What was the role of the United Kingdom in the Nuremberg Trials post world war 2?

by Jurjeneros
kieslowskifan

Well, the UK was part of the four Allied judges and prosecution for the International Military Tribunal (IMT). Geoffrey Lawrence was the main British judge at the IMT and President of the tribunal. Hartley Shawcross was the UK's prosecutor for the IMT and worked in conjunction with the other prosecutors for the IMTs.

The IMT though soon became mired in legal fog and the emerging Cold War meant that the type of inter-Allied unity that enabled the IMT fell apart. Each of the Allied powers conducted their own tribunals, often called National Military Tribunals (NMTs), in their own occupation zones in the aftermath of this breakdown which was apparent while the IMT was going on. The UK was no different in this regard and they held tribunals in the British zone with many taking place in Hamburg's Curiohaus. Lüneburg was the site of an earlier British-run tribunal, the Belsen trial. The Hamburg courts were often overshadowed by their American NMTs (confusingly located in Nuremberg and called the Subsequent Nuremberg Tribunals although they were not inter-Alllied affairs like the IMT) but the British did have some prominent defendants. The Tesch trial involved the responsibility of corporate entities for the Holocaust. The Stalag Luft III case was a trial against the German officers responsible for the execution of escaped PoWs from the "Great Escape" in March 1944. The British NMTs, along with others, were collected in the Law Reports of Trials of War Criminals for the UN.