How a Lawyer Led the Allies to Victory at Nuremberg

In the fall of 1945, a bit more than six years after Nazi Germany invaded Poland and started the biggest and deadliest conflict in history, a largely self-taught lawyer from a tiny hamlet in the southwest corner of New York State set out to convict the surviving Nazi leadership of crimes “so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.” In his roughly four-hour opening statement at the first Nuremberg trial, Robert H. Jackson, chief prosecutor for the United States, offered the first full public picture of how the Nazis had planned and carried out the many horrors that shock the world to this day, including the systematic murder of an estimated six million Jews.