The Nuremberg Trials

Abstract:     
No trial provides a better basis for understanding the nature and causes of evil than do the Nuremberg trials from 1945 to 1949. Those who come to the trials expecting to find sadistic monsters are generally disappointed. What is shocking about Nuremberg is the ordinariness of the defendants: men who may be good fathers, kind to animals, even unassuming - yet who committed unspeakable crimes. Years later, reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt wrote of the banality of evil. Like Eichmann, most Nuremberg defendants never aspired to be villains. Rather, they over-identified with an ideological cause and suffered from a lack of imagination or empathy: they couldn't fully appreciate the human consequences of their career-motivated decisions.

Twelve trials, involving over a hundred defendants and several different courts, took place in Nuremberg from 1945 to 1949. By far the most attention - not surprisingly, given the figures involved - has focused on the first Nuremberg trial of twenty-one major war criminals. Several of the eleven subsequent Nuremberg trials, however, involved conduct no less troubling - and issues at least as interesting - as the Major War Criminals Trial. For example, the trial of sixteen German judges and officials of the Reich Ministry (The Justice Trial) considered the criminal responsibility of judges who enforce immoral laws. (The Justice Trial became the inspiration for the acclaimed Hollywood movie, Judgment at Nuremberg.) Other subsequent trials, such as the Doctors Trial and the Einsatzgruppen Trial, are especially compelling because of the horrific events described by prosecution witnesses.

Keywords: Famous Trials, Trial, Nuremberg, Nazi, Nazis, War crimes, War criminals, Justice Trial, Doctors Trial, Einsatzgruppen, Robert Jackson, Rudolph Hess, Hermann Goering, Hans Frank, Wilhelm Keitel, Alfred Rosenberg, General Alfred Jodl, Albert Speer

JEL Classifications: K10, K40, K41, K42

Working Paper Series