July 23rd

On July 23rd, 1942, the concentration camp Treblinka began operations. It operated until October 1943 and slaughtered 850,000 people, largely Jews and some Romani.

International law has traditionally had difficulty with massacres of populations within a country's boundaries. International law, for the most part, does not interfere with the workings inside a country, until WWII it was primarily about relationships between governments. International law is unusual in that it requires the consent of the governments it affects, so it can be difficult to get agreement on something a government may want to do itself later.

Additionally, the word genocide did not exist until 1944. It is hard to prosecute something you don't even have a good definition for.

The Nuremberg Trials was the first large-scale attempt to prosecute for genocide. The Nuremberg Trials was actually more than one series of hearings; there was a set dedicated to doctors such as Mengele, another for judges of the Nazi regime. But the first was for the generals and leaders of the movement.

The Nuremberg Trials were important for many reasons, but few tribunals have had to create law after the crimes occurred. In fact, the prosecution worked very hard to try to apply existing law to the charges against the war criminals. This meant that the largely feel-good treaty the Kellogg-Briand pact was presented as being binding. The law of conspiracy was brought in as well, as war crimes were traditionally committed on the battlefield, not at headquarters.

Still, the Allied forces went to great lengths to try to make the trials legitimate, giving the defense translated documents, access to lawyers, and time to prepare. Normally the victor would try the crimes, according to their own laws. In the case of Germany, the country was now being occupied by four separate nations. The Nuremberg Tribunals tried to accommodate the several nations involved by using its own rules of procedure. These rules of procedure were based on common law, not a civil law system like the Germans were used to.

The French and the Soviets called victims of the camps as witnesses; neither the US nor the British had. It was the eyewitness accounts of camps such as Treblinka that made genocide real to the general public. Without the painstaking research for the trials, it is unlikely historians today would have nearly as much information about the actual experiences of Nazi concentration camps.

Quite possibly the greatest legacy of the Nuremberg trials was the development of international law, and creating tools to deal with massacres. The formation of the United Nations was heavily impacted by the Nazi trials. The Rwanda tribunals today owe a great debt to the failures and successes of the Nuremberg Tribunals.