Seventy year ago, the 1945-46 Nuremberg Trials of Nazi Germany’s top surviving wartime leaders reached their climax. On October 1, 1946, 19 of the 22 Nuremberg defendants were found guilty of war crimes. It had taken 315 days since the start of the trials for the International Military Tribunal that the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union formed at the end of World War II to reach the decisions that still shape our views of international law.
The charges—conspiracy to wage aggressive war, waging aggressive war, crimes against the conduct of war, crimes against humanity—were of such magnitude that only six of the Nuremberg defendants were convicted on all four counts, but the picture of Nazi Germany, based largely on German records, that the trials revealed was enough to horrify the world.
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