Arthur Seyss-Inquart was one of the major figures in the Nuremberg Trials and played a major role in the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938, as well as the extermination of Jews. Some admired him as Hitler’s right-hand man in Austria, while others despised him, mockingly referring to him as “six and a quarter”. The Führer retained his faith in Seyss-Inquart until the last day of his life, and the Сourt was equally assured of his guilt.

First Step to World War

On 28 November, witness testimony was presented for the first time at the court session. It was read out, because the witness himself was in the Western hemisphere. The document was an affidavit executed by George S. Messersmith, a former consul general of the United States of America in Berlin, who, due to his high diplomatic post, had witnessed Germany's preparation for aggression. The defence was on its feet: why wouldn't an American diplomat appear in court and be cross-examined? Sergei Miroshnichenko, a lawyer and international law scholar, explained how the International Military Court resolved such disputes.

Over 2,000 documents from the Extraordinary State Commission (CHGK) have been published to date, both previously available and recently declassified, as part of the All-Russian Project “No Statute of Limitation”. They contain detailed data on human and material losses. The CHGK materials prove that the Nazi terror in the occupied territories was planned and systematic. Under existing international law, the acts of the occupiers in the USSR fall under the definition of genocide.

Dmitry Astashkin, Candidate of Historical Sciences (PhD), and Senior Researcher at the Saint Petersburg Institute for History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, describes the Soviet prosecution's process of selecting witnesses.

On 26 November at 10 a.m., US lawyer Sidney Alderman appeared before the prosecutor’s stand. His mission was to prove to the International Military Tribunal that Germany had planned the war long before it began. Alderman presented the tribunal with what he called the Hossbach Protocol, “one of the most striking and revealing of all the captured documents which have come to hand”. Dmitry Astashkin, a specialist in Nazi war crimes and senior researcher at the Saint Petersburg Institute for History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, contributed to the understanding of the content and importance of the document.

“Operation Barbarossa” is the code name of the plan for the quick invasion of the USSR by Nazi Germany, that it tried to realise from June to September 1941. This document proved Germany’s pre-planned aggression against the Soviet Union. On 26 November, US prosecutor Sidney Alderman presented it to the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg.

When the organisers of the tribunal were picking the location for the trials, what mattered most was that Nuremberg had its Palace of Justice fully preserved along with its prison. However, they couldn't imagine what it was like to live in a place surrounded by ruins infested with rats, and close to poverty-stricken hungry Germans who were hunting for table scraps and cigarette butts.

Quotation from document: “(1) After the victory of the National Socialist revolution, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’, or Nazi, Party) embodies the concept of the German State and is inseparable from the State. (2) It is a corporation under public law. Its organisation will be determined by the Führer.(...)"

For over 30 years, Martin Bormann, head of the Nazi Party Chancellery, was considered one of the most wanted international criminals. With no verifiable evidence of his fate at hand at the time, the International Military Tribunal tried him in absentia.

On 22 November, American chroniclers were slightly disappointed. The meeting was not as impassioned as they had anticipated. US prosecutors narrated the details of their search for documents of the Third Reich and how evidence for the court had been prepared.

On the afternoon of 22 November, US Major Frank B. Wallis, the American prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, described “legitimate” steps taken by the NSDAP to seize power.

The Nuremberg trials got under way in the Bavarian town on 20 November 1945. So who were the main defendants on trial?

"The Tribunal was an absolute innovation in history as it created the very procedural norms it observed."

Robert Jackson, who led the US prosecution, spent all of 21 November on his feet, behind the podium, reading out the opening speech, which outlined, in general terms, what his team would be doing.

For a long time, the belief that the credit for creating the judicial base for the Nuremberg Trials belongs to the United States was prevalent in the Western historiography related to said trials. Lately, however, Western historians started talking about the previous assessment being erroneous, with Soviet professor and legal scholar Aron Trainin, the man who developed the basic legal formulas for the trials, becoming the subject of several studies.

On 20 November 1945 the surviving leaders of the Nazi regime in Germany went on trial in the Bavarian city of Nuremberg. They were put on trial on the basis of a set of legal principles which would become the bedrock of international law on war crimes and genocide for 75 years.

The pillaging of occupied territories by Nazis was not limited to isolated incidents of looting; it reflected a systematic policy. On 29 January 1940, Hitler appointed one of the most influential Nazi Party ideologists, Alfred Rosenberg head of an organisation tasked with appropriating works of art in European countries. Formed within the Nazi Party's foreign policy department, the new organisation was named the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce (ERR).

Before Disney shaped our perception of dwarves in its animated films, they were known through German fairy tales as hardworking but morally unscrupulous craftsmen. These are apt words for describing the Krupp dynasty: its history is a synthesis of purposefulness, calculation and cynicism. The last of the Krupps industrialists did not care about the moans and groans that echoed in his factories; they were little less than a line item in the bill of sale for each gun, tank or submarine presented to the Reich. And every death (be it of a German or an enemy combatant, it didn’t matter) brought the dynasty money, rewards, and glory. Peter Romanov offers his view on the history of the dynasty.