The Verdict on Nuremberg

1st October 2026 is the 80th anniversary of the verdicts being handed down at IMT Nuremberg. Tom Blackmore has been telling the story of his grandfather, Nuremberg prosecutor and ECHR artisan David Maxwell Fyfe for many years. For this anniversary he asks what the verdict on Nuremberg is 80 years on through the filter of present events.

Still from the courtroom set of Nuremberg (2025)

It is the 80th anniversary of the verdicts being handed down at IMT Nuremberg (the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials). But what is the verdict on Nuremberg itself eighty years on?

‘Alas, the Nuremberg Trials do not have a good historical reputation any more’

This was the judgement of Griff Rhys Jones in January 2024.

I had the pleasure of working with Griff a thousand years ago. He showed a sublime skill for capturing a lesson for people at work and bringing it to life. Unlike his Cambridge University forbear John Cleese who relied on a persona of a surreal pedagogue to convey people skills, Griff gently used dialogue to tease an enthusiasm for knowing more.

Griff’s judgement of Nuremberg has become increasingly popular in intellectual circles over the past two decades. Scepticism has grown around the idea of ‘victor’s justice,’ incomplete and misleading evidence, and even a sense that perhaps those on trial did not know of the horrors of the Nazi state.

This coolness was on display at a Nuremberg moot that I attended by chance also in Cambridge. A gathering of international schoolchildren were invited to act as Prosecution and Defence to the accused at Nuremberg. In their presentations the prosecutors seemed to have more power, confident in their view at a distance of 80 years and a packet full of evidence, that their defendant had not been witness to the atrocities and that the trial was unjust.

Sitting at lunch with teachers from Hills Road Sixth Form College I shared their discomfort and their shivers of terror at what we had heard.

Amongst the evidence at the Trials in 1945 and 46 was the record of the Holocaust. In 2020 we were honoured to contribute one flame - 'Shining a light on the evidence of Nuremberg' - to the 75, one for each year since the liberation of Auschwitz. We also were invited to take part in the last live National Commemoration to be held, just before the outbreak of Covid. Our flame read around its base an extract from a letter written by David Maxwell Fyfe from Nuremberg in 1946:

When one sees children of Mo's age and younger in this horrible place and the clothes of infants who were killed, it is worth a year of our lives to help to register for ever and with practical result the reasoned horror of humanity.

Because history is written and rewritten, the present events in Israel and Gaza since October 7th 2023 have changed the filter through which we see the Holocaust, and subsequently the perception of Nuremberg.

At the start of 2022, as soon as Russia invaded Ukraine, Philippe Sands and others championed the establishment of a tribunal to charge Russia with aggressive war. This would allow the leaders of Russia to be put on trial. This brave move has faded from public awareness as it is subsumed by other judicial machinery.

The event of the 80th anniversary of the War Crimes Trials was the release of James Vanderbilt’s film Nuremberg. Although epic in scope the strongest scenes were those conducted between Rami Malek’s Douglas Kelly and Russell Crowe’s Herman Goering in his cell. Here we are shown the struggle with tackling the charisma of power, and the seduction of evil. Away from there American Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson, clear about the nobility of his cause, is haunted with an inability to confront the Goering cross-examination. They stand for the American male psyche struggle with that same power manifested today.

However, this is a Hollywood film which requires a spectacular deus ex machina to achieve a Hollywood ending. Kelly’s easy views are challenged by film evidence of the death camps and personal testimony. He returns to the Courthouse in time to offer his notebook detailing his interviews with Goering. Rejected by Jackson these notes are picked up by the British prosecutor David Maxwell Fyfe, digested overnight, so that Maxwell Fyfe can the next day interrupt proceedings to question Goering and make him reveal his guilt. Grateful for the psychiatrist’s insight Maxwell Fyfe shakes hands with Kelly, and Jackson is satisfied that the enemy is held to account.

As Kelly had returned to America before the cross-examinations began these episodes are fiction. But they conjure Nuremberg as an American victory, not the green shoots to an international order, the corrosion of which we are presently witnessing.

The verdict on the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials eighty years on is not encouraging. History does not judge – there is no good or bad historical reputation – but writers of history, the product of their time, paint pictures that suit them.

Maxwell Fyfe, who after all was not a character of fiction and was in the courtroom, put it this way:

'Most people approach the subject of War Crimes Trials fundamentally either as cynic or idealist. This is, I think, because in essence the case for or against trying war criminals depends on that controversial subject which has become succinctly known as human rights. Your cynic says, "Human Rights? There are none." Your idealist, however, takes the view that there are certain rights and freedoms not created by lawyers but to which mankind as such is heir and which cannot be alienated. It is a conception akin to the idea of the Law of Nature which had such a wide influence on relationship in past centuries, although now somewhat outmoded. The idea of fundamental Human Rights is one in which I firmly believe.' 

David was a child of the Scottish Enlightenment and had faith in the rights and freedoms of the individual against the power of the state. The evidence at Nuremberg revealed to him that these human rights were abused time after time in the Nazi state, and across the continent of Europe which was subjected to barbarism and terror. These were the rights and freedoms that he championed as an artisan of the European Convention and Court on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms at Strasbourg.

And these are the rights and freedoms that have grown  and matured over the past eight decades, providing the freedom of expression to all – including the cynics, who having lived in their warm embrace are content to dismiss them because they are scared and old.

Events will move on and history will be written afresh. We can only hope that this will be a story of idealists who struggled for peace, democracy and human rights – not the story which opens a door to the need for another tribunal at Nuremberg.