:focal(1285x1016:1286x1017)/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/d1/4e/d14ed238-3b62-4506-9f53-fc2178dade60/nov2025_d17_prologue.jpg)
In the fall of 1945, a bit more than six years after Nazi Germany invaded Poland and started the biggest and deadliest conflict in history, a largely self-taught lawyer from a tiny hamlet in the southwest corner of New York State set out to convict the surviving Nazi leadership of crimes “so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.”
In his roughly four-hour opening statement at the first Nuremberg trial, Robert H. Jackson, chief prosecutor for the United States, offered the first full public picture of how the Nazis had planned and carried out the many horrors that shock the world to this day, including the systematic murder of an estimated six million Jews.
The war in Europe had ended just six months earlier. But, as Jackson made clear to the International Military Tribunal, assembled to decide the fate of these higher-level Nazis, the Allies’ great victory would be incomplete without a legal reckoning suited to the scale of the offenses.
“The common sense of mankind demands that law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people,” he said, as 21 defendants, including Hermann Göring, commander in chief of the Luftwaffe, and Hans Frank, who had led the Nazi terror campaign in Poland, looked on from the dock.
“It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power and make deliberate and concerted use of it to set in motion evils which leave no home in the world untouched.” The veteran litigator told the French, British, Soviet and American judges hearing the case—and the grieving world—what was to come: “We will give you undeniable proofs of incredible events.”
It was, on occasion, used by presidents to rehearse important speeches such as the State of the Union address; and at other times, as a spot for visitors to dump their hats, bags and coats. But for more than 80 years, the White House movie theater was mostly a place where the first family and their guests went for entertainment.
Meta will lay off roughly 600 employees within its artificial intelligence unit as the company looks to reduce layers and operate more nimbly, a spokesperson confirmed to CNBC on Wednesday.
Israel, having banned the United Nations aid agency for Palestinian refugees from sending aid and staff to Gaza, is now taking unprecedented steps to de-register major nongovernmental aid groups for ideological reasons, according to several officials of humanitarian organizations.
Silver-lined clouds hung over the Yup’ik village of Kwigillingok the Thursday before a weekend storm was forecast to pass through.
Chess grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky has died at 29, the Charlotte Chess Center announced on Monday, Oct. 20.
Brooklyn-based writer and reporter Jasper Nathaniel was going through the Turmus Ayya olive fields in the West Bank when he captured the spine-chilling footage showing masked Israeli settlers beating Palestinian settlers senseless, armed with crude melee weapons.
