In 1945, the British took part in the most extensive scheme of war crimes trials in history. It was a unique endeavour. The criminal prosecution of men and women of another nation, Germany, who had abused, killed, tormented uncountable numbers of human beings and who had sought to eradicate whole races and categories of peoples from existence, was lauded as a victory for rational and civilised behaviour. By bringing unimaginably cruel crimes before courts of law where the accused were treated with formal respect, where the evidence of their guilt was presented, where they were allowed to defend themselves and justify their actions or given the chance to establish their blamelessness, there was hope that a civilised humanity would reassert itself. It was the conquest of a system based on evil by a system founded on law. The fury unleashed by the discovery of atrocity after atrocity, of individual and collective brutality, of a concentration camp network whose purpose was the enslavement of the enemies of Nazi Germany and the deliberate extermination of peoples, was to be corralled by a legal process. Law was the cultured response and ‘Nuremberg’ the name that came to symbolise its form. And so a myth was born.