Based on a prosopography of three bodies (the United Nations War Crimes Commission founded in 1943 by allied governments in London; the French and US delegations to the International Military Tribunal), this paper aims to explain an obvious paradox: By creating their prosecution teams, the allied governments, especially the US government, didn''t resort to the obvious specialists of these questions during the war at a diplomatic level, that is the jurisconsults of the UNWCC. On the contrary, the teams were formed by “occasional” professionals, that is professionals without international legal capital, but with specific experiences in the army, some social properties which favored their employment in Nuremberg (German speakers) and a certain social capital. This paradox has to be explained in the light of the disintegration of the international sphere during the war and the relative weakness of inter-allied bodies (at least those without immediate military purpose) before 1945. The war actually led to a strong “desectorization” of international activities as they existed in the inter-war period and a correlative strengthening of war-oriented national institutions. Moreover, for practical reasons, it was necessary to rely upon those professionals whose knowledge of enemy states and their crimes was already important, that is in the US case, intelligence agencies and military justice. If, in many respects, the Nuremberg Trial was not an international arena such as those that existed before the war, the trial participated modestly in the reconstruction and redefinition of international activities: for some Nuremberg “veterans” this unprecedented experience favored directly or indirectly careers in the foreign service and / or in the new international organizations created in the aftermath of WWII.
