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Erynne Hagerty
Mr. Hawkins
World History- P, Period 6
April 8th, 2016
Postwar Trials
When World War II ended, there were millions dead and even more suffering. There was
devastation on both sides, and people were angry at the ones who had caused their suffering. To
try to bring justice for the victims and survivors of the war, there were a good number of postwar
trials held to hold the criminals accountable for their actions. They were commonly placed on
trial with witnesses who were brought forward and documentation to prove their crimes.
The Auschwitz Trials were among the many held to bring justice for the survivors of the
brutal war. The first trial was held during November and December of 1947 in Cracow, Poland,
and the second was held in Frankfurt, Germany from December 1963 to August 1965. The
Auschwitz Trials were working to punish the SS personnel who worked at Auschwitz; however
there were only sixty-three of the approximately 7,000 SS personnel who served at
Auschwitz, including Birkenau, Buna-Monowitz, and satellite camps were tried after the
war (Website #1). Sixty-three people out of seven thousand arent even one percent of the
personnel that participated in the cruelty that was forced upon the victims of the Holocaust. The
first trial, having lasted only one month, included [a] survivor testimony, [while] the judges
perused a wide variety of German documents (Website #1). This was to ensure that the
criminals were punished to their fullest extent, and that accurate information was presented.

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Having a survivor testify allows a first-hand experience of the crimes that were committed, and
the documents served as written documentation of the events. As for the next trial, unlike the
first trial in Cracow, based on international law and the legal definition of crimes against
humanity, these trials were conducted according to German criminal law (Website #1).
Because the criminals were German and the trial was being held in Germany, it would be fairer if
they were tried as German criminals. However, this resulted in a large disparity between the
severities of the punishments given and even if they were given. In addition, the deNazification in Germany was not implemented in all high government levels including the
Justice Department (Website #1). This was a huge factor in why many of the personnel were
simply never discovered or were never brought to justice. Many people still held the same
moralities and beliefs as they had before the war, and this made it more difficult to deliver justice
to those who needed it. Another factor was that when the trials were being held, the people
invested great efforts in uncovering documents and testimonies relating to the system and
structure of the camps, and far less in bringing specific persons to trial (Website #1). This
caused many people to slip away undetected from the justice system, however allowed room for
strong arguments for the people that they did bring in.
The Nuremberg Trials were among the biggest trials after World War II. The trial went
from November 20, 1945, to October 1, 1946. Inside of the trials, the prosecution introduced
written evidence of its own, including original military, diplomatic, and government files of
the Nazi regime that fell into the hands of the Allies after the collapse of the Third Reich
(Website #2). In addition to bringing in witnesses to prove a first-hand experience of the horrors
committed, they brought in the documentation that proved it. The prosecution decided to split
their case into two different portions in order to ensure their success. Their first phase focused

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on establishing the criminality of various components of the Nazi regime (Website #2) and
the second phase worked to establish the guilt of individual defendants (Website #2). This
was to make sure that they addressed all of the issues that needed to be taken care of, and that
they were done efficiently. Had they tried to combine them to make the trial shorter, it would
have made it easier for them to mess up or not deliver their message as clearly. During the trials,
the observers who watched the trials noted that there were generally three types of reactions
to the trial amongst the defendants - the unrepentant, the repentant and the confused
(Website #2). The repentant were the ones who had finally realized that their actions were far
worse than they had originally believed, and tried to rid themselves of their guilt by turning on
Hitler and saying they no longer supported his ideas. The confused were desperately trying to
ignore the enormity of what had happened, denying anything and everything in order to avoid
admitting what they had done. The unrepentant obviously held no remorse for the actions that
they had caused and were even proud of it, or that they were simply obeying their orders and
thus they did no wrong. Because of this, it was decided that there would be a precedent that all
persons, regardless of their station or occupation in life, can be held individually
accountable for their behavior during times of war (Website #2). This way the argument
that they were simply following the orders that were given to them would become null. This was
among the three large contributions to international law that the Nuremberg Trials gave. They
also established three discrete substantive war crimes that are punishable under
international law: crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, and crimes in violation of
transnational obligations embodied in treaties and other agreements (Website #2). Because
there not too many international issues, these laws had previously not been very well defined or
well carried out. Because of this, many people were allowed to slip by because there was no

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definite punishment for them, regardless of whether or not the justice system wanted to let them.
Defining these laws helped make it easier for the future to charge international criminals and
charge the perpetrators of World War II.
After World War II, there were millions left dead and even more injured or sick. The
people were tired and angry from the devastating losses, and wanted justice for their friends and
families. However, when it was such a large scale, such as this, there werent too many ways to
accomplish this. However, the law is one way to seek justice after genocide (Website #3).
This way there could be some minimal comfort provided to the suffering people left after the
war. They had brought enormous devastation to the world and left it in ruins, and they deserved
to be charged for it. It was decided that major war criminals, whose crimes could be
assigned no particular geographic location, would be punished by joint decisions of the
Allied governments (Website #3). After all, they could no longer be just defined by one
nations laws, as they had crossed borders. So, the simplest decision was to make it so that the
criminals were charged based off of the decisions of the people they had wronged. Their crimes
were defined as crimes against humanity, which was considered by the IMT as "murder,
extermination, enslavement, deportation...or persecutions on political, racial, or religious
grounds" (Website #3). The trials after the war were designed to punish the criminals to the
fullest extent of the law that they could so that this would never happen again in history. There
were many different people who were placed on trial, such as leading physicians, members of
mobile killing units, members of the German justice administration and German Foreign
Office, members of the German military's High Command, and leading German
industrialists (Website #3). These were the people who had directly witnessed the slaughtering
and had done nothing to fix it, had supported it, and even performed the killing themselves. The

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prosecution teams of the trials did their best to charge them as they could to provide justice for
the families and friends of those they had wronged. Despite the best attempts, however, to bring
in as many of the criminals as possible, there were many perpetrators of Nazi-era criminality
[who] have never been tried or punished (Website #3). In fact, there were many cases, [in
which] German perpetrators of National Socialist crimes simply returned to their normal
lives and professions in German society (Website #3). This was hugely unfair for the families
and the friends of the people who suffered and died, and even more unjust for the people who
were targeted and killed because of the Holocaust. However, those who were brought to justice
were faced with severe charges such as lifetime penalties or even a death sentence, although a
few were allowed to slip through because of the legal systems.
The trials managed to bring some of the perpetrators to justice and punish them to the
fullest extent in order to bring the victims a certain degree of comfort, however there was a large
percentage of the criminals who simply slipped away and were never charged anything for their
actions. In addition, because of the disparities in some of the legal systems used in the original
trials, some of the criminals were not charged as severely as others or never even served their full
sentence.