The Nuremberg Trials took place after the Second World War and aimed to convict various leading members of the Nazi Party for the crimes against humanity that they had committed. The most famous of these trials was the first one to take place and was given the title the ‘Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal’. This tried 24 of the most important and often nototious leaders of Nazi Germany including the commander of the Luftwaffe, Herman Goering and the Deputy Fuhrer, Rudolf Hess.

The three main allied powers and France provided one judge, an alternate and prosecutors in order to decide upon the outcome of the trial. Various sentences were handed out ranging from full acquittals to death by hanging.

The Spoken Word has various recordings from the actual trial of the major war criminals in Nuremberg including the opening and closing speeches, the pleas of the defendants and the reading out of the sentences. This is another important snapshot of history from the Spoken Word repository.

• Opening Statement by Lord Chief Justice Lawrence
• Pleas of the Defendants
• Closing speech by Sir Hartley Shawcross
• The President of the Tribunal, Lord Chief Justice Lawrence, pronounces the sentences and reads the dissenting Russian opinion

The 1948 Soviet blockade of Berlin is just one of countless pivotal twentieth-century events to have been chronicled to the world by BBC correspondents.

Spoken Word Services hosts a small but significant on-line collection of some of the most important moments in the crisis, from British Secretary of State for Air Rt. Hon. Arthur Henderson’s impressions of seeing the massive airborne operation underway, to Patrick Smith’s account of Deputy Lord Mayor Dr. Friedensburg’s tense anti-Communist meeting in West Berlin at the height of the crisis, to Bevin’s speech thanking RAF and USAF pilots and crews for their efforts in supplying 2.5 million West Berliners with rations and essential equipment.