# UNITED STATES HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL MUSEUM

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## War Crimes Trials

The law is one way to seek justice after genocide. After World War II, both international and domestic courts conducted trials of accused war criminals. Beginning in the winter of 1942, the governments of the Allied powers announced their determination to punish Nazi war criminals via legal means. On December 17, 1942, the leaders of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union issued the first joint declaration officially noting the mass murder of European Jewry and resolving to prosecute those responsible for violence against civilian populations.

The October 1943 Moscow Declaration, signed by U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt, British prime minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet leader Josef Stalin, stated that at the time of an armistice persons deemed responsible for war crimes would be sent back to those countries in which the crimes had been committed and adjudged according to the laws of the nation concerned. Major war criminals, whose crimes could be assigned no particular geographic location, would be punished by joint decisions of the Allied governments. The trials of leading German officials before the International Military Tribunal (IMT), the best known of the postwar war crimes trials, took place in Nuremberg, Germany, before judges representing each of the four Allied powers.

Between October 18, 1945, and October 1, 1946, the IMT tried 22 "major" German war criminals on charges of conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The IMT defined crimes against humanity as "murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation...or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds." Twelve of those convicted were sentenced to death, among them Hans Frank, Hermann Goering, Alfred Rosenberg, and Julius Streicher. The IMT sentenced three defendants to life imprisonment and four to prison terms ranging from 10 to 20 years. It acquitted three of the defendants.

Under the aegis of the IMT, American military tribunals conducted 12 further trials of high-ranking German officials at Nuremberg. These trials are often referred to collectively as the Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings. Gestapo (German secret state police) and SS members, as well as German industrialists, were tried for their roles in implementing the Nuremberg Laws, so-called racial "Aryanization" policies, mass shootings of Jews in concentration camps, shootings by Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units), deportations, forced labor, sale of poison Zyklon B used in gassings, and pseudoscientific medical experiments performed on camp prisoners.

The overwhelming majority of post-1945 war crimes trials involved lower-level officials and officers. They included concentration camp guards and commandants, police officers, members of the Einsatzgruppen, and doctors who participated in medical experiments. These war criminals were tried by military courts in the British, American, French, and Soviet zones of occupied Germany and Austria, and also in Italy.

Other war criminals were tried by the courts of those countries where they had committed their crimes. In 1947, a court in Poland sentenced Auschwitz camp commandant Rudolf Hoess to death. In the courts of West Germany, many former Nazis did not receive severe sentences, with the claim of following orders from superiors often ruled a mitigating circumstance. A number of Nazi criminals therefore returned to normal lives in German society, especially in the business world.

The efforts of Nazi hunters (such as Simon Wiesenthal and Beate Klarsfeld) led to the capture, extradition, and trial of a number of Nazis who had escaped from Germany after the war. The trial of Adolf Eichmann, held in Jerusalem in 1961, captured worldwide attention.

Many war criminals, however, were never brought to trial or punished. The sentences of many of those convicted were eventually reduced. The hunt for Nazi war criminals continues today.

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