In April 1949, judgment was rendered in the last of the series of 12
Nuernberg war crimes trials which had begun in October 1946 and were
held pursuant to Allied Control Council Law No. 10. Far from being of
concern solely to lawyers, these trials are of especial interest to
soldiers, historians, students of international affairs, and others. The
defendants in these proceedings, charged with war crimes and other
offenses against international penal law, were prominent figures in
Hitler’s Germany and included such outstanding diplomats and politicians
as the State Secretary of the Foreign Office, von Weizsaecker, and
cabinet ministers von Krosigk and Lammers; military leaders such as
Field Marshals von Leeb, List, and von Kuechler; SS leaders such as
Ohlendorf, Pohl, and Hildebrandt; industrialists such as Flick, Alfried
Krupp, and the directors of I. G. Farben; and leading professional men
such as the famous physician Gerhard Rose, and the jurist and Acting
Minister of Justice, Schlegelberger.
In view of the weight of the accusations and the far-flung activities of
the defendants, and the extraordinary amount of official contemporaneous
German documents introduced in evidence, the records of these trials
constitute a major source of historical material covering many events of
the fateful years 1933 (and even earlier) to 1945, in Germany and
elsewhere in Europe.
The Nuernberg trials under Law No. 10 were carried out under the direct
authority of the Allied Control Council, as manifested in that law,
which authorized the establishment of the Tribunals. The judicial
machinery for the trials, including the Military Tribunals and the
Office, Chief of Counsel for War Crimes, was prescribed by Military
Government Ordinance No. 7 and was part of the occupation administration
for the American zone, the Office of Military Government (OMGUS). Law
No. 10, Ordinance No. 7, and other basic jurisdictional or
administrative documents are printed in full hereinafter.
The proceedings in these trials were conducted throughout in the German
and English languages, and were recorded in full by stenographic notes,
and by electrical sound recording of all oral proceedings. The 12 cases
required over 1,200 days of court proceedings and the transcript of
these proceedings exceeds 330,000 pages, exclusive of hundreds of
document books, briefs, etc. Publication of all of this material,
accordingly, was quite unfeasible. This series, however, contains the
indictments, judgments, and other important portions of the record of
the 12 cases, and it is believed that these materials give a fair
picture of the trials, and as full and illuminating a picture as is
possible within the space available. Copies of the entire record of the
trials are available in the Library of Congress, the National Archives,
and elsewhere.
In some cases, due to time limitations, errors of one sort or another
have crept into the translations which were available to the Tribunal.
In other cases the same document appears in different trials, or even at
different parts of the same trial, with variations in translation. For
the most part these inconsistencies have been allowed to remain and only
such errors as might cause misunderstanding have been corrected.
Volume I and part of Volume II of this series are dedicated to the first
of the twelve cases, _United States vs. Karl Brandt, et al._ (Case No.
1). This trial has become known as the Medical Case, because 20 of the
23 defendants were doctors, and the charges related principally to
medical experimentation on human beings. The remainder of Volume II is
devoted to the trial of former Field Marshal Erhard Milch, who was also
charged with criminal responsibilities for medical experimentation on
human beings (of which charge he was acquitted), and with responsibility
for the deportation to forced labor of numerous civilians, in violation
of the laws of war (of which charge he was convicted).