The second category comprised "offenses against humanity"– various atrocities, contrary to generally accepted notions of criminal law, that had been committed on racial grounds since the Nazi rise to power in 1933. Such offenses had been recognized as criminal at least since the Hague Convention of 1907.

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Last, and least clearly drawn, were "crimes against peace," the making of aggressive war. Although most laypeople would agree that war is by nature aggressive, a line was drawn between defensive war (permitted) and offensive war (punishable). Early on, in the charter that established the system, "obedience to orders" was banned as a defense. It might be raised in mitigation of a sentence, but it would not support an acquittal.

The Nuremberg defendants were divided into groups, mostly according to their wartime activities and positions. There were, for example, the "medical" trials, a prosecution of doctors and other medical officials for the hideous experiments that maimed and murdered countless concentration-camp inmates and POWs.

Those defendants were the white-coated killers who had injected helpless people with urine and gasoline and typhus, who had ruptured prisoners’ lungs in high-altitude experiments, who had sterilized men with massive, burning doses of X-rays. Twenty-three defendants were tried in that single proceeding. Seven were acquitted; seven were sentenced to death; nine others went to prison, some of them for life.

All 12 trials were convened under an Allied mandate called Law No. 10, promulgated pursuant to the 1945 London Charter on the prosecution of war criminals. The dozen trials involved some 185 defendants split into five general categories, each category tried in two or three separate trials.

Twenty-two government ministers faced justice, along with 56 members of the police and SS. Twenty-six military officers, 39 lawyers and doctors (including those in the medical trial), and 42 financiers and industrialists completed the list. Four of the accused committed suicide; four more were excused from prosecution because of age or illness. Of the 177 actually tried, 35 were acquitted. Twenty-four of the rest were sentenced to death. Twenty more received life sentences; 98 were sentenced to prison for a term of years.

But the famous trial was the prosecution before the International Military Tribunal, the litigation most people recognized simply as "the Nuremberg Trial." That trial was special, the proceeding against the major figures of Hitlerian Germany, the big names who in the public eye represented all the brutality and aggression, the murderous racial theories and the countless killings.

And it was fitting that those men were tried in Nuremberg. Gutted by Allied bombs, a moonscape of ruins, legendary, medieval Nuremberg had once been the Valhalla of National Socialism. This lovely old city had seen the biggest of the party rallies: the serried ranks of the Nazi faithful, the bands crashing out the "Horst Wessel Lied," the massed swastika flags, the booming chant of "Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!" when the Führer finished one of his electrifying speeches.

Now, in this first dreary, full year of peace, the men who had led Germany down her tragic road were going to pay the bills. Ghosts of a myriad of innocents long dead were rising again. Their cold presence was in the very courtroom, somehow all the more terrifying as they lingered in the shadows behind the matter-of-fact arguments by a series of international prosecutors.

Hitler was not in the dock, of course, the arch criminal himself. The Führer had sent old men and boys to die, firing Panzerfausts at Soviet tanks in the ruins of Berlin, but he had saved the easy road for himself: a single pistol shot. Heinrich Himmler, the petit bourgeois snob, had gone the same way. Captured by the British in Lüneburg, Himmler had crushed a vial of poison between his teeth and departed for whatever special hell is reserved for those who murder helpless people by the millions.

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