The trial of the major war criminals was only the beginning. It was followed by further trials in Germany and in Asia, and by a burst of international lawmaking that created much of the modern framework of human rights and international criminal law.
The later Nuremberg trials
From 1946 to 1949, the United States held twelve further trials in the same Palace of Justice, before American military tribunals, often called the subsequent Nuremberg trials. They tried doctors, judges, industrialists, SS officers, military commanders and government officials. In the Einsatzgruppen trial, the chief prosecutor, Benjamin Ferencz, was just twenty-seven years old. He presented reports in which the killing units had recorded their own murders, and all of the defendants were convicted. Ferencz spent the rest of his long life campaigning for an international criminal court.
The Doctors' Trial and the Nuremberg Code
The first of these trials, the Doctors' Trial (December 1946 to August 1947), tried twenty-three defendants, most of them physicians, for medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners and for the murder of disabled people. Prisoners had been frozen, infected with diseases, subjected to high-altitude pressure and mutilated, often fatally. Sixteen defendants were convicted, and seven were sentenced to death.
In its judgment, the court set out ten principles for medical research on human beings, now known as the Nuremberg Code (1947). Its first principle states that the voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. Subjects must be able to choose freely, must understand the experiment and its risks, and must be able to stop at any time. The code became the foundation of modern research ethics, influencing later standards such as the World Medical Association's Declaration of Helsinki (1964).
The Tokyo Trial
In Asia, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, known as the Tokyo Trial, tried Japanese wartime leaders from 1946 to 1948. Judges came from eleven nations. Twenty-five defendants were convicted, and seven, including the wartime prime minister Hideki Tojo, were hanged. The emperor, Hirohito, was not prosecuted, a decision made largely by the American occupation authorities. The Indian judge, Radhabinod Pal, wrote a long dissent arguing that all the defendants should be acquitted of the charges, criticizing the trial as victors' justice and pointing to Western colonialism and the atomic bombings. His dissent remains controversial.
The Nuremberg Principles
In December 1946, the United Nations General Assembly affirmed the principles of international law recognized by the Nuremberg Charter and judgment. In 1950, the UN's International Law Commission formulated them as the Nuremberg Principles, including that any person who commits an act that is a crime under international law is responsible for it, that holding official position does not relieve a person of responsibility, and that acting under orders does not either, provided a moral choice was possible.
The Genocide Convention and the Universal Declaration
Raphael Lemkin, who had coined the word genocide, campaigned tirelessly to make it a crime in its own right. On 9 December 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, defining genocide as acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. The very next day, 10 December 1948, the Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In 1949 the four Geneva Conventions strengthened protections for wounded soldiers, prisoners of war and civilians in wartime.
A long pause
The Cold War soon froze further progress. The United States and the Soviet Union, rivals in a global contest, had no interest in an international court that might judge their own actions or those of their allies. For more than forty years, no international criminal tribunal was created, even as atrocities continued in many parts of the world.
Worked example: applying the Nuremberg Code
Apply the code's first principle to a modern case. A drug company wants to test a new medicine in a poor community where most people cannot read and few have access to doctors. It plans to offer free food to anyone who joins the trial.
- Is consent voluntary? Offering food to hungry people may pressure them to join. The code requires consent free of force, fraud or coercion, and undue inducement can be a form of coercion.
- Is consent informed? If participants cannot read the consent form, the researchers must explain the risks in a way they understand, in their own language.
- Can participants stop? They must be told they can leave the study at any time without losing access to care.
- Are risks justified? The code requires that risks never exceed the humanitarian importance of the problem and that unnecessary suffering be avoided.
The code was written in response to crimes committed by doctors who treated human beings as mere material for experiments. Its central idea, that a person's body cannot be used without their free and informed agreement, is a direct expression of human dignity. It reminds us that the lessons of Nuremberg apply not only to dictators and generals but to anyone with power over others.