The expected roles were reversed in 1945: Churchill’s Britain wanted summary executions of the Nazi leadership, while Stalin’s Soviet Union demanded a trial to document 27 million dead and build a case for reparations. The United States wanted a legitimate process that would re-educate Germany and showcase Western justice. This episode follows the London Conference where the Nuremberg Charter was hammered out, the revolutionary shift to holding individuals rather than states responsible, the stripping away of sovereign immunity and superior orders defences, and the Soviet jurist Aron Trainin’s concept of crimes against peace that Justice Robert H. Jackson forced through by threatening to walk out.

We look hard at the compromises: the ex post facto problem, the deliberate tethering of crimes against humanity to aggressive war so that Jim Crow and the Great Terror stayed outside the court’s reach, and Murray Bernays’s securities-fraud-inspired conspiracy charge that connected bureaucrats to mass murder. The trial itself contrasted 4,600 captured documents with survivor testimony such as Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier’s account of Auschwitz and liberation footage that forced an adjournment. The defence blamed Hitler 12,000 times, exposed the Soviet lie about Katyn, and used Admiral Nimitz’s own testimony to spare Doenitz on submarine warfare. Twelve were hanged, three acquitted, and within a decade Cold War politics had quietly freed most of the rest.

• Why the British feared retroactive law and how Jackson’s hardball kept aggression as the supreme crime
• How the US and USSR colluded to limit crimes against humanity to protect their own domestic abuses
• The conspiracy charge borrowed from American fraud prosecutions
• Paper versus testimony: the Anglo-American document strategy and the French and Soviet human evidence
• The Katyn embarrassment, the Nimitz questionnaire, and the amnesties of the early 1950s