Publish Date: Dec. 10, 1945
Cover Story: Day of Judgment
How TIME Covered the News: Adolf Hitler may have been dead, but the trauma of the genocide he unleashed upon Europe still gripped the whole continent. The Allied powers rounded up numerous top Nazi officials responsible for enacting Hitler’s commands, including carrying out the horrors of the Holocaust. All told, 24 Third Reich leaders were put on the stand in Nuremberg, Germany, to answer for their crimes.
“The courtroom lights were dimmed for the first time since the trial started, and the defendants sat in semidarkness. Across a motion picture screen moved, in light and shadow, what veteran correspondents called the most terrible pictures of mass slaughter and torture they had ever seen. It was an endless stream of corpses—single corpses and small mountains of them, corpses lying still and corpses being carted away by bulldozers, corpses shrunk by starvation and corpses battered by boots or clubs, staring corpses and corpses which, miraculously, had still some life left in them and feebly moved about before the camera.”