.  Behind them stood six American sentries with
their backs against the wall.  At 10 a.m., the marshal shouted, “Attention!
All rise.  The tribunal will now enter.”  The judges from the
four countries walked through a door and took their seats at the bench. 
Sir Geoffrey Lawrence rapped his gavel.  “This trial, which is now
to begin,” said Lawrence, “is unique in the annals of jurisprudence.” 
The Major War Figures Trial was underway in Nuremberg.

The trial began with the reading of the
indictments.  The indictments concerned four counts.  All
defendants were indicted on at least two of the counts; several were indicted
on all four counts.  Count One, “conspiracy to wage aggressive war,”
addressed crimes committed before the war began.  Count Two, “waging
an aggressive war (or “crimes against peace”), addressed the undertaking
of war in violation of international treaties and assurances.  Count
Three, “war crimes,” addressed more traditional violations of the laws
of war such as the killing or mistreatment of prisoners of war and the
use of outlawed weapons.  Count Four, “crimes against humanity,” addressed
crimes committed against Jews, ethnic minorities, the physically and mentally
disabled, civilians in occupied countries, and other persons.  Perhaps
the greatest of these crimes against humanity was, of course, the mass
murder of jews in concentration camps–the so-called “Final Solution.” 
For an entire day, defendants listened as prosecutors read a detailed list
of the crimes they stood accused of committing.

The next day Robert Jackson delivered his opening
statement for the prosecution.  Jackson spoke eloquently for two
hours.  He told the court, “The wrongs which we seek to condemn and
punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating that civilization
cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being
repeated.”

The prosecution case was divided into two main phases.  The
first phase focused on establishing the criminality of various components
of the Nazi regime, while the second sought to establish the guilt of individual
defendants.  The first prosecutorial phase was divided into parts.

The prosecution presented the case that the Austrian invasion constituted
an aggressive war, then proceeded over the course of two weeks to show
the same for invasions of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium,
Holland, Luxembourg, Greece, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union.  Prosecution
proof on the counts of conspiring to wage and then waging an aggressive
war consisted mainly of documentary evidence.

A second part of the prosecution case concerned the Nazi’s use of
slave labor and concentration camps.  Evidence introduced during this
part of the prosecution case brought home the true horror of the Nazi regime. 
For example, on December 13, 1945, U. S. prosecutor Thomas Todd introduced
USA Exhibit #253: tanned human tattooed skin from concentration camp victims,
preserved for Isle Koch, the wife of the Commandant of Buchenwald, who
liked to have the flesh fashioned into lampshades and other household objects
for her home.  Then Todd introduced USA Exhibit #254: the fist-shaped
shrunken head of an executed Pole, used by Koch as a paperweight.

On December 18, the prosecution began introducing evidence to establish
the criminality of the Nazi party leadership, the Reich Cabinet, the SS,
the Gestapo, the SD, the SA, and the German High Command.  Some of
the evidence brought cries and gasps from spectators.  A British prosecutor,
seeking to establish the criminality of the SS, read an affidavit from
Dr. Sigmund Rasher, a professor of medicine who performed experiments on
inmates at Dashau concentration camp.  The affidavit described an
experiment conducted to determine what method to use to save German fliers
pulled out of freezing North Sea waters.  Rasher ordered inmates stripped
naked and then thrown into tanks of freezing water.  Chunks of ice
were added, as workers repeatedly thrust thermometers into the rectums
of unconscious inmates to see if they were sufficiently chilled. 
Then the inmates were pulled out of the tanks to see which of four methods
of warming might work best.  Most inmates were dropped into either
tanks of hot water, warm water, or tepid water.  One quarter of the
inmates were placed next to the bodies of naked female inmates.  (Rapid
warming with hot water was determined to be most effective.) Rasher stated
in his affidavit that most of the inmates used in the experiment went into
convulsions and died.

In January, a series of concentration camp victims testified about
their experiences.  Marie
Claude Vallant-Couturier, a 33-year-old French woman, provided particularly
powerful testimony about what she saw at Auschwitz in 1942.  Vallant-Couturier
described how a Nazi orchestra played happy tunes as soldiers separated
those destined for slave labor from those that would be gassed.  She
told of a night she was “awakened  by horrible cries.  The next
day we learned that the Nazis had run out of gas and the children had been
hurled into the furnaces alive.”

On February 18, 1946, Soviet prosecutors introduced a film entitled
Documentary Evidence of the German Fascist Invaders.  The film, which
consisted mostly of captured German footage, showed Nazi atrocities accompanied
by Russian narration.  In one scene a boy is shown–shot because he
refused to give his pet dove to an SS man.  In another scene, naked
women are forced into a ditch, then made to lie down as German soldiers–smiling
for the camera–shoot them.

The prosecution rested on March 6.  After the thirty-three witnesses
and hundreds of exhibits that had been produced, no one could deny that
crimes against humanity had been committed in Europe.

Hermann Goering took his seat in the witness chair wearing a gray
uniform and yellow boots.  His defense attorney, Otto Stahmer, asked
whether the Nazi party had come to power through legal means.  In
a long answer delivered without notes, Goering gave his account of the
Nazi rise to power.  He told the court, “Once we came to power, we
were determined to hold on to it under all circumstances.”  Goering
was unrepentant.  He evaded no questions; offered no apologies. 
He testified that the concentration camps were necessary to preserve order:
“It was a question of removing danger.”   The leadership principle,
which concentrated all power in the Fuhrer, was “the same principle on
which the Catholic church and the government of the USSR are both based.” 
Commenting on Goering’s performance in the witness box, Janet Flanner of
the New Yorker described Goering as “a brain without a conscience.”

The courtroom was crowded on March 18, when Robert Jackson began
his long awaited cross-examination
of Goering.  Goering at first managed to deflect most of Jackson’s
intended blows, often providing lengthy answers that buttressed points
he made on his direct examination, such as the fact that he had opposed
plans to invade Russia.  Only by the third day of cross-examination
did Jackson begin scoring points.  He asked Goering whether he signed
a series of decrees depriving Jews of the right to own businesses, ordering
the surrender of their gold and jewelry to the government, barring claims
for compensation for damage to their property caused by the government. 
Goering, trembling at times, was given little opportunity to do more than
admit the truth of Jackson’s assertions.  After describing the awful
events of Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938, when 815 Jewish shops
were destroyed and 20,000 Jews arrested, Jackson asked Goering whether
words he was quoted as saying at a meeting of German insurance officials
(concerned about the loss of non-Jewish property on consignment at the
Jewish shops) was accurate: “I demand that German Jewry shall for their
abominable crimes make a contribution of a billion marks….I would not
like to be a Jew in Germany.”  Goering admitted that the quote was
accurate.  When Jackson finally ended his four-day cross-examination,
reviews came in mixed.  Most observers believed Goering had shown
himself to be a brilliant villain.

Over the course of the next four months, lawyers for each of the
defendants presented their evidence. In most cases, the defendants themselves
took the stand, trying to put their actions in as positive of a light as
possible.  Many of the defendants claimed to know nothing of the existence
of concentration camps or midnight killings.  Typical was Joachim
von Ribbentrop.  Asked on cross-examination, “Are you saying that
you did not know that concentration camps were being carried out on an
enormous scale?”, Ribbentrop replied, “I knew nothing about that.” 
Prosecutor Maxwell-Fyfe then displayed a map showing a number of concentration
camps located near several of Ribbentrop’s many homes.  Other defendants
used their testimony to emphasize that they were merely following orders–although
the IMT disallowed defense of superior orders, the issue was raised anyway
in the hope that it might affect sentencing.

Sometimes defense evidence actually strengthened the prosecution’s
case.  Such was the case on April 15, when the attorney for Gestapo
and SD Chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner called Colonel
Rudolf Hoess to the stand.  Hoess was the commandant of Auschwitz. 
Why he was called as a defense witness remains a mystery.  Speculation
is that it was thought his testimony, revealing his very large role in
the gassing of thousands of inmates, might make Kaltenbrunner’s guilt seem
small in comparison.  Hoess’s matter-of-fact account of mass executions
using Zyklon B gas–sometimes 10,000 inmates killed in a single day–left
many in the courtroom stunned.

A few of the defendants confessed their mistakes and offered apologies
for their actions.  Wilhelm Keitel regretted “orders given for the
conduct of war in the East, which were contrary to accepted usages of war.” 
Hans
Frank, Nazi Governor of Poland, answered “Yes” when asked whether he
“ever participated in the annihilation of the Jews.”  “My conscience
does not allow me simply to throw the responsibility simply on minor people….A
thousand years will pass and still Germany’s guilt will not have been erased.”
Albert
Speer, Minister of Armaments, was the most willing of all defendants
to accept blame. “This war has brought an inconceivable catastrophe,” Speer
testified, “Therefore, it is my unquestionable duty to assume my share
of responsibility for the disaster of the German people.”  After Speer
finished his testimony the London Daily Telegraph described it as “a tremendous
indictment which might well stand for the German people and posterity as
the most important and dramatic event of the trial.”

As June ended, the last of the twenty-one defendants, Hans Fritzsche,
completed his testimony. The defense rested.

Defense summations had been underway for two days when they were
interrupted on July 6 for the trial in abstentia of Martin Bormann, the
notorious Jew-hater who served as Hitler’s private secretary and who transmitted
his most barbaric orders.  Rumors abounded that Bormann might be in
Spain, Argentina, or some German hideaway, but the Allies had been unsuccessful
in tracking him down.  Bormann’s lawyer, Friedrich Bergold, offered
an unusual defense, but perhaps the only one open to him: he argued that
his client was dead. (Bormann’s remains were finally identified in Berlin
in 1972.)

After the Bormann case concluded, summations for the defense resumed. 
Robert Jackson stopped coming to court, using the time instead to draft
his own closing argument–one that he hoped would make a strong moral statement
to the world. Defense summations continued for over two more weeks, finally
concluding with the closing argument for Rudolf Hess, on July 25.

The courtroom in the Palace of Justice, which had largely emptied
for the defense summations, was full again on July 26, 1946, for the much
anticipated closing
argument of Robert Jackson.  Jackson took shots at each of the
defendants in turn.  His strongest attacks were reserved for Goering. 
In the dock, Goering–with perverse pride–kept a count of references to
him.  Speer and the other repentant defendants got off the lightest. 
Jackson concluded his summation with a passage from Shakespeare:

“[T]hese defendants now ask this Tribunal to say that they
are not guilty of planning, executing, or conspiring to commit this long
list of crimes and wrongs. They stand before the record of this Trial as
bloodstained Gloucester stood by the body of his slain king. He begged
of the widow, as they beg of you: ‘Say I slew them not.’ And the Queen
replied, ‘Then say they were not slain. But dead they are…’ If you were
to say of these men that they are not guilty, it would be as true to say
that there has been no war, there are no slain, there has been no crime.”

The last stage of the long trial was a defense of the Nazi organizations,
followed by final statements by each of the defendants.  On Saturday,
August 31, the first of the indicted defendants, Hermann Goering, moved
to the middle of the dock where a guard held before him a microphone suspended
from a pole.  Goering told the court that the trial had been nothing
more than an exercise of power by the victors of a war: justice, he said,
had nothing to do with it.  Rudolf Hess offered an odd final statement,
filled with references to visitors with “strange” and “glassy” eyes. 
He ended by saying it had been his “pleasure” to work “under the greatest
son which my people produced in its thousand-year history.”  Some
defendants offered apologies.  Some wept.  Albert Speer offered
a warning.  He spoke of the even more destructive weapons now being
produced and the need to eliminate war once and for all.  “This trial
must contribute to the prevention of wars in the future,” Speer said. 
“May God protect Germany and the culture of the West.”

On Tuesday, October 1, the twenty-one defendants filed into the courtroom
for the last time to receive the verdicts
of the tribunal.  Sir Geoffrey Lawrence told the defendants that they
must remain seated while he announced the verdicts.  He began with
Goering: “The defendant, Hermann Goering, was the moving force for aggressive
war, second only to Adolf Hitler….He directed Himmler and Heydrich to
‘bring about a complete solution of the Jewish question.'” There was no
mitigating evidence.  Guilty on all four counts. Lawrence continued
with the verdicts.  In all, eighteen defendants were convicted on
one or more count, three (Schact,
Von
Papen, and Fritzsche)
were found not guilty.  The three acquitted defendants did not have
long to enjoy their victory.  In a pressroom surrounded by reporters,
they received from a German policeman warrants for their arrests. 
They were to next be tried in German courts for alleged violations of German
law.

Sentences were announced in the afternoon for the convicted defendants. 
Again, Lawrence began with Goering:
“The International Military Tribunal sentences you to death by hanging.” 
Goering, without expression, turned and left the courtroom.  Ten other
defendants (Ribbentrop,
Keitel,
Rosenberg,
Frank,
Frick,
Kaltenbrunner,
Streicher,
Sauckel,
Jodl,
and Seyss-Inquart)
were also told they would die on a rope. Life sentences were handed down
to Hess,
Funk,
and Raeder. 
Von Schirach and Speer
received 20-year sentences, Von
Neurath a 15-year sentence, while Doenitz
got a 10-year sentence.  The trial had lasted 315 days.

Over the next two weeks, the condemned men met for the last times
with family members and talked with their lawyers about their last-ditch
appeal to the Allied Control Council, which had the power to reduce or
commute sentences.  On October 9, the Allied Control Council, composed
of one member from each of the four occupying powers, met in London to
discuss appeals from the IMT.  After over three hours of debate, the
ACC voted to reject all appeals.  Four days later, the prisoners were
informed that there last thin hope had disappeared.

On October 15, the day before the scheduled executions, Goering sat
at the small desk in his prison cell and wrote a note:

“To the Allied Control Council:

I would have had no objection to being shot.  However, I will
not facilitate execution of Germany’s Reichsmarschall by hanging! For the
sake of Germany, I cannot permit this.  Moreover, I feel no moral
obligation to submit to my enemies’ punishment.  For this reason,
I have chosen to die like the great Hannibal.”

Then Goering removed a smuggled cyanide pill and put it in his mouth.
At 10:44 p.m., a guard noticed saw Goering bring his arm to his face and
then began making choking sounds.  A doctor was called.  He arrived
just in time to see Goering take his last breath.

A few hours later, at 1:11 a.m. on October 16, Joachim von Ribbentrop
walked to the gallows constructed in the gymnasium of the Palace of Justice. 
Asked if he had any last words, he said, “I wish peace to the world.” 
A black hood was pulled down across his head and the noose was slipped
around his neck.  A trapdoor opened.  Two minutes later, the
next in line, Field Marshal Keitel, stepped up the gallows stairs. 
By 2:45 a.m., it was all over.

Trials of Germans continued in Nuremberg for over two more years.
The International Military Tribunal was done with its work, however. 
All judges for the subsequent Nuremberg
trials would be drawn from the American judiciary.  The Nuremberg
trials continue to generate discussion.  Questions are raised both
about the legitimacy of the tribunals and the appropriateness of individual
verdicts they reached.

More important, perhaps, is the question of whether Nuremberg mattered. 
No one could deny that the trials served to provide thorough documentation
of Nazi crimes.  In over half a century, the images and testimony
that came out of Nuremberg have not lost their capacity to shock. 
The trials also helped expose many of the defendants for the criminals
they were, thus denying them a martyrdom in the eyes of the German public
that they might otherwise have achieved.  There are no statues commemorating
Nazi war heroes.  The revelations of Nuremberg may also have contributed
to building democracy in Germany.  The Nuremberg trials did not, however,
fulfill the grandest dreams of those who advocated them.  They have
not succeeded in ending wars of aggression.  They have not put an
end to genocide.  Crimes against humanity are with us still.