The Nuremberg Trials and the Holocaust

by Mark Weber

A common response to expressions of skepticism about the Holocaust story is to say something like "What about Nuremberg? What about the trials and all the evidence?!" This reaction is understandable because the many postwar "war crimes" trials have given explicit, authoritative judicial legitimacy to the Holocaust extermination story.

By far the most important of these was the great Nuremberg trial of 1945-1946, officially known as the International Military Tribunal (IMT). The governments of the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and France put on trial the most prominent surviving German leaders as "Major War Criminals" for various "war crimes," "crimes against peace," and "crimes against humanity." In the words of the Tribunal's Charter, these "Nazi conspirators" carried out their crimes as part of a great "Common Plan or Conspiracy."

In addition, twelve secondary Nuremberg trials (NMT) organized by the US government alone were conducted between 1946 to 1949. Similar trials were also conducted by the British at Lüneburg and Hamburg, and by the United States at Dachau. Since then, many other Holocaust-related trials have been held in West Germany, Israel and the United States, including the highly-publicized trials in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann and John Demjanjuk.

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