The most famous war crime trial was that of Nuremberg, when 22 leading Nazis were put on trial beginning on November 20 1945, concluding on October 1 1946, when 19 of the defendants were found guilty 12 sentenced to death, 3 to life imprisonment 4 were given a prison term of 10-20 years and 3 were acquitted, Hermann Goring committed suicide the night before he was to be executed.
It is interesting to note that the Allied powers established an international Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo in 1946, which tried prominent Japanese leaders.
There were 12 further trials conducted by US military tribunals in Nuremberg [often described as the subsequent Nuremberg proceedings]. Between December 1946 and April 1949, US prosecutors tried 177 persons [convicting 97]. Among them were leading physicians [participating in war crimes] Einsatzgruppen members [killing squads], members of the German justice administration and German Foreign Office, members of the German military High Command, and leading German industrialists. It should be pointed out that “the subsequent Nuremberg proceedings” [12 trials] although carried out in the same court house as the International Military Tribunal [trial of major German war criminals], as previously mentioned was in fact an American military court, and not an international trial [the developing “Cold War” made these impractical]
Each of the four Allied powers occupying Germany and Austria, France, Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States, tried a variety of Perpetrators for war crimes committed within their zone of occupation. The majority of post-1945 war crime trials concerned lower-level Nazis, who were to provide more detailed knowledge of the various concentration camps [including death camps].
In December 1945 Allied Control Council Law No 10, authorised German courts to try crimes committed during the war by Germans against their own citizens, or stateless persons in Germany, persons involved in the Nazi “euthanasia programme were also tried by newly constructed German tribunals.
In 1949 Germany became divided into two separate countries, the Federal Republic of Germany [West Germany] was established in the territory occupied by Britain, France, and the United States. The German Democratic Republic [East Germany] was created in the Soviet occupied zone and was closely allied to the Soviets. Both countries continued war crime trials in the following decades. Since 1949 over 900 trials were conducted in West Germany, and after 1990 in a united Germany. There have been criticisms of these trials as the outcome was often acquittal or a light sentence. In addition thousands of officials and perpetrators have never faced trial, many have returned to their normal occupation, as they practised within the Third Reich. For instance a majority of judges in West Germany for several decades had been former Nazi officials.
Many nations that the Germans occupied during WW2 or collaborated with Germans in the persecution and mass murder of their civilian population, in particular the Jews, Czechoslovakia, France, Hungary, Poland and the Soviet Union, and others, tried thousands of suspects. It is interesting to note that the Soviet Union held its first trial against local collaborators in 1943, long before the end of WW2. In Poland, the Polish Supreme National Tribunal tried 49 Nazis who had perpetrated crimes during the occupation, among them was Rudolf Hoss, the longest serving Auschwitz commandant, who was sentenced to death and hanged in the execution block at Auschwitz in 1947, various other Auschwitz personnel, were also sentenced to death by the Tribunal.
By 1950 the Cold War dominated, and interest in achieving justice for crimes of WW2 waned, in fact trials outside Germany largely ceased, and many of the convicted perpetrators were released during the 1950's.
With the exception of Poland, crimes specifically against Jews were not the focus of most postwar trials, during the immediate period after WW2, full international awareness of the Holocaust was only slowly developing, this changed in 1961 with the trial of Adolf Eichmann [see image] the chief administrator of the deportation of European Jews, which took place in Israel. This trial also drew attention to the presence of accused Nazi perpetrators in a number of countries outside Europe, Eichmann himself had settled in Argentina after the war.
In 1979 the United States established the Office of Special Investigations, its purpose to pursue the perpetrators of Nazi crimes who were living in the that country, a decade later, Australia, Britain and Canada, introduced a similar procedure, the hunt for Nazi war criminals still continues.
Moving on to a more complicated area of Nazi war crimes, that of the the role of Jewish collaborators. When the Allied forces entered the concentration camps in 1945, they discovered piles of corpses, and dying inmates, but there were also a small number of survivors who were seeking revenge, not just against the Germans, but also former Jewish functionaries in the camps and ghettos. Freed inmates lynched and beat Jews who as ghetto policemen [Kapos] had abused them, and had surrendered them and their families to Nazi exterminators. For the first 20 years after the war many believed that those Jews who collaborated with the Nazis, shared responsibility with them for the catastrophe that had endured.
After the establishment of the State of Israel, The Nazi and Nazi Collaborators Punishment Law was passed in 1950, which became known as the Kapo trials, which would continue for the next 22 years. During the first phase August 1950-January 1952, alleged collaborators Nazis and Jews were put on equal footing, and it was only during the sentencing phase that provisions made for accused Jews to be considered as victims themselves, allowing in very limited cases some measures of leniency.
In the second Phase February 1952-1957, accused Jews were cast not as Nazis, but as Jewish collaborators of the Nazis, a clear difference was now drawn between the Nazis and their Jewish collaborators, the former could face charges of crimes against humanity, the latter could not, but the trials of both parties continued, but doubts began to emerge as to whether Jewish collaborators should be prosecuted. In the third stage 1958-1962 it was decided that most Jewish collaborators who had committed wrongs had done so with good intentions, and thereafter prosecutors only filed charges against those they believed had aligned themselves with Nazi aims.
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