Also absent was Robert Ley, who headed the German Labor Front from 1933 to the end of the war. Another crude, uncouth anti-Semite, Ley controlled an enormous budget and was virtual czar of all German workers. He controlled wages and hours and such profitable swindles as the Volkswagen fraud, in which thousands of workers paid for a car in installments and nobody ever saw either a car or a refund of his hard-earned marks. Unwilling to face trial at Nuremberg, Ley had hanged himself in his cell on October 24, 1945.

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One of the minor miracles of Nuremberg–and the other prosecutions–was that they happened at all. In an understandable fury at the enormous crimes perpetrated in Nazi Germany, many people wished for vengeance, pure and simple, administered summarily and quickly.

To the everlasting credit of the Allies, the trials were to be run fairly and formally, each person judged according to the evidence, and punished–or not–according to individual guilt. Lord Simon, speaking in the British House of Lords in 1943, put it as well as anybody could: "From…the British point of view, we must never fail, however deeply we are tried, and however fundamentally we are moved by the sufferings of others, to do justice according to justice…whatever happens…war criminals shall be dealt with because they are proved to be criminals, and not because they belong to a race led by a maniac…who has brought this frightful evil upon the world."

The trial itself was unique. It had no parallel in legal history. Retribution after war was certainly nothing new, but the Nuremberg prosecutions were unprecedented in every way. For one thing, they were to be good-faith proceedings, dedicated to convicting nobody, save on substantial evidence of guilt.

The Soviets were not happy with all the protections afforded the accused. The accused, they said, were already guilty, and needed only to be sentenced, a sort of "they’re-guilty-because-we-say-they-are" approach. The Western Allies, of course, would have none of the Soviet view, even though the Soviets were by no means alone.

Many people across the civilized world expressed their willingness to deal summarily with all "war criminals." Even The Nation, long the flagship of the American liberal press, proclaimed: "In our opinion…the proper procedure would have been to…read off their crimes with as much supporting data as seemed useful, pass judgment upon them quickly, and carry out the judgment without any delay whatever."

The accused would have the protection of an expert, unbiased judicial panel, one judge from each of the four major Allies (though it is and was a little hard to say "unbiased" and "Soviet" in the same breath). The International Military Tribunal would decide procedural matters by majority vote, with the president’s vote deciding ties. Conviction or sentence of any accused required three votes out of four. Each nation also appointed an alternate judge, present and sitting when that nation’s primary judge was absent for any reason. All four nations had to be represented before the Tribunal could do any business.

Most important of all, perhaps, the defendants were protected by defense counsel, able German lawyers whose sole obligation was to fight as hard as they could for their clients.

Just working out the procedure of the trials proved to be a complicated undertaking. To start with, some way had to be found to operate efficiently in four languages and have everybody in the courtroom fully understand what went on. And some common procedure had to be arrived at, some melding of the Anglo-American common-law tradition and the basically Roman law practiced in Europe. Even between the practitioners of Roman law–the Germans, the French and the Soviets–there were substantial differences.

There were other problems. Even the place of trial had to be settled. While the Western Allies agreed that Nuremberg was the logical venue, the Russians grumbled and held out for Berlin. Once that hurdle was cleared, there remained the substantial problem of facilities.

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