Despite the reputation the American zone had for harsher treatment than the French and British zones during denazification, American officials had reason to want to see a quick denazification process that would leave the western occupation zones relatively self-sufficient. While the Soviet Union purged Nazis from its zone's politics, economy, society, and culture, it also witnessed a shortage of qualified and experienced leaders, planners, and other figures to rebuild and grow postwar Germany. The United States and its allies hoped to avoid this situation by punishing the absolute worst offenders but allowing many others off with relatively light sentences or, in some cases, merely fines and temporary work restrictions. The Judges' Trial falls into this pattern; in the east, the Soviet Union worked to replace the judiciary system with one that not only represented the workers, but was populated by them, as crash courses in various branches of law created a whole new batch of East German judges with no connections to the previous regime. In the western zones, however, many judges managed to maintain or later regain their positions, and those who were prosecuted not only received relatively light sentences, but frequently saw these sentences commuted; indeed, in the case of the Judges' Trial, the highest profile case against members of the judiciary, many of those convicted even received pensions from the West German state afterwards.

Members of the German judiciary in the West also fought for this lighter sentencing as well, in part out of fear that they themselves might someday face investigations into their activities during the Nazi regime, and in part to spare German society the burden of tearing itself apart searching for the murders amongst them, since so many were implicated. Indeed, in the aftermath of World War II many Germans adopted an attitude of victimization--Germans had suffered at the hands of allied bombings, the Red Army, and Hitler and his henchmen.