Military Tribunal - The prosecutors sought to prove Nazi Germany's crimes through the Germans' own words and testimony. They based the case primarily on thousands of German documents seized by the Allies. Most of the witnesses they called to testify had been members of the Nazi Party, SS, or German state or military.
The defendants did not deny the authenticity of the documentary evidence. Most acknowledged that the crimes charged did occur. However, they denied that they bore any personal responsibility for them. Under the IMT's charter, the defendants could not claim innocence on the grounds that they had simply followed orders.
Military Tribunal
Bush identified Osama Bin Laden as the "prime suspect" in the attacks. The US demanded that the Taliban deliver Bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders to the US, and shut down the numerous Al Qaeda training camps in the country.
The Evidence
The Taliban refused. The U.S. began bombing Afghanistan on October 7, 2001. The indictment against 24 major war criminals and seven organizations was filed on October 18, 1945 by the four chief prosecutors of the International Military Tribunal.
On November 20, the trial began with 21 defendants appearing before the court. The United States held 12 additional trials in Nuremberg after the initial International Military Tribunal. In all, 199 defendants were tried, 161 were convicted, and 37 were sentenced to death.
The trial of leading German officials before the International Military Tribunal (IMT) is the best known war crimes trial held after World War II. It formally opened in Nuremberg, Germany, on November 20, 1945, just six and a half months after Germany surrendered.
Each of the four major Allied nations—the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and France—supplied a judge and a prosecution team. Trials in other countries: Thousands of other war criminals were tried by courts in those countries where they had committed their crimes.
The Defendants
For example, the Polish Supreme National Tribunal tried and convicted 49 leading Nazi officials for crimes committed during the German occupation of Poland. Military Tribunals are court proceedings used to try the enemy for violations of the laws of war.
Military Tribunals differ from criminal in some important ways. Military Tribunals are not required to preserve many of the rights protected in the Bill of Rights. For example, the Sixth Amendment requires criminal trials to be open to the public, but Military Tribunals can be secret.
Strict rules of evidence in the civilian justice system may not apply in a military tribunal. Decisions of Military Tribunals cannot be appealed in a federal court. Rather, the President, as Commander in Chief, makes the final decision in reviewed cases.
In October 1943, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin signed the Moscow Declaration of German Atrocities. The declaration stated that at the time of an armistice, Germans deemed responsible for atrocities, massacres, or executions would be sent back to those countries where they had committed the crimes.
Fleeting Justice
There, they would be judged and punished according to the laws of the nation concerned. Major war criminals, whose crimes affected more than one country, would be punished by joint decision of the Allied governments. In 2004, the Supreme Court held in Hamdi v.
Rumseld that habeas corpus did not depend on citizenship status. The President responded by convincing the Republican-led Congress to pass the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which addressed wartime conditions when habeas corpus did not apply to alien enemy combatants.
After much debate, 24 defendants were chosen to represent a cross-section of Nazi diplomatic, economic, political, and military leadership. Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Joseph Goebbels could not be tried because they committed suicide at the end of the war or soon afterwards.
Hermann Göring was the highest ranking Nazi official among the defendants. The Nuremberg Charter defined three crimes to be tried by the IMT: crimes against peace; war crimes; and crimes against humanity. In its definition of crimes against peace, the Charter includes "participation in a common plan or conspiracy" to commit crimes against peace.
Other Trials In The Postwar Era
On September 11, 2001, radical Islamic terrorists hijacked and crashed four passenger jets in New York, Washington, DC, and Pennsylvania. In all, 2,976 people, mostly civilians, lost their lives on that day. In the days following the attacks, US and British intelligence confirmed that Al-Qaeda, led by Osama bin Laden, had planned and carried out the attacks.
On September 20, President George W. Bush addressed Americans-many of whom had never heard of Al-Qaeda-in a televised speech before a joint session of Congress. Bush contrasted the September 11 attacks on civilian targets with December 7, 1941 when the Japanese bombed the naval base at Pearl Harbor.
He explained that while Al-Qaeda was linked to more than sixty countries, its base was Afghanistan. He condemned the Taliban regime which controlled Afghanistan, and announced the beginning of a War on Terror. On August 8, 1945, the French Republic, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the United States of America signed the London Agreement and Charter, also referred to as the Nuremberg Charter
. The Charter created an International Military Tribunal to try German leaders. Lord Justice Geoffrey Lawrence of Great Britain would serve as the court's presiding judge. The proceedings would be simultaneously translated into English, French, German, and Russian.
Verdict And Executions
The trial would make history being the first of its kind with judges from four countries. 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place, SW Washington, DC 20024-2126 Main telephone: 202.488.0400 TTY: 202.488.0406 Within a few years of the war's end, interest in bringing Nazi criminals to justice waned.
By the late 1950s, almost all of those who had been convicted but not executed were released. Of the convicted IMT defendants who were not hanged, only one spent the rest of his life in prison: Rudolf Hess, who had been a longstanding personal aide to Adolf Hitler and deputy party leader of the Nazi Party until 1941.
The United States and the Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings: On October 17, 1946, only one day after the IMT defendants were executed, President Harry Truman appointed Telford Taylor to be the new American chief war crimes prosecutor.
In November of 2008, Barack Obama was elected President. One of his campaign pledges was to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay by January 2010. troops remain in Afghanistan and Iraq, working to prevent the strengthening of Al-Qaeda.
Invest In Our Future
Between December 1946 and April 1948, Taylor oversaw the prosecution of 183 Germans in 12 separate trials in Nuremberg for the crimes set out in the Nuremberg Charter. These trials before American military tribunals are often referred to collectively as the Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings.
The IMT trial is the most famous of the war crimes trials held after World War II. During the five years that followed the end of the war, hundreds of thousands of Nazi perpetrators and their collaborators were tried by other courts in Germany and in the countries that were allied to or occupied by Nazi Germany.
The indictment of 24 Nazi government officials and organizations was filed on October 18, 1945 by the four chief prosecutors of the International Military Tribunal: Robert H Jackson of the United States, Sir Hartley Shawcross of Great Britain, Francois de Menthon of France, and Roman
A Rudenko of the Soviet Union. The jurisdiction of the Tribunal included crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The IMT defined crimes against humanity as "murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation...or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds."
Subsequent Nuremberg Trials
Two months later, President Bush approved the use of Military Tribunals to try accused terrorists, including many individuals captured in Afghanistan. Bush said that the Tribunals were needed to "protect the United States and its citizens, and for the effective conduct of military operations and prevention of terrorist attacks."
A detention camp was set up at the US Naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In the end, only 21 defendants appeared in court. German industrialist Gustav Krupp was included in the original indictment, but he was elderly and in failing health.
The Tribunal decided in preliminary hearings to exclude him from the proceedings. Nazi Party secretary Martin Bormann could not be located. Borman was thus tried in absentia. Head of the German Labor Front Robert Ley committed suicide on the eve of the trial.
"The United Kingdom, the United States and the Soviet Union have received from many quarters evidence of atrocities, massacres and cold-blooded mass executions which are being perpetrated by Hitlerite forces in many of the countries they have overrun . . . those German officers and
The Trial
men and members of the Nazi party who have been responsible for or have taken a consenting part in the above atrocities, massacres and executions will be sent back to the countries in which their abominable deeds were done in order that they may be judged and punished according
to the laws of these liberated countries and of free governments which will be erected therein..." The prosecution also presented films as evidence. One film produced by the United States showed the liberation of the concentration camps.
Another film produced by the Soviets showed evidence of Nazi atrocities and the liberation of Majdanek and Auschwitz concentration camps. The Holocaust was not the main focus of the trial, but considerable evidence was presented about the "Final Solution," the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jewish people.
This information included the mass murder operations at Auschwitz, the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto, and the estimate of six million Jewish victims. The former high station of these defendants, the notoriety of their acts, and the adaptability of their conduct to provoke retaliation make it hard to distinguish between the demand for a just and measured retribution, and the unthinking cry for vengeance which arises from the anguish of
Appointing The Court
war. It is our task, as far as humanly possible, to draw the line between the two. We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow.
We must summon such detachment and intellectual integrity to our task that this Trial will commend itself to posterity as fulfilling humanity's aspirations to do justice. In 1945, one of history's most notorious figures committed suicide by ingesting cyanide.
Heinrich Himmler, known for his role in the implementation of the "Final Solution," is remembered today for his heinous acts across Europe during World War II. Each of the four countries that created the International Military Tribunal (IMT) supplied one judge, one alternate judge, and a prosecution team.
The alternate judges participated in the Tribunal's deliberations but did not have a vote in its decisions. On October 1, 1946, the Tribunal convicted 19 of the defendants and acquitted three. Of those convicted, 12 were sentenced to death.
Three defendants were sentenced to life imprisonment and four to prison terms ranging from 10 to 20 years. On October 16, executions were carried out by hanging in the gymnasium of the courthouse. Hermann Göring committed suicide the night before his execution.
In 1947, the prisoners sentenced to incarceration were sent to Spandau Prison in Berlin. The Supreme Court continued to chip away at the President and Congress's power to establish the Military Tribunals in Boumediene v. Bush (2008).
The Court found the Military Commissions Act of 2006 to be an unconstitutional suspension of habeas corpus. Enemy combatant detainees at Guantanamo were entitled to the Fifth Amendment's protection of due process. The most effective way to secure a freer America with more opportunity for all is through engaging, educating, and empowering our youth.
And the most effective way to achieve that is through investing in The Bill of Rights Institute. We contribute to teachers and students by providing valuable resources, tools, and experiences that promote civic engagement through a historical framework.
You can be a part of this exciting work by making a donation to The Bill of Rights Institute today! From December 1946 to April 1949, a series of twelve additional military tribunals for war crimes against Nazi Germany leaders were held by the United States in the Palace of Justice.
The defendants were 177 high-ranking physicians, judges, industrialists, SS commanders and police commanders, military personnel, civil servants, and diplomats. The trials uncovered the German leadership that supported the Nazi dictatorship. Of the 177 defendants, 24 were sentenced to death, 20 to lifelong imprisonment, and 98 other prison sentences.
Twenty five defendants were found not guilty. Many of the prisoners were released early in the 1950s as a result of pardons. Thirteen of the 24 death sentences were executed. Although some Allied political leaders advocated summary executions of Nazi Germany's leaders, the United States proposed to try them instead.
In the words of US Secretary of State Cordell Hull, "a condemnation after such a proceeding will meet the judgment of history, so that the Germans will not be able to claim that an admission of war guilt was extracted from them under duress."
On October 16, 1946, ten of the condemned were hanged, cremated in Dachau, and their ashes dropped in the Isar River. Hermann Göring escaped the hangman's noose by committing suicide the night before. Martin Bormann, who was convicted in absentia, was much later proven to have died in Berlin during the final days of the war.
We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. We must summon such detachment and intellectual integrity to our task that this Trial will commend itself to posterity as fulfilling humanity's aspirations to do
justice.