The Nuremberg Trials are historically significant because they represent the first time leaders of a defeated nation were prosecuted in the name of International law- the first time such leaders were actually given a chance to plead for their lives in a tribunal setting.

The charges pertaining to the six organizations were designed around the problem of what to do with the hundreds of thousands of people who had been members of organizations such as the SS and the Gestapo. To indict an organization raised an important legal question regarding the legitimacy of creating a system whereby one could be found guilty based solely on proof of his association with that organization. The idea behind creating such a system was to find these organizations to have been criminal, and then to later hold hearings t

Of the twenty-four indicted, only twenty-one were actually tried. One of the defendants, Robert Ley hanged himself before the trial began. Another, Gustav Krupp, was judged too frail to stand trial. Martin Bormann, private secretary to Hitler, missing and presumed dead, so he was tried in absentia and sentenced to hang if he should ever turn up. After the trial of the 21 individual defendants was concluded, the court heard testimony about the organizations.

"...Violations of the laws or customs of war, including murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labor or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity."

Taylor, Telford, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, 1992. PP 3, 23, 165-180, 262-273.

There was, in fact, so much evidence, that the court was belabored to hear it all, and several times noted that a certain point had already been made satisfactorily in order to avoid getting lost in the sea of paperwork.

Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Chief to Reich Main Security,

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