19451776 Club
Four powers sign a charter to try Nazi leaders as criminals, not just prisoners of war
The document invents a charge nobody has ever prosecuted before: waging aggressive war.
Six months after Germany's surrender, the Allies still had to decide what to do with the men who ran the Third Reich. On August 8, 1945, France, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and the United States signed the London Charter, creating the International Military Tribunal and defining three new categories of prosecutable crime: crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. The trial opened that November in Nuremberg, the city where the Nazi party had once staged its rallies…
