After the war, some of those responsible for crimes committed during the Holocaust were brought to trial. Nuremberg, Germany, was chosen as a site for trials that took place in 1945 and 1946. Judges from the Allied powers—Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States—presided over the hearings of twenty-two major Nazi criminals.
Documentary on the Nuremberg trials at the end of World War 2, in which leaders of Nazi Germany were charged with War Crimes. Includes German and Allied war films shown as evidence of the crimes.
The original Nuremberg Laws — signed by Hitler in 1935 — were accessioned to the National Archives from the Huntington Library on August 25, 2010. This Inside the Vaults video short tells the story of the infamous document's journey to the National Archives from Gen. George S. Patton Jr.'s possession. The general had deposited the documents at the Huntington Library in California in 1945.
Held for the purpose of bringing Nazi war criminals to justice, the Nuremberg trials were a series of 13 trials carried out in Nuremberg, Germany, between 1945 and 1949. The defendants, who included Nazi Party officials and high-ranking military officers along with German industrialists, lawyers and doctors, were indicted on such charges as crimes against peace and crimes against humanity. Nazi leader Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) committed suicide and was never brought to trial. Although the legal justifications for the trials and their procedural innovations were controversial at the time, the Nuremberg trials are now regarded as a milestone toward the establishment of a permanent international court, and an important precedent for dealing with later instances of genocide and other crimes against humanity.