The first of the trials was the Major War Crimes Trial, in which 22 high-ranking Nazis stood trial in the Palace of Justice. Twelve of the defendants would be sentenced to death.

A further 12 trials – known as the Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings – were held at Nuremberg between 1946 and 1949.

Seventy-five years after the Nuremberg trials began, we hear from three people upon whose lives the trials and the events that proceeded them cast a long shadow: the son of one of those on trial, the son of one of the prosecutors and the daughter of a Holocaust survivor.

Niklas Frank is the son of Hans Frank, the governor-general of German-occupied Poland during World War II. Known as the “Butcher of Poland”, Hans Frank was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg trials for his role in the deaths of millions of Jews and Poles, and executed.

Hans Frank and other defendants in the Nuremberg courtroom [Photo courtesy of Niklas Frank]

Here, Niklas, who was born in 1939, describes what it was like to grow up with a father who was a high-ranking Nazi:

I remember visiting my father in the prison in Nuremberg when I was seven years old.

On the other side of the door was Hermann Goring, a very senior member of the Nazi party who was also on trial at Nuremberg (he was sentenced to death but committed suicide hours before he was due to be executed), talking to his wife, Emmy, and their little daughter, Edda.