The Nuremberg Trials: The Nazis and Their Crimes Against Humanity

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I recommend the book. Oct 14, Tom Delise rated it really liked it Shelves: The book is like reading a documentary. The build-up is slow but it gives a perspective of what antisemitism is all about. Its hard to believe the extent of lack of conscience! Jul 05, Ronald J. However, the real story is so much richer than the narrow slice of history dramatized in the film. For anyone interested in this fascinating dark chapter in history—and for anyone concerned with the course of history in the making as our leaders demonize minorities, assault the media and the courts, and speak of building walls—this is a MUST read.

I am extremely impressed by the layout of this book which took an enormous topic and broke it down in an easily readable sections. I am in awe of the level of coordination and undertaking that was necessary to have multiple countries come together and decide on charges against those who ideated and orchestrated decades of unthinkable crimes against humanity.

Jun 29, Gonzaga Escauriaza rated it it was amazing. Very interesting from the very first beginning. It reads very easy because it does not go deep into the confessions. They are summed up and just enough to understand have happened during the nazi era and be shocked about the behavior of most of the defendants. The comments about the reaction of the different defendants are accurate and witty. We can understand why Allies established these trials and how they organized them.

By the end of the day, each Nazi leader received his own punishments based on what he did during WWII. No matter what they accept the sentences, they still had to pay back for millions lost lives through those years. Jun 28, Mark Blei rated it liked it Shelves: However if you want a general sense of the trials without reading a 1, page book, this would be a great read for you. Heart Burning One of those vitally important things that you have to read in stages. You find yourself not wanting to put it down but have too as your heart burns and your eyes swell. This was a book i couldn't put down.

I am an 86year old male who lived through the second world war. A look at justice. I've read several accounts of the trials at Nuremberg and this one was well researched and easy to read. I learned and enjoyed.

Oct 23, Spurnlad rated it it was amazing. Clear and concise account of the trials and the crimes committed. Interesting Extremely interesting and also alarming. Very talented composed lawyers in the face of evil remained composed throughout under difficult circumstances. May 11, Nick rated it liked it. A short history of the trials. Factual and easy to read. Nov 23, Laura Bray rated it it was ok. Well written account I felt that this book provides a broad overview of the Trails, it would be of interest to the casual reader and the serious historian alike.

I would have preferred a more in depth account from both sides. Jan 20, Paul rated it liked it Shelves: I have mixed views on this book. I selected it to read as it is a reasonably short overview of the Nuremberg Trials and not that old, whereas most other books seemed to be pretty long and i was not sure how much time I was prepared to invest in this subject. It is a fast paced easy read with lots of pictures that give context to the text. Some of the events described are very powerful reminders of the unimaginable suffering that took place.

I have several to be honest - I have mixed views on this book.

I have several to be honest - 1 The Nuremburg Trial is too large a subject for this book to do it any justice. I realised this whilst reading the book - you really only touch the surface which is not enough. Here the author refers to the accused as "non-entities" or "fat" or other derogative terms. Really, that is not appropriate and as an author you loose all credibility.

To be honest, this book does not have a unique selling point. I expect other books cover the subject much better - so what is the point of it? The author was not present, therefore all his material must be based on other books so I suspect the descriptive flavouring added when describing events in the trial by this author starts to head towards fiction.

Apr 09, Carrie rated it it was amazing Shelves: For anyone interested in the fate of the various Nazi war criminals after WWII, this book is an excellent overview. It's laid out well - it starts with details about how the trials came to fruition, who the judges were, and how the Allied powers worked together. It discusses the debate between trying the Nazis versus execution without trial.

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It details all of the Nazis who were tried in the first round of Nuremberg trials, what their roles were, and how they interacted with the judges, the priso For anyone interested in the fate of the various Nazi war criminals after WWII, this book is an excellent overview. It details all of the Nazis who were tried in the first round of Nuremberg trials, what their roles were, and how they interacted with the judges, the prison psychologist, and each other.

It also summarizes their sentences, the rationale for their sentences, and their reactions to their sentences. At the end, there are summaries of other trials that took place in Nuremberg but that were not as famous as the first trials where Goering was tried. The Nuremberg Trials were lengthy and detailed; the author notes in this book how many of the prosecution and defense's arguments would go on for hours at a time.

I was worried that the book would get bogged down with tedious trial details, but it did not. The only complaint I have about this book is that I found it hard to recall who some of the leaders were. I was familiar with Goering and several other defendants going into this book, but I had not heard of many of the others. Toward the beginning of the book, the author lists all of the defendants and what they are accused of; I recommend bookmarking these brief summaries for the people who you are unfamiliar with, so that you can reference them later.

This is a great value for a Kindle book as well. Definitely a worthwhile and quick read. Jan 04, Marcia rated it liked it. History books, our teachers, and our families have made sure that we are all aware of the atrocious crimes against humanity that were committed during the Nazi reign. On May 8 of WWII was officially over on the Western front specifically and people began assimilating to their previous lives, returning from concentration camps, labour camps and safe houses. We have heard about the monstrous crimes that were conc Most of us have general knowledge of the Holocaust and the happenings of WWII.

We have heard about the monstrous crimes that were conceptualized and committed by the Nazis and SS, but what happened to leaders? Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler committed suicide and thus did not have to answer for their crimes, but what about Goering arguably Hitler's second or third in command and the other high level Nazis that worked along side with Hitler? The Nuremberg Trials addresses those questions with a simply and enlightening read.

Paul Roland does a fantastic job laying out the legal and political aspect of these trials in a simple read that manages to encompass the enormity of a trial that lasted almost a year and established laws and precepts that would remain intact. Even though this subject may seem dry of uninteresting, for a non-fiction book the author does a fantastic job of keeping on track and avoids becoming dry or overly factual in presentation.

I would recommend this book as a quick but enlightening read. Jan 07, David Lowther rated it really liked it. The Nuremberg Trials was a straightforward account of the first trial not long after the end of the war which dealt with the most senior of the Nazi functionaries. Roland sketches in the background, introduces the defendants, explains the four charges, outlines the indictments and then goes through the trial, verdicts and outcomes. As a footnote, he give brief details of the German war crimes trials involving other alleged war criminals.

How can principles enunciated by the Nuremberg Tribunal, to take it as an example, be of legal value until most of the states have agreed to a tribunal with jurisdiction to enforce those principles? How could the Nuremberg Tribunal have obtained jurisdiction to find Germany guilty of aggression, when Germany had not consented to the Tribunal? How could the law, first explicitly accepted in the Nuremberg Charter of , have bound the defendants in the trial when they committed the acts for which they were indicted years earlier? I don't mind what he does to the Nazis, but I hate to see the pretense that he is running a court and proceeding according to common law.

This is a little too sanctimonious a fraud to meet my old-fashioned ideas", Stone wrote. Jackson, in a letter discussing the weaknesses of the trial, in October told U. Truman that the Allies themselves "have done or are doing some of the very things we are prosecuting the Germans for. The French are so violating the Geneva Convention in the treatment of prisoners of war that our command is taking back prisoners sent to them.

We are prosecuting plunder and our Allies are practising it. We say aggressive war is a crime and one of our allies asserts sovereignty over the Baltic States based on no title except conquest. Douglas charged that the Allies were guilty of "substituting power for principle" at Nuremberg.

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Deputy Chief Counsel Abraham Pomerantz resigned in protest at the low caliber of the judges assigned to try the industrial war criminals such as those at I. Taft , a US Senate Majority Leader from Ohio and son of William Howard Taft , criticized the Nuremberg Trials for trying Nazi war criminals under ex post facto laws which resulted in his failure to secure the Republican nomination for President in A number of Germans who agreed with the idea of punishment for war crimes admitted trepidation concerning the trials.

A contemporary German jurist said:. That the defendants at Nuremberg were held responsible, condemned and punished, will seem to most of us initially as a kind of historical justice. However, no one who takes the question of guilt seriously, above all no responsibly thoughtful jurist, will be content with this sensibility nor should they be allowed to be.

Justice is not served when the guilty parties are punished in any old way, even if this seems appropriate with regard to their measure of guilt. Justice is only served when the guilty are punished in a way that carefully and conscientiously considers their criminal errors according to the provisions of valid law under the jurisdiction of a legally appointed judge.

The Tribunal shall not require proof of facts of common knowledge but shall take judicial notice thereof. It shall also take judicial notice of official governmental documents and reports of the United [Allied] Nations, including acts and documents of the committees set up in the various allied countries for the investigation of war crimes, and the records and findings of military and other Tribunals of any of the United [Allied] Nations.

Attractive as this argument may sound in theory, it ignores the fact that it runs counter to the administration of law in every country. If it were true then no spy could be given a legal trial, because his case is always heard by judges representing the enemy country. Yet no one has ever argued that in such cases it was necessary to call on neutral judges. The prisoner has the right to demand that his judges shall be fair, but not that they shall be neutral.

As Lord Wright has pointed out, the same principle is applicable to ordinary criminal law because 'a burglar cannot complain that he is being tried by a jury of honest citizens'. One criticism that was made of the IMT was that some treaties were not binding on the Axis powers because they were not signatories. This was addressed in the judgment relating to war crimes and crimes against humanity, [avalon 26] which contains an expansion of customary law: The Nuremberg Trials employed four official languages: English , French , German and Russian.

In order to address the complex linguistic issues that clouded over the proceedings, interpretation and translation departments had to be established. However, it was feared that consecutive interpretation would slow down the proceedings significantly. What is therefore unique in both the Nuremberg tribunals and history of the interpretation profession was the introduction of an entirely new technique, extempore simultaneous interpretation.

This technique of interpretation requires the interpreter to listen to a speaker in a source or passive language and orally translate that speech into another language in real time, that is, simultaneously, through headsets and microphones. Interpreters were split into four sections, one for each official language, with three interpreters per section working from the other three languages into the fourth their mother tongue.

For instance, the English booth consisted of three interpreters, one working from German into English, one working from French, and one from Russian, etc. Defendants who did not speak any of the four official languages were provided with consecutive court interpreters. Some of the languages heard over the course of the proceedings included Yiddish , Hungarian , Czech , Ukrainian , and Polish. The equipment used to establish this system was provided by IBM , and included an elaborate setup of cables which were hooked up to headsets and single earphones directly from the four interpreting booths often referred to as "the aquarium".

Four channels existed for each working language, as well as a root channel for the proceedings without interpretation. Switching of channels was controlled by a setup at each table in which the listener merely had to turn a dial in order to switch between languages. People tripping over the floor-laid cables often led to the headsets getting disconnected, with several hours at a time sometimes being taken in order to repair the problem and continue on with the trials.

Interpreters were recruited and examined by the respective countries in which the official languages were spoken: Many were former translators , army personnel, and linguists , some were experienced consecutive interpreters, [97] others were ordinary individuals and even recent secondary school-graduates who led international lives in multilingual environments.

With the simultaneous technique being extremely new, interpreters practically trained themselves, but many could not handle the pressure or the psychological strain. Many often had to be replaced, many returned to the translation department, and many left. Serious doubts were given as to whether interpretation provided a fair trial for the defendants, particularly because of fears of mistranslation and errors made on transcripts. The translation department had to also deal with the overwhelming problem of being understaffed and overburdened with an influx of documents that could not be kept up with.

More often than not, interpreters were stuck in a session without having proper documents in front of them and were relied upon to do sight translation or double translation of texts, causing further problems and extensive criticism.

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Other problems that arose included complaints from lawyers and other legal professionals with regard to questioning and cross-examination. Legal professionals were most often appalled at the slower speed at which they had to conduct their task because of the extended time required for interpreters to render an interpretation properly. Also, a number of interpreters protested the idea of using vulgar language, especially if it referred to Jews or the conditions of the Nazi concentration camps. Yet, despite the extensive trial and error, without the interpretation system the trials would not have been possible and in turn revolutionized the way multilingual issues were addressed in tribunals and conferences.

A number of the interpreters following the trials were immediately recruited into the newly formed United Nations , while others returned to their ordinary lives, pursued other careers, or worked freelance. Outside the boundaries of the trials, many interpreters continued their positions on weekends interpreting for dinners, private meetings between judges, and excursions between delegates.

Nuremberg trials

Others worked as investigators or editors, or aided the translation department when they could, often using it as an opportunity to sharpen their skills and to correct poor interpretations on transcripts before they were available for public record. For further reference, a book titled The Origins of Simultaneous Interpretation: Today, all major international organizations, as well as any conference or government that uses more than one official language , uses extempore simultaneous interpretation. Notable bodies include the Parliament of Kosovo with three official languages, the Parliament of Canada with two official languages, the Parliament of South Africa with eleven official languages, the European Union with twenty-four official languages, and the United Nations with six official working languages.

Documents in Law, History, and Diplomacy. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For the Soviet film about the trials, see Nuremberg Trials film.

Lieber Code Human shields Crimes against humanity Crime of apartheid. Jews on selection ramp at Auschwitz, May Joint Declaration by Members of the United Nations. Holocaust survivors Deportations of French Jews to death camps. Days of remembrance Memorials and museums Righteous Among the Nations. There were, I suppose, three possible courses: Which was it to be? Was it possible to let such atrocities go unpunished?

It will be remembered that after the First World War alleged criminals were handed over to be tried by Germany , and what a farce that was! The majority got off and such sentences as were inflicted were derisory and were soon remitted. A few years from now the lawyers of the world will condemn this trial. You can't have a trial without law.

The Nuremberg Trials : The Nazis and Their Crimes Against Humanity

The trials were conducted under their own rules of evidence. The Charter of the International Military Tribunal permitted the use of normally inadmissible "evidence". Article 19 specified that "The Tribunal shall not be bound by technical rules of evidence The defendants were not allowed to appeal or affect the selection of judges. Goodhart , Professor at Oxford , opposed the view that, because the judges were appointed by the victors, the Tribunal was not impartial and could not be regarded as a court in the true sense.

This section does not cite any sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. July Learn how and when to remove this template message. This speech by Lawrence is reprinted in Mettraux , pp. The Nuremberg option wasn't apple pie either". Archived from the original on Retrieved 21 April Archived from the original on 11 March Retrieved 23 November Foreign relations of the United States. Conferences at Malta and Yalta, Museen der Stadt Nuernberg CS1 maint: The New York Times.

Kaplan, 76, prosecutor at Nuremberg trials". From Nuremberg to the Hague: The tribunal's eventual decision was that Gustav Krupp could not be tried because of his condition but that 'the charges against him in the Indictment should be retained for trial thereafter if the physical and mental condition of the defendant should permit'. Gilbert does not provide Ley's IQ, presumably because Ley committed suicide before the tests were done, though Gilbert is not explicit on this point.

Sereny , p. Coincidentally, Brunner , p. Moreover, in some cases no verbatim notes were taken, whereas other protocols were recorded by a psychologist who seems to have had no previous experience with the Rorschach. Nuremberg Defendants at ukmc. Retrieved 21 November Nuremberg Diary , p. Report of Commission to Examine Defendant Hess". Retrieved 11 September Government leaders, military rulers, and political activists. Library of Congress Country Studies. Archived at the Wayback Machine. Archived from the original PDF on 30 April The trial removed 11 of the most despicable Nazis from life itself.

In the early morning hours of Wednesday, October 16, , ten men died in the courthouse gymnasium in a botched hanging that left some strangled to death for as long as 25 minutes. Archived from the original on 2 March Woods, botched the execution. A number of the hanged Nazis died, not quickly from a broken neck as intended, but agonizingly from slow strangulation. Ribbentrop and Sauckel each took 14 minutes to choke to death, while Keitel, whose death was the most painful, struggled for 28 minutes at the end of the rope before expiring.

MacLean, The Fifth Field: Arcturus Publishing Limited, Antony's College, Oxford, that "[t]he Nuremberg trials have not had a very good press. They are often depicted as a form of victor's justice in which people were tried for crimes which did not exist in law when they committed them, such as conspiring to start a war. Richard Overy Archived at the Wayback Machine. There was no precedent. No other civilian government had ever been put on trial by the authorities of other states What the Allied powers had in mind was a tribunal that would make the waging of aggressive war, the violation of sovereignty and the perpetration of what came to be known in as 'crimes against humanity' internationally recognized offences.

Pendas, Boston College, Massachusetts. Marshall Cavendish Corporation page Chinese Journal of International Law. Russia to release massacre files, 16 December online Archived at the Wayback Machine. US military personnel and their wives were under strict orders to destroy or otherwise render inedible their own leftover surplus so as to ensure it could not be eaten by German civilians.

A Companion to Russian History. McMillan, Five Men at Nuremberg , pp. The origins of simultaneous interpretation: Nuremberg Trial Proceedings volume 1. Lillian Goldman Law Library. Archived from the original on 7 January Bower, Tom []. Blind Eye to Murder: Davidson, Eugene []. The Trial of the Germans: University of Missouri Press. The Death and Life of Germany. The Third Reich at War. A critical evaluation of the Nuremberg legacy". Conversations with the Defendants and Witnesses. Heller, Kevin Jon University of North Carolina Press.

Law, Meaning, and Violence. University of Michigan Press. Mason, Alpheus Thomas []. Pillar of the Law. Perspectives on the Nuremberg Trial. The Nazi Elite in Allied Hands. Mirages of International Justice: Senarclens, Pierre de Sereny, Gitta , Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth , London: Reaching Judgment at Nuremberg.

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Wright, Quincy July American Journal of International Law. From Nuremberg to Baghdad. Links to related articles. Axis and Axis-aligned leaders. Bengal famine of Chinese famine of —43 Greek Famine of Dutch famine of —45 Vietnamese Famine of Major defendants at the Nuremberg trials. Remains discovered in Berlin in and conclusively identified in ; confirmed to have committed suicide on 2 May 2 Committed suicide on 15 October before sentence could be carried out 3 Found unfit to stand trial 4 Committed suicide on 25 October Crimes against international law.

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