Courtroom 600 of the monumental Nuremberg Palace of Justice is disconcerting at first glance. It is smaller than the visitor imagines upon opening the door. The furnishings are different from those that existed during the trial of the Nazi leadership at the end of World War II, 80 years ago.

Ordinary trials continued to be held here until five years ago, and the room retains the bland, functional air of a German regional court. It feels like a place that’s still under construction, much like the idea that was born in this very room between November 20, 1945, and October 1, 1946.

In an era of wars and massacres with impunity, from Ukraine to the Middle East, passing through Sudan and other parts of the planet, the edifice of international justice that was born in Nuremberg is showing severe cracks.

“If the people who have suffered horror in Ukraine, in Sudan, in Israel on October 7, and in Gaza, in Palestine, ask themselves what international law has done for them, they will answer that it hasn’t done much,” says jurist and writer Philippe Sands by telephone. Nuremberg and what followed from that trial “has not been able to prevent horrors in our time,” he adds.

But Sands cautions that the idea of international criminal justice is, from a historical perspective, very recent: “It’s a system that’s still in its infancy.” It has a long way to go.

Eight decades ago, in Nuremberg, for the first time, the highest-ranking officials of a state sat in the dock of an international tribunal, 21 men associated with the most horrific crimes of the 20th century. Among them were the highest-ranking living Nazi leader, Hermann Göring (Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler had already died by suicide); the minister and architect Albert Speer; the Nazi chief Rudolf Hess; the diplomat Joachim von Ribbentrop; Hans Frank, jurist, governor of Poland, and perpetrator of the Holocaust; ideologues such as Alfred Rosenberg and Julius Streicher; and military officers such as General Keitel and Admiral Dönitz.

The United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and France organized the tribunal to judge crimes “so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive if they are repeated.” These are the words, in his opening statement, of the U.S. chief prosecutor, Robert H. Jackson, who added: “That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.”

Nuremberg was to try three types of crimes: crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. It ended with three acquittals, seven sentences of life imprisonment or long prison terms, and 13 death sentences.

Thus was born what Gurgen Petrossian, a jurist at the International Academy of Nuremberg Principles, calls the Nuremberg Idea, which is as follows: “When a person commits an international crime — whether it be genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, or crimes of aggression — that person must be held accountable. And this means that, regardless of who committed the crime, when, or where, the fate of these individuals is sealed: it is only a matter of time before they appear before a tribunal.”

After the convictions of the Nazi leaders, 12 more trials were held in Nuremberg, until 1949. A year earlier, the U.N. had adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

Then, beginning in the late 1950s, national trials took place in Germany, helping the country — without being forced by the victors — to confront its responsibility for the murder of six million Jews. Trials such as those of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961 and Klaus Barbie in Lyon in 1987 were held. But the idea of international justice went into hibernation. It wasn’t until the 1990s, with the massacres in the Balkans and Rwanda, that the International Criminal Tribunals in The Hague and Arusha were established.

It was the golden age of the Nuremberg Idea. “We were very optimistic,” notes French historian Annette Wieviorka, author of The Nuremberg Trials, referring to “this brief historical moment between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the attack on the Twin Towers.” That is why, she adds, “the lessons of Nuremberg are difficult to apply today.”

Philippe Sands sees the spirit of Nuremberg in the current International Criminal Court, in whose creation he participated, and in the arrest of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in London in 1998, the subject of his latest book, 38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia. He also sees it in the nascent Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine, which is reviving the main accusation against Nazi leaders. “Without Nuremberg, everything would have been very different,” says the Franco-British jurist.

Some current dysfunctions of international justice can be traced back to the original sins of Nuremberg. It was a trial, for example, organized by the powers that won the war and their leaders (and one of them, Stalin, had already perpetrated some of his greatest crimes). This “imbalance” persists.

Sands cites the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq at the beginning of this century and the roles of the United States and the United Kingdom. He also mentions the indictment of former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte last March by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes against humanity in his war on drugs. This prompts him to reflect: “What is happening in the Caribbean and the Pacific, with 76 alleged drug traffickers summarily executed [by the U.S.], is it compatible with international law? Is it a crime against humanity?”

More imbalances. There are world leaders wanted by the International Criminal Court, such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. But it seems unlikely they will ever face trial.

“Pinochet traveled to London in October 1998 thinking he was completely safe, so you never know,” Sands notes. “It’s unlikely, but what we do know is that they receive advice on this matter and they don’t ignore it. It’s better than nothing.”

Faced with the temptation of cynicism, of thinking that what began in Nuremberg is just empty words, he recalls the case of Judge Thomas Buergenthal, a survivor of Auschwitz, who told him a few years ago that he wished there had been a Genocide Convention and an ICC in 1943. It probably wouldn’t have stopped the crimes, Buergenthal maintained. “But it would have told us that we weren’t alone and that it was known that crimes were being committed,” he added. “And it would have given us hope. This is more important than anything.”

In courtroom 600, they avoid discussing specific cases, but Petrossian is also clear: “International law has always been in crisis.” “That the political situation is difficult,” he adds, “doesn’t mean that it has ceased to exist legally, or that the Nuremberg Idea has disappeared.”

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Niklas Frank can’t shake off his father, the Nazi war criminal Hans Frank. He never will. He compares him to a goblin, an evil spirit clinging to his shoulders, refusing to let go. He’ll always have him with him.

“I used to hate my father,” he says, on a cloudy autumn morning, in his little house on the plain north of the Elbe, a place that seems straight out of a Grimm Brothers fairy tale. “Now I despise him.”

Niklas was six years old when his father sat in the dock at Nuremberg. The trial began on November 20, 1945, 80 years ago today. Now 87, he has been a widower for three years, and as he chain-smokes, he recounts his memories and laments that Germany and a past that seems infinite.

“It will never end,” he explains, “because the victims are still alive, burning in my brain.”

Niklas Frank was a born a prince of National Socialism, the son of Hitler’s chief lawyer and viceroy in the territories between present-day Poland and Ukraine, where the extermination camps of Treblinka, Majdanek, Belzec, and Sobibor were located. The boy, the youngest of five siblings, grew up in the lap of luxury in Wawel Castle in Krakow, from where the “Butcher of Poland” orchestrated the murder of millions of Jews. He was seven years old when Hans Frank was hanged on October 16, 1946, along with the other Nazi leaders condemned to death.

For years, Niklas carried with him the well-known photograph of his father’s corpse. “To make sure he’s dead.” In the image, he is seen with a tag on his suit that reads: “H. Frank.”

Niklas repeated the mantra for years: “I am against the death penalty, except in the case of my father.” “I am selfish,” he says now. “If my father hadn’t been hanged, he would have destroyed my brain with his ideology. He was a charming young man. He spoke so fluently, he was so inspiring, that he surely would have ruined my brain, and I probably would have needed decades after his death to find the truth.”

Niklas Frank lives in Ecklak, a village of 300 inhabitants in the state of Schleswig-Holstein, north of Hamburg. From the late 1970s he worked for the Hamburg weekly Stern, as both a reporter and columnist. Even as a child — in the Krakow ghetto or in Nuremberg prison, where he visited his father a few weeks before his execution — he was an observer. His wife, Hannelore, was a judge in the small town of Itzehoe.

Arriving in Ecklak by road from Itzehoe, the host advises visitors: “Go to the garden next door before the interview begins.” Beside it, by the road that runs through the village, stands a statue he commissioned: a crocodile with its skin painted in the black, red, and yellow colors of the German flag, and a giant teardrop. A plaque reads: “The only honest monument to the Jewish children, women, and men murdered by us (also applies to Austria).”

“As far as German crimes are concerned,” Niklas says, “there is no greater chauvinist than me. I have no interest in other countries with many murders. No one committed crimes like the ones we committed with the Holocaust.”

Near the statue, there is a small wooden structure. On the door, a sign reads: “Entrance to Hell.”

The visitor hesitates, cautiously opening the door. Inside is a photograph of Hans Frank with Adolf Hitler. There are photos of corpses in the extermination camps. There is another one we’ve never seen, and it causes unsettling discomfort. It is the corpse of Hans Frank. But not clothed, as in the well-known photograph of those executed at Nuremberg. He is naked. Niklas Frank obtained this photograph two years ago and believes it must be made public. It would be “a personal revenge,” but he says no media outlet wants to publish it.

“Everyone can tolerate lots of images of naked Jews, mountains of them,” he complains. “And they can’t tolerate the naked murderer?”

Among the rare breed of children of high-ranking Nazis, Niklas Frank stands out, ever since he published the book Der Vater. Eine Abrechnung (The Father: A Reckoning) in the 1980s. The son of the Butcher of Poland confronts his father without compromise, sometimes brutally. He is an extreme reflection — because his father’s crimes were extreme — of a society that, starting in the 1960s, embarked on a similar endeavor: holding parents and grandparents accountable for their crimes, whether committed or uncommitted. And accepting that this legacy defines national identity. But few went as far as he did, and not all of society shared his attitude, nor did all the children of Nazis. Another Germany told itself: yes, Nazism was criminal, but they denied that their parents or grandparents could have participated in it.

In his book East West Street (2017), about the origins of international criminal law, Philippe Sands brought these two Germanies together in the figures of Niklas Frank and Horst Wächter, son of Otto von Wächter, another Nazi criminal who, unlike Frank, managed to escape from Nuremberg. While Frank accused his father, Wächter justified his: “I know that the whole system was criminal and that he was part of the system, but I don’t believe he was a criminal.”

The conversation with Niklas Frank begins in a tiny booth next to his house, which he uses for smoking. He smokes the same Camel cigarettes his mother, Brigitte Frank, nicknamed the “Queen of Poland,” used to smoke. On the wall of this room hangs a drawing, made by one of his grandsons, of Lady with an Ermine. The same Leonardo da Vinci painting that Hans Frank appropriated and hung on the walls of Wawel Castle.

Niklas recalls the few pleasant memories associated with his father, who called him Fremdi — “stranger” or “foreigner” — because Hans suspected that Niklas’s biological father might be someone else: either Karl Lasch, one of his subordinates, or Carl Schmitt, the eminent philosopher of law. This was the environment in which Hans Frank moved, Hitler’s lawyer in the 1920s, president of the German Academy of Law, and Reich Minister without Portfolio before being appointed Governor-General of occupied Poland.

“He’s a criminal, but he became a criminal because he was a coward and because he wanted to advance his career,” says Niklas. “Besides, he was in love with Hitler.” He says he hasn’t found any antisemitic references in his father’s youthful diaries. He believes that if Hitler had ordered him to hate the Spanish, Hans Frank would have persecuted the Spanish, or the French.

— And what is there of Hans Frank in you, his son?

— Cowardice. And, if necessary, I can lie perfectly well. This is my father’s legacy. That said, I’ve lied very little. I’ve only done so when I’ve had a relationship with someone other than my wife.

He gets emotional when he remembers that time. He also recalls a scene during his wife’s terminal illness: “I was in the back of the house drinking a beer and crying. Suddenly, Auschwitz appeared in my head, Auschwitz, Auschwitz. In a very strange way, this comforted me. Because we were able to live long lives and even experience a fatal illness like cancer.”

In his talks at schools, he asks young people to imagine that the Jews killed in the extermination camps are their loved ones. To visualize it. How they are taken from their homes, put on trains, forced into gas chambers. He has done this exercise a thousand times. “How many times I sent my wife to the gas chamber, our daughter, our three grandchildren!” he says. “You feel a millionth of the fear that we inflicted on millions of innocent people.”

He also tells young people: “Enjoy life, but remember that you are German. So you must keep in mind what your grandparents and great-grandparents did, or saw done and did nothing to stop. Please react immediately if you come across people who speak inhumanely.”

Niklas emphasizes that these boys and girls “are not responsible” and “should not feel guilty,” but he distrusts Germans. He views with alarm the rise in antisemitism and, in the statements of even moderate politicians about immigrants, a tone that reminds him of another era. He cites the electoral successes of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, which, in Ecklak, garnered 21% of the vote in the general election.

All of Germany’s efforts to confront the crimes of the Nazi period, a model effort for many, have a different meaning for Hans Frank’s son. “We live in the best democracy we’ve ever had, but it was built by Nazis.” He argues that, after World War II and the arrival of democracy, “they obeyed the new system, just as they had obeyed the Third Reich.” “I assume there are only a million true democrats in Germany,” he asserts. “The rest are prepared to live in a dictatorship and love it.”

Inside his house, Niklas shows EL PAÍS a tiny room, his bedroom, where dark, twisted paintings he did as a teenager, depicting hanged men, adorn the walls. In the living room, he takes out a box of photos from the golden age — or perhaps the darkest — when the Franks reigned in Krakow. Hitler was there, his father was there. Familiar presences, neither distant nor exotic here. “This is the Queen of Poland, in white, enjoying life,” he says, pointing to his mother, Brigitte, who died in 1959, when he was 20. “They knew exactly what was happening in the camps.” “And this is me!” he says, pulling out a photo in which he must have been about a year old. “Mr. Frank’s unloved son.”

Later, in his old Mercedes, while driving his visitors back to the station, he advises, almost as a conclusion to this intense morning, a distrust of Germans.

— Do you include yourself?

— Sometimes I don’t trust myself. When I’m starting to lie. Or when I’m being a coward. This makes me furious.

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