The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law, Kevin Jon Heller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), xviii + 509 pp., hardback, $135.00.

Abstract

Jurists, legal scholars, and historians appear unified in viewing the trial of the major Nazi war criminals before the International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Nuremberg as the single most important event in the development of international criminal law. Conferences staged several years ago to coincide with the sixtieth anniversary of the trial often had a celebratory, even hagiographic quality. Law students around the globe now dutifully study the so-called “Nuremberg Principles,” which insist, among other things, that “acts of state” and “superior orders” supply no defense against the charge of perpetrating international crimes. By contrast, the twelve so-called “subsequent proceedings” undertaken by American jurists before the Nuremberg Military Tribunal (NMT) have long been considered nothing more than footnotes to the IMT—and unhappy ones at that. The trials often warrant no more than brief mention in textbooks on international criminal law and are seen to have delivered little in terms of precedent. Now, however, scholars have begun the important task of re-assessing the NMT program and rescuing it from its decades of comparative neglect. These include useful treatments of individual trials, such as Valerie Hébert's study of the High Command case, Hitler's Generals on Trial (2010), and Hilary Earl's The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945–1958 (2009). What was missing in the scholarly literature, however, was an assessment of the trial program as a whole, a gap that has now been admirably filled by Kevin Jon Heller's The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law. Well-written, vigorously researched, and impressively ambitious in its scope, Heller's book makes an important case for a proposition that I take to be correct: in important respects the NMT program, more than the IMT, anticipated, if not paved the way to, more recent developments in international criminal law. Though following directly on the heels of the IMT, the NMT proceedings soon began re-orienting and transforming the jurisprudential paradigm that guided the trial of the major war criminals, delivering in its place a template for the future development of international criminal law.