The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, Germany, conducted the first major international criminal trial, setting precedents for the admissibility of evidence in proceedings against Nazi war criminals. The tribunal rejected evidence obtained through torture, required corroboration of testimony, and established that documentary evidence — Nazi records, orders, and communications — could be the primary basis for criminal conviction. These evidentiary standards influenced the development of international criminal law and were embedded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.

The Nuremberg trials and the documentary evidence of Nazi atrocities they brought to public consciousness had an enormous influence on post-war European and world literature. Poets including Paul Celan, Primo Levi, and Bertolt Brecht grappled with the relationship between recorded evidence and unspeakable horror. The idea that the archive itself — the bureaucratic record — could be criminal evidence transformed literary engagements with history, testimony, and the ethics of documentation.