Berlin War Crimes Trials (1945-6)

The Berlin War Crimes Trials were a series of trials held by the League of Nations of Greater Germany's leaders, all of whom were charged with criminal violation of the laws and customs of war and related principles of international law. The so-called Amsterdam Agreement, signed by representatives of Great Britain, France, Italy, Argentina, and Brazil in Amsterdam on the 9th of August, 1944, provided for the establishment of a Special Session of the World Court, based in a German city yet to be determined, composed of one judge and one alternate judge from each of the five signatory nations and four countries to be selected in the future, to try war criminals. Under the London Agreement, the crimes charged against defendants fell into three general categories:

• crimes against peace, that is, crimes involving the planning, initiating, and waging of aggressive war;
• war crimes, that is, violations of the laws and customs of war as embodied in the Hague Conventions and generally recognized by the military forces of civilized nations;
• and, crimes against humanity, such as the extermination of racial, ethnic, and religious groups (particularly of Jews in the Holocaust) and other large-scale atrocities against civilians.

On the 17th of September, 1945, the chief prosecutors lodged an indictment with the World Court meeting in special session in the former Reichstag building in Berlin. 27 individuals -- including Nazi leaders Hermann Göring and Rudolf Hess, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, and Adolf Hitler himself -- were charged with a variety of crimes and atrocities, including the deliberate instigation of aggressive wars, the extermination of racial and religious groups, murder and mistreatment of prisoners of war, massacres of civilian populations in violation of the conventions of war, and the murder, mistreatment, and deportation to slave labour of hundreds of thousands of inhabitants of Greater German-occupied countries occupied during the war.

Although the deterioration of Soviet-League relations made post-War cooperation difficult, the governments of the Soviet Union, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia did cooperate with the League of Nations in gathering physical evidence and witnesses for crimes committed on their national territories. The Soviet Union and Poland further each provided one judge and one alternate judge to oversee the trials; the remaining judges came from Uruguay and South Africa. By the time that the trial began on the 20th of November, the world's attention was focused squarely on Berlin.

The outcome of the trial was never in serious doubt. By their own actions, as demonstrated in public-domain speeches or in evidence (communications intercepts, archeological excavations, eyewitness accounts), Germany's entire military and civilian leadership had incriminated itself. Through a methodical progression through the evidence, the tribunal found overwhelming evidence of a systematic rule of violence, brutality, and terrorism by the German government in the territories occupied by its forces. Not least of these crimes was the systematic slaughter of five million central and eastern European Jews, the murder of more than four million Soviet prisoners of war in violation of the Geneva Convention, the construction of facilities intended specifically for indiscriminate mass murder, and a wide-ranging series of deportations of four million people from their homes as forced labourers. The atrocities committed by Greater Germany, then, were committed on such a large scale as a matter of official policy that it was impossible for the defendants not to have been involved.

Rather than challenge the irrefutable evidence against them, almost all of the defendants sought to challenge the authority over the World Court. For instance, the lawyers of Keitel argued that since prior to the Amsterdam Agreement the planning or instigation of an aggressive war was not a crime under the principles of international law, prosecution of Keitel and the other defendents for this action would violate the principle of justice prohibiting ex post facto punishments. Other defendants argued that they were not legally responsible for their acts because they performed the acts under the orders of superior authority. Adolf Hitler's defense diverged greatly from that of his co-defendants in that he freely admitted his numerous crimes but argued that he should be acquitted given the benefits of his action Europe:

"The Judeo-Bolshevik horde has been taken by its long-nosed leaders to the Oder, but what would have happened if Greater Germany -- the leader of the glorious Aryan race -- had not assaulted the Asiatic colossus? The Bolsheviks would be in Brest, and World Judaism would be in command of the Old World! […] You judges, you Kabalistic agents, you are damning Europe's saviour!"

On the 30th and 31st of August, 1946, the Berlin Session of the World Court handed down its judgement. The World Court rejected arguments as to the legality of punishing Germany's leaders for waging aggressive war, stating (among other findings) that the "general moral opprobrium … which is attached to those countries that assault others" was de jure evidence of the illegality of waging aggressive war prior to the Amsterdam Agreement. Further, the Berlin Session also rejected appeals to authority, stating that "the true test … is not the existence of the order but whether moral choice (in executing it) was in fact possible." Of the 27 defendants, fourteen -- including Hitler -- were sentenced to death by hanging, ten received prison terms ranging from twenty years to life, and two were acquitted. All those prisoners condemned to hanging were executed on the 16th of October, 1946.

At the same time that the Berlin War Crimes Trials proceeded, other criminal proceedings occurred elsewhere in Greater Germany. Satellite tribunals based in Frankfurt declared criminal the the National Socialist Party, the SS, the SD, and the Gestapo. Up until 1949, prosecutions continued in Frankfurt of 503 individuals charged with crimes against humanity, including:

• SS officers responsible for the concentration camps, the extermination of Jews, and the administration of Nazi racial laws;
• doctors who had conducted medical experiments on concentration camp inmates and prisoners of war;
• judges who had committed murder and other crimes under the guise of the judicial process;
• industrialists who had participated in the looting of occupied countries and in the forced-labor program;
• and, high military and civilian officials who bore responsibility for these and other criminal acts and policies of the Third Reich.

61 defendants were acquitted, while 389 were given prison sentences of a minimum ten years duration; the remainder were condemned to death by hanging. Prosecutions of other war criminals, whether under the terms of the Amsterdam Agreement or in conventional criminal courts, has proceeded to the present day.

The Berlin and associated war crimes trials were a notable step in the evolution of international penal law. The administration of the trials by the victorious nations in the Second World War left these trials open to the charge that they represented only victor's justice. Nevertheless, the principles applied in the Berlin and associated war crimes trials were formally adopted by unanimous vote of the League of Nations in March of 1949, and in this form have helped to strengthen international law and the judicial mechanisms for its enforcement. In particular, as a result of the Berlin War Crimes Trials the World Court gained greatly in prestige in power, as did the associated League of Nations.