In 1945 the victorious powers could have shot the men in custody. They built a courtroom instead — and had to invent the law they intended to apply.
Ten items. Work through the four activities — say your answer out loud before you reveal it.
Three terms: jurisdiction · immunity · impunity. Say the right one, then reveal.
Read each part. After it, there's a quick check (answer from memory first), then one question to discuss.
By the spring of 1945 the Allied governments had a practical problem and very little agreement about it. Senior figures in the British government, Churchill among them, argued for a short list of the principal leaders to be identified and shot once their identity was established. The reasoning was not vindictive so much as legalistic: their guilt was a fact of history, no court could add to it, and a trial risked giving them a stage. The Soviet position was that there should certainly be a trial, and that the verdict should be settled in advance — the form of the show trials Stalin had already run at home.
The Americans pressed for the third option, and the case was made most forcefully by Robert Jackson, a Supreme Court justice who took leave to become chief prosecutor. His argument was that a summary execution would be an act of policy that any future government could imitate, whereas a trial on evidence, with defence counsel and the possibility of acquittal, would leave behind a record that could not be denied and a rule that could be applied again. The four powers signed a charter in London in August 1945 creating an International Military Tribunal.
The charter had to invent as much as it codified. It set out four counts: conspiracy to commit the other crimes; crimes against peace, meaning the planning and waging of aggressive war; war crimes in the traditional sense; and a new category, crimes against humanity, covering the persecution and murder of civilian populations, including a state's own citizens. It provided that acting as head of state or on government orders would not free a defendant from responsibility, though orders might be considered in mitigation. The word genocide, coined the year before, appeared in the indictment but was not itself one of the charges.
1. What were the three options, and what was the argument for a trial?
2. Which two provisions of the Charter had the most far-reaching consequences?
1. Summary execution of the leaders; a trial with a predetermined verdict; or a genuine trial on evidence. The argument for the third was that it would produce an undeniable record and a rule capable of being applied to others, rather than an act of policy that any future victor could copy.
2. The creation of crimes against humanity, which reached a state's treatment of civilians including its own; and the removal of both head-of-state immunity and superior orders as defences, which established that individuals answer personally under international law.
The trial opened on 20 November 1945 and ran for nearly eleven months. Twenty-four men were indicted; twenty-one sat in the dock, one was tried in his absence, one had killed himself before proceedings began and one was found too ill to stand trial. Jackson's opening statement contained the sentence that is still quoted whenever an international court is established: that four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, should stay the hand of vengeance and submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law was, he said, one of the most significant tributes that power has ever paid to reason.
The prosecution's decisive choice was to build the case on documents rather than on witnesses. The regime had recorded itself with extraordinary thoroughness — orders, minutes, transport schedules, reports of numbers — and those records were now in Allied hands. Survivors did give evidence, and film taken at the liberated camps was shown in court. But the spine of the case was the defendants' own paperwork, which is much harder to attack than testimony and left a documentary record that has made denial an act of deliberate bad faith ever since.
The defences were serious and were argued properly. Counsel contended that the tribunal lacked jurisdiction, being a court created by the victors to try the vanquished. They submitted that crimes against peace were retroactive: individuals had not previously been punishable for waging war, however unlawful the war. They maintained that defendants had acted on the orders of a head of state within a functioning legal order. And they argued tu quoque — that the Allies had done comparable things. On one count that argument had real force: a German admiral charged over unrestricted submarine warfare produced a deposition from an American admiral confirming that the United States had conducted the Pacific war the same way, and the tribunal did not punish him on that ground. It also transpired long afterwards that one massacre laid at German doors in the indictment had in fact been committed by the Soviet security service, whose own government sat in judgment.
1. Why did the prosecution rely mainly on documents, and what did that achieve?
2. Give two of the four defence objections, and say where tu quoque actually succeeded.
1. Because the regime had documented itself exhaustively and the records were in Allied hands. Documents are far harder to discredit than testimony, and the result is a documentary record that makes later denial impossible in good faith.
2. Any two of: no jurisdiction (a victors' court); retroactivity of crimes against peace; superior orders and head-of-state authority; tu quoque. It had real effect on the submarine warfare count, where an American admiral's deposition confirmed the same practice, and the tribunal did not punish the defendant on that ground.
Judgment was delivered on 1 October 1946. Twelve of the defendants were sentenced to death, three to life imprisonment, and four to terms of years. Three were acquitted altogether. Those three acquittals are the most important part of the outcome, and they are usually left out of the summary. A court that had been created by the winners, applying law the winners had written days after the war, examined the evidence against three men and found it insufficient. The Soviet judge dissented, arguing that all should have been convicted. Whatever else the tribunal was, an acquittal was genuinely available in it, and three men walked out.
The most senior defendant was found dead in his cell hours before he was to be hanged, having obtained cyanide. The sentences were carried out in the gymnasium of the prison on 16 October 1946.
The principles were codified by the United Nations International Law Commission in 1950 and are now the ordinary furniture of international law: individuals bear responsibility under international law; official position is no defence; superior orders are no defence, though they may mitigate. From that line come the Genocide Convention, the revised Geneva Conventions, the tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s, and the permanent International Criminal Court established in 2002. The criticism has travelled just as far. The court was constituted by four powers, one of which had itself invaded a neighbour in 1939 and had committed the massacre it helped to prosecute. The charge of aggressive war has proved almost impossible to bring since, largely because the powers capable of bringing it are also capable of committing it. Robert Jackson foresaw the objection and answered it in the only way available to him: if these acts are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or Germany does — and he added that the tribunal would not be worth the paper it was written on if it did not lay down a rule that would be applied to everyone.
1. Why do the three acquittals matter so much to any assessment of the trial?
2. What are the Nuremberg principles, and what is the strongest criticism of the tribunal?
1. Because a show trial does not acquit. Three defendants were found not guilty on the evidence, over the dissent of one of the judges, which is the best available evidence that the proceedings were not predetermined.
2. That individuals are personally responsible under international law; that official position, including head of state, is no defence; and that superior orders are no defence though they may mitigate. The strongest criticism is that the court was created and staffed by the victors, one of whom had committed comparable acts — and that the crime of aggression has been all but unenforceable since, because those able to prosecute it are those able to commit it.
A trial transcript is a machine for keeping four things apart: what one side asserts, what the other side argues in reply, what a witness admits, and what the court decides. English does that work almost entirely through the choice of reporting verb — and the wrong verb quietly turns an allegation into a fact.
An internal investigation report into procurement irregularities. Complete each gap with one reporting verb, in the correct form.
1. The finance team says this happened, and it has not yet been proved. → "It is that three contracts were awarded without competitive tender."
2. The supplier's lawyers argue a position to the panel. → "Counsel for the supplier that the framework agreement permitted direct award."
3. The director gives up a point he had been fighting. → "The director that no written approval had been obtained."
4. The panel states what the facts are. → "The panel that the approval was given orally and recorded afterwards."
5. The panel states what the rule is. → "The panel that oral approval does not satisfy the policy."
1. alleged 2. submitted / contended 3. conceded / accepted / admitted 4. found 5. held / ruled
Look at 4 and 5. Same panel, same paragraph, two different verbs — because one is about what happened and the other is about what the rule means. Writers who use "found" for both lose the distinction that makes a report appealable.
A compliance memo has drifted. Rewrite each sentence so that it states the allegation without adopting it. Write only the missing words.
1. "The regional manager falsified the inspection records." → "The regional manager to have falsified the inspection records."
2. "He knew the certificates were out of date." → "He that he had known the certificates were out of date." (his response)
3. "The payments were approved by head office." → "The payments to have been approved by head office."
4. "Two staff reported it in January and nothing happened." → "Two members of staff having reported the matter in January."
1. is alleged 2. denies / denied 3. are understood / are said 4. report / describe
None of these makes the memo weaker. They make it survivable — the first version is a set of findings written by somebody who has not made any.
You are opening a case before a panel, setting out what each side says before you argue anything. Complete it, then read it aloud.
"Let me begin by separating four things. It is that the contracts were awarded outside the framework; that is the allegation, and it is not yet established. My client that any approval was sought orally, and I will come to the evidence on that. He does, however, that the written record was completed after the event, and he has said so from the first interview. I that on the documents before you the policy was not breached; but if the panel otherwise on the facts, I ask you to that a defect of record-keeping is not a defect of integrity."
alleged · denies · concede / accept · submit · finds · hold (or find)
Notice the order: allegation, denial, concession, submission. The concession comes before the argument, not after it — an advocate who gives up the indefensible point early is believed on the ones they keep.
Take these into the Speak tab: you will be arguing that a court had no right to exist, in language precise enough to be minuted.
A note before we argue: the events are summarised here and legal systems differ — this is material for discussion and for language, not legal advice. And one boundary should be explicit: what is arguable below is the legitimacy of the tribunal and the wisdom of trying rather than shooting. The crimes themselves are established on the defendants' own records and are not among the things being argued about.
All of it out loud, against the clock. Three registers: narrating with precision, arguing a position you may not hold, and reporting the same allegations to four rooms that need different things from you.
Present this to someone who knows the name and nothing else. Structure it: the three options in 1945 → why Jackson argued for a trial → what the Charter had to invent → the documentary case → the four defences → the verdicts and the three acquittals → what was codified afterwards.
Finish with one sentence on what the trial established that had not existed before. Use at least five key terms (indictment, jurisdiction, retroactive, superior orders, immunity, impunity, crimes against humanity, in absentia, victors' justice, complicity).
You are defence counsel making the opening jurisdictional argument. Your case: this tribunal was constituted by one side of the conflict; two of its counts were defined after the acts they describe; no national of a victorious power can be indicted before it; and one of the constituting powers has itself done things within the indictment.
Argue it in the register of a submission — I submit, I invite the tribunal to hold — and do not touch the facts of the atrocities, which are not your point. Then do it again in ninety seconds.
Take one serious allegation against a senior person in an organisation. Report it four ways, one minute each. What is alleged, admitted and established must not shift between rooms — only the register.
Prefer not to use anything of your own? Take one of these instead: