 For many of their offenses (e.g., killing a non-combatant without trial) the Nazis did not bother to (or were too reluctant to) legalize them by a formal law, so, the prosecutors at Nuremberg could have argued that the defendants broke German law to begin with.However, this line of argumentation was infrequently used in the trials.The trials gained so much attention that the "superior orders defense" has subsequently become interchangeable with the label "Nuremberg defense", a legal defense that essentially states that defendants were "only following orders" ("Befehl ist Befehl", literally "an order is an order") and so are not responsible for their crimes.