It was in Nuremberg, officially designated as the "City of the Reich Party Rallies," in the province of Bavaria, where Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party in 1935 changed the status of German Jews to that of Jews in Germany, thus "legally" establishing the framework that eventually led to the Holocaust.
Ten years later, it would also be in Nuremberg, now nearly destroyed by British and American heavy bombing, where surviving prominent Nazi leaders were put on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The war in Europe ended in May 1945, and soon the attention of the Allies turned to prosecuting those Third Reich leaders who had been responsible for, among other things, the persecution of the Jews and the Holocaust.
The trials began November 20, 1945, in Nuremberg's Palace of Justice, which had somehow survived the intense Allied bombings of 1944 and 1945.
The next day, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, named by President Harry S. Truman as the U.S. chief counsel for the prosecution of Axis criminality, made his opening statement to the International Military Tribunal.
"The most serious actions against Jews were outside of any law, but the law itself was employed to some extent. They were the infamous Nuremberg decrees of September 15, 1935," Jackson said.
The so-called "Nuremberg Laws"— a crucial step in Nazi racial laws that led to the marginalization of German Jews and ultimately to their segregation, confinement, and extermination—were key pieces of evidence in the trials, which resulted in 12 death sentences and life or long sentences for other Third Reich leaders.
But the prosecution was forced to use images of the laws from the official printed version, for the original copies were nowhere to be found.
However, they had been found earlier, by U.S. counter-intelligence troops, who passed them up the line until they came to the Third Army's commander, Gen. George S. Patton, Jr. The general took them home to California. There, they remained for decades, their existence not revealed until 1999.
Finally, this past summer, the original copies of the laws, signed by Hitler and other Nazi leaders, were transferred to the National Archives.
The Northwest Ordinance was an act passed by Congress in 1787 that provided rules for governing the Northwest Territory, land north of the Ohio River and west of the Alleghenies.
The soil was held together by grass roots. It was called sod. Settlers were called sodbusters because they had to break through the sod to plant crops. There was not a lot of wood, so settlers used sod to build homes.
