"During trials held in the German city of Nuremberg, the IMT (International Military Tribunal)
brought four charges against the defendants: (1) crimes against peace, (2) war crimes, (3) crimes
against humanity, and (4) conspiracy to commit any of the aforementioned crimes. Making no mention
of the Holocaust or the Shoah--such terms were not yet widespread--these indictments did not
identify specifically what had happened to the Jews or to other civilian populations targeted by the
Nazis and their collaborators. Yet, Article 6 of the IMT's charter did define crimes against
humanity to include "murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts
committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecutions on political,
racial or religious grounds...."
Taylor led the prosecution's case against the German High Command--the generals and admirals who
directed Nazi Germany's military conquests. Those conquests put vast numbers of European Jews under
Nazi domination and enabled the Einsatzgruppen, the SS, and the German Army itself to carry out a
"war against the Jews." Taylor's explicit task was not to show that members of the German High
Command were also Holocaust perpetrators; his aim was to document that Nazi Germany's military
professionals had waged war in criminal ways.
When the verdicts were announced on October 1, 1946, 19 of the Nuremberg defendants--including
Martin Bormann, head of the Nazi Party Chancellery, who was tried in absentia--were found guilty.
Three men were acquitted: Hjalmar Schacht, former minister of economics; Franz von Papen, first
vice-chancellor of the Nazi government; and Hans Fritzsche, chief of the Propaganda Ministry's Radio
Division. Taylor achieved his goal, however, when the guilty verdicts included Nazi military leaders
Wilhelm Keitel, chief of staff of the Wehrmacht High Command, and Alfred Jodl, chief of the
Wehrmacht Operations Staff.
Seven defendants received prison sentences that ranged from ten years to life. Twelve
defendants--Keitel and Jodl among them--were condemned to death by hanging. Ten executions took
place in the early hours of October 16, 1946. Having been tried in absentia, Bormann was missing
from the group of the condemned. Shortly before Hermann Göring, the commander-in-chief of the
Luftwaffe, was to be hanged, he escaped the gallows when he killed himself by swallowing cyanide.
The pursuit of justice at Nuremberg did not end when the IMT concluded its work in the autumn of
1946. Thousands of Nazi war-crimes trials took place in numerous countries before and after those
conducted by the IMT. The Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings began in December 1946. Lasting until
April 1949, they consisted of 12 trials under American jurisdiction. Now chief counsel for the
prosecution, Telford Taylor played a key part in those proceedings, which ultimately focused on 185
Nazi doctors, jurists, industrialists, military and SS leaders (including Einsatzgruppen personnel),
and other professionals and government officials. Their indictments specified crimes ranging from
abusive medical experimentation and participation in Nazi Germany's "euthanasia" program to
exploitation of slave labor, the administration of concentration camps, and mass murder."
http://www.holocaustchronicle.org/StaticPages/640.html
Jd
"I have set watchmen upon thy walls, O Jerusalem, which shall never hold their peace day nor night:
ye that make mention of the Lord, keep not silence, and give him no rest, till he establish, and
till he make Jerusalem a praise in the earth." (Isaiah 62:6-7)
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