Analysis: International Conference on Military Trials—Agreement and Charter

Date: August 8, 1945

Authors: Robert H. Jackson; Robert Falco; William Jowitt; Iona Nikitchenko; Aron Trainin

Genre: government document

Summary Overview

As early as December 1942, the three main Allied powers of World War II—the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union—had issued a statement condemning the Nazi regime's policy of exterminating European Jews, and had resolved to prosecute those responsible when the war was over. As Allied troops liberated German-held territory during 1944 and early 1945, they came across many of the concentration camps operated by the Nazis, and were appalled at what they found. By the time the war was over, many were determined to seek justice for the victims of what became known as the Holocaust by trying and punishing the architects of what the Nazis euphemistically called the “Final Solution.” The Agreement and Charter of the International Conference on Military Trials, otherwise known as the Nuremberg Charter, established the legal mechanism by which the victorious Allies would try the Nazi leadership for war crimes.

Defining Moment

By the time World War II came to an end, the basic facts of the Holocaust—in which some 6 million European Jews died, along with an estimated 5 million others considered undesirable by the Nazis—were well known by Allied leaders, and pressure mounted to bring the responsible leaders to justice. These were not the routine atrocities of war with which those who studied history were familiar; the representatives of the Allies who met at the International Conference on Military Trials in London from June 26 until August 8, 1945, declared that these were something new: they were “crimes against humanity.”

At the conclusion of World War I, there had been discussion of a possible tribunal to try those the Allied leaders considered responsible for starting the war and those who committed atrocities during the fighting. No such trials ever took place, as the Allies allowed Germany and the Ottoman Empire to try those considered war criminals under their own domestic laws. However, this was less than satisfactory to many, and Allied leaders were determined not to allow a similarly attenuated justice at the end of World War II.

However, trying the Nazi leadership was not an easy proposition, as each of the four nations represented at the London conference—the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and France— had different judicial traditions. At the beginning of the conference, not all of the Allied leaders even agreed that international trials were the best way to deal with the Nazi leaders: British prime minister Winston Churchill was quoted as preferring summary execution (execution without a trial). However, the American president, Harry S. Truman, argued that by trying the Nazis, later generations would be less likely to argue that the Nazis were executed without any evidence of their crimes.

However, the idea of staging an international trial, under international law, was new, and not approved of by all jurists in many of the Allied nations. The leaders at the London conference decided to limit the jurisdiction of the tribunal they were creating to actions taken during the pursuit of an international war that they considered illegal. The document produced at the end of the conference, the Nuremberg Charter, outlined the mechanisms that would ensure that the trials were conducted equitably and that the punishments called for by the tribunal would have legal justification.

Author Biography

The authors of the Nuremberg Charter were all noted jurists, many of whom would go on to play influential roles at the Nuremberg Trials that followed. Robert H. Jackson was an associate justice of the US Supreme Court whom Truman asked to lead the prosecution. Robert Falco, who served on the Nuremberg tribunal, was a French judge from the Paris Court of Appeals who had lost his position in 1944 because of his Jewish heritage. William Jowitt had been the British solicitor general, with a long career as an attorney and member of Parliament. Iona Nikitchenko was a judge in the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union. Aron Trainin was a professor and Soviet jurist who was influential in designing the Soviet legal system. Far from a united group, each of the signatories had their own views of how the Nazi leadership should be prosecuted, ranging from Jackson's reliance on the proceedings as justification for the punishments, to Nikitchenko's view that the outcomes of the trials were already decided.

Document Analysis

By the time representatives of the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union convened in London in July 1945, the war against Nazi Germany was over and the basic outline of how the war criminals of the Nazi regime would be dealt with had been agreed to in a series of meetings over the prior three years. The responsibility of those gathered at London was to codify those earlier discussions so as to create a legal framework for the trials that would follow. Abiding by such a charter would give the trials a legal legitimacy that simply executing the war criminals would not, and each of the articles in the charter sought to define, as precisely as possible, the legal justification and procedures for what would follow.

The first section gives the particulars on the tribunal and its reason for existence. Importantly, it clarifies the fact that it would not supersede national courts with regard to crimes that occur in a particular location. However, many of the Nazis stood accused of war crimes that had a wide or difficult-to-define geographical span, and these cases would be the province of the tribunal.

The main body of the charter gives the makeup of the tribunal, which “shall consist of four members, each with an alternate,” with each nation providing one of the members. Whereas in an American courtroom, the defendant's attorney could challenge the judge or the jury on the basis of bias, no such rights were provided to the Nazi defendants. The judges on the tribunal would select from among themselves a president, and his was to be the decisive vote in case of a tie.

The charter lists three types of crimes to be tried by the tribunal: crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Though war crimes trials had been held at the conclusion of past wars, crimes against peace and crimes against humanity were entirely new categories of offenses that the signers of the charter deemed necessary to create in order to cover the extent of the Nazi crimes of waging an aggressive war in violation of treaties and the atrocities and mass murders that made up the Holocaust.

The charter then goes on to list the job of the investigators, the rights of the defendants, and the extent of the powers of the tribunal in terms of conduct of the trials and sentencing. But though these rights may seem similar to those found in Western courtrooms, the protections afforded to the Nazi war criminals fell far short of what would be found elsewhere.

Glossary

contumacy: stubborn perverseness or rebelliousness; willful and obstinate resistance or disobedience to authority

mitigation: the act of making a condition or consequence less severe

probative: affording proof or evidence; serving or designed for testing or trial

Bibliography and Additional Reading

Ginsburgs, George, and V. N. Kudriavtsev. The Nuremberg Trial and International Law. Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 1990. Print.

Hirsch, Francine. “The Soviets at Nuremberg: International Law, Propaganda, and the Making of the Postwar Order.” American Historical Review 113.3 (2008): 701–30. Print.

Kelly, Michael J., and Timothy L. H. McCormack. “Contributions of the Nuremberg Trial to the Subsequent Development of International Law.” The Legacy of Nuremberg: Civilising Influence or Institutionalised Vengeance? Ed. David A. Blumenthal and Timothy L. H. McCormack. Dordrecht: Nijhoff, 2007. Print.