France v Goering (Nuremberg Trials)
4 Video Views·May 26, 2026
The Holocaust
Wikipedia • The Holocaust, known in Hebrew as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. From 1941 to 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered around six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, approximately two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population.
France v Goering (Nuremberg Trials)
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Video Summary
AI GeneratedFollowing World War II, the Nuremberg trials were established to hold senior leaders of the Third Reich accountable for unprecedented atrocities. These trials led to the creation of the Nuremberg Principles, which redefined international law to ensure that mass slaughter and war aggression could be prosecuted effectively, regardless of a defendant's rank or claims of obedience.
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During the Second World War, 85 million people died.
6 million of those died during the industrial slaughter of the Holocaust.
At the end of the war, there had to be a reckoning.
No form of reckoning would be perfect, but the form chosen was to place war criminals from Germany, Japan and their allies on trial.
The first of these trials was the trial of 24 senior military and political leaders of the Third Reich.
The trial was unprecedented in its scope, and it was necessary to develop new principles of law, now known as the Nuremberg Principles, after the city where the trials were held.
In a case note this short, we're going to discuss just two.
The first, which is actually Principle 6, established new crimes.
This was absolutely necessary.
Consider just one defendant, Wilhelm Keitel.
You've probably never heard of him.
He was one of the architects of the Holocaust, and was personally responsible for orders which led to thousands of executions.
He was knowingly responsible for sending thousands of civilians to their deaths.
What normal criminal laws could do justice to thousands of murder charges?
The court identified three new types of crime.
Crimes against peace, which meant planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances.
or devastation not justified by military necessity.
And war crimes, which meant murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhuman acts done against any civilian population, or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds.
The second principle I want to note, Principle 4, is now known as the Nuremberg Defense.
The principle states,
The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his government or of his superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.
In other words, merely following orders is no longer a defense.
Of the 24 defendants, 12 were sentenced to death, 9 were imprisoned and 3 were acquitted.
May the world never see their like again.