The Nuremberg Trials: a critical look at their legacy in the treatment of genocide in international criminal law.
- Apr 22
- 18 min read
Updated: Apr 23
Written by Alyssia Bouniol
Edited by Yatika Singh
Alyssia is a first year student in the Dual Degree program between Sciences Po Paris, Le Havre campus and Hong Kong University. She is passionate about political science, international relations, law, human rights, history and philosophy.
On November 20, 1945, the city of Nuremberg became the scene of unprecedented trials, judging international war crimes on a scale never seen before. The discovery of gas chambers after the fall of the Nazi regime left the world speechless in the face of all the misery, devastation, and horror caused by the war. Nevertheless, the need to define and judge these crimes quickly became apparent among the Allied powers, as all nations faced the urgent necessity to find a way to ensure that such mistakes would never happen again. In order to do so, the aim of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg aim was to highlight the extent of the crimes committed by Hitler's regime and to lay the foundations for a new international criminal justice system efficient enough to administer justice for victims’ and survivors’ dignity, while also restoring a sense of an international moral order.
The idea of putting Nazi leaders on trial took shape in January 1942 with the Declaration of Saint James, in which several governments in exile in London affirmed their will to prosecute those responsible of these crimes. This decision was reinforced in 1943 by the Declaration of Moscow, signed by Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill, which announced that Nazi criminals would be tried. These commitments led to the London Agreement of August 8, 1945, creating the International Military Tribunal (IMT), set up by the Allies. On October 18, 1945, the opening session of the International War Crimes Trial was held in Berlin, Germany. Later, however, with the capital destroyed and the venue unavailable, the court was moved to Nuremberg – a city of symbolic importance as it was the birthplace of the first anti-Semitic laws drafted. It is there that the International Military Tribunal (IMT) was held, which tried 24 of the most high-ranking Nazi officials from November 20, 1945, to August 31, 1946. The charges against them included war crimes, crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, and conspiracy to commit these crimes.
This was the first time in history that such charges had been brought against defendants, particularly government officials, thereby establishing an appropriate legal definition of these crimes. They would later inspire the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Before 1945, international law was inter-state and consensual, which meant that there was no institutionalized prosecution of international crimes. The ad hoc establishment of trials allowed for the formation of an authority responsible for judging these crimes of unprecedented gravity and recognizing the individual responsibility of their perpetrators, unlike in 1918 when German leaders had escaped individual punishment. The principles of Nuremberg (1950) thus laid the foundations for international criminal law and established a legal framework for the prosecution of genocide, leaving a lasting influence on the development of international human rights and international criminal law, particularly with regard to the creation of tribunals, conventions, ad hoc courts such as the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (1993-2017) or the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (1994-2015), and the International Criminal Court (ICC, 1998). This article explores the legacy of the Nuremberg trials, but also their relevance in changing times, whether they have shaped lasting legal norms in international criminal justice or whether their continued relevance has required political and institutional reinforcement.
In this light, this article seeks to answer: to what extent did the Nuremberg Trials shape a sustainable international criminal justice model that still is relevant today? To this end, it will assess [1] the legal framework that Nuremberg built and the innovations that it brought to the legal domain, [2] the challenges it faced upon enforcement, [3] and its legacy and continued relevance from the XXth century onwards until today [2].
Legal framework and innovations
The Nuremberg Trials set a legal framework that served as a model for many other trial proceedings to judge the crimes committed by the Nazis after World War II. This is due to the innovations they brought to international jurisdiction in order to be able to judge fairly the worst atrocities.
The legal structure of the Nuremberg Trials is based on the Charter of the International Military Tribunal (IMT). Article 6 is particularly significant, as it establishes the notion of individual criminal responsibility for individuals who violated international law. It defines the “crimes coming within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal for which there shall be individual responsibility”. This means that any individual who commits a crime at the time of war can now be held responsible individually under international law, and no longer be exempted from liability for their wartime misconduct. Before this, international law held that only states were subjects of the law and could be held liable for their actions. For instance, the Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907’s efforts to regulate international criminal law were restrained by the interests and unilateral actions of the individual states. However, the extent of the gravity of the crimes committed by the Nazis led to the consensus that since war crimes are committed by individuals, not abstract entities, justice can only be served and international law enforced by holding those individuals themselves accountable.
Additionally, several defendants argued that crimes committed in an official framing under a country’s name, especially when the offenders are state officials, could not lead to their being held accountable by the courts of another state. For them, a state, and therefore its officials, cannot be tried by another one. However, Article 7 of the Charter rejected the notion positing that the perpetrators who committed these crimes did it in the name of their country. This allowed for the application of individual responsibility to the highest levels of political authority, including heads of state and military leaders, subjecting them to equal legal scrutiny. Before this, heads of state were treated as the embodiment of sovereignty, and for that reason, could be placed beyond the reach of law even when committing international crimes. But for the IMT, the crimes were committed by men – not the state itself – and so participating in collective state decision-making does not make individuals stay out of reach of legal accountability.
On the question of hierarchical pressure, the Tribunal acknowledged its influence on individual conduct, but still refused to accept it as an excuse to negate personal agency. Compliance with orders, they argued, does not relieve one of responsibility when a choice can still be made. Moreover, Article 8 of the Charter also rejects the “superior orders” defence, as many defendants argued they acted by obeying and following the orders of their superior in hierarchy and therefore lacked individual culpability. Therefore, the Trials implemented the refusal of these defences to ensure more fairness.
The IMT also modified the international criminal code to make aggression war a recognized crime. Before World War II, waging war was not considered a crime and political or military leaders could not be held criminally responsible for it. War was seen as an instrument of national policy and diplomacy in itself. Nuremberg Trials set a difference for aggressive war. They described it as the “supreme international crime”, because it held within itself the accumulated evil of all the crimes perpetrated during it.It was thus the first time aggressive war was truly regulated in law. Article 6 of the Nuremberg Charter thus sets the definition for ‘crimes against peace’ as launching a war of aggression. For the defence, this reasoning did not respect nullum crimen sine lege (“no crime without law”), a legal principle that stated that an individual cannot be punished for an act that was not criminal at the time it was committed. The tribunal refused the defence by standing that the defendants could reasonably have known that their conduct was criminal under international law, as they signed international commitments before the crimes were committed, indicative of consent to condemn aggressive war. The defendants were also high-ranked leaders who actively helped shape and then deliberately violate those rules. This allowed to reject the retroactivity objection, and make those crimes punishable.
The Nuremberg Tribunals also contributed to set legal definitions and legitimize the categories of crimes committed by the Nazi regime, allowing their codification into international law. They defined ‘war crimes’ as ‘violations of the laws or customs of war’. This includes “murder, ill-treatment, or deportation to slave labour [...], murder or ill treatment of prisoners of war [...]”. Finally, it defined ‘crimes against humanity’ as any and all inhumane acts, or systematic and widespread atrocities, committed against a civilian population. This category allowed to recognize a state’s liability under international law when committing crimes within its own borders, and not be treated as a matter of domestic jurisdiction anymore. Conspiracy and complicity in such crimes is also considered as an international crime, enabling to hold accountable those who planned these atrocities without directly enforcing their application. This laid out jurisdiction over the atrocities committed by giving them definition and legitimacy, thus expanding the scope of international law and criminalising aggressive war. Finally, genocide, as defined by Raphael Lemkin, was not yet legally codified and thus not used as a charge against the defendants, although it was implicitly mentioned in the prosecution. The trials helped, nevertheless, through evidence and testimonies of the Holocaust, which killed more than six millions Jews in Europe, to shape the future legal recognition of genocide as a distinct international crime in itself. Although they established a hierarchy of jurisdictions, the Charter ensured justice through its Article 16 by emphasising fair trials rights for the defendants charged with a crime under international law.
Despite being a military tribunal, Nuremberg adopted rules allowing defendants the right to counsel, present evidence, and access documents in their own language. This set an important difference with the summary executions or arbitrary trials in martial courts of the time, offering legitimacy and settling fairness. A whole new court was even created on the special occasion of the trial of these crimes, as an ad hoc tribunal. This model was thus created to compensate for the lack of a permanent international criminal court to acknowledge the existence and try this type of crime. Indeed, before this, international criminal prosecution was never institutionalised and needed the consensus of every party before launching the adjudication. This means that states had to consent to be tried, which made the process very intricate. The Nuremberg Tribunals were thus able to enforce international law on states and individuals in response to exceptional crimes. It did not set itself as a permanent global criminal authority, but as a temporary jurisdiction that was limited but functional, in order to judge criminals whose acts had no clear territorial setting and threatened collective security.
One of the innovations the Nuremberg Tribunals brought up to life was also to implement a primacy of international law over state’s national jurisdiction. This means that a subject of law must obey international principles settled in official treaties over the national obligations they have to a state. If a country does not judge or punish an act recognized as a crime under international law, the perpetrator is still held liable for his crime and international norms must apply. States’ sovereignty could not be accepted as a shield for international crimes anymore, while a distinction was drawn between this use of the notion and sovereignty as a Westphalian principle of equality among states. Certain forms of violence against civilians could indeed violate obligations owed to the international community or even threaten collective security. This innovation allowed international authority to coexist with, or override, sovereignty claims and domestic law under defined conditions. This reasoning paved the way for future developments in human rights law and international criminal jurisprudence.
Limits on enforcement and criticisms
The Nuremberg Trials faced a significant number of criticisms and challenges that hindered the proceedings. This is particularly interesting as many of the crimes that were tried had not been prosecuted ever before by a multinational tribunal like the IMT, so the proceedings were entirely new and vulnerable to critics. Some of those were particularly relevant at that time, for others, they still are today.
Indeed, in 1946, the Nuremberg Trials were notably accused of being based on a “victors’ justice” foundation. The critic pointed out that the tribunal was established selectively by the victors of the war, to try the vanquished under law. Even though the Allies did not arbitrarily exact revenge, seeking instead to conduct a legal proceeding following the rule of law, they got reproached for being biased and lacking nuance. The image the public opinion had of the Tribunals was the Axis powers on one side, facing the Allies on the other. One was behind the bar of the defendants, and the other behind the judges' bench. Hermann Göring, one of the defendants, highlighted what he thought was an unfair trial by comparing the crimes he was accused of with those the victorious nations did. For instance, the mass rapes perpetrated by the Red Army when entering Berlin, Germany, in 1945 were a silenced issue as the USSR was among the victorious nations judging the trial, despite it also being an international crime. He notably emphasized the colonial history of the Allied nations, mentioning how they had reasons to stay blind in front of their own acts as they also committed numerous unpunished crimes. He even extended his criticism to the Allies’ domestic affairs, asserting that the United States had mistreated and slaughtered indigenous American peoples when seeking their own ‘lebenstraum’.
Additionally, the Charter of the IMT was strongly contested by the defence, who argued that it did not respect the fundamentals of law by setting itself as an instance of ex post facto justice (‘from after the fact’), referring to a law or legal action that retroactively prosecutes an act that had not been defined or made punishable at the moment it was committed. For instance, according to the Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928), war was considered a tool of policy and diplomacy. However, this agreement did not mention explicitly that it would imply that the leaders deciding to wage war would be held with individual criminal responsibility for it and could be tried in court. The IMT brought nuance to this legal norm by adding that aggressive war was a breach into international law, and that individual accountability should be held for it as the defendants should have known their actions were illegal, in addition to the fact that they concluded treaties before these acts were committed. However, following the notion of retroactivity (nullum crimen sine lege), a crime could not be punished if it was not recognized as infringing law at the moment it was committed. Critics thus argued that transforming a state obligation into a personal criminal offence after the fact was a violation to legality principles.
The IMT was also criticized for derogating Axis nations’ sovereignty and interfering in their domestic affairs. Indeed, in the case of crimes against humanity like systematic persecution or murders, international law rules according to the principle of state sovereignty, or state immunity, which stands that these are usually recognized as internal matters as long as they take place within a state’s borders. This prevented a state or its representatives from being sued or prosecuted by another country’s court. For instance, in the South African case Liebowitz v Schwartz, Nicolas J describes state immunity as the impossibility for a state to be a party of legal proceedings in another country’s courts against its will. But although the defense did claim their sovereignty rights, it was refused by the prosecutor so that the defendants could comply with international criminal law norms that prevailed over the national ones. Thus, despite the fact it allowed the Tribunal to intervene without it being considered as interference, this rule retroactively challenged sovereignty-based legal order.
Among the other conditions required to try a crime against humanity was the war-nexus, meaning that the crime has to have happened during an armed conflict or crimes against peace, otherwise the court can not rule over it. This means that any offence that happened before the war fell outside the Tribunal’s jurisdiction. Indeed, anchoring the crime in an already unlawful wartime context enables to avoid retroactivity objections, as it ties the crime to a legal framework that already existed when the acts were committed, but also because asserting jurisdiction in a country on peacetime would be a radical breach in sovereignty. This enabled the Tribunal to present mass atrocities against civilians as an internationally cognisable crime and not merely an internal issue, easing, in the meantime, concerns about interference in domestic affairs.
However, the nexus requirement created an ambiguity. It implied that an identical criminal conduct, whether it would be systematic persecution or deportation for instance, would not be judged the same by international law, or even be considered under international law, depending on whether they occurred during an armed conflict or not. As a result, atrocities committed during war were prosecutable while the same ones committed in peacetime fell outside international criminal law. This exposed a normative inconsistency within the law, as the gravity of the act did not change but its legal status, and by extension its prosecution and judgement, did. Therefore, this was a way to maintain political consensus among them, and avoid mentioning uneasy issues like colonies or internal repression beyond Europe. Thus, crimes against humanity’s prosecution was an innovation that was partially constrained by sovereignty and selectivity, which reshaped the boundaries of international criminal law but also created a fragile legal doctrine lacking coherence. This foresaw later endeavors to detach crimes against humanity from armed conflict and ban the war-nexus entirely in international criminal tribunals.
Legacy and continued relevance
The legacy of the Nuremberg Trials is codified through the Nuremberg Principles (1950). It transformed the reasoning left by the Tribunal into general norms of international law, converting the Nuremberg Trials into a normative reference model.
In 1946, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the principles of international law present in the Charter and judgement of the International Military Tribunal. This enabled it to accept and recognize these principles internationally, at a broader scale, and not confine them to the authority of the victorious nations alone. They were now represented as expressions of the international community’s will. In 1950, the United Nations created the International Law Commission to convert the judicial reasoning of the Nuremberg proceedings into general legal norms. For that, the Commission extracted all the norms from the Charter and judgement of Nuremberg and framed them in abstract legal language so it can be applied more broadly to other cases. Thus, they did not replicate the institutional form of the tribunal to not reproduce its procedures specific to its case, so they would not also have to reference each time to the exceptional circumstances of post-war Germany.
They were, however, able to stabilise its legacy in law independently of the political conditions of the time. Among the innovations present in the Charter, seven were kept: individual criminal responsibility, even for heads of state or military leaders, rejection of defense of sovereign immunity and of the “superiors’ orders”, primacy of international law, the definitions and classification of international crimes and fair trials. In the same time, some others were selectively not kept, such as the war-nexus on crimes against humanity, which was removed to not replicate the inconsistency between wartime and peacetime crimes it used to lead to. The modern definition and understanding of crimes against humanity therefore owes its existence to Nuremberg’s innovations and limitations. These principles were moreover used to draft international conventions regulating armed conflict, human rights and international law. It is notably the case for the Geneva Convention of 1949 in armed conflict, which Articles 49, 50, 129, 146 imposes universal jurisdiction by requiring states to search for and prosecute or hand over persons accused of grave breaches in international law even if they are not directly involved, like murder or torture. That overlaps with the universal jurisdiction put into place for war crimes and crimes against humanity prosecuted at Nuremberg. Finally, the IMT was allowed to draft the Convention on Genocide in 1948. The Convention reaffirmed recognition of criminal accountability by binding states to punish genocide, regardless of whether the perpetrators are ‘constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals’ (Article IV). Thus, Nuremberg’s substantive norms persist through their inscription in the official agreements that built the new system of international law after the war, still lasting today.
Beyond protocol, institutions were also established mirroring Nuremberg’s model. Ad hoc tribunals, solving the crisis they have to face and judging extraordinary crimes thanks to the ad hoc construction, legal norms and proceedings Nuremberg left behind. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) was thus put into place in 1994 to judge the genocide of the Tutsis, or the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in 1993 to prosecute the massacres during the civil war. These ad hoc tribunals were the primary applications of the legacy of Nuremberg. They invoked and applied three common principles left by Nuremberg’s legacy: [1] individual, not state, criminal responsibility; [2] rejection of immunity based on official capacity, rank and status; [3] primacy of international law on liability to capture collective accountability without collapsing into guilt by association. Thus, they inscribed themselves in the continuity of the IMT, while adapting themselves to new contexts. Finally, Nuremberg’s model inspired the creation of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 1998, in function since 2002 through the Rome Statute. This institution illustrates both the success and the limits of this legacy. Many of the Statute’s articles reflect the Nuremberg Principles’ influence, such as the individual criminal responsibility and the irrelevance of status and rank in immunity. However, on the other hand, the Statute’s detailed definitions and procedural safeguards show an effort to resolve issues in the long-term, which Nuremberg succeeded to do only temporarily. The ‘no immunity’ principle is also easier to apply in a system with direct enforcement power than in a treat-based system which depends on cooperation between states. The case of ICC Appeals Chamber, 2019, shows that cooperation can involve third-party states which implicates immunities in arrest and surrender context. The institutional application of the Nuremberg norms remains questionable in the geopolitical reality of today.
Finally, we can see the relevance of the Nuremberg Trials’ legacy in today’s contemporary conflicts where atrocities have to be acknowledged and prosecuted. Nowadays, many calls for a special tribunal modeled on Nuremberg to apply international law and prosecute the crime of aggression are made in the context of the war in Ukraine, after Russia’s invasion. A Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine, ad hoc international criminal tribunal, has been in the process of being established by the Council of Europe since 2025, to prosecute those responsible of crimes of aggression in the conflict. It aims to complement the existing International Criminal Court investigation in Ukraine (2022) investigating any “war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide committed on any part of the territory of Ukraine by any person" from 2013 onwards. However, it still seems a challenge to prosecute high-ranked chief of states, as French historian Annette Wieviorka agrees: “The lessons of Nuremberg are difficult to apply today”. As a proof of that, world leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin are wanted by the ICC, which is waiting for a third party country to prosecute them. However, it is highly unlikely he will ever face trial as no country wants to face a confrontation with Russia. Despite this, according to Gurgen Petrossian, jurist at the International Academy of Nuremberg Principles: “International law has always been in crisis. That the political situation is difficult doesn’t mean that it has ceased to exist legally, or that the Nuremberg Idea has disappeared.”
Conclusion
In conclusion, the Nuremberg Tribunal represents a jurisdictional revolution as it rejects immunity for officials and individuals following state or superiors’ orders and impunity for mass crimes, whose definitions are finally set clearly. International law begins to prime over national legal norms while fair trials are guaranteed to the international community. Despite certain critics of applying a victors’ or ex post facto justice were formed, or the limitations imposed on state sovereignty and by the war-nexus clause on crimes against humanity, the International Military Tribunal inspired many international conventions through the enactment of the Nuremberg’s Principles, such as the Geneva Convention (1949) or Convention on Genocide (1948). It also influenced the construction of other institutions like the ad hoc tribunals for Rwanda and former Yugoslavia, and most of all the International Criminal Court (1998), that throws the foundations of a global jurisdictional order. But the path is still intricate. Remembering Nuremberg is not just a memory duty, but a call to strengthen international justice to render our shared human dignity in front of mass atrocities. The war in Ukraine today but many other conflicts, like the one in the Gaza strip or the crimes in Central African Republic, call for action by taking model on the Nuremberg Trials’ legacy and adapting it to the modern Professor Reginbogin, co-editor of Nuremberg Principles and Ukraine: The Contemporary Challenges to Peace, Security and Justice, he emphasised that the Nuremberg Principles remain as relevant today as ever and how important it is to maintain the credibility of international courts to ensure that they continue to operate in a transparent manner.
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