After the Holocaust, hundreds of Nazi war criminals were put on trial. The trials lasted for several years, and were significant in bringing the criminals to justice.
Before World War II was even over, the Allies declared their intention to bring those responsible for the crimes to trial, and to that end they established an international military tribunal after the war. Holocaust survivors also worked to bring the war criminals to justice. In February 1946, the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in Germany set up a legal department with a special office for handling Nazi war criminals. During its period of operation, the office endeavored to expose war criminals and to assist the authorities in having them convicted.
The Nuremberg Trials were a series of trials held in the city of Nuremberg (Nürnberg) in Germany. The main trial commenced in October 1945 and lasted a year. In the course of the trial, 22 senior German and Austrian Nazis were indicted. The government-appointed judges were expected to follow their conscience and act in accordance with the law. The aspiration to emphasize the universal dimension of the Nazis' crimes led to the inclusion of the murder of Jews within the comprehensive definition of "crimes against humanity", as opposed to appearing as a separate category during the trials.
The sole Jewish witness at the Nuremberg Trials was poet and partisan Abraham Sutzkever, who lived in the Vilna ghetto and the Narocz Forest during the war. He gave his testimony on 26 February; it lasted five hours. As an official witness at this historic trial, Sutzkever felt the immense weight of responsibility on his shoulders. Before taking the stand, he wrote in his diary: "I pray that my words give adequate expression to the souls of the martyrs." In his testimony he described the first days of occupation and the persecution of the Jews. Although he wanted to speak in Yiddish he was compelled to speak in Russian, one of the official languages of the trial. Throughout his appearance at the trial, he refused to sit down, preferring to stand as if saying Kaddish for the victims.
Many survivors hoped that the Nuremberg Trials would expose their years of suffering to the world. For them, the trials were a matter of elementary justice, and they expected the war criminals to face the full force of the law. Twelve of the Nazis standing trial were sentenced to death. On 30 November 1945, journalist Shabtai Keshev Klugman reported from the courtroom in the Undzer Weg (Our Way) newspaper:
"I keep feeling that the souls of our martyrs are hovering here in the courtroom, looking for an answer to that awful question: Why?"
Twelve additional trials were held in Nuremberg between December 1946 and April 1949, in the course of which 177 members of organizations and groups defined as criminal were tried. Some were acquitted, some were sentenced to prison terms but few were sentenced to death.
The Eichmann Trial took place in Israel some 15 years after the Nuremberg Trials. As opposed to the Nuremberg Trials, which were criminal trials in Germany, the Eichmann Trial had clearly nationalistic and educational objectives. David Ben Gurion sought to shape the heritage of the past, and to use the trial as a platform to reveal what had befallen the Jewish people during the Holocaust. Furthermore, the Nuremberg Trials were principally document-based as opposed to witness-based, while the witness testimonies of some 110 Holocaust survivors formed the heart of the Eichmann Trial.
