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20 November 1945Reputable sourceWell documented

A word invented one year earlier enters an indictment for the first time

On the timeline · around 20 November 1945 · Allied VictoryAllied VictoryA word invented one year earlier enters an indictment for the first time19451946

What happened

Twenty-four senior Nazi officials were indicted before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, though only twenty-two ultimately stood trial: Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Joseph Goebbels had all already killed themselves, industrialist Gustav Krupp was excluded for failing health, and Robert Ley hanged himself the night before proceedings opened. The indictment used, for the first time in any legal document, the word genocide, coined barely a year earlier by the Polish-Jewish legal scholar Raphael Lemkin; prosecutors used it repeatedly through the trial, though the judges ultimately did not adopt the term in their final verdict. On 1 October 1946, the tribunal convicted nineteen defendants and acquitted three; twelve were sentenced to death. Hermann Göring, the most senior official tried, escaped hanging by killing himself the night before his scheduled execution.

Why it matters

Nuremberg established, as binding international law rather than mere rhetoric, that following orders is not a legal defense for war crimes and that individuals, including a nation's own senior leaders, can be held personally criminally accountable, a foundation nearly every international human-rights tribunal since has built directly on.

How we know

The trial's full proceedings, including transcripts of witness testimony and the thousands of captured German documents entered as evidence, were preserved and later published in full, and the prosecution built its case primarily on the Nazi regime's own paperwork rather than contested testimony.

Sources

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