On the question of the legal basis of authority Nuremberg military tribunal
The article raises one of the key legal issues related to the results of the Second World War. The absence of laws expressly providing for the acts imputed to the defendants allowed them to build a line of defense around the principle of nullum crimen. The authors show the logic and reasoning of the accusation. They relied, firstly, on the contractual nature of international law, in which the norms are not laws adopted by the authorized body, but principles recognized by the world community. One of these principles, which had already taken root by the end of the 1920s, was the recognition of war as an international crime requiring criminal prosecution. Secondly, it was argued that the Wehrmacht and the Nazis at the front and in the occupied territories committed crimes provided for by the criminal legislation of any civilized country - murder, torture, sexual crimes, seizure of property, illegal imprisonment, the use of slave labor, etc. Specific perpetrators were subject to responsibility for these crimes at the place of commission - for example, the Kharkov, Krasnodar, Velikoluksky, Leningrad and other processes are widely known. The leaders of the Reich were seen as the creators and leaders of an unprecedented organized criminal community, as persons whose criminal activity is not associated with a specific geographic location, and therefore it is more appropriate to be tried by an international court. The applied not quite usual procedure of bringing to responsibility seems to be a purely technical measure, which made it possible in a relatively short time to consider a criminal case of unprecedented scale. Formulating and proving accusations according to the traditional scheme (for each episode - motive, purpose, form of guilt, method of committing, causal relationship, amount of damage, etc.) was theoretically possible, but would probably continue to this day.