Nuremberg Remembered: The Road to Nuremberg

As Allied forces marched toward Germany in the spring of 1945, they witnessed what the Nazis had done to civilian populations in concentration camps. Even earlier in January Soviet troops had come upon the death camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland. The scenes of brutality and inhumanity defied description: corpses were piled like cords of wood on carts and surviving individuals looked like mere skeletons. The unsanitary conditions and rampant disease left Allied witnesses sickened and, at times, speechless. The journalist Edward R. Murrow, who broadcast from the concentration camp at Buchenwald just after liberation, told his radio audiences that if they were eating lunch they might want to stop eating as they heard the description of events.

The victorious Allied powers-Great Britain, the United States, the U.S.S.R., and resistance France-were asking: What should be done with those responsible for the unspeakable crimes that had taken place? What should be done with the Nazi officials responsible for initiating the war? During meetings of Allied officials, there had been discussion of what would happen to the perpetrators, but no specific plan of action was taken because the priority at the time was winning the military war. As the war drew to a close, two sides emerged: Sir Winston Churchill of Great Britain favored immediate execution of the leading Nazis, thereby leaving them no time to elicit sympathy during a long drawn-out trial; Joseph Stalin of the U.S.S.R., who initially advocated massive executions but under pressure changed his stance, seemed to favor show trials, which essentially meant there was no due process but immediate punishment meted out to those deemed guilty. Initially U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt seemed to side with Churchill and his adviser Henry Morgenthau, Jr., who suggested immediate executions of leading Nazis and the return of Germany to an impotent agrarian state. However, U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson pushed for the rule of law to prevail and began swaying Roosevelt in the direction of trials. President Harry Truman, who succeeded Roosevelt upon his death in the middle of April 1945, immediately sided with the concept of trials that would scrupulously follow the rule of law.

One of Truman's first acts as president was to appoint U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson the chief prosecutor for the United States in an international military court designed to try the leading Nazi defendants who were captured at the end of the war. The United Nations, formed in the immediate postwar months, endorsed the idea of trials. Moreover, Truman persuaded Churchill and Stalin to agree to submit to the rule of law rather than summary justice or show trials.

Planning the logistics for the trials took place during the summer of 1945 in London. The first of the trials, the International Military Tribunal, opened in Nuremberg in November 1945 and lasted until the following October; the chief American prosecutor was Justice Robert Jackson. The second set of trials were held under American leadership at Nuremberg with General Telford Taylor as the chief prosecutor.