Tag Archives: NMT

New Bibliography on the Nuremberg Trials

Congratulations and thanks to Professor Kevin Jon Heller and his colleague Catherine E. Gascoigne for producing, just in time for the 70th anniversary of the commencement of the International Military Tribunal (IMT) proceedings at Nuremberg, a new bibliography on the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals.

Yes, that’s plural—trials.  The IMT, commencing in Fall 1945 and concluding in Fall 1946, was the one and only international Nuremberg trial.  Thereafter, the United States, with Nuremberg in the center of its military occupation zone in what had been Nazi Germany, conducted twelve additional trials there, before Nuremberg Military Tribunals (NMTs), between Fall 1946 and Spring 1949.

A great virtue of the Heller/Gascoigne bibliography is that it lists and also describes in narrative, in fifteen concise pages, leading book-length publications (i.e., books and long articles) on both the IMT and the under-studied NMTs.

The IMT adjudicated the guilt of twenty-two surviving Nazi leaders plus six organizations.  It was the four-nation trial, prosecuted and judged jointly by U.S., U.K., U.S.S.R. and French representatives.  U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson served as U.S. chief prosecutor.  The defendants included, to name one handful of the nineteen who were convicted, Hermann Goering, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Albert Speer and Julius Streicher.

The U.S.-only NMTs, often called the “subsequent proceedings” because they followed the IMT, adjudicated the criminal guilt of 177 additional individuals.  General Telford Taylor, previously a senior member of Jackson’s U.S. team before the IMT, served as chief prosecutor.  Each case concerned persons who had worked together in an important sector of the Third Reich.  These cases came to be known by short names of either a leading defendant or the occupational sector:  The Medical Case; The Milch Case; The Justice Case; The Pohl Case; The Flick Case; The I.G. Farben Case; The Hostage Case; The Reich Main Security Office (RuSHA) Case; The Einsatzgruppen Case; The Krupp Case; The Ministries Case; and The High Command Case.

(Unlike that list, which I arranged by the numbers (1-12) that Taylor and team assigned to the cases, Heller and Gascoigne organize NMT case-specific scholarship in alphabetized case-name order.  Neither listing method fully captures the sequence and the various overlaps of the twelve trials; for that, the best book, listed modestly in the new bibliography, is Heller’s own The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law (2011).)

This new bibliography is published in the Oxford Bibliographies online series.  That means it is only a click away but, alas, it isn’t free/it is behind a paywall.  I expect that leading libraries subscribe to the Oxford series, so teachers, researchers and students should have relatively easy access.  And anyone else can buy in, of course.

Access to this bibliography, however obtained, is a good development.  It is a fine guide to important resources on cases that are permanently significant, for how they occurred and what they uncovered, and as models and lessons for our time and the future.

(Hat tip:  Kevin Heller himself, here on Opinio Juris.)