Was the Nuremburg trials a kangaroo court? | AskHistorians Archive Observer

*Note this answer deals mainly with the main tribunal, not the so-called "Doctor's Trial" or Einsatzgruppen Trials

Although the Nuremberg tribunals departed far from the ideal of a fair and balanced courtroom, they were not a kangaroo court in the common meaning of the word. The defendants had an opportunity for defense council, the trials were open, and the defendants were allowed to meet the charges against them. There were four main charges (I. Conspiracy to commit war, II. Plotting a war of aggression, III. War crimes, IV. Crimes against humanity) and some defendants were able to be acquitted of these charges. The reduction of Dönitz's charges exemplified how the procedure did work with a degree of fairness. Part of the charges against Dönitz was that his practice of unrestricted submarine warfare constituted a breech of international law, but his defense team was able to argue that the similiar actions of the Allied navies meant that this was not a violation of international law. Some defendants, like the prewar economist Hjalmar Schacht were able to gain an acquittal on all charges. The Tribunals themselves were somewhat long and often bogged down in procedural issues during the nine months they were in operation. US public opinion surveys of the American zone showed that German interest in the Tribunals initially peaked when they opened, but Germans gradually became bored with the process and interest in the Tribunals only revived when the initial judgements were handed out. As such, the Nuremberg Tribunals tribunals do not fit into the paradigm of a large show trial. In contrast to the slow pace of Nuremberg, the Moscow Trials of the Great Purges typically lasted a little over a week.

However, there were many areas in which the Nuremberg process fell short of the norms of a fair trial. In hindsight, the Tribunal would have been better off without indictments I and II. Not only is conspiracy a very hard thing to prove in a legal court, but these charges often allowed for a highly selective use of evidence on the part of the prosecution. This most famously came up in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in which the Allied prosecution had to dance around the fact that the secret protocols of the Pact called for the carving up of Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe. The Tribunals also broke a number of legal precedents and norms that made outside observers quite uncomfortable. While evidence was not fabricated (another departure from the Moscow Trials), the Tribunal did restrict the type of evidence or testimony that could be entered into the courtroom, often in ways that benefited the prosecution. The defense teams often invoked the legal concept Nulla Poena Sine Lege (no punishment without prior law) to the indictments, but the Tribunal responded with both a dismissal of this defense and a selective reading of international law to establish legal precedents that the Third Reich had violated. The origin and biases of the Tribunal's judges was also a major source of contention during the tribunals and afterwords. Goering's attorney, Otto Strahmer, argued that since both the judges and prosecution were appointed by the victorious Allied powers, the Tribunal had violated the impartiality of the judiciary since both the prosecution and the judges were on the same side. The non-German origin of the judges found a wide resonance within postwar critiques of the Tribunals, especially within West Germany. Wilhelm Grewe, a German legal scholar and future diplomat of the FRG, wrote in a 1947 critique of the Tribunals that Nuremberg lacked proper judicial norms and were not operating under a legally appointed judge.

Grewe's criticism of the Tribunals has some merits, but his critique reflected the incredible difficulties that came with bringing legal punishment for crimes like those of the Third Reich. Simply put, there were few precedents in international law for the Tribunal to base itself upon, so the process would be inherently flawed and legally questionable on some level. The lack of German judges in the Tribunal was problematic, but critiques of the Tribunal on this ground ignores how active the German legal community was in collaboration with the Third Reich. Although German jurists like Grewe and Hubert Schorn would argue that the German legal profession was alienated from by the Third Reich's arbitrary flaunting of legality, recent research such as that conducted by Ingo Muller and Michael Stolleis has shown the German legal establishment often was quite involved in sanctioning the various crimes of the Third Reich.

In hindsight, the Tribunals had two seemingly paradoxical shortcomings. First, the Tribunals were actually quite lenient in their sentences beyond major offenders. The muddled legal nature of the proceedings meant that other than death sentences, the length and terms of imprisonment were often quite arbitrary and unclear. This made it much harder to extend the judicial process to mid-level individuals. Second, there was a wider perception, especially strong in the West, that the Tribunals were more thorough and successful than they were in reality. Although the Tribunals were able to prosecute major offenders like Goering, they had decidedly mixed success at bringing down prosecutions to lower-level officials. The bureaucratic backlog and difficulty of bringing up charges led to something of an amnesty-mania inside Germany after the first round of Tribunals. This wide-spread perception that the Trials were a form of victor's justice gave advocates in the FRG in the 1950s an issue to push for a blanket amnesty or pardon of German offenders already convicted. In the GDR, the idea that the West had allowed prominent NSDAP members to slither back into power became one of the talking points of both the Soviets and SED, but the GDR similarly abandoned any deep commitment to a thorough denazification. This sense that Nuremberg was a victor's justice abetted a selective amnesia about the Third Reich within Germany (mostly in the FRG) in which all those Germans responsible for the Third Reich's crimes were executed, but the German populace as a whole was unfairly held accountable for the actions of a criminal clique.