They didn’t look like much. With a couple of exceptions, they were just a gaggle of wan, morose, rumpled men, mostly middle-aged or elderly. Some paid close attention to what went on around them. Some seemed not to care. Taken as a group they were unimpressive, the kind of people one could pass on the street and never notice.

But once they had come extremely close to ruling the world.

The trial had begun on November 20, 1945, 50 years ago this month. Twenty-one tired-looking men sat in two rows in a Nuremberg courtroom, on trial for their lives. They were what remained of the top leadership of the Thousand-Year Reich, and just short months before, they had cast very long shadows indeed. Now those days were just a bitter memory, already fading in the hunger and depression of postwar occupied Germany.

The ground rules for the war crimes prosecutions were straightforward in theory, although they were sometimes a little hard to administer in practice. Traitors would be dealt with by their own nations. The British, for example, duly tried the odious William Joyce, better known as Lord Haw-Haw, for his propaganda broadcasts from Nazi Germany. Too late, American-born Joyce tried to repudiate his claim to British citizenship. His apostasy did not save him from the gallows.

Small fry–the ordinary killers and such–would be tried by courts-martial. And those Germans who had committed crimes centered in the countries that Germany had occupied during the conflict would be dealt with in those countries. Thus Karl-Hermann Frank, the repulsive Reichsprotektor of the Czech Protectorate, was tried and publicly executed in Prague in 1946, as some 5,000 approving Czechs looked on.

A number of trials also took place in the Far East. Many Japanese, both civilian and military, were tried for wartime atrocities. Twenty-eight of the top leaders were tried by the International Military Tribunal, with 11 nations represented among the judges. The trial lasted two years, and all the defendants were convicted.

In Europe, most of the minor trials were held within the zones of occupation by the respective occupiers. American courts tried the concentration-camp staff at Dachau; the British dealt with the brutal Belsen guards; other Germans were tried in Denmark, Belgium, Russia, or wherever their crimes were alleged to have taken place.

For the rest, many of the more important European trials were held in Berlin. The ones that drew the most attention, however, took place in Nuremberg. There were 12 of them altogether, all involving important figures in World War II Germany.

The International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg would deal with ‘major defendants, in the words of Robert Jackson, America’s chief prosecutor. Less clearly, the Tribunal would also address the criminal character of certain organizations, including the Sicherheistdienst (State Security Service), the SS, and the Gestapo. And here the character of the trials diverged from the ordinary course of criminal justice. Findings in the main trial, said Jackson, that an organization is criminal in nature will be conclusive in any subsequent proceedings against individual members….

This was an uncomfortable concept, this idea of guilt by membership. And, as it turned out, the theory was largely unnecessary to the prosecutions; the accused German leaders had done enough ugly things that party membership was not necessary to convict them of serious crimes. The offenses charged against the defendants fell generally into three categories. First, there were war crimes, a fairly well-defined class of offenses long recognized by most soldiers, which included maltreatment of POWs (prisoners of war), murdering wounded men, and similar offenses.

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.

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.

One other famous figure was not present, though he was still on trial in absentia. Martin Bormann, the crass, crude, calculating chief of the Nazi Party Chancellery. In the last days of the war, Bormann had disappeared in the shell-torn horror of wrecked Berlin. He was dead, some men said, but others were not so sure. Without positive proof of his death, he remained a defendant, the Brown Eminence still, a shadow at the back of the prisoners’ dock.

But most of the other old familiar names were there. There was Rudolph Hess, the demented longtime deputy party leader, who had flown to Scotland in May 1941 on a half-baked peace mission. Much to his surprise and anger, he had languished in a British prison ever since.

Next to Hess sat Der Dicke (The Fat One), Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, chief of the Luftwaffe and once Hitler’s heir apparent. A legitimate ace fighter pilot in World War I, Göring had gone on to sybaritic luxury, almost unbounded power, and a host of Wagnerian illusions. Now he was simply a somewhat deflated fat man in a plain, baggy uniform.

In the back row sat Albert Speer, architect and engineer. Speer was a remarkable man, always something of a loner in Nazi Party circles, creator of the phenomenal surge in German war production even under the shower of Allied bombs. Highly intelligent, basically decent, in the last days of the war Speer saved Germany’s future at the risk of his own life. He had countermanded Hitler’s Götterdämmerung order to burn and destroy all that remained of German resources. Nevertheless, Speer had used slave laborers by the millions to supply Germany’s war machine. For that he would be tried as a major war criminal.

Sitting together at the other end of the back row were the senior officers of the vanquished German navy. A dedicated Nazi, Grossadmiral Erich Raeder had commanded the Kriegsmarine until January 1943, when he resigned in protest of a decree by Hitler to scrap the surface fleet. As the author of unrestricted submarine warfare, Raeder faced charges of war crimes. Raeder’s companion, Admiral Karl Dönitz, had succeeded Raeder as chief of the German navy. Also a convinced party member, Dönitz was appointed Hitler’s successor in the Führer’s will. As Germany fell apart around him, he spent his few days in office trying to negotiate a peace, largely with the Western Allies alone. Dönitz was the U-boat master, the single commander who came closest to winning the war for Germany; his boats sank some 15 million tons of Allied shipping. Had Hitler listened to his urgings to build up the U-boat fleet at all costs, who knows how the war might have ended?

Joachim von Ribbentrop was there, too, the ex-champagne salesman who had risen to be Hitler’s closest adviser on foreign policy and foreign minister of Germany. Unctuous and fawning to Hitler, he was obsessed with power and social standing. He had no claim to nobility, but fraudulently added the aristocratic von to his name. Propaganda Minister Paul Josef Goebbels, who had a way with words, summed up Ribbentrop pretty well: He bought his name, he married his money, and he swindled his way into office.

Next to Ribbentrop in the front row sat one of the two professional soldiers on trial. Feldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel, then 64, had risen to be chief of the armed forces under Hitler. A servile flatterer, he once called Hitler the greatest commander of all times. His fawning attitude to Hitler earned him the contemptuous nickname of Lakeitel (lackey) throughout the German army. One story says that stenographers at the Führer’s conferences never bothered to record Keitel’s first remarks. They were always the same as Hitler’s last ones.

Keitel abetted the systematic murders carried out by the SS in the East, and he promulgated the infamous Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog) decrees, allowing seizure without warrant or trial of people endangering German security.

In the row behind Keitel sat General Alfred Jodl, chief of the Wehrmacht operations staff, which directed the entire war outside of Russia. Jodl had condoned a number of illegal acts, including the shooting of hostages.

Julius Streicher was a particularly nasty piece of work. One of the very early Nazis, Streicher’s major contribution to the party had been a series of rabble-rousing speeches and his crass, semipornographic tabloid, Der Stürmer (The Stormer). Streicher’s paper dripped with hatred for anything Jewish and invented whatever news it needed to condemn Jews as the authors of every ill Germany was heir to. A sadist, he rose to become Gauleiter (district leader) of Franconia, although his influence declined somewhat as the war went on.

Even fouler than Streicher was huge, brutal Ernst Kaltenbrunner, onetime Austrian lawyer and police official. A boyhood friend of Adolf Eichmann, Kaltenbrunner became commander of the Austrian SS, and after the Anschluss (the German annexation of Austria) became Austrian minister for state security. In 1943 he replaced the vile Reinhard Heydrich as chief of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), the state security office. He thus became not only Gestapo chief but also boss of the death camp system and executor of the final solution, the extermination of the Jews. An alcoholic egotist, Kaltenbrunner personally researched the efficacy of the various means of execution used in his camps. He drove RSHA’s goons to hunt down more Jews and was responsible for the murder of Allied parachutists.

Equally repulsive in his own way was Walther Funk. Once a journalist of sorts, he became able chief of the office for economic policy for the party. Funk, an oily, undersized man, was a well-known homosexual and alcoholic, but for a while served as the spokesman for German big business. He became president of the Reichsbank in 1939, and as such presided over the huge secret SS accounts, stuffed with phenomenal amounts of money and other valuables stolen from murdered Jews.

Alfred Rosenberg, the philosopher of National Socialism, dealt in the mystic nonsense that passed for Nazi doctrine. He preached, for example, that international Jewry was responsible for the Russian Revolution and that Freemasons had somehow fomented World War I. His writing, as convoluted and distorted as his speech, included such racist claptrap as The Track of the Jew Through Time and Immorality in the Talmud.

Obsessed with dark, international conspiracies, Rosenberg harped endlessly on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the plan of an international Zionist conspiracy, a spurious document in fact invented by the czarist secret police. Rosenberg also edited the Nazi Party paper, and in 1930 published The Myth of the Twentieth Century, a garbled smorgasbord of Nazi racial and anti-Christian theory that Goebbels condescendingly referred to as philosophical belching. Baldur von Schirach, Reich youth leader, said that Rosenberg sold more copies of a book no one ever read than any other author (maybe excepting Hitler’s turgid Mein Kampf).

Schirach himself sat in the dock just a few seats from Rosenberg. Schirach was a genuine aristocrat, and his American mother had passed on to him the blood of two signers of the Declaration of Independence. Anti-Semitic, anti-Christian and oddly anti-aristocrat, Schirach joined the party in 1924 and for many years was the highly effective organizer and leader of the Hitler Youth, a compulsory military-style organization for German youth between the ages of 10 and 18. Later relieved of his job due to Bormann’s intrigues, he became Gauleiter of Vienna. He participated in the deportation of almost 200,000 Austrian Jews to the East, although he tried to persuade Hitler to moderate his treatment of Eastern Europe generally and the Jews in particular.

Near Schirach sat Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Austrian Nazi and enthusiastic supporter of the 1938 Anschluss. He was rewarded for his treason with the governorship of Austria, which he held until the spring of 1939. As governor of the Netherlands during the war, he deported Dutch Jews to the camps and shipped some 5 million Netherlanders to Germany for forced labor.

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