In the middle of a city that had officially been categorized as "90-percent dead" a few months before, 21 men filed into the Nuremberg Palace of Justice on November 24, 1945, to be tried for crimes that had never existed before.
The men, a cross-section of what was left of the Nazi leadership, had spent the last few months imprisoned in a castle in Luxembourg, mostly bored and left in the dark about what was going to happen to them.
Depending on their dispositions, the men had either been expecting instant execution or were offended to have been arrested in the first place. The alpha-male among them was Hermann Göring, former chancellor of the Reichstag, former head of the German air force, former designated successor to Adolf Hitler. Göring held a press conference in July at which he was asked if he knew that he was on the war criminals' list. "No," he answered. "That question surprises me very much for I cannot imagine why I should be."
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