Summary of Paul Roland's The Nuremberg Trials

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

Sample Book Insights:

#1 The end of the Second World War in Europe in 1945 brought about a dilemma for the Allies. They wanted to punish the German nation, but they didn’t want to make the Nazis seem like martyrs.

#2 The Allied powers decided that Germany needed to renounce its past, and to do that, they needed to help in its rebuilding. However, they did not send in Einsatzgruppen death squads to murder civilians, nor did they set up concentration camps and death camps to exterminate undesirable elements of the population.

#3 The Allied leaders realized that something had to be done with the captured Nazi elite, because the will to pursue those guilty of perpetrating atrocities was quickly evaporating. They decided to execute the captured Nazi leaders, rather than let them go through the legal process.

#4 The American secretary of war, Henry Stimson, was against the idea of having a trial for the Nazi leaders. He believed that if the leaders were summarily executed, the world would say that their enemies were afraid to put them on trial and had instead killed them to silence them.