United Nations War Crimes Commission

[3][4] The Commission did not adjudicate war crimes itself, but rather advised, supervised, and coordinated with Allied states to conduct their own trials.

[4] The UNWCC also called for the creation of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and other courts to adjudicate war crimes, and its research and expertise were subsequently utilized in support of these judicial bodies.

The investigation should cover war crimes of offenders irrespective of rank, and the aim will be to collect material, supported wherever possible by depositions or by other documents, to establish such crimes, especially where they are systematically perpetrated, and to name and identify those responsible for their perpetration.The commission was formally established roughly a year later, on 20 October 1943, at a meeting held at the British Foreign Office in London;[7] it was supported by the governments of seventeen Allied nations: Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Czechoslovakia, France,[note 1] Greece, India, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, South Africa, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Yugoslavia.

By March 1945, a month before Hitler's death, "the commission had endorsed at least seven separate indictments against him for war crimes.

"[12]Vahagn Avedian states that the designation of the subsequent report as "restricted" might explain why it is relatively unknown in the literature and has been overlooked in many relevant discussions about e.g.

The seven-page historical background used mainly the Armenian massacres during World War I and the findings of the 1919 Commission of Responsibilities to substantiate the usage of the term Crimes Against Humanity as a precedent for the Nuremberg Charter's Article 6, in turn being the basis for the impending review of the UN Genocide Convention.