Nuremberg trials


The Nuremberg trials were a series of military tribunals held after World War II by the Allied forces under international law and the laws of war. The trials were most notable for the prosecution of prominent members of the political, military, judicial, and economic leadership of Nazi Germany, who planned, carried out, or otherwise participated in the Holocaust and other war crimes. The trials were held in Nuremberg, Germany, and their decisions marked a turning point between classical and contemporary international law.
The first and best known of the trials was that of the major war criminals before the International Military Tribunal. It was described as "the greatest trial in history" by Sir Norman Birkett, one of the British judges present throughout. Held between 20 November 1945 and 1 October 1946, the Tribunal was given the task of trying 24 of the most important political and military leaders of the Third Reich. Primarily treated here is the first trial, conducted by the International Military Tribunal. Further trials of lesser war criminals were conducted under Control Council Law No. 10 at the U.S. Nuremberg Military Tribunal, which included the Doctors' trial and the Judges' Trial.
The categorization of the crimes and the constitution of the court represented a juridical advance that would be followed afterward by the United Nations for the development of an international jurisprudence in matters of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and wars of aggression, and led to the creation of the International Criminal Court. For the first time in international law, the Nuremberg indictments also mention genocide

Origin

A precedent for trying those accused of war crimes had been set at the end of World War I in the Leipzig War Crimes Trials held in May to July 1921 before the Reichsgericht in Leipzig, although these had been on a very limited scale and largely regarded as ineffectual. At the beginning of 1940, the Polish government-in-exile asked the British and French governments to condemn the German invasion of their country. The British initially declined to do so; however, in April 1940, a joint declaration was issued by the British, French and Polish. Relatively bland because of Anglo-French reservations, it proclaimed the trio's "desire to make a formal and public protest to the conscience of the world against the action of the German government whom they must hold responsible for these crimes which cannot remain unpunished."
Three-and-a-half years later, the stated intention to punish the Germans was much more trenchant. On 1 November 1943, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States published their "Declaration on German Atrocities in Occupied Europe", which gave a "full warning" that, when the Nazis were defeated, the Allies would "pursue them to the uttermost ends of the earth ... in order that justice may be done. ... The above declaration is without prejudice to the case of the major war criminals whose offences have no particular geographical location and who will be punished by a joint decision of the Government of the Allies." This intention by the Allies to dispense justice was reiterated at the Yalta Conference and at Potsdam in 1945.
British War Cabinet documents, released on 2 January 2006, showed that as early as December 1944 the Cabinet had discussed their policy for the punishment of the leading Nazis if captured. The British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, had then advocated a policy of summary execution in some circumstances, with the use of an Act of Attainder to circumvent legal obstacles, being dissuaded from this only by talks with US and Soviet leaders later in the war.
, considered to be the most important surviving official in Nazi Germany.
In late 1943, during the Tripartite Dinner Meeting at the Tehran Conference, the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin, proposed executing 50,000–100,000 German staff officers. US President Franklin D. Roosevelt joked that perhaps 49,000 would do. Churchill, believing them to be serious, denounced the idea of "the cold blooded execution of soldiers who fought for their country" and that he would rather be "taken out in the courtyard and shot" himself than partake in any such action. However, he also stated that war criminals must pay for their crimes and that, in accordance with the Moscow Document which he himself had written, they should be tried at the places where the crimes were committed. Churchill was vigorously opposed to executions "for political purposes." According to the minutes of a meeting between Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta, on 4 February 1945, at the Livadia Palace, President Roosevelt "said that he had been very much struck by the extent of German destruction in Crimea and therefore he was more bloodthirsty in regard to the Germans than he had been a year ago, and he hoped that Marshal Stalin would again propose a toast to the execution of 50,000 officers of the German Army."
Henry Morgenthau Jr., US Secretary of the Treasury, suggested a plan for the total denazification of Germany; this was known as the Morgenthau Plan. The plan advocated the forced de-industrialisation of Germany and the summary execution of so-called "arch-criminals", i.e. the major war criminals. Roosevelt initially supported this plan, and managed to convince Churchill to support it in a less drastic form. Later, details were leaked in the US generating widespread condemnation by the nation's newspapers and propaganda was published about the plan in Germany. Roosevelt, aware of strong public disapproval, abandoned the plan, but did not adopt an alternative position on the matter. The demise of the Morgenthau Plan created the need for an alternative method of dealing with the Nazi leadership. The plan for the "Trial of European War Criminals" was drafted by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and the War Department. Following Roosevelt's death in April 1945, the new president, Harry S. Truman, gave strong approval for a judicial process. After a series of negotiations between Britain, the US, Soviet Union, and France, details of the trial were worked out. The trials were to commence on 20 November 1945, in the Bavarian city of Nuremberg.

Creation of the courts

On 20 April 1942, representatives from the nine countries occupied by Germany met in London to draft the "Inter-Allied Resolution on German War Crimes". At the meetings in Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam, the three major wartime powers, the United Kingdom, United States, and the Soviet Union, agreed on the format of punishment for those responsible for war crimes during World War II. France was also awarded a place on the tribunal. The legal basis for the trial was established by the London Charter, which was agreed upon by the four so-called Great Powers on 8 August 1945, and which restricted the trial to "punishment of the major war criminals of the European Axis countries."
Some 200 German war crimes defendants were tried at Nuremberg, and 1,600 others were tried under the traditional channels of military justice. The legal basis for the jurisdiction of the court was that defined by the Instrument of Surrender of Germany. Political authority for Germany had been transferred to the Allied Control Council which, having sovereign power over Germany, could choose to punish violations of international law and the laws of war. Because the court was limited to violations of the laws of war, it did not have jurisdiction over crimes that took place before the outbreak of war on 1 September 1939.

Location

and Luxembourg were briefly considered as the location for the trial. The Soviet Union had wanted the trials to take place in Berlin, as the capital city of the 'fascist conspirators', but Nuremberg was chosen as the site for two reasons, with the first one having been the decisive factor:
  1. The Palace of Justice was spacious and largely undamaged, and a large prison was also part of the complex.
  2. Nuremberg was considered the ceremonial birthplace of the Nazi Party. It had hosted the Party's annual propaganda rallies and the Reichstag session that passed the Nuremberg Laws. Thus it was considered a fitting place to mark the Party's symbolic demise.
As a compromise with the Soviets, it was agreed that while the location of the trial would be Nuremberg, Berlin would be the official home of the Tribunal authorities. It was also agreed that France would become the permanent seat of the IMT and that the first trial would take place in Nuremberg.
Most of the accused had previously been detained at Camp Ashcan, a processing station and interrogation center in Luxembourg, and were moved to Nuremberg for the trial.

Participants

Each of the four countries provided one judge and an alternative, as well as a prosecutor.

Judges

Assisting Jackson were the lawyers Telford Taylor, William S. Kaplan and Thomas J. Dodd, and Richard Sonnenfeldt, a US Army interpreter. Assisting Shawcross were Major Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe and Sir John Wheeler-Bennett. Mervyn Griffith-Jones, who was later to become famous as the chief prosecutor in the Lady Chatterley's Lover obscenity trial, was also on Shawcross's team. Shawcross also recruited a young barrister, Anthony Marreco, who was the son of a friend of his, to help the British team with the heavy workload.

Defence counsel

The vast majority of the defense attorneys were German lawyers. These included Georg Fröschmann, Heinz Fritz, Otto Kranzbühler, Otto Pannenbecker, Alfred Thoma, Kurt Kauffmann, Hans Laternser, Franz Exner, Alfred Seidl, Otto Stahmer, Walter Ballas, Hans Flächsner, Günther von Rohrscheidt, Egon Kubuschok, Robert Servatius, Fritz Sauter, Walther Funk, Hanns Marx, Otto Nelte, and Herbert Kraus/Rudolph Dix. The main counsel were supported by a total of 70 assistants, clerks and lawyers. The defense witnesses included several men who took part in war crimes themselves during World War II, such as Rudolf Höss. The men testifying for the defense hoped to receive more lenient sentences. All of the men testifying on behalf of the defense were found guilty on several counts.

The trial

The International Military Tribunal was opened on 19 November 1945 in the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg. The first session was presided over by the Soviet judge, Nikitchenko. The prosecution entered indictments against 24 major war criminals and seven organizations – the leadership of the Nazi party, the Reich Cabinet, the Schutzstaffel, Sicherheitsdienst, the Gestapo, the Sturmabteilung and the "General Staff and High Command", comprising several categories of senior military officers. These organizations were to be declared "criminal" if found guilty.
The indictments were for:
  1. Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of a crime against peace
  2. Planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression and other crimes against peace
  3. Participating in War crimes
  4. Crimes against humanity
The 24 accused were, with respect to each charge, either indicted but not convicted, indicted and found guilty, or not charged, as listed below by defendant, charge, and eventual outcome:

Intelligence tests and psychiatric assessments

The Rorschach test was administered to the defendants, along with the Thematic Apperception Test and a German adaptation of the Wechsler-Bellevue Intelligence Test. All were scored as having above average intelligence, several considerably so.
NameI.Q.
Dönitz, Karl138
Frank, Hans130
Frick, Wilhelm124
Fritzsche, Hans130
Funk, Walther124
Göring, Hermann138
Hess, Rudolf120
Jodl, Alfred127
Kaltenbrunner, Ernst113
Keitel, Wilhelm129
Neurath, Konstantin von125
Papen, Franz von134
Raeder, Erich134
Ribbentrop, Joachim von129
Rosenberg, Alfred127
Sauckel, Fritz118
Schacht, Hjalmar143
Schirach, Baldur von130
Seyss-Inquart, Arthur141
Speer, Albert128
Streicher, Julius106

Throughout the trials, specifically between January and July 1946, the defendants and a number of witnesses were interviewed by American psychiatrist Leon Goldensohn. His notes detailing the demeanor and comments of the defendants survive; they were edited into book form and published in 2004. Jean Delay was the psychiatric expert for the French delegation in the trial of Rudolf Hess.

Overview of the trial

  • 20 November 1945: The trials begin.
  • 21 November 1945: Robert H. Jackson opens for the prosecution with a speech lasting several hours, leaving an impression on both the court and the public.
  • 26 November 1945: The Hossbach Memorandum is presented.
  • 29 November 1945: The film Nazi Concentration and Prison Camps is screened.
  • 30 November 1945: Witness Erwin von Lahousen testifies that Keitel and von Ribbentrop gave orders for the murder of Poles, Jews, and Russian prisoners of war.
  • 11 December 1945: The film The Nazi Plan is screened, showing long-term planning and preparations for war by the Nazis.
  • 3 January 1946: Witness Otto Ohlendorf, former head of Einsatzgruppe D, admits to the murder of around 90,000 Jews.
  • 3 January 1946: Witness Dieter Wisliceny describes the organisation of RSHA Department IV-B-4, in charge of the Final Solution.
  • 7 January 1946: Witness and former SS-Obergruppenführer Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski admits to the organized mass murder of Jews and other groups in the Soviet Union.
  • 28 January 1946: Witness Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, member of the French Resistance and concentration camp survivor, testifies on the Holocaust, becoming the first Holocaust survivor to do so.
  • 11–12 February 1946: Witness and former Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus, who had been secretly brought to Nuremberg from Soviet captivity, testifies on the question of waging a war of aggression.
  • 14 February 1946: The Soviet prosecutors try to blame the Katyn massacre on the Germans.
  • 19 February 1946: The Soviet film Cruelties of the German-Fascist Intruders, detailing the atrocities in the extermination camps, is screened.
  • 27 February 1946: Witness Abraham Sutzkever testifies on the murder of almost 80,000 Jews in Vilnius by the Germans occupying the city.
  • 8 March 1946: The first witness for the defense testifies – former General Karl Bodenschatz.
  • 13–22 March 1946: Hermann Göring takes the stand.
  • 15 April 1946: Witness Rudolf Höss, former commandant of Auschwitz, confirms that Kaltenbrunner had never been there, but admits to having carried out mass murder.
  • 21 May 1946: Witness Ernst von Weizsäcker explains the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939, including its secret protocol detailing the division of Eastern Europe between Germany and the Soviet Union.
  • 20 June 1946: Albert Speer takes the stand. He is the only defendant to take personal responsibility for his actions.
  • 29 June 1946: The defense for Martin Bormann testifies.
  • 1–2 July 1946: The court hears six witnesses testifying on the Katyn massacre; the Soviets fail to pin the blame for the event on Germany.
  • 2 July 1946: Admiral Chester W. Nimitz provides written testimony regarding attacks on merchant vessels without warning, admitting that Germany was not alone in these attacks, as the US did the same.
  • 4 July 1946: Final statements for the defense.
  • 26 July 1946: Final statements for the prosecution.
  • 30 July 1946: Start of the trial of the "criminal organizations".
  • 31 August 1946: Last statements by the defendants.
  • 1 September 1946: The court adjourns.
  • 30 September–1 October 1946: The sentencing occurs, taking two days, with the individual sentences read out on the afternoon of 1 October.
The accusers were successful in unveiling the background of developments leading to the outbreak of World War II, which cost around 50 million lives in Europe alone, as well as the extent of the atrocities committed in the name of the Hitler regime. Twelve of the accused were sentenced to death, seven received prison sentences, three were acquitted, and two were not charged.

Executions

The death sentences were carried out on 16 October 1946 by hanging using the standard drop method instead of long drop. The U.S. Army denied claims that the drop length was too short, which may cause the condemned to die slowly from strangulation instead of quickly from a broken neck, but evidence remains that some of the condemned men choked in agony for 14 to 28 minutes. The executioner was John C. Woods. The executions took place in the gymnasium of the court building.
Although the rumor has long persisted that the bodies were taken to Dachau and burned there, they were actually incinerated in a crematorium in Munich, and the ashes scattered over the river Isar. The French judges suggested that the military condemned be shot by a firing squad, as is standard for military courts-martial, but this was opposed by Biddle and the Soviet judges, who argued that the military officers had violated their military ethos and were not worthy of the more dignified death by shooting. The prisoners sentenced to incarceration were transferred to Spandau Prison in 1947.
Of the 12 defendants sentenced to death by hanging, two were not hanged: Martin Bormann was convicted in absentia, and Hermann Göring committed suicide the night before the execution. The remaining 10 defendants sentenced to death were hanged.

Nuremberg principles

The definition of what constitutes a war crime is described by the Nuremberg principles, a set of guidelines document which was created as a result of the trial. The medical experiments conducted by German doctors and prosecuted in the so-called Doctors' Trial led to the creation of the Nuremberg Code to control future trials involving human subjects, a set of research ethics principles for human experimentation.
Of the indicted organizations the following were found not to be criminal:
  • "The General Staff and High Command" was found not to comprise a group or organization as defined by Article 9 of the London Charter 14 Members of the High Command were tried as Criminals at the high command trial case 12 of the Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings
  • Sturmabteilung

    Subsidiary and related trials

The American authorities conducted subsequent Nuremberg Trials in their occupied zone.
Other trials conducted after the first Nuremberg trial include the following:
While Sir Geoffrey Lawrence of Britain was the judge who was chosen to serve as the president of the court, arguably, the most prominent of the judges at the trial was his American counterpart, Francis Biddle. Prior to the trial, Biddle had been Attorney General of the United States but had been asked to resign by Truman earlier in 1945.
Some accounts argue that Truman had appointed Biddle as the main American judge for the trial as an apology for asking for his resignation. Ironically, Biddle was known during his time as Attorney General for opposing the idea of prosecuting Nazi leaders for crimes committed before the beginning of the war, even sending out a memorandum on 5 January 1945 on the subject. The note also expressed Biddle's opinion that instead of proceeding with the original plan for prosecuting entire organizations, there should simply be more trials that would prosecute specific offenders.
Biddle soon changed his mind, as he approved a modified version of the plan on 21 January 1945, likely due to time constraints, since the trial would be one of the main issues which was to be discussed at Yalta. At trial, the Nuremberg tribunal ruled that any member of an organization convicted of war crimes, such as the SS or Gestapo, who had joined after 1939 would be considered a war criminal. Biddle managed to convince the other judges to make an exemption for any member who was drafted or had no knowledge of the crimes being committed by these organizations.
Justice Robert H. Jackson played an important role in not only the trial itself, but also in the creation of the International Military Tribunal, as he led the American delegation to London that, in the summer of 1945, argued in favour of prosecuting the Nazi leadership as a criminal conspiracy. According to Airey Neave, Jackson was also the one behind the prosecution's decision to include membership in any of the six criminal organizations in the indictments at the trial, though the IMT rejected this on the grounds that it was wholly without precedent in either international law or the domestic laws of any of the Allies. Jackson also attempted to have Alfried Krupp be tried in place of his father, Gustav, and even suggested that Alfried volunteer to be tried in his father's place. Both proposals were rejected by the IMT, particularly by Lawrence and Biddle, and some sources indicate that this resulted in Jackson being viewed unfavourably by the latter.
Thomas Dodd was a prosecutor for the United States. There was an immense amount of evidence backing the prosecutors' case, especially since meticulous records of the Nazis' actions had been kept. There were records taken in by the prosecutors that had signatures from specific Nazis signing for everything from stationery supplies to Zyklon B gas, which was used to kill the inmates of the deathcamps. Thomas Dodd showed a series of pictures to the courtroom after reading through the documents of crimes committed by the defendants. The showing consisted of pictures displaying the atrocities performed by the defendants. The pictures had been gathered when the inmates were liberated from the concentration camps.
, a Lutheran pastor, and Sixtus O'Connor, a Roman Catholic priest, were sent to minister to the Nazi defendants. Photographs of the trial were taken by a team of about a dozen US Army still photographers, under the direction of chief photographer Ray D'Addario.

Legacy

The Tribunal is celebrated for establishing that "crimes against international law are committed by men, not by abstract entities, and only by punishing individuals who commit such crimes can the provisions of international law be enforced." The creation of the IMT was followed by trials of lesser Nazi officials and the trials of Nazi doctors, who performed experiments on people in prison camps. It served as the model for the International Military Tribunal for the Far East which tried Japanese officials for crimes against peace and crimes against humanity. It also served as the model for the Eichmann trial and for present-day courts at The Hague, for trying crimes committed during the Balkan wars of the early 1990s, and at Arusha, for trying the people responsible for the genocide in Rwanda.
The Nuremberg trials had a great influence on the development of international criminal law. The Conclusions of the Nuremberg trials served as models for:
The International Law Commission, acting on the request of the United Nations General Assembly, produced in 1950 the report Principles of International Law Recognized in the Charter of the Nürnberg Tribunal and in the Judgement of the Tribunal. See Nuremberg Principles.
The influence of the tribunal can also be seen in the proposals for a permanent international criminal court, and the drafting of international criminal codes, later prepared by the International Law Commission.
Tourists can visit courtroom 600 on days when no trial is on. A permanent exhibition has been dedicated to the trials.

Establishment of a permanent International Criminal Court

The Nuremberg trials initiated a movement for the prompt establishment of a permanent international criminal court, eventually leading over fifty years later to the adoption of the Statute of the International Criminal Court. This movement was brought about because during the trials, there were conflicting court methods between the German court system and the U.S. court system. The crime of conspiracy was unheard of in the civil law systems of the Continent. Therefore, the German defense found it unfair to charge the defendants with conspiracy to commit crimes, while the judges from common-law countries were used to doing so.

Criticism

Critics of the Nuremberg trials argued that the charges against the defendants were only defined as "crimes" after they were committed and that therefore the trial was invalid, and thus seen as a form of "victor's justice".
As Michael Biddiss observed in a 1995 edition of History Today, "the Nuremberg Trial continues to haunt us. ... It is a question also of the weaknesses and strengths of the proceedings themselves."
Quincy Wright, writing eighteen months after the conclusion of the IMT, explained the opposition to the Tribunal thus:Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court Harlan Fiske Stone called the Nuremberg trials a fraud. " Jackson is away conducting his high-grade lynching party in Nuremberg,... I don't mind what he does to the Nazis, but I hate to see the pretense that he is running a court and proceeding according to common law. This is a little too sanctimonious a fraud to meet my old-fashioned ideas", Stone wrote.
Jackson, in a letter discussing the weaknesses of the trial, in October 1945 told U.S. President Harry S. Truman that the Allies themselves "have done or are doing some of the very things we are prosecuting the Germans for. The French are so violating the Geneva Convention in the treatment of prisoners of war that our command is taking back prisoners sent to them. We are prosecuting plunder and our Allies are practising it. We say aggressive war is a crime and one of our allies asserts sovereignty over the Baltic States based on no title except conquest."
Associate Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas charged that the Allies were guilty of "substituting power for principle" at Nuremberg. "I thought at the time and still think that the Nuremberg trials were unprincipled," he wrote. "Law was created ex post facto to suit the passion and clamor of the time."
U.S. Deputy Chief Counsel Abraham Pomerantz resigned in protest at the low caliber of the judges assigned to try the industrial war criminals, such as those at I.G. Farben.
Robert A. Taft, a US Senate Majority Leader from Ohio and son of William Howard Taft, criticized the Nuremberg Trials for trying Nazi war criminals under ex post facto laws, which resulted in his failure to secure the Republican nomination for President in 1948.
A number of Germans who agreed with the idea of punishment for war crimes admitted trepidation concerning the trials. A contemporary German jurist said:
The validity of the court has been questioned on a number of grounds:

Legitimacy

One criticism that was made of the IMT was that some treaties were not binding on the Axis powers because they were not signatories. This was addressed in the judgment relating to war crimes and crimes against humanity, which contains an expansion of customary law: "Hague Convention of 1907|the Convention expressly stated that it was an attempt 'to revise the general laws and customs of war,' which it thus recognised to be then existing, but by 1939 these rules laid down in the Convention were recognised by all civilised nations, and were regarded as being declaratory of the laws and customs of war which are referred to in Article 6 of the Charter."

Introduction of extempore simultaneous interpretation

The Nuremberg Trials employed four official languages: English, French, German and Russian. In order to address the complex linguistic issues that clouded over the proceedings, interpretation and translation departments had to be established. However, it was feared that consecutive interpretation would slow down the proceedings significantly. What is therefore unique in both the Nuremberg tribunals and history of the interpretation profession was the introduction of an entirely new technique, extempore simultaneous interpretation. This technique of interpretation requires the interpreter to listen to a speaker in a source language and orally translate that speech into another language in real time, that is, simultaneously, through headsets and microphones. Interpreters were split into four sections, one for each official language, with three interpreters per section working from the other three languages into the fourth. For instance, the English booth consisted of three interpreters, one working from German into English, one working from French, and one from Russian, etc. Defendants who did not speak any of the four official languages were provided with consecutive court interpreters. Some of the languages heard over the course of the proceedings included Yiddish, Hungarian, Czech, Ukrainian, and Polish.
The equipment used to establish this system was provided by IBM, and included an elaborate setup of cables which were hooked up to headsets and single earphones directly from the four interpreting booths. Four channels existed for each working language, as well as a root channel for the proceedings without interpretation. Switching of channels was controlled by a setup at each table in which the listener merely had to turn a dial in order to switch between languages. People tripping over the floor-laid cables often led to the headsets getting disconnected, with several hours at a time sometimes being taken in order to repair the problem and continue on with the trials.
Interpreters were recruited and examined by the respective countries in which the official languages were spoken: the United States, United Kingdom, France, the Soviet Union, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, as well as in special cases Belgium and the Netherlands. Many were former translators, army personnel, and linguists, some were experienced consecutive interpreters, others were ordinary individuals and even recent secondary school-graduates who led international lives in multilingual environments. It was, and still is believed, that the qualities that made the best interpreters were not just a perfect understanding of two or more languages, but more importantly a broad sense of culture, encyclopedic knowledge, inquisitiveness, as well as a naturally calm disposition.
With the simultaneous technique being extremely new, interpreters practically trained themselves, but many could not handle the pressure or the psychological strain. Many often had to be replaced, many returned to the translation department, and many left. Serious doubts were given as to whether interpretation provided a fair trial for the defendants, particularly because of fears of mistranslation and errors made on transcripts. The translation department had to also deal with the overwhelming problem of being understaffed and overburdened with an influx of documents that could not be kept up with. More often than not, interpreters were stuck in a session without having proper documents in front of them and were relied upon to do sight translation or double translation of texts, causing further problems and extensive criticism. Other problems that arose included complaints from lawyers and other legal professionals with regard to questioning and cross-examination. Legal professionals were most often appalled at the slower speed at which they had to conduct their task because of the extended time required for interpreters to render an interpretation properly. Additionally, a number of interpreters protested the idea of using vulgar language, especially if it referred to Jews or the conditions of the Nazi concentration camps. Bilingual/trilingual members who attended the trials picked up quickly on this aspect of character and were equally quick to file complaints.
Yet, despite the extensive trial and error, without the interpretation system the trials would not have been possible and in turn revolutionized the way multilingual issues were addressed in tribunals and conferences. A number of the interpreters following the trials were immediately recruited into the newly formed United Nations, while others returned to their ordinary lives, pursued other careers, or worked freelance. Outside the boundaries of the trials, many interpreters continued their positions on weekends interpreting for dinners, private meetings between judges, and excursions between delegates. Others worked as investigators or editors, or aided the translation department when they could, often using it as an opportunity to sharpen their skills and to correct poor interpretations on transcripts before they were available for public record.
For further reference, a book titled The Origins of Simultaneous Interpretation: The Nuremberg Trial, written by interpreter Francesca Gaiba, was published by the University of Ottawa Press in 1998.
Today, all major international organizations, as well as any conference or government that uses more than one official language, uses extempore simultaneous interpretation. Notable bodies include the Parliament of Kosovo with three official languages, the Parliament of Canada with two official languages, the Parliament of South Africa with eleven official languages, the European Union with twenty-four official languages, and the United Nations with six official working languages.

Citations

Avalon Project

These citations refer to documents at