(gentle piano music) - What do you do with Germany after the war?

How do you bring justice after the Holocaust?

- When they were putting Nuremberg together, they needed somebody to be in the courtroom.

- Really Nuremberg is a trial that everybody watches and everybody follows.

- [Ed] I think everybody was aware of the prison camps and what went on there.

- The Nuremberg trials took the very top people involved in the perpetration of this crime.

- Goring was there and Hans was there.

- It's exciting that we have a Pittsburgh connection to the Nuremberg trials because those trials were so important.

I love the fact that we have somebody from Pittsburgh who was there.

(gentle piano music) - The war ends in May of 1945 in Europe.

(bomb blasting) The trial actually begins in November of 1945 and ends in October of '46.

There were 12 trials, the first trial being the one that's the most famous.

(gentle piano music) So it is an enormously complicated undertaking.

It is for two judges from each of the victorious countries, meaning America, England, France, and Soviet Russia.

And it's something like over 100 witnesses, the 100,000 pieces of documentation.

(gentle piano music) - I ended up in an armor division.

Third army was in the middle of Europe.

A ninth army was up towards Holland and the north and the French were down below in the seventh, and we went through the middle of Europe, with the pattern and it became time for the war to end.

I ended up in the first Signal Corps and when they were putting Nuremberg together, they needed somebody to be in the courtroom to see that things were working.

After they went to the Signal Corp, the man that was running the organization, he was a captain and he got word from Nuremberg they needed two people and he says, I'm gonna ask for volunteers, and I know you don't volunteer, this is good duty so volunteer.

So we did.

That's how I ended up in Nuremberg.

- There were about 113 witnesses, about 80 for the defense and about what, 33 for the prosecution.

And they were crammed together in this space so that those people who were there and if Ed was there, wow, just not that many people were there.

- There were civilian people established a communication system in a courtroom, but they weren't to be in there.

It was a military trial.

If I wasn't involved in the trial at all, just be in there and be aware if there's a problem, get somebody to solve it.

Well, they did have a glass booth there with interpreters and each one had access to the phone system.

You had a headphone and you could get six different languages just by dialing.

I had to listen to it in order to determine that the communication system was working.

By the time I left there, I had a pretty good idea who was there and what was going on.

It was a courtroom scene.

The prosecutors explaining what they were gonna do, the evidence they had.

- I think there was something like 5 million words recorded.

The lawyers they wanted to capture for posterity.

The meaning of what had happened, not just the Holocaust, which of course was major.

Not just what happened to the Jews, but what the Nazis had done to humanity.

- [Ed] They bring them in and seat them there.

And the trial starts, the judge is there and the prosecutors are there.

- [Narrator] Do you still say that neither Hitler nor you knew of the policy to exterminate the Jews?

- [Translator] I already have said that not even approximately did I know to what degree this thing took place.

- [Ed] Some of them were pretty worked up, but they didn't think they should be there.

- What's interesting is how these men followed Hitler.

He didn't have PhDs.

He didn't have army service or a tremendous record in the army, he was an ordinary guy.

And yet he was able to convince these people.

Many of whom were far more educated than he, and far more experienced than he, he was able to command their attention and get them to follow him.

- [Ed] They had cells in the courthouse.

They were kept in the cells and they were brought into the courtroom every morning.

Well, they weren't powerful there.

But it was obvious what was going on and it was pretty obvious a conclusion was gonna come.

- Some of the innovations of Nuremberg, some of the like crimes against humanity, that's totally a new designation, correct?

- It's not as sufficient defense to say that you were just following orders.

A country's entire policies were on trial.

All sorts of people throughout the government were held responsible for the theory of that policy and the execution of that policy.

- There were 12 men who was sentenced to death.

One of whom was Martin Bormann, who was a chief Lieutenant of Hitler's, but he was never found.

- (indistinct) - A high ranking individual, very close to Hitler, but he committed suicide before he was to be hanged.

Hans Frank, the leader in Poland, who was just brutal.

These people were brutal.

All of them were because they had no sense of humanity.

(gentle piano music) And this is one of the great disturbing realities of the Holocaust.

The Holocaust was perpetrated by educated people who use their education in the service of murder and destruction.

- [Man] He did everything in a way of not keeping his promises.

He deceived the world, Germany and me.

- I was there probably about three months.

Our unit that we were attached to was going home.

And the person in charge came and said, look, you can stay here forever, but you have to sign up for a four year hitch or there wasn't any choice there.

I was waiting to go home.

- Nuremberg accomplishes great in the formation of a new kind of international law and a new kind of court system and so forth.

There had never been anything like an international tribunal before.

The primary thing was crimes against peace to prevent another war, to prevent Germany or any other country from launching a war.

And it was really the Americans who prepared the whole Nuremberg structure and they wanted to create laws that would be for good for justice.

- Neither of the statements of the defendants, nor the arguments of the defense, we're able to refute our grave accusations.

It has been impossible to cast doubt on events which actually took place.

The truth cannot be challenged.

That is the real meaning of this trial.

- What Nuremberg did really was a dramatic change and has continued to impact us 75 years later.

Nuremberg had an impact on finally creating the International Criminal Court in which there are now individual leaders being held accountable for crimes against humanity and being held responsible for the actions of their government, their army, their subordinate.

- And you're saying all that comes from Nuremberg?

- We were involved in something that was worldwide and it was so long ago.

I just wiped it out of my mind.

The war is over and I give up on it.

- [Narrator] Rudolf Hess, guilty of conspiracy and crimes against peace, life imprisonment.

Joachim von Ribbentrop, guilty of conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity, death by hanging.