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The Nuremberg Trials And Crimes Against Humanity, Katie A. Welgan

Young Historians Conference

The London Charter, signed in August 1945 by Allied leaders to establish the International Military Tribunal, included a seemingly novel category of wartime wrongdoing in the charges against Nazi leaders—crimes against humanity. Although condemned by some as ex post facto law ungrounded in legal precedent, this codified prohibition of destructive action taken by a government against its own citizens was a culmination of humanitarian theory which began in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War. Codified law protecting noncombatants developed during the following centuries, yet the violent excesses of World War I and the failure of the subsequent Leipzig trials …