Cases

Adolf Eichmann, a senior SS officer who organised the logistics of deporting millions of Jews to death camps, escaped after the war and lived in Argentina under a false name. In May 1960 Mossad agents seized him outside his home in Buenos Aires and secretly flew him to Israel. He was tried in Jerusalem in 1961 — a televised trial that brought survivor testimony to a world audience — convicted of crimes against the Jewish people and crimes against humanity, and hanged in 1962. Argentina protested to the UN Security Council, which in Resolution 138 (June 1960) declared that such violations of a member state's sovereignty could endanger international peace and asked Israel to make reparation — while explicitly saying it did not condone Eichmann's crimes. The two countries settled the dispute by joint statement that August. Arguments for the abduction: Argentina had sheltered Nazi fugitives and extradition was unlikely; the crimes were of a scale that justified extraordinary measures; the trial itself was conducted openly, with defence counsel. Arguments against: kidnapping across borders undermines the international legal order and sets a precedent any state can invoke; Israel did not exist when the crimes were committed, raising jurisdiction questions; an international tribunal would have been more legitimate. Hannah Arendt's reporting on the trial ("the banality of evil") added another layer of controversy.

From November 1945 to October 1946, the International Military Tribunal — one judge and one prosecution team each from the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union and France — tried leading figures of Nazi Germany for conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes, and the newly defined crimes against humanity. Of the 22 defendants who stood trial, 12 were sentenced to death, 7 received prison terms from 10 years to life, and 3 were acquitted. Göring killed himself before his execution. The case for the trials as justice: the defendants had counsel of their choice, saw the evidence (much of it the regime's own documents), and three were acquitted — not the outcome of a show trial. The alternative many leaders favoured was summary execution. Nuremberg established that heads of state and officials are personally accountable and that "following orders" is no defence, laying the groundwork for the Yugoslavia and Rwanda tribunals and the International Criminal Court. The case for "victors' justice": only the losers were tried; Allied acts such as the bombing of Dresden and Hiroshima were never examined; the Soviet judges sat in judgment over aggression while the USSR had itself invaded Poland in 1939 and carried out the Katyn massacre (which the Soviets tried to pin on the Germans at Nuremberg). Critics also argue crimes against peace were applied retroactively, breaching the principle of no punishment without prior law.