Click on image to enlarge.

eBook Category: History/General Nonfiction
eBook Description: At the end of the Second World War the victorious Allies began unprecedented proceedings against those leading Nazis who had been captured. The trial that followed was conducted in four languages and involved over 400 sessions of open court. Andrew Walker provides a chronology of the proceedings and revealing portraits of the personalities involved. There are frequent references to the terrible events unleashed on Europe by the Nazis and the book asks the questions that were raised at the time and have not been fully answered since. What was the legal validity of the trial and were the ones who were tried always the right people to bear the responsibility for Nazi crimes?

eBook Publisher: Pocket Essentials/Pocket Essentials
Fictionwise Release Date: January 2007

One of the most extraordinary things about the Nazi War trials in Nuremberg in 1945 and 1946 was the fact that they took place at all. At the end of the most devastating war in history, victors as well as vanquished were exhausted. Much of Europe was in ruins. Germany itself was a virtual wasteland and many of its people were close to starvation. In this context, the fact that a tribunal was convened and that, over a period of more than a year, those leading Nazis who had survived and been captured were tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity is astonishing enough.Yet, the trials themselves were unprecedented. Never before had nations in victory attempted to hold the leaders of the defeated nation to legal account. The challenges faced by those who established the tribunal were enormous. The international law under which the men were tried was debatable. The argument that the trial was vengeance masquerading as justice was one that was heard from its beginning. To prove, as Rebecca West wrote, that ?victors can so rise above the ordinary limitations of human nature as to be able to try fairly the foes they vanquished, by submitting themselves to the restraints of law? would be no easy task. From the very beginning the Nuremberg Trial was about much more than the individual fates of the men who stood trial. It became the focus of desires for a post-war settlement in Europe that would ensure lasting peace and that would exorcise the horrors of the previous six years. It embodied hopes that solutions could be found to problems of international conflict which had plagued the continent for centuries. Again in the words of Rebecca West, it could ?warn all future war-mongers that law can at last pursue them into peace and thus give humanity a new defence against them?. In this sense, the Nazi War Trials can be seen as one of the most significant events of the twentieth century. This book is primarily an attempt to provide a clear and accurate précis of what happened at Nuremberg between 20 November 1945, when the trial began, and 16 October 1946, when sentence was carried out on those men convicted by the tribunal. It identifies each of the defendants, summarises the charges against each of them and gives a brief account of the prosecution and defence speeches, the judgement, the sentencing and the carrying out of the sentences. It also looks at the cases the Allies made against various key organisations within the Nazi state.To set the trials in context, the book examines the debate amongst the Allies before the war ended about what form judgement on the Nazis would take and looks briefly at events after they were concluded. At a time when the war crimes court in The Hague still pursues men involved in the Balkans War and when the trial of Saddam Hussein in Iraq is underway, the Nuremberg Trial has a renewed relevance and this book endeavours to show why.