NUREMBERG: The German city of Nuremberg was associated like no other with the Nazis. It was here that they created the main race laws against Jews and where their enormous party rallies took place.

But once World War II was over, the southern city was also where the Allies decided to put on trial the Fuehrer's surviving henchmen, an event marked at the weekend, exactly 65 years on, with the opening of a new exhibit.

“Better late than never,” Hans-Christian Taeubrich, the head of a documentation centre opened in 2001 on the site of the immense Nazi rally grounds and a co-organiser of the new exhibit, told AFP.

The new exhibit is located in the attic above courtroom 600 where 21 top Nazis including Hermann Goering and Rudolf Hess went on trial on November 20, 1945, in full view of the world's, and Germany's, media.

The courtroom is still in use but when not, members of the public can still enter, and visitors to the new exhibit can peek through small windows and see where the historic events of 1945-6 unfolded.

Courtroom 600 was later renovated, but the wood-panelled walls remain, and organisers of the new exhibit were able to track down the actual part of the dock where Goering sat and was sentenced to death on October 1, 1946.

“For decades this was just in the cellar here,” curator Henrike Zentgraf told AFP. “But apart from this, very little is left of the original furnishings. Most of the benches probably ended up in someone's stove.”

It also features contemporary newsreel, newspaper and magazine coverage including a double spread from Life magazine in October 1946 with photos of the bodies of 11 of the 12 defendants sentenced to death by the court.

“This photo series was done in order to nip in the bud any rumours that they were still alive, although they were not widely published,” Zentgraf said.

The morbid snapshots include Goering, one leering eye still open. Hitler's overweight designated successor cheated the gallows by swallowing cyanide in his cell hours before his date with the hangman.

From the attic, there is a view of the adjacent prison, much of which has since been knocked down, where the notorious defendants were held. The small gymnasium where the executions took place is also no more.

Others hanged included Joachim von Ribbentrop, foreign minister, and Hans Frank, governor general of occupied Poland. Three defendants were acquitted and seven given jail sentences, including Albert Speer, Hitler's architect.

Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy who parachuted into Scotland to offer Britain peace in 1941, was sentenced to life behind bars. He committed suicide in Spandau prison in West Berlin in 1987, aged 93, the jail's only inmate.

Nuremberg's rally grounds museum has attracted more than 1.5 million people.

Together with a sharp increase in visitors making the pilgrimage to courtroom 600, many from outside Germany, this persuaded authorities to create something else.

“We started tours to the courtroom in 2000. There were 3,000 (people) in the first year but most recently there were 35,000,” Taeubrich recalled. “And this attic was the only free space.”

'End for impunity'

The Allies, including initially Churchill, were tempted by summary executions but it was finally decided to do things by the book.

“That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason,” US chief prosecutor Robert Jackson said in his opening remarks.

The trial was presided over by four judges from the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and France, and lasted 218 days. All defendants had a lawyer.

Using simultaneous interpretation for the first time ever in a courtroom, 236 witnesses were called, and 5,330 documents and 200,000 affidavits were brought before the court, as well as film footage of concentration camps.

Sixty-five years on, the new exhibit focuses on the trials' legacy — helping other countries recovering from conflicts such as the former Yugoslavia and Sierra Leone.

Nuremberg also inspired the International Criminal Court, the world's only independent, permanent tribunal to try genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, which started operating in The Hague in 2002.

The United States, however, which was the driving force in making Nuremberg free and fair, does not support the ICC, together with fellow permanent UN Security Council members Russia and China.

The new exhibit has the Nuremberg Principles, defining for the first time what constituted a war crime, painted on the wall.

“It was so clear that they were guilty but still they had a trial,” said Juliana Rangel, head of the library and documentation division at the UN's International Court of Justice (ICJ).

“It was so well done, with the respect of the defendants' rights. It was very important, it was a landmark. It was the beginning of the end for impunity,” she told AFP.