The Nuremberg Trials

Seven Things You Should Know About

The Nuremberg trials almost didn't happen. Churchill wanted the Nazi leaders shot. Stalin wanted show trials. The decision to hold genuine legal proceedings — against significant opposition — was one of the most consequential choices of the twentieth century.

What happened at Nuremberg between 1945 and 1949 changed the world in ways most people have never fully understood. The trials created international criminal law from scratch. They established crimes against humanity as a legal concept that has shaped human rights law ever since. They rejected the defense of following orders — permanently transforming that phrase from an excuse into an accusation. They documented the Holocaust so thoroughly, in the Nazis' own words and their own documents, that the historical record has never been successfully challenged.

And they revealed something disturbing about the men in the dock: that they were not monsters. They were human beings — politicians, generals, lawyers, doctors, businessmen — whose ordinariness is the most unsettling thing about them.

Seven Things You Should Know About the Nuremberg Trials covers the debate over whether to hold trials at all, the legal framework that had to be invented almost overnight, the extraordinary documentary evidence that convicted the defendants with their own paperwork, the purpose of creating an undeniable historical record, the defendants themselves and what they revealed about evil, the twelve subsequent trials that prosecuted doctors and judges and industrialists, and the legacy — remarkable and incomplete — that Nuremberg left behind.

Part of the I'm No Expert, But series: short, accurate, accessible books on surprising topics. Readable in under an hour. The kind of book that leaves you thinking: I'm glad I know that now.