The trial would be “the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world,” U.S. Chief Prosecutor Robert H. Jackson said as the proceedings began. “The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored.”

On Nov. 20, 1945 — 80 years ago last Thursday — more than 20 top Nazis who had survived the collapse of Adolf Hitler’s Germany were put on trial in the medieval but now bombed-out town of Nuremberg.

Some of the worst Nazis had already escaped justice. Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, his minister of propaganda, and Heinrich Himmler, who oversaw the Nazi project to exterminate Europe’s Jews, had killed themselves.

But other top Nazis were in custody, including Hermann Göring, t

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