The Allies nearly skipped the trial completely. Early in 1945, Churchill and Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau favored summary execution of the top Nazis. Secretary of War Henry Stimson argued that a court would do what a firing squad could not: build a record. President Truman appointed Robert Jackson, a sitting Supreme Court justice, as chief prosecutor. The London Charter of August 1945 set out the charges: crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and conspiracy to commit them. Nuremberg was chosen because its Palace of Justice still stood and had a prison attached.

The trial opened on November 20, 1945. Twenty-two men were tried, one of them in absentia. Jackson made a deliberate choice about evidence. He would not rest the case on survivor testimony alone, which a defense could call biased. He built it on the regime’s own paperwork: orders, minutes, transit records, and signed memoranda. The Germans had documented their crimes with bureaucratic pride, and the court read those documents back to them.

The judges from the United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union delivered the verdict on October 1, 1946, sentencing twelve leaders to death and giving seven others prison terms. Three defendants were acquitted. Hermann Göring killed himself with smuggled cyanide hours before the hangings. The Charter had closed off the defense every defendant reached for. Acting on orders could reduce a sentence. It could not erase guilt. That principle was later written into the Nuremberg Principles adopted by the UN International Law Commission.

Nuremberg was also the start of a longer process, not the end of one. Twelve further trials run by the United States followed, reaching doctors, judges, industrialists, and camp and Einsatzgruppen personnel. The Doctors’ Trial produced the Nuremberg Code on informed consent. The 1948 Genocide Convention and the 1949 Geneva Conventions came out of the same postwar moment.

The criticisms made sense. The Charter defined crimes after the conduct occurred. A Soviet judge sat in judgment after the Soviet Union had carved up Poland alongside Germany and murdered Polish officers at Katyn, a massacre Soviet prosecutors tried to pin on the defendants. Allied bombing of cities was never examined. Admiral Dönitz was convicted on submarine warfare charges even though the American Pacific commander had used the same tactics, and the court declined to hold that against him. Those flaws are documented. The defense of the tribunal is that its method, prosecution by the defendants’ own records, produced a verdict the defendants could not plausibly call fabricated.

The durable core of Nuremberg is narrow. A person answers for what he does. An office is not immunity. An order is not an alibi when a moral choice was possible. The record since 1946 shows that principle enforced unevenly.

Germany is the strongest case for it working. The Frankfurt Auschwitz trials of the 1960s, pushed by prosecutor Fritz Bauer against a reluctant public, forced ordinary Germans to see camp staff as individuals rather than as an abstraction. Argentina tried its junta in 1985. The Yugoslavia and Rwanda tribunals followed, then the International Criminal Court in 2002. The weak case is the powerful defendant. Russia is not a party to the ICC and rejects its jurisdiction, and the court’s 2023 warrant for Putin has no enforcement behind it. The defense Nuremberg rejected, that the order came from above, is still the first one offered.

The American record is the uncomfortable one. The United States built Nuremberg and then declined to be bound by what grew from it. It signed the Rome Statute in 2000, withdrew its signature in 2002, and passed a law authorizing force to free American personnel held by the court. After the war, American military tribunals convicted Japanese interrogators for waterboarding. After 2001, the CIA used it, legal memos supplied the cover, and no one was tried. The current administration has gone further and launched an all-out campaign against the ICC, with Trump calling it a “rogue institution” at the UN. The ICC’s pursuit of Israeli leaders over Gaza is the stated trigger, and that case is contested. The United States and Israel say the court has no jurisdiction over non-members and can be politicized. That objection is serious. The answer is that Nuremberg’s authority never rested on consent. The victors claimed these rules bound everyone, including themselves.

The domestic parallel is shaky. The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the administration may keep deporting immigrants to third countries they have no ties to. Legality is not the point, because the Nazi regime’s acts were lawful under its own statutes, and Nuremberg held that this answered nothing. A court ruling settles what the state may do. It does not settle whether the agent carrying it out can disclaim responsibility for the method.

Let’s be careful here and not ignore that no serious reading puts American immigration enforcement next to the Holocaust. The Nuremberg Principles reach war crimes and crimes against humanity, not ordinary deportation. What is disturbingly identical though is the habit of obedience: the officer, the contractor, and the official who says the order came from above.

The shootings cannot be left out of this account. On January 7, ICE officer Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old Minneapolis woman, in her SUV. Federal officials said he acted in self-defense and that she drove toward him. Ross had been dragged by a vehicle in a separate 2025 incident, and his claim deserves a full hearing. A hearing is what has not happened. The FBI barred Minnesota investigators from the case. The Vice President declared that Ross has absolute immunity. The county medical examiner ruled the death a homicide, a finding about the manner of death, not about guilt. As of the most recent public reporting, no charge has been filed. Alex Pretti was killed by federal immigration agents in the same city within weeks. This month in Austin, an ICE agent shot a Venezuelan asylum seeker as he made deliveries, and the administration answered by charging the man who was shot.

The pattern reaches children. Last October in Hoffman Estates, outside Chicago, video showed federal agents pulling a teenage girl from a car and throwing her to the ground, where an officer appeared to put a knee on her back as she said she was not resisting. Her parents say the family told the agents they were citizens. DHS said it was not involved and that the video showed a year-old Chicago police arrest of another teenager. Chicago police said that arrest happened at a different location, and local police confirmed ICE agents were in the village that day.

The Nuremberg connection here is structural, not criminal. These are killings under domestic law, and no international court has a role in them. The lesson concerns who gets to judge. The Supreme Court has held that federal officers are not immune from state prosecution merely because they are federal officers. The protection applies when an officer acts reasonably within his lawful duties, and a court decides whether that is true. That is a fair test. It fails when the agency that employed the shooter holds the evidence and a senior official announces the verdict in advance. A doctrine built to protect the officer who acted reasonably cannot be stretched to protect the officer no one will examine.

Nuremberg did not teach that obedience is a crime. It taught that obedience is not an alibi.

A country that wrote that rule, then exempted itself from its enforcement, keeps the trials as a monument and ignores the law they made.Tyranny resistanceBlack Eye for DemocracyEfficiency