American History Standard Essay:
Standard 6: Understand the causes and course of World War II, the character of the war at home and abroad, and its reshaping of the United States role in the post-war world.
Benchmark 7: Describe the attempts to promote international justice through the Nuremberg Trials.
By: McKenzie Johnston
The Nuremberg Trials were two sets of trials that lasted from 1945-1949. They were to try all of the top Nazi political and business leaders. The International Military tribunal, which was headed by military officials whose job was to replace the role of the jurors, were chosen from four of the main Allied countries: the United States, Great Britain, Russia and France. The Allied countries’ military representatives tried many of the highest-ranking German officials in the Nuremberg Palace in Nuremberg, Germany. There were many trials that made up the Nuremberg trials as a whole including the Medical Trials, the Justice Trials, and the Einsatzgruppen Trials.
The Medical Trials or the Doctors Trial is one of the many trials that made up the Nuremberg Trials. Twenty-three German doctors who were involved with the Nazis were tried. The physicians were either involved with war crimes that involved medical actions to the so called claimed “impure” or “not worthy of life”. Those two names were what the Nazis called the mentally ill or physically disabled bodies. Some of the doctors also participated in conducting experiments on the prisoners in the concentration camps. Their war crimes included many experiments that tested the effects of many different conditions and diseases. They tested freezing, malaria, poison gas, sulfanilamide, bone, muscle, and nerve regeneration, bone transplantation, saltwater consumption, epidemic jaundice, sterilization, typhus, poisons, and incendiary bombs on the prisoners. These trials lasted 140 days with over 85 witnesses testifying and 1,500 documents presented. Seven doctors eventually were executed while sixteen of them were found guilty.
The Justice Trials, also known as the Judge’s Trials, were the trials that were held for the law related criminals. For this specific trial sixteen German jurists and lawyers were to have their time in court. Nine of the suspects had been working under the Reich Ministry of Justice and the rest were prosecutors and judges from the Special Courts and People’s Courts of Nazi Germany. The judges and prosecutors were on trial for helping the Nazis out with their program for “racial purity.” The accusations of these crimes were made on January 54, 1947. Overall the entire trial lasted from March 5 to December 4, 1947. Ten defendants were found guilty and four received life sentences. The rest of the prisoners got varied lengths of time to serve. The last four had all of their charges dropped. This specific trial really brought attention to the affect that the people that are ahead of the law like judges and lawyers could really do by backing the Nazis. The Justice Trials were also the source of inspiration for the movie “Judgment at Nuremberg.”
The Einsatzgruppen Trials were better known as the “The United States of America vs. Otto Ohlendorf, et al.” This trial was the ninth trial out of twelve trials that were involved in the Nuremberg Trials. The SS death squads; which is another name for “Einzatsgruppen” were the people tried in this ninth trial. They worked from behind the front of line of the Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe from 1941-1949. This group of people killed more than one million Jews and thousands of people including, Roma, disabled people, political commissars and more. Twenty-four defendants were involved in this trial and all of them were all officers of these “Einsatzgruppen” groups. One of the main members, Otto Ohlendorf, was responsible for the deaths of 90,000 men, women, and children. The members of this horrible group along with Otto were brought to justice starting on July 3, 1947 and ended on April 10, 1948. Over this amount of time fourteen were sentenced to death, seven served long lengths of imprisonment starting anywhere from ten years to life, two were not tried, four were actually released, one died of natural causes and one was executed because of his insanity.
The Nuremberg Trials were the first trials to bring war criminals to justice for committing such horrible crimes to humanity. Previous to the trials, everyone involved in war that got caught for something would claim that they were just following orders. The Nuremberg Trials did not take those words as the truth. Ever since that very first day of the trials the justice system has not been the same. A person involved in a criminal act can no longer say to the court that he was just obeying commands and get away with what he/she did thanks to the Nuremberg Trials. It allowed victims and their families to have closure as it brings every person involved in their crime to get what they deserved.
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