Few of the judgments of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg have aroused as much disquiet as those relating to the German invasion of Norway in April 1940. The sentence on Admiral Erich Raeder, the navy chief regarded by the Tribunal, along with the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg, as one of the two leading instigators of the invasion, was described by a British critic as ‘the most monstrous of all the miscarriages of justice committed as Nürnberg’. In his History of the Second World War Sir Basil Liddell Hart wrote:

Indignation has not been confined to those who object to the Nuremberg Trials in their entirety. Even among those broadly sympathetic to the Nuremberg principles the case of Norway has been regarded as a significant lapse: not as blatant as some that called in question the past record of the Soviet Union, but as serious as any involving the three western powers.