Nuremberg Trials Essay

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Following World War II, war trials convicted the criminals of their crimes. There were hundreds of trials that took place to punish the Nazi criminals. According to UnitedStatesHolocaustMemorialMuseum.org, “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 Jews and resolving to prosecute those responsible for crimes against civilian populations.” The United Nations War Crimes Commission would be in charge of the trials. These trials took place all over Europe.Many of them were in Germany and were held by the country that was occupying Germany after the war. According to UnitedStatesHolocaustMemorialMuseum.org, “The IMT defined crimes against humanity as “murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation.” Most of the trials were with lower-level officials, and most of the first information we knew about concentration camps came from evidence and eyewitness accounts from these trials. Some of the specific trials were the Nuremberg trials, the Doctors trials, and the Auschwitz trials.
One of the most well-known trials is the Nuremberg trials. The Nuremberg trials were a sequence of 13 trials that took place in Nuremberg, Germany, from 1945 to 1949. According to history.com, “Nuremberg had been the site of annual Nazi propaganda; holding the postwar trials there marked the symbolic end of Hitler’s government.” The people that were going to be charged were Nazi Party Officials, high-ranking military officers, German industrialists, doctors, and lawyers. They were charged with crimes against peace and humanity. The leader of the Nazi’s, Adolf Hitler took his own life before he could be tried. During the trials, the m...

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...ance fighter toward the close of WWII. This was a part of “Operation Last Chance”, a movement to find the last of the Nazi fugitives and to punish them before they die. According to NewYorkPost.com, “The hunt is no longer for high-level perpetrators of the Holocaust, in which some six million Jews were murdered, but for thousands of people who helped in the machine of death.”
Post war trials punished the criminals of World War II. While the Nuremberg Trials were a big part, the lesser-known trials like the Doctors trial and the Auschwitz trial also played a big role as did the trials in Japan.Trials today continue punishing the criminals that deserved to punished a long time ago. Nazi-era criminals remain free. They are still out there, having yet to been punished. Many of them are living normal lives, and justice demands they be held accountable for what they did.

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