Author: MD Nasiur Rahaman Khan, St. Joseph’s College of Law, Bengaluru, Karnataka
LinkedIn Link: https://www.linkedin.com/in/md-nasiur-rahaman-khan-3930b5264
1. Abstract:
The United States v. Hermann Göring et al. (1945 – 46) and The Allied Powers v. Hideki Tojo et al. (1946 – 48)famously the Nuremberg and Tokyo Trials marked a turning point in the history of international criminal law, for they established that even state leaders could be held personally responsible for war crimes, crimes against peace, and crimes against humanity. Yet beneath this landmark achievement there is a troubling contradiction. The victorious Allied Powers positioned themselves as judges against Nazi and Japanese leaders, while their own wartime conduct, colonial violence, strategic bombing, and civilian devastation remained largely outside the trial. This article critically examines whether these trials were the birth of universal justice or the refined performance ofthe victor’s justice. It argues that although the tribunals laid the foundations of modern accountability, they also revealed the selective morality of international law: defeat was punished, power was excused. In that sense, Nuremberg and Tokyo were not only trials of men, but trials of the world’s conscience as well.
2. To the Point
“Everything is fair in love and war.” – Often attributed to John Lyly, Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578)
Maybe Convenient words, perhaps, for those who survive war and then get to write its rules, the quote it captures one of the central dilemmas of how societies judge conflict. World War II ended with immense destruction, millions of deaths, mass graves, ruined cities and widespread atrocities committed by multiple actors. In response, Nuremberg and Tokyo emerged as tribunals of accountability, but also as tribunals of power. These trials established the principle that political and military leaders could be held individually accountable for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and aggression, a historic step, no doubt. Yet the deeper question refuses to settle: if justice is universal, why did it begin with the defeated and end before reaching the victors? The Allies judged atrocities on foreign soil and Axis powers were prosecuted, while Allies’s own conduct was often explained away as strategy, necessity, or collateral damage. That is where the hypocrisy becomes difficult to ignore. The trials changed history, yes but they also exposed how selective justice can wear the mask of moral authority.
3. Use of Legal Jargon
3.1 The Legal Foundation
The Nuremberg Trial was conducted before the International Military Tribunal (IMT), established by the London Charter of 1945, while the Tokyo Trial was held before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), constituted in the aftermath of the war to prosecute senior Japanese leaders. Together, these tribunals marked an important shift in international law: they did not merely punish defeated states, they attempted to pierce the old veil of sovereignty and hold individuals personally answerable for conduct once treated as an act of state. In legal terms, the message was unmistakable thatpower could no longer hide behind uniform, flag, or office.
3.2 Three Categories of Crimes
The trials became historic because they introduce three major categories of international crimes.
Crimes Against Peace referred to the planning, preparation, initiation, or waging of a war of aggression. In plain terms, it was not only the soldier who pulled the trigger, but also the statesman who gave the order.
War Crimes covered violations of the laws and customs of war, including the killing of prisoners of war, mistreatment of civilians, destruction without military necessity, and other breaches of humanitarian restraint.
Crimes Against Humanity extended the law’s even further, targeting murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against civilian populations, whether in war or in systematic persecution.
These categories were groundbreaking because they translated moral outrage into legal vocabulary. But they also carried an uncomfortable irony: the law was being made universal in language, yet selective in application.
3.3 Individual Criminal Responsibility
Perhaps the most revolutionary idea emerging from both tribunals was individual criminal responsibility. State officials were no longer protected by rank, and the old defence that one was merely acting on behalf of the statelost much of its defence. The argument that a person was “only following orders” could not automatically erase culpability. Obedience, the tribunals implied, is not a sacred passport to impunity.
This was the true legal shock. International law no longer treated atrocities as anonymous acts of governments; it treated them as the decisions of people. And once that principle is accepted, the next question becomes unavoidable: if individuals can be tried for atrocity, why should accountability stop where political victory begins?
4. The Proof
4.1 Why Nuremberg and Tokyo Were Revolutionary
To dismiss the Nuremberg and Tokyo Trials as mere spectacles of punishment would be unfair to history. They did something legal civilization had long avoided to do: they said that heads of state, generals, ministers, and ideologues could no longer hide behind the old excuse of sovereign power. For the first time, international law spoke in the language of individual guilt rather than collective guilt. That was a serious breakthrough. The trials helped shape the modern understanding that crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity are not abstract sins of the state, but punishable acts of human choice.
Yet even this achievement carries a problem. The law became revolutionary not because it was universally fearless, but because it had finally found the courage to punish someone. The question is: why only someone’s? That is where admiration ends and suspicion begins. International criminal law was born with a moral ambition, but it was carried into the courtroom by the victors, and victors rarely arrive empty-handed.
4.2 The Problem of Victor’s Justice
Here lies the real problem in the story. The Allies presented themselves as the guardians of civilization, but civilization has a habit of becoming selective when power enters the picture. The same powers that condemned aggression and mass violence had themselves participated in wartime conduct that caused immense civilian suffering. Strategic bombing was treated as necessity; colonial domination was treated as history; atomic devastation was treated as an unavoidable end to a terrible war. In other words, when the victors killed civilians, the vocabulary changed. It was not called atrocity, it was called strategy, pressure, self-defence, necessity, or collateral damage. The dead did not ask for terminology, but history often does.
This is where the hypocrisy becomes difficult to ignore. If the law is truly universal, why did the trial stop at Axis leaders? Why were the Allied bombing campaigns not put under the same moral microscope? Why were the deaths caused in Hiroshima and Nagasaki never examined as crimes in the same spirit that guided the prosecution of enemy leaders? Why did colonial violence, occupation, and imperial extraction remain outside the courtroom?
The answer is uncomfortable but not complicated: because international justice, at that moment, was still dependent on the political will of the powerful. And the powerful, unsurprisingly, were not eager to convict themselves. A tribunal may speak the language of law, but if its moral horizon is drawn by the victors, its neutrality begins to look like a costume rather than a principle.
That does not mean the Axis leaders were innocent. They were not. Their conduct produced some of the darkest chapters in human history. But moral clarity does not require us to become blind. One side’s crimes do not erase the other side’s crime. A courtroom that prosecutes one form of cruelty while excusing another merely organizes injustice.
4.3 Justice or Selective Accountability?
This is the hardest question, and perhaps the most honest one. Nuremberg and Tokyo were not false trials. They were real, consequential, and historically important. They did define categories of war crimes and established a legal basis for later international criminal justice. But they also revealed that justice, when is filtered through geopolitics, does not always appear as justice; sometimes it appears as the afterlife of victory.
So, the proper conclusion is not that the trials were meaningless. It is that they were incomplete. They created a law of accountability, but they did so in a world where accountability was still unevenly distributed. The defeated were judged. The victors were remembered.
That is why these trials matter even today. They force us to confront a disturbing truth: international law can condemn brutality in its principles, while hesitating before power in practice. The legal vocabulary may be universal, but the courtroom remains political unless it gains courageto judge all sides with equal seriousness. Until that happens, the phrase “justice” will continue to carry a shadow.
And in that shadow stands the central lesson of Nuremberg and Tokyo: no war is morally superior merely because it is won. A war that kills civilians, destroys societies, and leaves nations in ashes cannot be cleaned by victory and prosecuting the defeated. At best, these trials showed that atrocity can be named. At worst, they showed that naming is not the same as judging everyone.
5. Case Laws
5.1 United States v. Hermann Göring et al. (Nuremberg Trial)
The Nuremberg Trial was the first major international criminal proceeding of its kind, with Hermann Göring standing among the most notorious figures in the trial. The defendants were charged not merely with battlefield excesses, but with crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The trial’s legal significance lay in its refusal to accept rank as immunity. It declared, for the first time in modern international law, that individuals could be punished for atrocities committed under the banner of the state. Yet the trial also carried the unmistakable trail of history written by the winners. Its greatness lay in accountability; its weakness lay in the selective reach of that same accountability.
5.2 The Allied Powers v. Hideki Tojo et al. (Tokyo Trial)
The Tokyo Trial extended the Nuremberg model to the Asia-Pacific theatre, placing Hideki Tojo and other Japanese leaders before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. Like Nuremberg, it sought to punish aggression, mass violence, and wartime brutality on a scale that had scarred civilian life across continents. Its legal value was undeniable: it helped consolidate the principle that those who design and direct war cannot hide behind the machinery of the state. But Tokyo also deepened the critique of victor’s justice. The tribunal punished the defeated empire, yet the devastation caused by the victors remained largely outside the courtroom’s moral reach. Justice was delivered, but not evenly.
5.3 Justice Radhabinod Pal’s Dissent
Justice Radha Binod Pal’s dissent is the intellectual blow of the Tokyo Trial. The Indian judge rejected the idea that the trial could claim complete moral authority when its structure excluded scrutiny of Allied conduct. His dissent gave the proceedings a constitutional and postcolonial flavour, because it questioned whether law can genuinely call itself impartial when it prosecutes only one side of a global catastrophe. Pal did not deny the horrors of war; rather, he questioned the fairness of a justice system that seemed to condemn the defeated while exempting the powerful. His dissent remains powerful precisely because it forces the uncomfortable question the main judgment tried to contain: can there be true international justice without equal accountability?
5.4 Prosecutor v. Duško Tadić (International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, 1995)
The Tadić case before the ICTY marked the first international criminal prosecution since Nuremberg and Tokyo. The tribunal held Tadić responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the Bosnian War. More significantly, the Appeals Chamber confirmed that individual criminal responsibility for violations of international humanitarian law exists irrespective of whether the armed conflict is international or internal in character. This judgment directly built upon the framework established at Nuremberg, demonstrating that the principle of individual accountability had survived half a century and could function in a genuinely multilateral forum, not merely one constructed and controlled by victorious superpowers settling scores with the defeated.
6. Conclusion
The Nuremberg Tribunal delivered its judgment on 1 October 1946. Of the twenty-two defendants, twelve were sentenced to death by hanging including Ribbentrop, Keitel, and Rosenberg, though Göring escaped execution by suicide. Three defendants received life imprisonment, four received lesser prison terms, and three were acquitted. The Tokyo Tribunal concluded on 12 November 1948, sentencing seven defendants to death, including General Tojo, while sixteen received life sentences and two received lesser terms. These verdicts marked the first time in history that international law formally pronounced that the crimes of states are the crimes of individual men and women, and that power is not a permanent shield against judgment.
The Nuremberg and Tokyo Trials changed the course of legal history. They proved that even the most powerful leaders could be called to account for the suffering they caused upon humanity. Yet they also revealed an uncomfortable truth about power and justice: the ability to judge is often possessed by those who escape judgment themselves.
Perhaps the greatest legacy of these trials is not the convictions they produced, but the question they left unanswered. Can justice truly be universal if it arrives only for the defeated? A legal system that punishes one atrocity while ignoring another may create accountability, but it struggles to create legitimacy.
History remembers Nuremberg and Tokyo as the birth of international criminal law. It should also remember them as a warning. The moment law begins to distinguish between the crimes of enemies and the crimes of allies; it risks becoming an instrument of power rather than a guardian of humanity.
For the dead, it never mattered who won the war. The bomb, the bullet, and the grave make no distinction between victor and vanquished. Perhaps that is the lesson international law still struggles to learn: no nation is morally superior to the suffering it causes, and no justice can be complete unless it is served to all sides with equal courage.
7. FAQs
Q1. Were the Nuremberg and Tokyo Trials examples of true justice or victor’s justice?
They were both. They made history by proving that leaders could be held personally responsible for mass atrocities, but they also exposed a hard truth: the defeated were judged far more strictly than the victors. Their legacy is therefore not purity, but paradox.
Q2. Why do these trials still matter today?
Because they gave the world the language of crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. More importantly, they left behind a warning: international law loses moral force when it punishes destruction only after victory has already been declared.
