Nuremberg's Geopolitical Significance in Contemporary International Law and European Security Architecture -Part I

Executive Summary

Nuremberg's transformation from medieval commercial nexus to twentieth-century symbol of retributive justice and contemporary nexus for European security strategization constitutes one of history's most consequential urban trajectories.

The city represents both historical reckoning and forward-looking institutional innovation.

As host to Enforce Tac 2026, an international defence and security conference convened under the patronage of German Federal Chancellor Friedrich Merz, Nuremberg reasserts its position as the epicenter for multilateral security dialogue among NATO, European Union, and allied constituencies.

Simultaneously, the institutionalization of the Nuremberg Principles through the International Nuremberg Principles Academy and jurisprudential lineage extending to the International Criminal Court establishes the city as the normative foundation for contemporary international criminal accountability.

Introduction

Nuremberg occupies a distinctive position in contemporary geopolitics, functioning simultaneously as historical testimony, legal precedent, and operational platform for European security coordination.

The city's significance derives neither from demographic magnitude nor economic dominance, but rather from its accumulation of historical and normative authority.

To analyze Nuremberg's geopolitical weight requires engagement with four interconnected dimensions: its historical geography as a trade and political nexus, its role as venue for the prosecution of Nazi leadership and the codification of international criminal law, its institutionalization through the International Nuremberg Principles Academy, and its current function as host to Enforce Tac 2026, a gathering that reframes European security as a question of comprehensive, networked resilience rather than strictly military deterrence.

Historical Evolution and Geographic Significance

Nuremberg's historical emergence as a regional power cannot be divorced from its geographic positioning. Located in Bavaria's Middle Franconia administrative region, the city sits at the nexus of multiple transportation and commercial networks.

The Pegnitz River connects via the Regnitz to the Main River, which flows into the Rhine. The contemporaneous Rhine-Main-Danube Canal extends the city's connectivity southward to the Black Sea and northward to the North Sea, rendering Nuremberg a nodal point in continental transportation infrastructure.

This positioning catalyzed mercantile concentration from the medieval period onward. The 1050 CE documentary record first mentions Nuremberg as the site of an imperial castle positioned at the boundary between East Francia and the Margraviate of the Nordgau.

By 1219, Emperor Frederick II granted the city Imperial immediacy, coinage rights, and autonomous customs authority. Nuremberg subsequently became, alongside Augsburg, one of two great trade centers on the Rome-to-Flanders axis, attracting merchants in textiles, metals, and artisanal goods.

The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries witnessed further cultural and intellectual efflorescence, with the city serving as home to Albrecht Dürer and location of Martin Behaim's construction of the world's earliest surviving terrestrial globe.

The Industrial Revolution substantially augmented the city's economic importance; by the nineteenth century, Nuremberg functioned as the industrial heart of Bavaria, with Siemens and MAN establishing major facilities.

This capacity for sustained relevance across multiple historical periods—from medieval trade to industrial modernity to contemporary security dialogue—constitutes a defining characteristic.

The Nuremberg Trials and the Institutionalization of International Criminal Law

The post-1945 trajectory fundamentally transformed Nuremberg's historical identity.

Between November 20, 1945, and October 1, 1946, the International Military Tribunal convicted 22 senior Nazi leaders on charges of crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, establishing unprecedented juridical ground.

The trials did not merely adjudicate criminal culpability; they codified principles that restructured international law itself.

The London Charter and the tribunal's judgment established that individuals, rather than abstract state entities, bear direct responsibility under international law. This relocates accountability from sovereigns to persons acting through state machinery.

The tribunal rejected superior orders as a complete defense, establishing that moral agency persists within hierarchical state structures. Individual rank, official capacity, and governmental authorization ceased to function as protective barriers against international prosecution.

These principles were neither merely retroactive impositions nor victor's justice formalities; the tribunal's reasoning grounded itself in antecedent international conventions, customary practices, and the inherent rights of civilized nations to criminalize systematic atrocity.

The United Nations General Assembly unanimously adopted the Nuremberg Principles in its first session of December 11, 1946, a gesture that transposed the tribunal's singular context into a universally binding legal framework.

Four years thereafter, the International Law Commission formulated seven principles applicable to all future efforts to code crimes against peace and security of mankind.

This transformation converted an exceptional tribunal into normative scaffolding for all subsequent international criminal adjudication.

The Institutional Codification

The International Nuremberg Principles Academy and Modern Application

The establishment of the International Nuremberg Principles Academy represents the institutionalization of Nuremberg's normative legacy within the city itself.

Established by the Federal Republic of Germany, the Free State of Bavaria, and the City of Nuremberg, the Academy functions as a specialized center advancing international criminal law, human rights jurisprudence, and capacity-building for practitioners.

The Academy convenes the Nuremberg Forum biannually to examine developments in international criminal law across eighty years of evolution.

The 2025 iteration examined the persistence of the Nuremberg Principles amid contemporary geopolitical contestation of multilateralism and international law.

The principles that emerged from Nazi prosecution have become the doctrinal foundation for the International Criminal Court, which explicitly incorporates Nuremberg's innovations—individual accountability, rejection of superior orders, and affirmation of civilian protection—into its Rome Statute framework.

The ICC's jurisdiction over genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes represents direct lineage to Nuremberg's conceptual architecture.

The Court's application to contemporary conflicts, including those in the Balkans, Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo, and ongoing investigations regarding Ukraine and Palestine, demonstrates the continued operationalization of Nuremberg-derived principles across distinct geopolitical contexts.

Enforce Tac 2026 and Contemporary European Security Architecture

Nuremberg's function as nexus for contemporary European security emerged explicitly in February 2026 with Enforce Tac, convened under the explicit patronage of Federal Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

The trade fair, occupying over 60,000 square meters across eight exhibition halls, congregates more than 1,000 exhibitors from over 50 nations and 19,000 professional attendees representing governments, military establishments, law enforcement, and security industry participants.

The thematic organization—"Networked Security"—reframes European security as an integrative challenge requiring coordination across internal affairs, external defence, cyber domain, and critical infrastructure resilience.

The event's patronage by the Federal Chancellor signals Germany's strategic repositioning within Europe, emphasizing coordinated security architecture as fundamental to continental stability.

The gathering's composition—EU, NATO, and allied partner state delegations—reflects a consensus that European security cannot be managed through traditional bilateral arrangements or sphere-of-influence delineations. Rather, hybrid threats, cyberattacks, and asymmetric challenges necessitate integrated governmental, corporate, and societal mobilization.

The German-Nordic Defence Industry Dialogue convened alongside Enforce Tac exemplifies this integrative approach, bringing together defence industrial capability with governmental strategy to accelerate technological development and supply-chain resilience.

The event's location in Nuremberg carries deliberately layered historical resonance—the city that bore witness to accountability for systemic atrocity now serves as platform for constructing resilience against future threats.

Cause-and-Effect Analysis

Historical Trajectory and Geopolitical Function

Nuremberg's contemporary geopolitical significance emerges directly from the causal sequence initiated by the trials themselves.

The tribunal's establishment of individual accountability mechanisms created legal precedent that constrained state conduct and elevated human rights into the structural architecture of international law.

This elevation of accountability norms subsequently produced institutional consequences: the creation of ad hoc tribunals for Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Lebanon; the establishment of the International Criminal Court; the diffusion of Nuremberg principles into domestic legal systems across the globe.

Contemporary geopolitical actors now operate within a normative environment wherein systematic atrocity generates legal liability regardless of sovereign claims.

This has produced deterrent effects upon certain categories of conduct while simultaneously generating contestation, particularly from states that perceive international criminal law as weaponized against their interests.

The renewal of geopolitical competition between great powers has correspondingly generated renewed contestation of the multilateral order that Nuremberg helped establish.

Yet the principles themselves remain operative: investigations into conduct in Ukraine, Syria, and the Israel-Palestine context all invoke Nuremberg-derived frameworks, indicating the penetration of these norms into contemporary consciousness despite geopolitical fracture.

The Nazi and the Psychiatrist

Psychological Dimensions of Systemic Evil

The publication of Jack El-Hai's The Nazi and the Psychiatrist (2013) illuminated a dimension of Nuremberg's significance that extends beyond juridical and institutional analysis into the psychology of atrocity perpetration.

El-Hai's work examines the interactions between Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, an ambitious American army psychiatrist, and Hermann Göring, the Reichsmarschall and highest-ranking Nazi captive.

Kelley endeavored to identify psychological abnormalities that might distinguish Nazi leadership from ordinary humanity. He administered Rorschach inkblot tests and conducted extensive interviews with 22 principal defendants.

Kelley's conclusions proved unsettling to postwar audiences.

Rather than identifying a distinctive Nazi personality type or cluster of personality disorders, Kelley determined that the defendants exhibited normal psychological profiles, average to above-average intelligence, and personalities "which could be duplicated in any country of the world today."

Kelley characterized them as possessing three commonplace characteristics: unbridled ambition, weak ethical frameworks, and excessive nationalism capable of justifying nearly any action.

This finding—that ordinary persons become perpetrators of extraordinary evil when institutional frameworks permit—carries profound implications. It suggests that atrocity emerges not from abnormal psychology but from the alignment of ordinary human motivation with permissive institutional structures and ideological justification.

Göring himself confessed to Kelley that his primary motivation had been singular: achievement of supreme command of the Third Reich. Other Nazis similarly articulated rationalized justifications for conduct that violated international law and fundamental human decency.

Kelley's methodology and conclusions paralleled those of his competitor, psychologist Gustave M. Gilbert, though their interpretive frames diverged. Gilbert concluded that the Nazi defendants exhibited psychiatric pathology.

Kelley, by contrast, concluded that no pathology distinguished them—that they represented ordinary humans operating within extraordinary circumstances. Kelley's thesis proved psychologically traumatic to himself.

Increasingly alcoholic and troubled by his recognition of latent "Nazi" impulses within himself and his society, Kelley died by suicide on January 1, 1958, employing the identical mechanism—cyanide—that Göring had utilized in October 1946.

This parallel, separated by twelve years and crossing from perpetrator to observer, illustrates the psychological hazards inherent in extended proximity to systematic evil, even in the context of professional distance and apparent rational analysis.

Future Directions and Continued Contestation

Nuremberg's significance in contemporary geopolitics faces renewed contestation amid great power competition and the selective prosecution evident in international criminal law.

Critics note that the ICC's docket disproportionately reflects African cases and investigations of peripheral powers, whereas investigations of conduct by permanent Security Council members remain limited or absent.

The question of accountability for Allied conduct during the Second World War—the bombing of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki—remains normatively unresolved, illustrating the asymmetry inherent in victor's justice transformed into universal principle.

Contemporary geopolitical tensions have produced renewed challenges to multilateral order, with states questioning the legitimacy of international courts and the principles they embody.

Yet the 2025 Nuremberg Forum demonstrated sustained commitment to advancing international criminal law despite these contestations.

The forum participants acknowledged that accountability mechanisms remain necessary for international peace, even as they confronted the practical reality that selective application and geopolitical power dynamics constrain their universality.

Enforcement Tac 2026 and the patronage of Federal Chancellor Merz signal Germany's sustained commitment to international legal frameworks and multilateral security coordination, positioning Nuremberg as platform for reconstructing Europe's security architecture in response to contemporary threats.

Conclusion

Nuremberg occupies a distinctive and irreplaceable position in contemporary geopolitics, functioning simultaneously as historical archive, legal foundation, institutional platform, and operational nexus for European security coordination.

The city's transformation from medieval trade center to Nazi rally site to international tribunal location to contemporary security conference venue illustrates the capacity of geographic position and historical event to accumulate normative significance across centuries.

The Nuremberg Principles, codified from the trials and operationalized through the International Criminal Court, remain foundational to international law despite renewed contestation.

The psychological insights generated by Kelley's examination of Nazi leadership—that atrocity emerges from ordinary human motivation within permissive institutions rather than from abnormal psychology—carries implications that extend far beyond historical inquiry.

Enforce Tac 2026 demonstrates that contemporary European security coordination recognizes Nuremberg's historical significance and seeks to operationalize the principles of accountability and multilateral cooperation that the city symbolizes.

The city's role in shaping European security architecture reflects broader recognition that sustainable international order requires institutional mechanisms of accountability, normative frameworks constraining state conduct, and platforms for multilateral dialogue. Nuremberg's geopolitical significance thus derives not from traditional measures of power but from its capacity to embody and institutionalize principles that transcend any single state's interests.

Key Notes on The Nazi and the Psychiatrist

The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Hermann Göring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and a Fatal Meeting of Minds at the End of WWII, authored by Jack El-Hai and published in 2013, provides comprehensive examination of the psychological evaluations conducted at Nuremberg through the lens of the relationship between U.S. Army psychiatrist Douglas M. Kelley and Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring.

The work draws upon Kelley's long-hidden personal papers and medical records, previously unavailable to scholarly examination, to construct a narrative of professional ambition, psychological discovery, and personal deterioration.

Kelley's Background and Methodology

Douglas M. Kelley possessed impeccable credentials as a psychiatrist.

Born in Truckee, California, in the Sierra Nevada mountains, Kelley rose rapidly through psychiatry's professional ranks, achieving directorship of the San Francisco County Psychopathic Hospital by age 30. His service in the European landscape during World War II positioned him as chief psychiatrist for the 30th General Hospital.

When the Allies organized trials for Nazi leadership, Kelley's ambition, intellectual capabilities, and burning curiosity secured his assignment as psychiatrist responsible for evaluating the defendants' mental fitness for trial.

Kelley's official mandate involved tending to medical requirements and assessing psychological competency. His actual ambition extended considerably further: to identify a psychological marker, a distinguishing trait that would reveal Nazi leaders as fundamentally different from ordinary humanity.

Kelley administered Rorschach inkblot testing to approximately 21 of the 23 principal defendants, supplemented by extensive one-on-one interviews conducted over approximately six months. The interviews totaled hundreds of hours of direct interaction, with particular emphasis upon Hermann Göring.

Göring's Psychological Profile and Kelley's Assessments

Hermann Göring presented himself as an unusual subject for psychiatric examination. The Reichsmarschall—Hitler's presumed successor—arrived at the detention facility dragging 49 suitcases containing gem-encrusted jewelry, gold cigarette cases, precious watches, and approximately 20,000 paracodeine pills.

Göring possessed a well-documented history of opioid dependency, dating to morphine use in the 1920s. Despite this, Göring maintained considerable charm and intelligence, engaging Kelley in extensive discussions regarding German politics, war strategy, and the likely outcome of his trial. Kelley noted in his assessments that Göring displayed narcissistic fixation upon his physical prowess, emotional volatility, and remarkable cynicism regarding his responsibility for atrocities.

In intimate conversations conducted in Göring's cell, the Reichsmarschall confessed to Kelley his fundamental motivation: singular driving ambition to achieve supreme command of the Third Reich. Regarding alleged war crimes, Göring insisted he had undertaken them to advance German national destiny, though in candid moments he reduced the justification to naked ambition and self-preservation. Kelley described Göring as filled with mystic fatalism, convinced that he would ultimately face execution, yet planning a vigorous courtroom defense.

Remarkably, in a letter to Kelley's wife, Göring suggested that if both men failed to survive the postwar period, his daughter should be placed in Kelley's care—a gesture indicating a degree of personal trust or manipulation extraordinarily unusual between custodian and captive accused of crimes against humanity.

Kelley's Central Finding

The Absence of Psychological Abnormality

The most controversial and psychologically significant finding from Kelley's examination was precisely that no psychological abnormality distinguished Nazi leadership. The defendants exhibited average to above-average intelligence. Their Rorschach results fell within normal parameters.

Their psychiatric profiles revealed no identifiable personality disorder cluster characteristic of Nazi perpetrators. Instead, Kelley concluded that the defendants possessed three common characteristics: unbridled ambition, weak ethical standards, and strongly developed nationalism capable of justifying any action conducted in the name of national interest.

Kelley further noted that these three characteristics were unremarkable. They could be identified among ordinary people in any nation.

Given the institutional context that permitted and valorized such characteristics—the Nazi state structure with its hierarchical command authority and ideological justification for territorial expansion—such ordinary people became perpetrators of extraordinary evil.

Kelley articulated this conclusion with disturbing clarity: the Nazi leaders could be replicated in any country of the world. They were not monsters or clinically insane. They were ordinary humans with ambition, ethical flexibility, and patriotic intensity, provided opportunity and institutional permission to exercise power without restraint.

Comparative Perspective: Kelley and Gilbert

Kelley's assessments competed for authority with those of Gustave M. Gilbert, a psychologist also assigned to evaluate the defendants.

The two professionals viewed each other with professional wariness, and their conclusions diverged markedly.

Gilbert concluded that the Nazi defendants exhibited psychiatric pathology. He characterized Julius Streicher, for instance, as paranoid with apathetic obsessive qualities.

Kelley, examining the same individual, concluded that Streicher exhibited normal psychological functioning combined with a systemized series of beliefs founded upon emotion and prejudice rather than factual reality.

Gilbert's thesis—that the Nazis represented a psychiatrically disordered cohort—proved more palatable to postwar audiences.

The public had endured years of horrific war and wanted reassurance that the perpetrators of such horror were fundamentally abnormal, that they represented a pathological deviation from normal human psychology.

Kelley's contrary conclusion—that ordinary people become perpetrators when institutional conditions permit—offered no such reassurance.

Yet Kelley's findings aligned more closely with the evidence: the Rorschach results yielded no distinguishing profile, and the defendants' intelligence and rational articulation of their motivation contradicted claims of psychiatric abnormality.

Kelley's book, Twenty-Two Cells in Nuremberg, published in 1947, received considerably less popular attention than Gilbert's subsequent work.

Kelley himself recognized this disparity and attributed it to his unwelcome message: that Nazi evil emerged not from abnormal psychology but from the alignment of ordinary human characteristics with permissive institutional structures.

Kelley's Postwar Deterioration and Suicide

Kelley returned to the United States following the trials, published his findings, and became a public intellectual addressing the nature of evil and the psychological characteristics of authoritarian personalities.

He advocated for psychiatric examination of political candidates to prevent future Nazis from reaching power. He warned Americans about the presence of Nazi-like individuals within their own society, directing particular attention toward southern segregationists.

He recognized that the danger posed by Nazi-like personalities was not uniquely German but rather a universal human risk. Yet the recognition of this dark potential within humanity—and perhaps within himself—took psychological toll.

Kelley experienced increasing professional obsession, alcoholism, and emotional difficulty. His marriage deteriorated amid financial and psychological stress. He became increasingly angry and withdrawn.

On January 1, 1958, exactly twelve years after Göring's suicide in October 1946, Kelley committed suicide by ingesting cyanide powder, employing the identical method that Göring had utilized.

The parallel death—perpetrator and observer, separated by a dozen years, both choosing cyanide—carries profound symbolic resonance.

It suggests that extended proximity to systematic evil, even within a professional and purportedly objective context, exacts psychological cost.

Kelley had sought to understand evil rationally; he discovered instead that his understanding generated recognition of evil's banality and his own vulnerability to the same human impulses that had produced Nazi atrocity.

Whether the psychological burden of this recognition contributed to his eventual suicide remains unknowable, but the parallel is inescapable.

Implications for Understanding Systemic Evil

El-Hai's reconstruction of Kelley's work and life yields implications extending far beyond historical curiosity about Nuremberg.

If Nazi leadership represented ordinary humans with unremarkable psychological characteristics, then the danger of systematic atrocity lies not in identifying and eliminating aberrant individuals but in constraining institutional structures and ideological frameworks that permit ordinary humans to exercise power without restraint.

This perspective aligns with contemporary social psychology research demonstrating that ordinary people, placed in situations granting authority without accountability, exhibit tendencies toward coercion and abuse (as illustrated in the Stanford Prison Experiment and Milgram obedience studies).

It suggests that sustainable defense against atrocity requires institutional mechanisms of accountability, ethical restraints upon power exercise, and explicit normative frameworks rejecting the equivalence between national interest and unrestricted state action.

The Nuremberg Trials and the principles they established—individual accountability, rejection of superior orders, affirmation of civilian protection—represent precisely such institutional and normative constraints.

Yet the sustainability of such constraints depends upon continued vigilance and resistance to ideologies claiming that national interest justifies any action.

Kelley's insight—that evil emerges from ordinary humans acting within permissive institutions—carries implications for contemporary governance that remain urgent and largely unheeded.