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 Cro ...