Friday, November 20, was the 70^th anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials-the trials that brought Nazi war criminals to justice for their participation in the systematized killing of six million Jews and between four and six million non-Jews during World War Two. The Nuremberg trials are remembered not only for the prosecution of top Nazi officials, lawyers, doctors and guards, but also because it was the first international trial for war crimes, bringing together France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States to create a unique court-of-law . The procedures for the trial were created through the London Charter of the International Military Tribunal, which was put into effect on August 8, 1945. The trials are broken up into two sets, with the first set of trials being known as the Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal. There were three categories of crime- crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The Final Solution was decided on in the January of 1942 at the Wannsee Conference, and with its implementation, the Nazis deported European Jews to six extermination camps whose names to this very day symbolize the very worst of what humanity is capable of. These six concentration camps (although there were thousands of sub-camps) were Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Sobibor, Belzec, Treblinka and Chelmno.

It wasn’t until December of 1942, that the United States, Great Britain and the Soviet Union “issued the first joint declaration officially noting the mass murder of European Jewry and resolving to prosecute those responsible for violence against civilian populations.”

Fuhrer of the Third Reich Adolf Hitler, architect of the Holocaust Heinrich Himmler and Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, arguably the three most notorious Nazi officials, all killed themselves before being able to be put on trial. The highest-ranking official prosecuted at the Nuremberg Trials was Hermann Goering, head of the Luftwaffe (air force) ,and founder of the Gestapo. Goering killed himself by poison before his sentence of hanging was carried out.

The Trial of Major War Criminals ended on October 1, 1946, with twenty-four individuals being indicted along with six organizations, including the High Command of the German Army, the SS and the SA, being deemed criminal. Numerous other trials followed, with examples being the Doctors’ Trial, in which all of the accused were being prosecuted for experimenting on patients, and the Einsatzgruppen Trial, in which soldiers that were part of mobile death squads were sentenced. The trials officially ended on April 13, 1949.