The document, filed with the International Military Tribunal, charged senior surviving Nazi officials including Hermann Göring and Rudolf Hess with conspiracy, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against peace. It set in motion a trial that would establish, for the first time, that individuals — including heads of state — could be held criminally liable under international law for atrocities committed during wartime.
Filing the indictment was itself a diplomatic achievement, requiring the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union to agree on shared legal procedure despite deep differences in their legal traditions. American prosecutors favored adversarial cross-examination; Soviet jurists were accustomed to trials where guilt was essentially predetermined. The compromise document that emerged became the foundation of modern international criminal law.
The indictment's core innovation was the charge of 'crimes against peace' — the idea that launching a war of aggression was itself a punishable crime, not merely a matter of state sovereignty. This idea, resisted by some legal scholars at the time as retroactive justice, would eventually underpin the United Nations Charter's restrictions on the use of force.
The trials that followed, opening in late November, produced testimony and documentary evidence — including films of concentration camps — that created an irrefutable historical record of the Holocaust at a moment when few outside occupied Europe fully grasped its scale.
Key people: Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, Robert H. Jackson