War Crimes Trials, Nuremberg and Tokyo

War Crimes Trials, Nuremberg and Tokyo (1945–1948).The experience of allowing Germany to try its own war criminals after World War I, which involved farcical trials, led the Allies in Janaury 1942 to announce their intention of trying enemy war criminals. In the Declaration on German Atrocities in Occupied Europe (1 November 1943), the Allies asserted that those accused of general crimes would be tried by an international tribunal, while those charged with local crimes would be tried at the scene. The Japanese received similar warnings. The British favored summary execution of war criminals, but the American preference for trials prevailed. The London Conference of June 1945 developed a charter for the international tribunal, and President Harry S. Truman appointed Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson as the U.S. representative.

After formal opening proceedings in Berlin, the German trials were held in Nuremberg from November 1945 to October 1946 before a tribunal of U.S., British, French, and Russian judges. The twenty‐four individuals indicted included German foreign ministers and Adolf Hitler's top military advisers and commanders; six organizations were indicted as well. The charges included conspiracy to wage aggressive war, the mistreatment of civilians and prisoners of war, and crimes against humanity (particularly the campaign to exterminate the Jews). The defendants were provided with lawyers; the prosecution depended primarily on documents written or received by the defendants. Of the nineteen individuals found guilty, twelve were sentenced to death, including the top Nazis Hermann Göring (who committed suicide in prison) and Joachim von Ribbentrop, and the remainder were given prison sentences from ten years to life. Acting under the London Charter and authority granted by the Allied Control Council, the United States conducted twelve additional trials at Nuremberg; the French held one at Rastatt.

The International Tribunal for the Far East, established in April 1946 with an eleven‐nation panel of judges, was restricted to trying persons charged with the crime of aggressive war. The twenty‐eight Japanese officials indicted included four prime ministers, four foreign ministers, and five war and two navy ministers. Emperor Hirohito was not tried. Of twenty‐five found guilty in April 1948, seven received death sentences, including Prime Minister Hideki Tōjō, and the others, prison sentences. Hundreds of local trials were held in Europe and the Pacific. Beginning in the late 1950s, the Germans conducted war crime trials of their own. In 1961–1962, the Nazi official Adolf Eichmann was extradicted, tried, and executed by Israel for his role in the wartime campaign to exterminate the Jews.

The trials proved significant, especially in Germany, for the records and testimony about wartime events they made available. Furthermore, they established mechanisms and precedents for dealing with war crimes by formal proceedings rather than by acts of vengeance. The Cold War prevented the subsequent application of these precedents except in isolated cases, such as the conviction of William Calley for his role in the My Lai massacre, but they remained available. In the 1990s several persons involved in atrocities associated with ethnic conflict in former Yugoslavia were charged as war criminals by the International Court of Justice at the Hague, Netherlands, and some were apprehended and tried.
See also International Law; World War II.

Bibliography

Whitney R. Harris , Tyranny on Trial: The Evidence at Nuremberg, 1954.
Richard H. Minear , Victor's Justice: The Tokyo War Crimes Trial, 1971.
Philip R. Piccigallo , The Japanese on Trial: Allied War Crimes Operations in the East, 1945–1951, 1979.

Gerhard L. Weinberg