Courtroom 600 of Nuremberg’s monumental Palace of Justice is disconcerting at first glance. It is smaller than the visitor imagines when opening the door. The furnishings are different from those that existed during the trial of the Nazi leadership at the end of the Second World War, 80 years ago.
Ordinary trials were held here until five years ago and the room still retains the bland and functional air of a German regional court. It seems like a place still under construction, just like the idea born in this very room between November 20, 1945 and October 1, 1946.
In an era of wars and unpunished massacres, from Ukraine to the Middle East, passing through Sudan and other parts of the planet, the edifice of international justice born in Nuremberg shows serious cracks.
“If the people who suffered the horror in Ukraine, in Sudan, in Israel on October 7, and in Gaza, Palestine, ask themselves what international law has done for them, they will answer that it hasn’t done much,” jurist and writer Philippe Sands says by phone. Nuremberg and what followed that trial “could not prevent the horrors of our time,” he adds.
But Sands warns that the idea of international criminal justice is, from a historical perspective, very recent: “It’s a system that is still in its infancy.” There is a long way to go.
Eight decades ago, in Nuremberg, for the first time, the highest officials of a state sat in the dock of an international tribunal, 21 men associated with the most horrific crimes of the 20th century. Among them were the highest-ranking living Nazi leader, Hermann Göring (Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler had already died by suicide); minister and architect Albert Speer; Nazi leader Rudolf Hess; the diplomat Joachim von Ribbentrop; Hans Frank, jurist, governor of Poland and author of the Holocaust; ideologists such as Alfred Rosenberg and Julius Streicher; and military officers such as General Keitel and Admiral Dönitz.
The United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and France organized the tribunal to try crimes “so calculated, so malignant and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate them being ignored, because it cannot survive if they are repeated.” These are the words, in his opening statement, of the Chief United States Attorney, Robert H. Jackson, who added: “Those four great nations, red with victory and wounded with wounds, withhold the hand of vengeance, and willingly subject their captive enemies to the judgment of the law: it is one of the most significant tributes that Power ever paid to Reason.”
Nuremberg was supposed to try three types of crimes: crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity. It ended with three acquittals, seven sentences of life imprisonment or long prison terms and 13 death sentences.
Thus was born what Gurgen Petrossian, a jurist at the Nuremberg International Academy of Principles, calls the Nuremberg Idea, which is as follows: “When a person commits an international crime – be it genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes or crimes of aggression – that person must be held accountable. And this means that, regardless of who committed the crime, when, or where, the fate of these individuals is sealed: it is only a matter of time before appear before a court of law.”
After the conviction of the Nazi leaders, 12 more trials were held in Nuremberg, until 1949. A year earlier, the UN had adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
Then, starting in the late 1950s, national trials took place in Germany that helped the country – without being forced by the victors – to face its responsibility for the murder of six million Jews. Trials were held such as those against Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961 and against Klaus Barbie in Lyon in 1987. But the idea of international justice has gone into hibernation. It was only in the 1990s, with the massacres in the Balkans and Rwanda, that the International Criminal Tribunals in The Hague and Arusha were established.
It was the golden age of the Nuremberg Idea. “We were very optimistic,” observes French historian Annette Wieviorka, author of The Nuremberg Trialsreferring to “this brief historical moment between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the attack on the Twin Towers”. This is why, he adds, “the lessons of Nuremberg are difficult to apply today”.
Philippe Sands sees the spirit of Nuremberg in the current International Criminal Court, in whose creation he participated, and in the arrest of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in London in 1998, the subject of his latest book, 38 London Street: On impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia. He also sees it in the nascent Special Court for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine, which is reviving the main indictment against Nazi leaders. “Without Nuremberg everything would have been very different,” says the Franco-British jurist.
Some current dysfunctions of international justice can be traced back to the original sins of Nuremberg. It was a trial, for example, organized by the powers that had won the war and their leaders (and one of them, Stalin, had already perpetrated some of its greatest crimes). This “imbalance” persists.
Sands cites the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq earlier this century and the role of the US and UK. It also mentions the indictment of former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte last March by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes against humanity in his war on drugs. This prompts him to reflect: “Is what is happening in the Caribbean and the Pacific, with 76 alleged drug traffickers summarily executed (by the United States), compatible with international law? Is it a crime against humanity?”
Other imbalances. There are world leaders wanted by the International Criminal Court, such as Russian Vladimir Putin and Israeli Benjamin Netanyahu. But it seems unlikely they will ever face trial.
“Pinochet went to London in October 1998 thinking he was completely safe, so you never knew,” Sands notes. “It’s unlikely, but what we know is that they get advice on this topic and they don’t ignore it. It’s better than nothing.”
Faced with the temptation of cynicism, of thinking that what began at Nuremberg are just empty words, he recalls the case of Judge Thomas Buergenthal, an Auschwitz survivor, who told him a few years ago that he wished there had been a Genocide Convention and an ICC in 1943. It probably wouldn’t have stopped the crimes, Buergenthal argues. “But he would tell us that we were not alone and that crimes were known to be committed,” he added. “And it would have given us hope. That’s more important than anything.”
In room 600, specific cases are avoided, but Petrossian is also clear: “International law has always been in crisis.” “That the political situation is difficult,” he adds, “does not mean that it has ceased to exist legally, or that the Nuremberg Idea has disappeared.”
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