Germany marks 75th anniversary of landmark Nuremberg trials

Seventy-five years ago, the dock of Courtroom 600 of the Nuremberg Palace of Justice was packed with some of the most nefarious figures of the 20th Century: Hermann Goering, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop and 18 other highranking Nazis.

They weren’t yet known as war criminals — it was a charge that didn’t exist until the Nuremberg trials began on Nov. 20, 1945, in what is now seen as the birthplace of a new era of international law.

The proceedings broke new ground in holding government leaders individually responsible for their aggression and slaughter of millions of innocents. In addition to establishing the offense of war crimes, it also produced the charges of crimes against peace, waging a war of aggression, and crimes against humanity, whose legacies live on in the International Criminal Court of today.

Nuremberg was the city where Adolf Hitler reviewed torchlight Nazi party rallies and promulgated the race laws of 1935 that paved the way for the Holocaust.

The testimony of hundreds of witnesses was heard over 218 trial days. One of them was Rudolf Hoess, the Auschwitz death camp commandant, who

“reacted to the order to slaughter human beings as he would have to an order to fell trees,” wrote U.S. prosecutor Whitney R. Harris.

On Oct. 1, 1946, Goering, Hitler’s air force chief and right-hand man, was sentenced to death along with 11 others, including Martin Bormann, Hitler’s deputy, who was tried in absentia. Bormann is now known to have died in Berlin in 1945 as he tried to flee the Soviets. Seven drew long prison sentences and three were acquitted.

Fifteen days later, the condemned men were hanged in the courthouse’s adjacent prison. Goering committed suicide by swallowing a poison pill in his cell the night before.