Robert Jackson decided early that the prosecution would rely mainly on the Nazis' own documents, rather than on witnesses whose memories or motives could be questioned. The Nazi state had been a bureaucracy that recorded everything, and Allied forces had captured huge quantities of its files. The result was a case built largely from the regime's own words.

Paper trails

Teams of investigators sorted through tons of captured documents: orders, memos, minutes of meetings, reports and diaries. Among the most important was the Hossbach Memorandum, a record of a meeting in November 1937 in which Hitler laid out to his top military and foreign policy officials his plans to seize territory by force, beginning with Austria and Czechoslovakia. It helped the prosecution prove that aggressive war had been planned in advance. Hans Frank's official diary, dozens of volumes, recorded his brutal rule in occupied Poland in his own words. Reports by SS units listed the numbers of people they had murdered.

The film

On 29 November 1945, the prosecution showed a film titled Nazi Concentration Camps, made up of footage shot by Allied military cameramen as they liberated the camps. It showed starving survivors, bodies being bulldozed into mass graves, and the instruments of murder. The courtroom lights were dimmed, with small lights left on the defendants' faces so that their reactions could be observed. Several defendants turned away or wept; others stared. For many in the courtroom and the world, the film made the scale of the crimes impossible to deny.

Witnesses

Although documents formed the backbone of the case, some witnesses gave testimony that became famous.

• Otto Ohlendorf, a commander of one of the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units that followed the German army into the Soviet Union, testified in January 1946. Calmly, he told the court that the unit under his command had killed about 90,000 men, women and children in a single year. He described how the killings were organized, and he said he had considered it his duty to obey.
• Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, a French resistance member and photographer who had survived Auschwitz and Ravensbrück, testified for the French prosecution in January 1946 about the selections, gassings and abuse she had witnessed. After testifying, she walked slowly past the dock and looked the defendants in the face.
• Rudolf Höss, the former commandant of Auschwitz, was called in April 1946 as a witness for the defense of Kaltenbrunner, who hoped Höss would show that he had not directed the camp's killings. Instead, Höss described, in flat, bureaucratic terms, how the camp had murdered vast numbers of people in gas chambers. He claimed about two and a half million had been gassed there; historians now estimate the total deaths at Auschwitz at about 1.1 million, most of them Jews. His testimony was devastating nonetheless.

The defendants on the stand

Many defendants testified in their own defense. Göring spent days on the stand and initially got the better of Jackson in cross-examination, sparring cleverly over documents; the British prosecutor Maxwell Fyfe later questioned him more effectively. Albert Speer took a different approach: he accepted a general responsibility as a member of the leadership, while denying knowledge of the extermination of the Jews. His apparent remorse impressed the court. Historians have since shown that Speer knew far more than he admitted.

What the trial did and did not focus on

The murder of Europe's Jews was presented as part of the evidence, especially under crimes against humanity and war crimes. But the trial's structure placed the conspiracy to wage aggressive war at the center of the case, and some historians argue that the specific nature of the Holocaust was not fully understood or emphasized at the time. The word genocide, coined in 1944 by the Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, appeared in the indictment, but genocide was not yet a separate crime in international law.

Worked example: why documents?

Jackson's choice to rely on documents rather than mainly on survivors' testimony was controversial even among the prosecutors. Weigh the reasons.

• For documents: They could not be accused of exaggeration or revenge. They showed planning and intent at the highest levels. They used the regime's own words, making denial harder for defendants and for future generations.
• For witnesses: Survivors could convey human suffering in a way no memo could. Their voices gave victims a place in the story. A trial made only of paper risked treating mass murder as an administrative matter.
• The result: Nuremberg's documentary record became an invaluable resource for historians, but survivors' voices were less central than many later felt they should have been.

Later trials took a different approach. In the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, over a hundred witnesses, many of them survivors, testified, placing their experiences at the heart of public memory. The two approaches together show that justice after atrocity needs both proof that convinces and testimony that is heard.