Before the Nuremberg Trials, this was Winston Churchill’s shocking plan for Nazi war criminals
As Europe lay in ruins following the end of the Second World War, Churchill’s instinct was to punish the surviving Nazi leadership without a trial. How was the decision made to stage the Nuremberg Trials instead?
In May of 1945, Allied forces pressed through Germany. With Adolf Hitler dead and Berlin fallen, the last remnants of Nazi military resistance were slipping away.
As the Allied soldiers broke the Third Reich’s grip on Europe, they encountered scenes that defied belief. With each concentration camp liberated, the mountain of evidence of mass murder on a scale previously unimaginable grew taller.
There was a question now looming large in the minds of the victorious Allies: what should be done with the remaining Nazi leaders, such as Hermann Göring, who had led Europe into catastrophe?
There was no standing international criminal court, no established legal framework for prosecuting aggressive war, and no precedent for putting a defeated government on trial. International law in 1945 was largely concerned with relations between states, not criminal responsibility for individual political leaders.
Some proposed that the most straightforward option would be to execute the surviving architects of Nazi rule and move on from a staggeringly awful chapter of European history. That was precisely the instinct of Britain’s wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill.
So how did the Nuremberg Trials emerge from that backdrop? And how was Churchill convinced to support an unprecedented trial instead?
Planning justice before the war had ended
Nuremberg wasn’t conceived only after Germany surrendered in May 1945. The question of how to prosecute Nazi leaders had already been percolating for years.
Reflecting on the origins of Nuremberg for a four-part HistoryExtra podcast series, international lawyer Phillipe Sands says, “Already in 1942, efforts were underway – with governments in exile in particular – committing to the prosecution of Nazi criminals for crimes committed on their occupied territories.”
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In 1942, much of Europe was under Nazi occupation. Governments from Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands and other countries were operating in exile, largely from London. Reports of atrocities were reaching Allied capitals. The Holocaust was underway, even if the full scale of it wasn’t at yet clear. Mass shootings in Eastern Europe and the systematic deportation of Jews to extermination camps were already taking place.
These governments wanted assurances that their suffering would not be forgotten once the war ended. They pressed Britain and the United States to commit, publicly and formally, to postwar accountability.
In 1943, the Allies issued the Moscow Declaration, warning that those responsible for atrocities would be returned to the countries where their crimes were committed to face justice.
This declaration marked one of the first collective Allied statements that punishment would follow victory.
The question was: how?
The Yalta turning point
The decisive political moment came in February 1945 at the Yalta Conference, held in Crimea. There, the leaders of the three major Allied powers – Britain’s Winston Churchill, US president Franklin D Roosevelt, and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin – met to hash out a postwar settlement.
With France and Belgium soon to be liberated, Germany’s defeat seemed assured – but the details of a prospective peace were unresolved. Borders, occupation zones, reparations and political reconstruction all were on the table. So too was the fate of captured Nazi leaders.
“[At Yalta], Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin met and agreed that there would be a trial to deal with any surviving Nazi leaders,” says Sands, but that Churchill “had to be brought in, kicking and screaming”.
“There’s written documentary material which makes it clear that Winston Churchill wanted them lined up and shot,” he notes.
Execution would be, in Churchill’s eyes, “much more efficient, much quicker, much cheaper”. He was also wary of creating legal precedents that might later be used against British imperial actions.
Roosevelt and Stalin, however, found themselves aligned.
“For different reasons, Roosevelt and Stalin wanted a trial to show that we were different from the Nazis,” Sands explains. “That was symbolically very significant.”
For Roosevelt, a public legal process would demonstrate that the Allied war effort had been grounded in law and justice, rather than revenge. For Stalin, whose country had suffered catastrophic losses, a trial would publicly document Nazi crimes and reinforce the extent of Soviet sacrifices. The Soviet Union had lost more than 20 million people during the war, and its leadership wanted international recognition of that loss.
Churchill, then, was backed into a corner. “Once the two of them had joined forces on that, Churchill then accepted.”
What would a ‘trial’ actually look like?
Even after consensus emerged out of Yalta, enormous practical questions remained – especially as there was no international criminal code defining ‘crimes against humanity’.
Who would be tried? On what charges? Under whose law? Who would judge? Where would the court sit?
The answer to the last question, at least, soon became evident. The German city of Nuremberg had hosted vast Nazi Party rallies before the war and contained a courthouse complex large enough to hold an international tribunal.
The proceedings that followed were also designed to serve as a record. Prosecutors assembled films, documents, and witness testimony to create a detailed archive of Nazi crimes. The proceedings were conducted in four languages, and meticulously transcribed.
The trial would go on to establish four central pillars of international law: that aggressive war itself could be criminal; that state officials could be held personally accountable; that systematic atrocities were punishable under international law; and that the victors wouldn’t resort to summary revenge. This legal language defined at Nuremberg would shape later tribunals and, eventually, the International Criminal Court.
It was a far cry from Churchill’s desire for immediate execution. But for all of Nuremberg’s successes, the decision to subject the Nazis to the law didn’t resolve growing tensions between the Allies. The United States and the Soviet Union would soon find themselves on opposite sides of a global ideological divide that would define the next decades – a divide that would end back in Germany once more, when the Berlin Wall came toppling down.
Phillipe Sands was speaking to David Musgrove on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
Authors
James Osborne is a digital content producer at HistoryExtra