Each of these countries also had a prosecution team. A Japanese scholar also was indicted, but charges against him were dropped during the trial because he was declared unfit due to mental illness. Japanese Emperor Hirohito and other members of the imperial family were not indicted. In fact, the Allied powers permitted Hirohito to retain his position on the throne, albeit with diminished status.
These subsequent trials, however, were not held by international tribunals but instead by domestic courts or by tribunals operated by a single Allied power, such as military commissions. In Germany, for example, each of the Allied powers held trials for alleged war criminals found within their respective zones of occupation. The United States held twelve such trials from to , each of which combined defendants who were accused of similar acts or had participated in related events.
The Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals contributed significantly to the development of international criminal law, then in its infancy. Roosevelt changed his mind, and the Morgenthau Plan was dropped. It was solely focused on a judicial process of bringing these criminals before a court. The charter served as a model for the future Tokyo Charter, which brought those responsible for War Crimes to justice in Japan.
The court's jurisdiction was defined in the Instrument of Surrender of Germany, which handed political authority, and crucially, sovereign power, to the Allied Control Council. This paved the way for the council to punish violations of international law and laws of war. Public Domain. One of the major discussion points was the location of the International Military Tribunal and its trials. Stalin called for it to be in Berlin.
Other areas mooted by world leaders included Leipzig and Luxemburg. However, Nuremberg was selected for two reasons. Its Palace of Justice was big enough to house everybody required for the trials. Two, Nuremberg was considered the ceremonial birthplace of the Nazi Party. To bring those high-ranking officials to justice in the same city that hosted the party's propaganda rallies was seen as a symbolic statement of intent. For the first and most crucial trial at Nuremberg, 24 senior figures from the upper echelons of Nazi Germany stood accused of a range of indictments.
They included the Holocaust's most notorious architects, including Wilhelm Frick, the Reich Law Leader and Governor-General of occupied-Poland; Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who held overall control of the Nazi death squads; and Albert Speer, the Minister of Armaments who had used Jews as slave labour in the production of munitions.
Prosecutors presented four indictments. Those on trial were accused of either single items or all of them in some cases. For the first time in International Law, the indictments featured 'genocide', a word coined in by Raphael Lemkin. It literally meant the act of killing a race or a people. Of the 24 men on trial under the International Military Tribunal, 18 were convicted of the more sickening indictments of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Three were acquitted of all charges, and decisions could not be reached for two for the defendants. For others, the council of judges issued death penalties. Twelve of the defendants were ordered to be hanged, one of whom was sentenced in absentia Martin Bormann - who was, in fact, already dead it would later transpire.
Some of those condemned expressed remorse. Others did not. One of the men, Julius Streicher, cried out "Heil Hitler! For him, death was an unduly drawn-out affair due to an error in the process. Streicher, it was reported, "went down kicking," which likely dislodged the hangman's knot out of position. Arguably some of the most significant moments of 20th-century justice, responsible for all the hangings that day was year-old Master Sergeant John C.
Woods would accidentally kill himself four years later by electrocution while attempting to fix some electrical lighting. He was 39 years of age. The bodies of the hanged prisoners were incinerated, and the remaining ashes were scattered into the River Isar. Hermann Goring, who, next to Hitler, was one of the most influential figures in the Nazi Party, committed suicide hours before his execution.
He had swallowed a cyanide capsule. In the first category there were included: the order to slaughter commandos to the last man even if they surrendered; the order to separate political commissars from other Russian prisoners and shoot them; ill-treatment and murder of Russian prisoners; the use of prisoners for medical experiments; the use of prisoners for labour contrary to international conventions. Against the civilian population the following crimes were proved: extermination of certain sections by organized mass murder; large scale deportation; for labour in Germany in the most shocking conditions; the taking and shooting of hostages; the economic exploitation of occupied territories over and above the needs of the occupying troops; wanton devastation of towns and villages; the plunder of works of art.
The list is not exhaustive" Calvocoressi More often than not a crime which is a War Crime is also a Crime against Humanity and vice-versa:. This restriction was so as to not infringe in the domestic affairs of a sovereign state merely on the grounds that it was offending against humanitarian principles" Calvocoressi The plan to exterminate the Jewish race falls under the category of Crimes against Humanity.
Also, experiments conducted by the Nazis fall under both categories. The experimenters were given indictments by the Military Tribunal five days after the main trials were completed in Nuremberg, but were not those twenty two members who were convicted in the actual Nuremberg Trials.
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