Many critics of the Nuremberg Trial contend that the final judgment was a foregone conclusion before the proceedings began. Since the Allies were victorious, they held power over the vanquished, and any claim of justice being served was merely a mask for vengeance. Yet the Allies could have skipped a trial altogether, as British prime minister Winston Churchill and Soviet premier Joseph Stalin preferred, and simply executed the Nazis they held responsible for the war. In the end, however, the Allies recognized that all was not fair in the treatment of a vanquished enemy and that a trial would help highlight the difference between their governments and that of Germany, which had allowed no legal recourse for the millions of displaced or murdered civilians that the Nazis had deemed the scourge of the Reich.

Trials are never perfect, and the Nuremberg Trial...