The Nuremberg Palace of Justice, like much of the rest of the ancient city, had been heavily bombed. Much reconstruction needed doing before any sort of trial could be held. And, besides general refurbishment, the chosen courtroom had to be greatly enlarged. It had to hold not only an elevated bench to accommodate eight judges but also the 21-defendant dock, plus room for a small army of counsel for both sides (some 50 lawyers appeared for the prosecution alone). Room also had to be found for a good-sized interpreters’ booth, a lectern from which the lawyers could question and argue, a witness box, a press gallery, and an area for spectators.

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And so a wall was knocked out to expand the courtroom. The new courtroom got the requisite furniture and a fresh coat of paint. Left standing at the courtroom entrance were three large bronze panels mounted on marble pillars. In the center, Eve offered Adam an apple, emblematic of human temptation to do the forbidden. Eden was flanked by a figure with a sword–that was justice–and the Roman fasces, the bundle of rods and axes that symbolized the authority of the state.

The courtroom also received a sophisticated sound system. All testimony, arguments of counsel and rulings by the court were to be transmitted into the interpreters’ booth and simultaneously translated into the three languages not then being spoken. All participants in the trial, including each accused and counsel, were provided with headsets and a system of switches, by which they could choose to listen to the proceedings in any of the four languages. The sound system extended to the press gallery and the spectators’ seats as well. There was even a system of lights, installed to warn speakers when they were talking too fast.

Once facilities were available, the accused were moved into the neighboring prison–most of them had thus far been confined in Luxembourg. They were held in individual cells, and some care was exercised to thwart attempts at suicide.

Even so, Ley had managed to unravel a GI towel and hang himself. After that, precautions against suicide were increased, although the spectacle of the erstwhile Nazi Party bigwig dangling from a toilet pipe in a dingy cell seemed at least as appropriate as a formal execution. After Ley’s death, each defendant was constantly watched by a guard, day and night.

The prosecution glittered with a whole galaxy of illustrious lawyers. Counsel for the United States was led by tough, able Robert H. Jackson, justice of the United States Supreme Court. For Britain, Attorney General Sir Hartley Shawcross led, although the lion’s share of the actual trial was carried by brilliant, urbane Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, himself once attorney general under Sir Winston Churchill.

Well before the trials began, the prosecutors had to decide whether to rely primarily on documentary evidence or on live witnesses. The decision was taken to depend on documents, a resolution that turned out to be quite correct. Aside from the stupendous logistical task of rounding up the right witnesses in the wilderness of postwar Europe, there was another, more important consideration. Nobody could later accuse a piece of paper of having a poor memory, of perjury, or of biased testimony. However, the decision to rely primarily on paper evidence required the sifting of thousands upon thousands of documents, a colossal job of evaluation and cross-referencing that required months of work by hundreds of people.

The Nuremberg Trial proceeded on a formal indictment, couched in four counts. First, the defendants were accused of participating in a "Nazi master plan," a massive conspiracy to gain "totalitarian control of Germany," to rearm, to conquer others, and in the process to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The second count simply alleged that the defendants did the things they were alleged to have planned under count one.

Count three charged violations of the customs and laws of warfare, including killing civilians, taking hostages, and maltreating prisoners of war.

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