From the pages of the South China Morning Post this week in 1945
The Nuremberg trials opened with 20 of the men primarily responsible for leading Nazi Germany through 12 years of tyranny and war disaster sitting on wooden benches at the Nuremberg Court House listening to the reading of the 30,000-word indictment drawn up against them by legal experts of the Allied nations.
There were no sensations on the first day of the long-awaited trial and the 240 international journalists present concentrated on the reaction of the German leaders to being in the dock - and even then there was little to report - as the reading of the indictment droned on in three languages.
Mr Justice Robert Jackson, chief United States prosecutor, opened the prosecution case against the leading Nazis with a vigorous 61-page address outlining the history of Nazism and its leaders.
'The real complaining party at our Bar is civilisation,' he said. 'In the prisoners' dock sit 20 broken men. No charity can disguise the fact that the forces which these defendants represent are the most sinister forces in society - dictatorship and oppression, malevolence and passion, militarism and lawlessness.'
An American prosecutor testified about how the 'conspirators' acquired and consolidated control in Germany by making schools the tools of the Nazi system and 'instruments for the teaching of Nazi doctrines'.
