‘The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated,’ declared Justice Robert H. Jackson in his opening statement at the Nuremberg Trials, on 20 November 1945.
Eighty years on, those words land with the full weight of history. Picture the room: panelled wood, a tangle of microphones, translators in glass booths, a forest of uniforms and armbands muted now by defeat. Outside, Nuremberg is rubble – its grand avenues scoured of pageantry, its stonework scorched and fissured; the theatre of power inverted into a courtroom for accountability. Inside, Jackson fixes the narrative from his first sentence: this will not be a trial for vengeance, but an insistence that the modern world, having created the machinery of annihilation, must also forge a law to judge those who used it. Even Jackson’s earlier phrase about the defendants – ‘They are symbols of fierce nationalisms and of militarism… living symbols of racial hatreds… of the arrogance and cruelty of power’ – cut like a chisel into stone, carving the plaque that would hang over the entire proceedings.
The men in the dock were already familiar to the world by their surnames alone: Göring, Ribbentrop, Keitel, Hess, Streicher, Kaltenbrunner, Sauckel, Jodl, Frank, Frick, Doenitz, Schacht, Funk, Speer. These names had become a grim catechism of the Nazi regime. Hermann Göring, Reichsmarschall, first among equals, sat with a swaggering composure that seemed to defy the moment. He was still the decorated aerial ace of the Great War, the founder of the Gestapo, the strutting embodiment of the regime’s vanity and cruelty. And yet, the mask had slipped many months before once he was in allied captivity, when he had been stripped of his pocketful of morphine ampoules and costly uniforms. Now, in the courtroom, behind the bravado was a performer who knew the script was ending without him.
What of the lesser names sat alongside Göring? Joachim von Ribbentrop, the unhappy salesman of Hitler’s diplomacy, struck a sullen and bewildered figure, as if haunted by all the handshakes he mistook for achievements – the pacts that bought time, the betrayals that cost lives. Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Adolf Hitler’s lackey: the Prussian general despised by his own subordinates, with a pencil moustache, stiff collar, sat erect in his seat. Alfred Jodl, the operations chief, was the mind of the war machine stripped to charts and tables.
Then there was the fascinating profile of Rudolf Hess, who drifted between paranoia, suppressed insanity, and detachment – the airman who flew to Scotland for a fantasy peace and found himself recast as a symbol of the regime’s derangement. Ernst Kaltenbrunner, towering and gaunt, had the cold eyes of the SS: he did not merely follow orders; he inhabited them. Julius Streicher, publisher of Der Stürmer, wore the leer of the propagandist whose pen was his weapon. Under questioning in the dock, Streicher’s vulgarity would curdle into self-pity.
Finally, there was the Führer’s one-time favourite, the architect Albert Speer, who purposely sat apart, immaculately dressed, offering a cultivated remorse: the man who had served as the Third Reich’s minister of armaments and war production would confess just enough to be believed, but cannily refused to admit the scale of his own culpability.
Each defendant was a different angle of the same edifice: they were the component parts of a regime in which Nazi Germany’s aggression was planned, racial science was systematised, and annihilation was administered by ledger and railcar.
The allied prosecution piled up the evidence: minutes of conferences, maps inked with spears and arrows, ledgers of expropriation, aerial photographs, the documentary films from the camps that forced the courtroom to absorb the visual fact of barbarism. Witnesses brought the smell of burning barracks and the tally of mass shootings before the court’s polished benches. Jackson’s strategy was simple and devastating: intent, organisation, execution. The war was not an accident of history, nor a storm that broke over Europe without warning or agency. It was plotted. Treaties were shredded after their usefulness was exhausted. Rearmament was camouflaged in budgets and ministries. The invasion routes were rehearsed like theatre. The genocide was conceived and then industrialised. That chain was the prosecution’s spine: from idea to plan, to action, and then finally to genocide.
By the autumn of 1945, Germany itself stood as Exhibit ‘A’ in the case against its former rulers. Across the Third Reich, 63 cities had been pounded into fragments; more than three and a half million homes were gone, and a quarter of all urban dwellings lay in ruins. Nuremberg, whose parades once staged the choreography of power, had seen three quarters of its medieval centre burned to ashes, its rooftops folded into the streets. Berlin had become a skeletal capital, one third of its buildings reduced to rubble and half its population without habitable shelter and close to starving. Nearly 400,000 civilians had died under Allied bombardment, but the deeper wound was moral: a nation disfigured not only by firestorms but by the slow revelations, emerging day by day, of the crimes committed in its name by Adolf Hitler’s regime. The Führer may have died by suicide, but these defendants in the dock were thus not the only symbols of collapse; the cities outside the courthouse doors had already delivered their own silent testimony about what the regime had wrought.
Yet controversy was present from the first day of these trials. The allied legal teams were aware that they were forging a new reality in the court, with their determination to introduce new terms such as ‘crimes against peace’ and ‘crimes against humanity’. They had a moral clarity, but Jackson knew he must persuade the world that moral reality can precede legal codification. He therefore framed the case as civilisation defending itself: if the most organised crime in history cannot be judged because the crime lacked a tidy legal name beforehand, then law is useless.
He was equally aware of the hypocrisy charge. The Soviet delegation, sat within sight of the microphones, were a walking contradiction – judges from a regime that had previously sided with Hitler in 1939 and filled the Katyn forest with 20,000 Polish officer’s corpses. The RAF and USAAF may have burned Dresden to a cinder (and the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki loomed large in the world’s imagination), but in the courtroom where he now stood, Jackson argued, he could not try the illegality of the whole war: this court could only hold to account these Nazi defendants for the criminal actions they had conceived and made possible.
The defendants themselves revealed, in their courtroom performances, what the regime tried to mask in doctrine. Göring vigorously insisted on his personal dignity – seemingly not willing to grant the court the power to make him small. His cross-examinations would become theatre, his scorn for Jackson’s team as sharp as a bayonet point; but there also appeared a whiff of desperation to his bluster, an actor pushing a last scene too hard. Ribbentrop, on the other hand, shrank under the weight of his own words, discovering that diplomatic language can be sharper than a dagger when the record is complete. Keitel, for his part, pleaded the soldier’s eternal defence – obedience to commands; Jackson countered that orders cannot launder conscience. Streicher, the inciter, discovered there was no trench for him to hide in when his own words had metaphorically paved the roads to the gas chambers. Speer – the ultimate survivor – offered a smooth confession that stopped short of self-immolation; his memoir would one day, however, turn his courtroom performance into a well-crafted rehabilitation for the new West German Republic.
When the verdicts were announced on 1 October 1946 – 12 were condemned to death, others to long imprisonment, three to acquittal – the sentences felt like both climax and prologue. Judgment had been passed, but questions still echoed in the rafters.
Meanwhile, across oceans, another trial – mirroring the process in Nuremberg – was unfolding in the East. Tokyo, in 1946, was an urban skeleton thanks to the relentless American incendiary raids in the last six months of the war. The American occupation was now busy restructuring the entire country – rebuilding its shattered infrastructure, re-tooling its economy, introducing a new democratic constitution (including emancipation for women) and reintegrating thousands of imperial troops returning from China and the Pacific. But retribution to those who had brought on this calamity was required, too. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) would open in May with 28 defendants seated where maps of empire were once unfurled. The charges would rhyme with Nuremberg’s – crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity – but the music would be played in a different key. The tribunal was not a concert of equals but an instrument of occupation, administered under the authority of General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers.
If Germany’s ruins framed the Nuremberg courtroom, Japan’s annihilation formed the unspoken prologue to the Tokyo tribunal. By August 1945, American firebombing had erased 40 per cent of the nation’s urban fabric; 66 cities lay gutted, some almost erased from the map altogether. Tokyo’s great firestorm of 9-10 March (Operation ‘Meetinghouse’) had officially killed a hundred thousand people in a single night, a mortality that exceeded the instant death toll of either atomic blast. Hiroshima lost 69 per cent of its buildings in a flash; Nagasaki saw 40 per cent of its streets turned to ash. Japan’s industrial output had collapsed by 90 per cent, its merchant fleet sunk to a remnant, its ration lines stretching through the ruins. To walk into the IMTFE courtroom in 1946 was to step out of a city that had been not merely defeated but immolated, and the defendants faced judgment before a population whose survival felt newly contingent. The tribunal’s work unfolded, therefore, not just in the aftermath of a fallen empire, but also in a landscape where the terrible cost of Japan’s imperial ambitions was seen all around.
Chief Prosecutor Joseph B. Keenan stepped into that ambiguity and defined the Allies’ ambition in a sentence: ‘War and treaty-breakers should be stripped of the glamour of national heroism and exposed as what they really are – plain, ordinary murderers.’ His line was designed to puncture myths. It was aimed as much at Tokyo’s streets as at the judges’ bench, seeking to turn the country’s supposed heroes into criminals not through revenge, but through a process of moral demystification. Keenan’s cadence echoed Jackson’s severity, but his stage was differently lit: where Nuremberg’s four-power bench lent a kind of collective authority, Tokyo’s single commanding presence cast a longer political shadow. The argument was the same – sovereignty is not a shield, orders are not absolution – but the audience was an occupied nation, and the one figure who might have symbolised that principle most completely was absent from the dock.
Emperor Hirohito was the tribunal’s unspoken centre of gravity. The American decision to preserve his person and position – redefined now as constitutional symbol – removed the most sacred pillar from the courtroom’s architecture. It was a decision born of strategy: Japan must be stabilised. The Cold War already whispered at the door, Stalin’s Red Army had occupied Manchuria, and McArthur’s reforms required a national figurehead. Japan had been bombed into oblivion and had to be rebuilt, reconstituted and moulded into a crucial American ally. But it was also a moral wound, acknowledged even by members of the bench. In his dissent, the Australian judge Sir William Webb insisted that the emperor was ‘a leader in crime’, a man whose authority could have arrested the machine at key moments. The exemption became the trial’s original sin: if the law reaches the cabinet but stops at the throne, what was the true lesson about power and responsibility? That argument has raged to this day.
And yet, the evidence piled up. In the flattened city, the prosecution assembled charts of ministries and chains of command, laying bare the structure of Japanese militarism: the Army Ministry’s dominance, the Liaison Conferences, the Imperial General Headquarters – how decisions had flowed down the chain of command. Witnesses spoke of the Nanjing Massacre of December 1937 in a hush that seemed to dim the electric lights; allied POWs recounted a calculus of starvation and cruelty from 1942 onwards; civilians traced the map of forced labour with the names of dead relatives. The defendants included Prime Minister Hideki Tojo – the square-browed emblem of a war cabinet – alongside General Seishirō Itagaki, diplomat Kōki Hirota, spymaster Kenji Doihara, and generals Akira Mutō and Heitarō Kimura. They presented themselves as patriots, cogs, administrators of circumstances beyond their control, men carried along by necessities.
When the sentences were finally read in late 1948, seven were condemned to die, 16 to life imprisonment. As the Cold War came on by the early 1950s, some of these lifers would be paroled, such as Field Marshal Shunroku Hata, confidant of the emperor who had been ordered to defend the southern part of the country against the planned American invasion of the Home Islands. Tokyo had spoken in 1948, but in a different vernacular than Nuremberg two years before. The emperor still presided – diminished but present – over a society racing to rebuild. The occupation’s reforms tilted toward economic revival; the politics of remembrance fragmented along regional and party lines. In time, textbooks would soften chapters or skip them, visits to Yasukuni Shrine would provoke light diplomatic controversy, and activists would fight to keep memory from being paved over by miracle-growth GDP. The Tokyo judgment created an archive and a legal precedent, but it also left a contentious public debate that continues to this day.
Set side by side, the two trials reveal their kinship first. Both declared that leadership brings liability – that the modern state’s enormous capacity for harm had to be matched by a doctrine of accountability that reached the hands that pulled its levers. Both insisted, against centuries of habit, that ‘only following orders’ was not a sacrament but an alibi. Both courtrooms concluded that aggression was not a diplomatic misadventure but rather a crime. Both, crucially, made a record – meticulous, indexed, undeniable – so that later generations could not explain away atrocity as the fog of war. In this way, they became more than adjudications; they became the scaffolding of a collective memory.
But the differences matter, not merely for historians’ footnotes but for the shape of the world that came after. The Nuremberg trials took place in a Europe where the Final Solution had burned into the public conscience; their legal theory could lean, however precariously, on the Hague and Geneva traditions, the Kellogg–Briand Pact of 1928, and a latticework of imperfect prior norms. Tokyo, on the other hand, spoke in a theatre where colonial hypocrisies were still on stage; the ‘crime against peace’ was newer, and the empire that stood accused did so in front of empires that still stood. Nuremberg’s Germany eventually undertook a difficult, public reckoning – ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ – that became part of national identity: laws against denial, memorials placed like moral cairns along the city streets, textbooks that taught the horror without euphemism. Japan walked a more ambivalent path: memory countered by national pride, victim narratives refracting the story through the bombed cities, a patchwork of curricula depending on prefecture and politics.
The lives of the Nuremberg defendants, in verdict and after, say something about justice and the nature of the system of which they were a part. Göring’s cyanide suicide on the eve of his hanging declared his last refusal – he would choose even his exit. Julius Streicher went to the gallows spewing bile to the last breath, proof that his propaganda was not a costume so much as a skin. Ribbentrop, devoid of glamour, faced the rope with the dull astonishment of a man who thought signatures were a shield. Keitel, the soldier of obedience, found there is no parade step that allowed him to march away from responsibility. Hans Frank, the Governor-General of occupied Poland, left behind diaries that read like the mundane testament of a true monster. Admiral Dönitz, Hitler’s handpicked successor to lead the Third Reich after the Führer’s suicide, stood for the idea that the state itself could be inherited like a jacket – one day, he was the commander of submarines, the next the custodian of defeat.
Speer was the anomaly – a man whose articulate remorse made him the reader’s companion and the historian’s problem, provoking one to question just how far confession can reach without becoming theatre. He was sentenced to 20 years in Spandau prison, from where he would eventually be released in 1966. These verdicts showed a wider truth to the public: murderous regimes are not composed only of ideologues; they are furnished by professionals, managed by administrators, piloted by men who took their lunch at the same time every day.
Tokyo’s defendants presented a different gallery. Hideki Tojo was the regime’s face, but Kōki Hirota embodied it – the civilian statesman who believed in diplomacy until diplomacy was required to launder war. Seishirō Itagaki was the line officer whose career became a map of the continent’s suffering. Kenji Doihara, a spymaster’s spymaster, was a reminder that empires are built upon the dark arts. Akira Mutō and Heitarō Kimura were men of campaigns and staff papers, their names forever bound to the horrors of forced labour and skeletal prisoners along jungle rails. The court’s sentences were both epitaphs and arguments – about agency, about the place where patriotism ends and crime begins, about whether a uniform transforms a moral act or only decorates it.
Here, the absence of Hirohito was the anomaly: the men hanged for decisions made beneath a sovereign who remained inviolate. That tension echoed even in Tokyo’s achievements: the tribunal documented, preserved, warned; but it also taught by omission, leaving space for a later politics to revise what the courtroom said too plainly.
From these rooms – in occupied corridors in Nuremberg and Tokyo – the postwar world built institutions that still speak. The Geneva Conventions of 1949, the Genocide Convention, the UN’s codification of the Nuremberg Principles, the ad hoc tribunals at The Hague and Arusha, and eventually the International Criminal Court: each is a descendant of that first declaration that civilisation must not merely win wars but also judge them. When, in 2002, Slobodan Milošević sat in a courtroom in the Hague to answer for Serb aggression and atrocities committed in the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s, the acoustics of the room carried Jackson’s tone from 1946. When charters for Sierra Leone or Cambodia invoked ‘command responsibility’, the ink traced back to the benches in Nuremberg and Tokyo. The legal language that took shape in a Bavarian winter and a Tokyo spring became the grammar of a world trying, not always successfully, to restrain itself from the horrors unleashed by war and genocide.
The trials also taught nations how to remember. Germany’s civic landscape is a network of memory – stumbling-stones underfoot, plaques on façades, memorials carved into the urban plan – while its law punishes the lie that denies the truth preserved by the courts in 1945-46. Japan’s memory remains a contested precinct; yet, within that argument, the IMTFE’s transcripts are a collection of facts available to anyone who wants to do the work. Archives cannot teach shame, but they can protect truth in a world where ‘fake news’ is used by the guilty as a shield. And across continents far from either courtroom, both trials offered a vocabulary for describing and prosecuting humanity’s worst crimes. In Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe, prosecutors and truth commissions learned to braid narrative with evidence, to ask not only ‘what happened?’ but ‘who decided?’ and ‘how shall we live together afterward?’ The doctrine that heads of state can be tried is now a live wire drawn across diplomacy. The doctrine that victims have standing in history, not just in grief, has emerged from footnote to principle.
As the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the Nuremberg trials passes, the courtroom feels less like a museum than a mirror. Perhaps the new Hollywood movie with Russell Crowe magnifies this feeling. Walk the aisles of the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg today and the microphones still seem to hum faintly with words that refuse to age: responsibility, guilt, command, conscience.
As the fighting in Ukraine rages, it emphasises that we live once again in a century where major powers test borders, where civilians are currency in negotiations, where digital propaganda attempts to do on a vaster scale what Streicher tried to do with print. The law born in Nuremberg and Tokyo will be asked to perform again and again, sometimes with teeth, sometimes with a whisper. Whether it is enough depends not only on judges and prosecutors but on publics who still think words like Jackson’s and Keenan’s are binding –because they bind us to a standard of civilisation rather than to the convenience of a moment. Hopefully, the new Hollywood interpretation of Nuremberg will reinforce this feeling.
And so, we return to those opening and closing words by the two allied prosecutors. Jackson, at Nuremberg, raised the curtain on a trial that would try the 20th-century’s soul; Keenan, in Tokyo, snapped the halo from the heads of ‘war and treaty-breakers’, declaring them criminals without glamour. ‘The wrongs’ that Jackson named have not exhausted themselves, but neither has the determination that named them. Which is why the fitting last word belongs to the president who oversaw both tribunals and understood their purpose beyond victory. As Harry S. Truman reflected in 1946: ‘The trials at Nuremberg and Tokyo will stand for all time as monuments of the law’s supremacy over tyranny. They mark the beginning of a new era, when men and nations will recognise that right is might.’ Eight decades later, the line remains less a boast than a marching order.
AloJapan.com