After the Third Reich initiated a brutal campaign that massacred more than six million Jews, history favored the steps that the Allied forces took, including bombing Germany to end the capability of the Nazi regime to repeat the atrocity.

The 7 October attack on Israel by the terror group Hamas that resulted in the slaughter of more than 1,400 mostly civilian individuals is now considered a reprise of the barbarity some 80 years ago.

A recounting of the Nuremberg trial published by Yad Vashem, Israel's official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, provided a window into the horrors of the tragedy, which historians described as man's worst inhumanity to man.

Termed as the "Trial of the Major War Criminals" at Nuremberg, several personalities prominent in the persecution of the Jews were brought to trial between 1945 and 1946.

Despite a list of convictions, the trial failed to resolve the question of many of what had motivated the Nazis to pursue the Europe-wide genocide.

Of the 9.6 million Jews who lived in the part of Europe under Nazi domination, it was conservatively estimated that 5.7 million disappeared, most of them deliberately put to death by the Nazi conspirators.

The Nuremberg trial involved scores of witnesses, thousands of pages of documents and testimony, and complex legal arguments.

The trial made available in a fully authoritative way, for the first time, the elements of the Holocaust story, making the proceedings the principal reference point for a study of the Nazi Holocaust.

The four powers behind the Nuremberg Trial — the Americans, British, Soviets, and French — defined the rules and focus of the proceedings at a conference of experts that met in London during the summer of 1945.

It was the Americans, not the Russians, who first familiarized the Nuremberg court with the Einsatzgruppen. These motorized SS units followed in the wake of the Wehrmacht in the Soviet Union, shooting Jews by the tens and, eventually, hundreds of thousands.