We are used to treating the trial at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg as an obvious aftermath of the war. And yet, at the time, immediately after the end of the war, the very idea of putting on trial people who had acted in accordance with the laws of their state, trying them for crimes that were not codified in written law (e.g. crimes against peace, or crimes against humanity) aroused quite widespread opposition and even indignation among some lawyers.
Even for that part of the legal world which did not doubt that the crimes of the Second World War should be accounted for in judicial terms, unanswered questions remained: how to judge mass, even industrial-scale murders, for what and on what basis to judge those who ‘merely’ gave orders and commands? In a world of sovereign states, do governments have the right to try the leaders of other states? Is this not a dangerous precedent?
The helplessness of the justice system in the face of mass, organised crimes was aptly expressed during the trial of the KL Lublin (Majdanek) staff by the Polish prosecutor Jerzy Sawicki, who, incidentally, was also the Polish delegate during the Nuremberg trial: ‘I am supposed to speak about the guilt of the defendants, i.e. I am supposed to put their guilt into words. Your Honour, words are the creation of people, and what happened there is inhuman. [I know that normally when a prosecutor stands before the court and asks for a death sentence, a shudder of horror goes through the court, the prosecutor and the audience. I feel all my powerlessness when the words “death penalty” are pronounced in this courtroom’.
It seems that most of the legal dilemmas faced by lawyers during the Nuremberg trials, whatever aspect they concerned, were ultimately located in the age-old tension/conflict between the Roman ‘judicial’ approach to law and the modern ‘legislative’ approach. The former concept was largely based on axiology, seeing legal norms in the perspective of morality derived from natural laws (St Thomas, Kant’s categorical imperative). Its proponents were charged with the accusation that interpreting legal rules on the basis of an ambiguous, unspecific and undefined morality had the effect of departing from legal rules and giving lawyers too wide a field of interpretation. The latter notion, over time referred to as legal positivism, prevailed in the early 20th century in continental Europe. It favoured a reasoned, rational approach to law, which was primarily reduced to the legal norm; moreover, the radical version of legal positivism emphasised that there was no necessary connection between law and morality (John Austin, Rudolf von Ihering). The discussion taking place among legal scholars still during and just after the war was in essence a debate between positivists and proponents of natural law. The former believed that the crimes of the Second World War could be judged with the help of existing laws and existing jurisprudence. The latter pointed out that the mass scale and specificity of the crimes required new legal solutions. It is important to note that the goal of both was to try and convict the criminals, but they wanted to achieve this by different methods.
Justice for the victors?
One of the main general criticisms of the Nuremberg trials was and still is that they were a manifestation of ‘victors’ justice’, which only prosecuted and punished crimes committed by the Axis states, while the Allies, most notably the Soviet Union, were not held accountable for their own war crimes. Critics argue that the selective application of justice undermined the credibility of the trials.
Indeed, Nuremberg was a ‘court of the victors over the vanquished’, but it was the only possible tribunal in the political situation of the time. Any trial, even the best-prepared one, is subject to the subjectivity of the judges, to human error, let alone a trial before an international tribunal in which the conflicting interests of four powers clashed and a defeated Germany tried desperately to defend itself.
Faced with a whole series of dilemmas and legal doubts, only the will of the politicians could push through the establishment of the International Military Tribunal. Pragmatism and political realism stood above procedural deficiencies, the subjectivity of the judges, and the impossibility of trying Soviet criminals. Awareness of these shortcomings accompanied both politicians and lawyers from the very beginning. The prosecutor on the British side, Sir Hartley Shawcross, wrote 20 years after the trial: ‘The wisest legal arguments pale into insignificance and even become irrelevant in the face of the facts which have been proved, including by the use of official Nazi documents. What happened [during the Third Reich period] touched the conscience of all civilised nations, including the German people, and even cried out for judgement and punishment.’
It is also worth remembering that even during the war the response to information about the mass murders carried out by the Germans was suggestions that extrajudicial punishment be administered to them. As early as 1941, Theodore N. Kaufman self-published his book Germany Must Perish, in which he proposed the sterilisation of the entire German nation. According to the author’s calculations, it would take four months to sterilise the male German population by some 25,000 surgeons, and about three years for women. The plan of the American finance minister Henry Morgenthau, who believed that Germany would be a security risk even after demilitarisation, was well known and considered after the war, so in his book Germany Is Our Problem (1945) he advocated making Germany an entirely agricultural country in order to deprive it of an economic base for war. Even Winston Churchill himself believed (W. Churchill’s dispatch to A. Eden of 17 September 1944) that most of the German leadership (50 to 100 people) should be executed without trial. In the perspective of the above ideas, any judicial solution was a victory for common sense and the principles of Western civilisation.
Today, it is not easy for us to understand the legal dilemmas of the time - the international trial of criminals from Rwanda, Yugoslavia or Sudan seems obvious to us, but it is worth remembering that after the atrocities of the war, innovative interpretations of the law raised fears of creating new chaos, the effect of which could be to undermine the legal foundations of Western civilisation. The most striking example is the comment by US Supreme Court Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone: ‘...I would like to inform you that the Supreme Court had nothing to do, either directly or indirectly, with the Nuremberg trials or the actions of the government that authorized them’. In a private letter, he wrote: ‘The Nuremberg trials are an attempt to justify the use of the power of the victor over the vanquished, since the vanquished caused the aggressive war’. He feared the lasting effects of the instrumental use of law in international politics.
Acting in accordance with the law of one’s own state
One of the fundamental dilemmas of the Nuremberg trials was the very fact of the establishment of an international tribunal. Western political thought was dominated by the Act of State principle, particularly firmly rooted in Anglo-Saxon law, derived directly from the concept of state sovereignty. This principle implies that, in an anarchic international system, the authorities of one state do not have the right to judge the authorities of another state, since the legal principles established by the sovereign are the law in its territory.1.According to this interpretation, a person acting on behalf, or in the interest, of a state cannot be held personally responsible for their actions; he or she is, as it were, subject to immunity on the grounds that their acts are presumptively legal, since they comply with the law established by the sovereign. Lawyers, both European and American, realised that a complete abandonment of the Act of State principle could be a dangerous precedent and could provide a legal basis for future interference in the internal legal system of sovereign states. The Nazi period provided an argument for many positivists to move away from the overly principled dominance of formalism over axiology and the overly radical separation of law and morality. The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg finally recognised the primacy of the prohibition on planning and waging aggressive war over the absolute sovereignty of the state. Moreover, among some of the lawyers involved in the work of the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC) there was a conviction which one of them, Hersh Lauterpacht, formulated clearly as follows: ‘... the community of nations has in the past claimed and successfully asserted the right to intercede on behalf of the violated rights of man trampled upon by the State in a manner calculated to shock the moral sense of mankind. The right of humanitarian intervention has for a long time been considered to form part of the law of nations’2. With regard to German crimes, he was convinced that the ‘fate of the accused ... serves as irrefutable proof that the scope of exclusive domestic jurisdiction ends where crimes against humanity begin’3.
Ultimately, the dilemma of ‘acting according to the law of the state’ was also resolved by the so-called Radbruch Formula. Its author proceeded from the premise that if the international community wanted to reckon with German crimes, which were committed according to criteria of legality but completely ignored elementary principles of morality, it could not resort to state law, as it did not provide for, or even prevent, such a reckoning. On the basis of a Roman jurisprudential maxim, Radbruch formulated the principle henceforth known in law as the Radbruch Formula: lex iniustissima non est lex, which can be translated as: a grossly unjust law is not a law. Thus, the law established by the legitimate government of the German Reich, by the fact of drastically violating natural law, became, according to Radbruch, a highly unjust law and therefore not valid. In the end, therefore, a sense of justice proved more important than dogmatic adherence to principles. It should also be stressed that this approach was also fostered by European public opinion, agitated by the evidence of war-time crimes being successively revealed.
For lawyers dealing with international law, this was one of the greatest dilemmas in history, concerning not only the application of principles, but above all the place of morals and values in international law. The legal interpretation that eventually prevailed at Nuremberg also makes it possible to try contemporary war criminals from the former Yugoslavia or Rwanda, among others. The undermining of the positivist conception of law by the premises contained in Radbruch formula made it possible to move beyond the dichotomy of the dispute: justice for the victors versus impunity for the perpetrators. Article 8 of the IMT Charter finally recognised that acting on the orders of a government or superior did not absolve criminal responsibility, although it may result in leniency. It was also emphasised that in the event of a conflict between national and international law the individual has a duty to comply with the latter, as in such a situation national law is not binding on the citizen.
Lex retro non agit!
The Nuremberg trials introduced new categories of crimes: ‘against humanity’ and “waging aggressive war” (against peace), which were not clearly defined in international law before the war. The so-called retroactivity of these provisions, i.e. the violation of two legal principles: nullum crimen sine lege (nulla poena sine lege) and lex retro non agit, was questionable. Since the legal terms themselves - crimes against humanity and crimes against peace - appeared after they had been committed by Nazi Germans, many legal scholars doubted whether the fundamental principles of law were being violated when trying war criminals. Disputes over the principle and interpretation of retroactivity also took place among the jurists of the IMT, including between the head of the American delegation, Robert H. Jackson, who believed that it was more important to try the criminals than to doubt the lex retro principle, and the advisor to the French delegation, Prof. André Gros, who had a lot of doubts on this issue.
In the end, Article 6 of the IMT Charter included the following provision: ‘The following acts, or any of them, are crimes coming within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal for which there shall be individual responsibility’. Article 6 was followed by a list of international crimes, including participation in a war of aggression and participation in a conspiracy (collusion) to commit one of the crimes against peace.
A witness at the Nuremberg trials, the Bavarian Social Democrat Wilhelm Hoegner, summarised these contentions as follows: ‘I remain of the opinion that the Nuremberg trials were contrary to the legal principle of nulla poena sine lege. After all, there were extraordinary circumstances, and this trial was the only chance to settle accounts with the criminal Nazi gang.’
Procedural objections and moral relativism
During the trials, the prosecutors were themselves a party to the conflict, so it was easy to formulate allegations of a lack of independence. The Tribunal was a military court with representatives of four powers, representing four different cultures and legal traditions (continental system, common law system, Soviet law). The jurists did not adopt any catalogue of procedural rules under which the proceedings were to take place, although it is clear that American law had the greatest influence on the final shape of the trial. The four powers did, however, reach a compromise on the application of substantive law, i.e. the legal norms applied before the tribunal.
The absence of a two-instance system, i.e. the possibility of an appeal against the verdict, was questionable. This was a political decision, motivated primarily by the Tribunal’s mode of work (ad hoc tribunal) 4. The political authorities wanted to try the defendants relatively quickly and definitively, hence the decision to make the verdicts final and indisputable. In view of the beginning of the Cold War, lengthy trials could be seen as a tool of the game between the Western Allies and the Soviets.
Some of the objections to the trials are of a more ethical nature, although to some extent they also relate to procedure, e.g. jury selection or unequal access to trial information. One can paraphrase the title of this text and write that the Themis at Nuremberg was one-eyed - she saw the German crimes but not the Soviet ones. Moreover, the Soviet lawyers at Nuremberg were themselves implicated in the crimes of the Soviet system. Morally, such a situation is of course unacceptable, but politically, under the circumstances, there was no alternative. The fact that there were Soviet lawyers, primarily judges, meant that much of the evidence of Soviet crimes, for example the Soviet aggression against Poland or the case of the Katyn massacre, was dismissed and the evidence was regarded as falsification.
German defenders often referred to the principle et tu quoque (Latin for ‘and you too’), an attempt to point out that the accusing Allies had themselves committed similar acts for which they accused German leaders. The defence counsels argued that German bombings of, for example, Coventry or London, were no different from Allied raids on Dresden or Leipzig. Similar allegations were made about the murder of German prisoners of war especially by the Soviets. These arguments sought to undermine the moral and legal legitimacy of the Tribunal.
The diversity of the verdicts, including the acquittal of some defendants, may be indicative of the fairness and insight of the Tribunal, which reflected on the individual guilt of each defendant. However, upon closer inspection of the judges’ behind-the-scenes deliberations, this picture is no longer so clear-cut. After the disclosure of Judge Biddle’s personal notes (thirty years after the Nuremberg trials), the bargaining over the sentences to be handed down came to light. This only confirms the primacy of politics over justice, perhaps better described as a ‘synergy of politics and justice’.
Criminals behind the desk and executors of orders
A phenomenon of the National Socialist system was the fact of the ‘total mobilisation’ of German society and the massive support given to Hitler. 5 That was support of the simple worker and the farmer, but also members of scientific and intellectual elites and by representatives of large industrial concerns. Ultimately, they created a system that organised a powerful machine of violence and extermination during the Second World War. The number of NSDAP membership cards issued reached 10.7 million, meaning that one in five adult Germans belonged to the Nazi party. As many as 17.3 million soldiers served in the Wehrmacht from 1939 to 1945 (of whom 15.6 million were Germans and Austrians). The most conservative estimate by German historians of the Wehrmacht’s involvement in the atrocities - particularly on the Eastern Front - is 5%; this would mean that more than 700,000 soldiers may have committed them. If we add to these figures members of SS formations, officials of the SS Race and Settlement Main Office, and representatives of large industrial concerns supporting Hitler, we get a picture of the entanglement and scale of support given to Hitler by the German people. In December 1963, 22 members of the Auschwitz staff stood trial in Frankfurt am Main. Already in the indictment, prosecutor Fritz Bauer pre-empted the defence arguments, writing: ‘It was not the case that there was only Nazi Hitler and only Nazi Himmler in Germany. There were hundreds of thousands, millions of others who carried it out not only because they were ordered to do so, but also because it corresponded to their own world view, which they adopted voluntarily.’ The Allies cannot be accused of trying only the most important representatives of the Third Reich at Nuremberg, because that was precisely the purpose of the trial. The selection of those who would sit on the dock was not only a matter of justice, but above all a matter of politics. The German Reich was to be tried at Nuremberg, represented by people from various institutions and spheres of life (from political activists, propagandists, military commanders to representatives of the business community). It is worth remembering that the main perpetrators escaped responsibility by committing suicide (Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler) or by fleeing abroad (Eichmann and Mengele, among others). The purpose of the trial was to develop the legal basis and jurisprudence that was later to be used by the courts before which lesser functionaries of the Nazi regime were to be tried. Of course, it should be remembered that the conflict between the Western powers and the Soviet Union dubbed the Cold War effectively rendered the planned denazification and trial of criminals impossible.
When it came to trying the guilty, a much more serious issue was that of ‘behind-the-scenes perpetrators’ who had not directly committed the crimes. This dilemma also applied to some commanders of concentration and death camps who themselves had not participated in the crimes directly. The resolution of this dilemma was all the more pressing because even before or during the Nuremberg trials, others were still taking place before American and British courts. 6
To resolve similar dilemmas, the concept of a multi-person crime, involving ‘taking part’ in a joint action, was used. This concept should not be confused with collective responsibility. The perpetrator of a multi-person international crime could have been an organisation, such as the SS, the Gestapo or even a specific ministry. In both Britain and the United States, there were legal constructs to try people who did not commit crimes directly. These were the concepts of collusion and conspiracy. Prior to the war, these were primarily used to try organised crime or economic crime, such as the Mafia. In this case, we are dealing with a plurality of perpetrators accused of jointly committing the crime, so the prosecution had to prove that the accused participated in a joint plan and had knowledge of its criminal objectives. The adoption of such premise in the trial of German criminals also made it possible to consider the very membership of certain organisations as participation in a conspiracy to wage a war of aggression. Such a concept was pushed by the American lawyer Murrey C. Bernays as early as 1944, as he submitted successive memoranda to the American government suggesting the use of the concept of conspiracy (collusion) to try not only individuals, but also organisations such as the Gestapo, SS, or SA. He suggested that a tribunal to try war criminals should link the criminal acts to the doctrine and policies of the Third Reich. Ultimately, the indictments and sentences in trials held even before the Nuremberg trials used the concept of a common plan/design, aiming at aggression or domination of other nations. The British used this concept in the trial of the Bergen-Belsen staff, and in November 1945, in the Almelo trial, a British military court explicitly stated that the ‘responsibility of the members of the group is equal to that of the man who fired the actual shot’.
This concept provoked fierce protests from lawyers outside the common law circle, including the French, who insisted on adherence to the continental principle of individual criminal responsibility. However, it was acknowledged that ‘aggression is by definition a multi-person crime, so the doctrine of conspiracy does not substantially increase the burden on defendants’. The prosecutors in the Nuremberg trials eventually formulated four charges, the first of which concerned participation in the creation and execution of a common plan, i.e. a conspiracy aimed at crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The prosecution team wanted to show that this conspiracy had been formed many years before the outbreak of war, namely its beginning in 1919, when the NSDAP was founded. The indictment emphasised a close connection between the charge of conspiracy and the commission of crimes against peace. Anyone who was to be convicted of participation in a conspiracy or a crime against peace had to be proven to have participated in a specific war of aggression.
The solution finally adopted allowed the leaders of the German Reich to be tried at Nuremberg and was reflected in the Charter of the IMT (Article 6): ‘The Tribunal ... shall have the power to try and punish persons who, acting in the interests of the European Axis countries, whether as individuals or as members of organizations, committed any of the following crimes: (...)planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing’. At the same time, Article 7 emphasised that ‘The official position of defendants, whether as Heads of State or responsible officials in Government Departments, shall not be considered as freeing them from responsibility or mitigating punishment’. Finally, the Nuremberg principles recognised that the preparation of a(n) (war of) aggression was a conspiracy involving participation in preparatory activities leading to aggression or awareness of the existence of a plan of aggression.
Related to the above issue is also the problem of acting on orders, which primarily concerns members of military organisations, but also officers of paramilitary formations. This is a particularly difficult issue, as the security system of states is largely based on the subordination of the security apparatus and the army. It is difficult to imagine that states would tolerate any subjective assessment of an order by a subordinate. This was the line of defence adopted by many lawyers who defended the German perpetrators, especially military ones (including Alfred Jodl, Wilhelm Keitel, or Erich Raeder). The defendants’ invocation of a ‘no-win situation’ would have meant that any, even worst, acts could be justified. Moreover, as the prosecutor Robert H. Jackson emphasised, ‘Hitler’s decisions would have been of no effect unless they had been carried out by Keitel and Jodl and the other men under him’. The Nuremberg law was based on the primacy of international law over the norms of domestic law in this regard. From the point of view of the law, the mere fact of acting on orders did not absolve the accused from liability; more important in the course of the proceedings were ‘mitigating circumstances’. The average executor of an order was most often not in a position to assess whether the order given to him was in accordance with international law or not, and therefore whether he could refuse to obey it. On the other hand, he was certainly convinced that the order was in accordance with German law and therefore legal, because under the Nazi system, as underscored by the defence lawyer at the Nuremberg trial Hermann Jahrreiß: ‘Hitler’s order was already a law before the Second World War (...). The Führer’s order was binding, that is legally binding’. The trials assessed whether the executor was aware of the criminal nature of the order or of the consequences of carrying it out and whether he had a realistic possibility of refusing to carry out the order. While both of these aspects may have been possible mitigating circumstances, they did not release one from responsibility in accordance with Article 8 of the IMT Charter: ‘The fact that the Defendant acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior shall not free him from responsibility, but may be considered in mitigation of punishment if the Tribunal determines that justice so requires’. For the sake of completeness, it is worth adding that paragraph 47 of the 1872 Reich Code, which was in force during the First and Second World Wars, contained a regulation with regard to acting on orders. The provision of interest to us reads: ‘A subordinate who obeys an order shall be liable to punishment if it was known to him that his superior’s order concerned an action whose purpose was a common or military offence’. So the Nuremberg regulations on this issue were largely in line with the German law hitherto in force.
Impact on post-war reconstruction
The Nuremberg trials, but also other trials of German criminals, were not received with much enthusiasm by their fellow countrymen. From a psychological point of view, this should not be surprising. The reluctance to settle accounts with the past meant the unwillingness to admit guilt. The mechanisms of denial were similar to other such cases; above all, the past was not talked about. Blame was shifted to others, leaders who behaved cowardly and committed suicide were accused, leaving the nation at the mercy of the victors. Crimes were explained by following orders, acting in accordance with the German law of the time. It was repeated that the German people had no idea of the crimes.
The attitude of the Germans to the Nazi past, but also to reckoning with it, can be traced quite accurately thanks to opinion polls taken during these years. The Office of Military Government for Germany (U.S.) (OMGUS) set up a special department for surveys in the American occupation zone, later extending their reach to other western zones and sectors of Berlin. Between 1945 and 1949, more than 70 surveys were carried out on large groups of respondents. Replying to the question about the guilt of the defendants tried at Nuremberg, respondents in the American occupation zone answered as follows: in 1945, 70% answered that they were guilty, in 1946, guilt was acknowledged by 75% of the respondents, but in August 1946, only 52% believed that the defendants were guilty. After the verdict was pronounced, 55% of the respondents thought the sentence was fair and 21% thought it was too lenient. When asked in October 1946 about the collective guilt of the Germans for the war (Kriegsschuld), as many as 92% of Germans answered that they were not guilty and 51% were willing to consider that those Germans who supported Hitler’s regime were partly to blame (Teilschuld). As many as 83% of Germans believed that ‘both sides’ fighting in the war had committed crimes against peace and against humanity.
It is fundamentally misguided to consider the Nuremberg trials from an ex-post perspective as a factor in deepening the post-war divisions in Germany by focusing on retaliation rather than reconciliation. Historical experience shows that the absence of a form of response to evil must result in a large-scale undermining of pro-justice convictions. A sense of harm, a failure to punish perpetrators, a fundamental sense of injustice can cause concrete losses and deficits both politically and socially. The sense of injustice gives rise to the desire for revenge (e.g. the conflict in Rwanda in the 1990s, or today’s post-colonial movements). In the short term, the processes may have deepened internal divisions in Germany and internationally. The focus on punishing the guilty without creating space for dialogue made some Germans feel that they were victims of the victors rather than partners in the construction of the post-war order. However, the long-term effects were unequivocally positive. The process helped solidify universal principles of accountability for war crimes and became the foundation for modern international law. It also contributed to the democratisation of West Germany and its integration into the West.
The years following the Second World War were an example of the implementation of so-called transitional justice in the Western occupation zones. The ultimate goal of such a process is a reform of institutions, social reconciliation and the prevention of future human rights violations. However, the path to this goal first leads through the use of legal mechanisms (courts, tribunals, commissions for crime prosecution) to hold perpetrators accountable and redress the wrongs of the victims. The legacy of Nuremberg continues to influence contemporary discussions about how to reconcile justice with the need to ‘heal the wounds of conflict’.
Summary
To put it in the language of political realism - the Nuremberg trials were a tool adequate for its time. The IMT was hostage to the political situation, but there was no other alternative at the time.
A breakthrough achievement was the introduction of the principle that individuals, not states, could be held responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity. This marked a major change in international criminal law.
Although today no-one questions the Nuremberg principles and, moreover, we are able to appreciate the achievements of the IMT with the benefit of hindsight and, unfortunately, subsequent crimes perpetrated elsewhere (Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Russia), it is worth remembering the enormous controversy that surrounded the very idea of an ‘international court’. Discussions among lawyers, which took place even before the decision to set up the Nuremberg Tribunal, could have led to a stalemate in which international justice would have judged only the direct executors of the crimes, but would have been powerless against the decision-makers who gave the orders that resulted in genocide. The very fact of the establishment of the IMT ended speculation on this aspect, and although doubts and controversy have remained, the decision itself regarding the establishment of the IMT is not challenged now.
NOTES
1 When writing about the anarchic international system what I have in mind is Hobbes’ perception of the international system as a world ‘without Leviathan’, that is with no supreme power over sovereign nation states.
2 A British lawyer of Polish-Jewish origin residing in England since 1923. He played a major part in forming a catalogue of crimes judged by the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. He co-created the term ‘crime against humanity’.
3 This view was presented in the closing statement of the British prosecutor in Nuremberg Hartley Shawcross, whose speeches were written by Lauterpacht; Quoted after: A. Bryl, Zbrodnie przeciwko ludzkości…, op. cit., pp. 50–61, here: 56–57.
4 An ad hoc tribunal, i.e. one set up temporarily to try and punish a specific crime and specific persons.
5 The term ‘total mobilisation’ was formulated by Ernst Jünger in his 1930 essay Die totale Mobilmachung.He notes that conflict has ceased to be a domain of professional armies and elites, to become a confrontation between entire societies, involving each social stratum and each aspect of life.
6 The biggest of them were trials of the staff of KL Bergen- Belsen (17 October–17 November 1945), KL Dachau (15 November–13 December 1945) and KL Mauthausen-Gusen (29 March–13 May 1946).