On March 19, 1946, in the rebuilt Nuremberg courtroom, the United States' chief prosecutor, Robert H. Jackson, read a line from a captured German document into the record against the man across from him, Hermann Göring: preparation for the liberation of the Rhine. Jackson was building a case that Germany had planned its 1936 remilitarization of the demilitarized Rhineland years before the invasion it staged as a sudden response to provocation. Göring stopped him. Read in the original German, he said, the phrase was Freimachung des Rheins, and it belonged to a different clause: clearing the river of barges and freight traffic so that general mobilization preparations could go forward unobstructed. That was a technical measure about river traffic, he said, not a plan to occupy or liberate the demilitarized Rhineland, and the prosecution's translation had put the second meaning where the document only supported the first.
The document was not new to the trial. The British delegation had entered it in evidence nearly ten weeks earlier, on January 9, as Exhibit GB-160, translated into English the same way then. In the sixty-nine days between, no correction to it appears anywhere in the trial record. The person who finally caught the error was the man it was used against, comparing this passage against the original German in his hands: the defendant.
Jackson did not let the objection sit overnight unanswered. The next morning he told the Tribunal that the prosecution had checked the translation and confirmed that Göring was right. He did not ask to withdraw the exhibit; it had already been admitted and stood before the court. He corrected it there, in open session, on the record, for a document his own side had used against the man he was cross-examining.
A trial conducted in four languages puts as much weight on a translated exhibit as on a word spoken from the stand, and a mistranslated document does not announce itself as an error. It reads as evidence. Nuremberg had interpreters working all four languages at once in real time, with monitors listening for a bad rendering as it happened. None of that reaches an error already sitting in a document's written translation by the time the document is admitted into evidence. That kind of error survives for as long as nobody with the original text, and a reason to check it, happens to open the same page.
Historians still argue about whether Jackson lost that exchange; Göring's composure on the stand usually gets the credit for beating him. Easy to miss in that verdict is what got fixed anyway: a false sentence, entered as evidence in the first trial the world had ever run with simultaneous interpretation, corrected within a day of being challenged, by the prosecutors who had the least reason to want it corrected. Eighty years later, the record still holds — not because every word in it was translated right the first time, but because when one of them wasn't, someone said so, and someone checked.