The law has its boundaries — what Nuremberg teaches us about guilt, evil, and the pursuit of global justice
The film Nuremberg examines the events surrounding the postwar International Military Tribunal, the first and most famous of the Nuremberg trials. This tribunal was established to carry out what its charter called the “just and prompt trial and punishment of the major war criminals of the European Axis.”
Among those indicted were Nazi leaders Hermann Göring, Alfred Rosenberg, and Wilhelm Keitel, part of a list that also targeted six organizations, including the Gestapo and the SS. Held in Nuremberg, Germany, the trial captured the world’s attention and ultimately produced 19 convictions. The global media coverage reflected the momentous nature of the proceedings.
Eight decades later, discussions about terms like “war crimes” and “genocide” fill news cycles, whether in reference to U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s Caribbean strikes or Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip.
The broad public understanding of these terms owes much to the Nuremberg trials and the extraordinary international cooperation they demanded. Yet today’s fragility of international justice—paired with evolving moral and legal notions of guilt—highlights the law’s limits when confronting the most grievous offenses.
A note: the Nuremberg trials were not the first attempt at international war-crimes justice. The 1921 Leipzig trials sought to try Germans for World War I crimes, but practical hurdles—such as transporting defendants and gathering credible evidence—led to only a handful of convictions, and some sentences were later overturned.
Even before World War II ended, leaders from the U.K., the U.S., and the USSR discussed how best to handle a defeated Germany. Some favored trials rooted in American legal principles, while others, like British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, cautioned against repeating Leipzig’s failures.
This time, several elements were different. The four chief prosecutors from the U.K., the U.S., the USSR, and France charged the defendants while most suspects were already in custody. Prosecutors benefited from an enormous cache of Nazi documents, and there was a notable degree of public engagement and international cooperation—many Germans, in fact, supported the idea of the trials.
A new legal framework emerged as well. The tribunal’s charter defined specific crimes under its jurisdiction—war crimes, crimes against peace, and crimes against humanity. While war crimes drew on preexisting international conventions, the latter two categories had not been codified before.
The proceedings began on November 20, 1945, and ran through September 1, 1946. Four judges, each from one of the allied nations, oversaw the case, with each country appointing a chief prosecutor. Defendants could select their own counsel, subject to the court’s approval. The verdicts arrived on October 1, 1946: 19 guilt findings out of 22 defendants, 12 of whom received death sentences.
Yet a notable blind spot lingered. The agreement that created the tribunal specified its aim to punish “the major war criminals of the European Axis.” Atrocities committed by Allied forces, as well as domestic actions by Allied governments (including Japanese American internment), did not fall under the court’s purview. Even Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Harlan Fiske Stone, warned about the legal precedents the trials might set, expressing concern that the framework resembled a court only in name.
Philosophers have continued to wrestle with the implications. Hannah Arendt, reflecting on the trials, suggested that Nazi crimes revealed legal systems’ limits when confronting guilt that transcends conventional crime. In the film, psychologist Douglas Kelley interviews Hermann Göring, initially expecting to glimpse pure villainy; instead, Göring appears almost ordinary and even charming to some observers, challenging the notion that monstrous crimes come only from monstrous individuals. This tension—between ordinary persons and extraordinary atrocities—remains a central question for Holocaust scholars and others studying how ordinary people can become agents of horror.
Nuremberg’s enduring impact
Even though the Nuremberg trials did not resolve every issue in designing a fair and enduring system for international justice, they marked a turning point. They helped shape the Nuremberg Principles and established a clear repudiation of the defense that “just following orders” excuses criminal conduct. The charter explicitly stated that obedience to government or superior orders does not absolve responsibility.
Importantly, the proceedings introduced the term “genocide,” a coinage of Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, used in the indictment and by prosecutors to describe the deliberate destruction of a people. This word would later be codified in the Genocide Convention of 1948.
The Nuremberg framework also laid groundwork for later international tribunals and influenced the creation of the International Criminal Court, which began operating in The Hague in 2002.
A fragile consensus endures
In the immediate aftermath, Secretary Stimson remained a strong defender of the trials, arguing that the bar was set not by law alone but by the “massed angered forces of common humanity.” Over the ensuing eight decades, the world has endured countless conflicts, and only a fraction of suspected perpetrators have faced international justice.
Disagreements persist about how to stop atrocities and even about whether certain acts qualify as crimes. The legitimacy of international courts remains a topic of debate—for instance, the United States’ 2025 sanctions on ICC officials after an arrest warrant was issued for Israeli officials over alleged Gaza-related crimes reflect ongoing tensions between national sovereignty and international justice.
Watching Nuremberg today invites a reconsideration of how to frame the present moment. Is the call to rely on the forces of common humanity still a viable strategy in today’s world, or has the political landscape shifted so much that consensus is unattainable? The takeaway, however, remains clear: the global vocabulary for “genocide” and “crimes against humanity” provides a crucial, widely understood mechanism to call out and counter grave wrongdoing when it unfolds.
