Lessons of Nuremberg, 60 years on

Set up by the Allies at the end of the Second World War, the International War Crimes tribunal, headed by Robert Jackson, the United States Chief Justice, tried 22 Nazi leaders, including the deputy Fhrer, Rudolf Hess, the former foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and Hermann Goering.

The trials lasted more than a year and resulted in 12 death sentences. Goering, who founded the Gestapo and ordered the Holocaust programme to be established, was convicted but committed suicide.

Nuremberg was revolutionary in many respects, not least because of the advances it made in protecting the rights of the accused. "We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow," Jackson said at the opening session. "To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well."

Nuremberg was the first time that war crimes were tried before an international tribunal. It was clear from Jackson's approach that the Americans, in particular, hoped it would serve as a model for a future international justice system with a permanent criminal court to handle cases of genocide and crimes against humanity.

"Ironically, in the years that followed, the United States became the biggest force of resistance to the establishment of the International Criminal Court in The Hague," Uwe Wesel, a professor emeritus in civil law and the history of law at Berlin's Free University, said.

"At the time of the Nuremberg trials, the United Nations set up an international law commission, but this commission has had to deal with repeated stumbling blocks.

"The Cold War came, and the United States started to think twice about participating, because of the fear that Americans could also be tried for war crimes. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the US no longer had to fear being drawn into a war with the Soviet Union, they continued to hesitate."

Nevertheless, experts see in Nuremberg the roots for all subsequent human rights trials, from the trials of those accused of genocide in Rwanda to the prosecution of the former Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein.

Nuremberg exposed every heinous Nazi crime - from the shrinking of the heads of Poles hanged at Buchenwald to the searing testimony of guards who shoved 2,000 men, women and children a day into the Auschwitz gas chambers.

Richard Sonnenfeldt, a Jew forced to flee Germany in 1938, was the chief interpreter at Nuremberg. He described Goering as "half gangster and half militarist", but said he could not hate him. The other Nazi leaders were, he said, "just creatures ... who couldn't function without orders from a superior or subordinates to give orders to".