“When I got back, Jackson’s group had been going for about a month. This was in Washington, in the Pentagon building. Jackson himself was not there - he was gone trying to gather evidence, and he initially thought that he would get all he needed from the Army and the Air Force and the Department of State. But as things worked out, there was very little such evidence over here, and I knew that. I had been working in intelligence, and although I knew nothing about the war crimes, I knew where the evidence was likely to be. I knew where the interrogations of captured officers had gone on, and what they learned from airplane reconnaissance. And I knew that these would also be the sources of evidence for the German crimes...

The decision to have the trial in Nuremberg was made in July. A lot of people think it was put in Nuremberg because of the Nuremberg laws, but that wasn’t it. The reason was because Nuremberg was the only place where we could find a prison and a courthouse that was usable. Even that courthouse had been damaged some and took a great deal of making over, but it was usable. There was a very good courthouse there called the “Palace of Justice.” There was also a very usable prison, one right up against the other.”

Holocaust Testimony (HVT 1777)
Fortunoff Video Archive
for Holocaust Testimonies
Yale University Library 

Telford Taylor is author of The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir. New York: Knopf, 1992.