The Principle
The Nuremberg Trials (1945-1946) were the most consequential legal event of the 20th century and the founding moment of international criminal law. When Allied prosecutors charged Nazi leaders with "crimes against humanity" - a legal category that had no precise precedent in positive international law - they were implicitly appealing to a standard of human dignity that transcended state law: the claim that certain acts are criminal regardless of whether the perpetrators' domestic law permitted or required them. This claim rests on a philosophical foundation whose most robust historical source is the biblical doctrine of the imago Dei - the teaching that every human being, created in God's image, possesses an inherent dignity that no state can legitimately destroy.
Biblical Foundation
Genesis 1:26-27 - "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them" - is the theological source of the dignity claim that the Nuremberg indictment implicitly invoked. If human beings bear the divine image, their murder, enslavement, deportation, and extermination is not merely politically inconvenient or militarily counterproductive but a violation of a sacred order built into creation. Genesis 9:6 - "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man" - establishes the corollary: precisely because the imago Dei makes human life sacred, its unjust taking demands legal accountability. Amos 1:3-2:3 records God indicting the nations - not Israel alone - for war crimes: "For three transgressions of Damascus, and for four, I will not turn away the punishment thereof; because they have threshed Gilead with threshing instruments of iron." The scope of divine moral accountability extends to all nations, a claim that the Nuremberg prosecutors were in effect translating into positive international law.
Historical Transmission
The concept of crimes against humanity had been developing in international legal thought since at least the 1907 Hague Conventions, which codified the "laws of humanity" as a reference standard in warfare. The term appeared in Allied condemnations of Ottoman atrocities against Armenians in 1915. But it was the Nuremberg Charter (1945) that gave it legal definition and force: Article 6(c) defined crimes against humanity as "murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population... whether or not in violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated." Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson's opening statement grounded the prosecution's claim in natural law: the defendants had violated principles accessible to all human reason that transcended positive law. This natural law appeal drew on the Grotian-Thomistic tradition whose biblical roots are documented throughout this project. Jacques Maritain, the Thomist philosopher whose framework shaped the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) that followed Nuremberg, explicitly grounded human dignity in the imago Dei.
Modern Application
Nuremberg established the foundation for the entire subsequent development of international criminal law: the Genocide Convention (1948), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), the establishment of the ad hoc tribunals for Yugoslavia (1993) and Rwanda (1994), and finally the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (1998). Each of these instruments builds on the Nuremberg premise that human beings possess an inherent dignity whose violation is criminal under international law regardless of what domestic law permits. The imago Dei doctrine, translated into the philosophical language of natural law and human dignity by the Thomistic tradition, provided the metaphysical foundation for this claim - a foundation that purely positivist legal theory cannot supply, because positivism can only say that states have agreed to treat these acts as crimes, not that they are intrinsically criminal.
Scholarly Debate
Scholars debate whether the Nuremberg trials were legitimate law or victors' justice. Hans Kelsen argued that the trials violated the principle of nullum crimen sine lege (no crime without prior law) because "crimes against humanity" had not been defined in prior positive international law. The response - that natural law and customary international law provided sufficient prior notice - engages the deeper question of whether international law can have a moral foundation independent of state consent. Michael Marrus's The Nuremberg War Crimes Trial and Telford Taylor's The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials provide historical accounts. For theology and law, the most important question is whether the imago Dei can continue to provide the metaphysical grounding for human rights law in a post-theistic world, or whether human dignity claims require a different foundation. John Tasioulas and others have argued that human dignity remains a viable secular concept; critics including John Rist argue that without its theological foundation in the imago Dei, human dignity is a philosophical orphan.