On 21 December, at the Final Act of the Paris Conference, the victorious countries distributed German property to be seized as reparations. Germany had to reimburse 20 countries around the world, including Egypt and New Zealand, to compensate for the damages caused by the predatory war.

In the final month of 1945, the International Military Tribunal was in session for just 15 working days – on 21 December the Court adjourned for the Christmas break. The judges and prosecutors went home; Chief American prosecutor Justice Robert Jackson took advantage of the holidays to see post-war Europe. A long nine months of litigation lay ahead. And the media summed up the start of the Nuremberg Trials.

A map from a secret report on the mass murder of Jews by Einsatzgruppe A in the Occupied Eastern Territories dated 15 October 1941 - 31 January 1942. Presented at the Nuremberg Trials on 20 December 1945.

Alexander Makushin, Co-Chair of the East-Patriotic Foundation, Co-Chair of the Clio community of historians, Expert at the Russian Military Historical Society (RMHS), describes how the property of “enemies of the Reich” was seized.

On 18 December, a Royal Canadian Air Force aircraft crash-landed near a military airfield near Oslo. Only two of the 17 passengers survived. Among those killed was Hjalmar Steenstrup, a Norwegian representative at the Nuremberg Trials. He was set to appear before the tribunal six weeks later to testify about Germany’s occupation of Norway.

Dmitry Astashkin, candidate of historical sciences (PhD) and senior researcher at the St. Petersburg Institute for History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, described how the Soviet side prepared documentary evidence for the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg.

The Dachau concentration camp was liberated by American troops on 29 April 1945. When the soldiers saw the condition of the prisoners, they immediately executed more than a hundred of the camp's guards. On 30 October, the US Army Joint Chiefs of Staff issued an order for a tribunal to be held over the employees of the Dachau concentration camp. On 13 December, the tribunal handed down its judgments.

On 10 December, Ernst Kaltenbrunner first appeared in the Nuremberg trials courtroom. Doctors got him back on his feet after a series of seizures. The defendant, Kaltenbrunner, was to stand trial not only for his crimes, but also for the actions of the most intricate part of the Reich's bureaucratic system – the RSHA (Reich Main Security Office). Peter Romanov provides his view on this man and the organisation he headed.

The prosecution at Nuremberg considered the event which marked the beginning of World War II – the Third Reich's invasion of Poland – between 4 and 6 December. The reason for the aggression was the issue of the Danzig Corridor, the territory between East Prussia and the rest of Germany where the Free City of Danzig (now Gdansk) was located. Hitler had stated that he wanted to repatriate the Prussian city in order to physically reunify Germany, but in reality, he wanted to take over all of Poland.

Dmitry Astashkin, Candidate of Historical Sciences (PhD) and Senior Researcher at the Saint Petersburg Institute for History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, explains the decisions that were promptly made by the Soviet prosecution team at the Nuremberg trials.

Some suggest that he was not even a true Nazi. But in the early 1930s, he supported Hitler, and during the preparation for military aggression, he became minister of foreign affairs. It was Ribbentrop who signed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union. But when Germany violated the agreement, the minister's role collapsed. His attempts to split the anti-Hitler coalition failed. Ribbentrop started plundering the occupied territories and deporting Jews.

They took up the posts one after another, and they were similar in age, origin, and education. This is where the similarities end and the “struggle of opposites” – political, professional, stylistic, and even epochal – begins.

On 3 December 1945, the prosecution presented to the Tribunal a package of the Reich’s official documents which proved that the uprising in Czechoslovakia’s Sudeten region had been organised directly from Berlin. In September 1938, Nazi militants among the Sudeten Germans assaulted police stations and customs offices and murdered civil servants. The Czechoslovak authorities firmly suppressed the insurgencies, with many of the culprits being detained. Despite this, as a result of the British-French “policies of appeasement”, on 30 September, in Munich, the Munich Agreement (Munich Betrayal) was signed, whereby the Sudeten region was to come under German rule.

Yevgeny Khaldei – author of unique photographs of the Nuremberg Trials and the only Soviet photographer who captured the Great Patriotic War from the first to the last day.

Leonid Leonov arrived in the ruined city of Nuremberg in the autumn of 1945 at the height of his fame. His report, in the Pravda newspaper, entitled “The Fascist Snake” (The Serpent of Nuremberg), was one of the most brilliant press statements about the Nuremberg Trials.

On 30 November and 1 December, the Tribunal examined the first witness at the trial. Major-General Erwin von Lahousen described some episodes of “Nazi kitchen”, where plans to exterminate the Polish population and Soviet prisoners of war were prepared.