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19451776 Club

Four powers sign a charter to try Nazi leaders as criminals, not just prisoners of war

The document invents a charge nobody has ever prosecuted before: waging aggressive war.

Six months after Germany's surrender, the Allies still had to decide what to do with the men who ran the Third Reich. On August 8, 1945, France, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and the United States signed the London Charter, creating the International Military Tribunal and defining three new categories of prosecutable crime: crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. The trial opened that November in Nuremberg, the city where the Nazi party had once staged its rallies…

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More from August 8
1863

Lee asks Davis to let him go; Davis refuses

Days after retreating from Gettysburg, the general tells his president he has lost confidence in himself.
1929

A German airship lifts off from New Jersey to fly around the world

Hearst money bought the trip; a New Jersey field bought its start and finish.
1974

Nixon tells the nation he is resigning; Ford takes over at noon tomorrow

Facing certain impeachment after the smoking gun tape, Nixon becomes the first president to quit.
18631776 Club
Tennessee was exempt from Lincoln's proclamation, so Johnson started with the people he owned.
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Read the full August 8 edition →Everything that happened on August 8 →
More from The World Wars
1935

Dr. Bob Smith takes his last drink, then walks into surgery

The Akron surgeon, sober after hours of talk with New York businessman Bill Wilson, steps into the operating room following a final relapse at an Atlantic City convention.
1942

Japanese submarine shells Fort Stevens; Doney orders blackout, holds his guns

Commander Tagami surfaces I-25 at the Columbia River mouth after dark, fires seventeen rounds, and slips away undamaged, leaving cut telephone lines on the Oregon coast.
1942

Congress makes the Pledge of Allegiance official, fifty years after a magazine wrote it

The wording, unchanged from Bellamy's 1892 Columbus Day campaign, is now federal law, with the United States seven months into war.
1944

Roosevelt signs the Servicemen's Readjustment Act; veterans to get mortgages, tuition, and a year's pay

Congress voted unanimously, sixteen days after D-Day, with the WWI bonus debacle and the 1932 Bonus Army march still fresh in every lawmaker's memory.
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