the tribunal established criminal responsibility for those who "in a significant manner contributed in Finland's engagement in the war...or prevented peace" between 1941 and 1944. Eight men were tried; wartime president Risto Ryti, six members of the cabinet, and the Finnish ambassador to Germany, but not any generals. Unlike other specifications of the crimes against peace, the Finnish trials charged those who joined the government after 1941 and rejected peace offers from the Soviet Union. Initially seven were convicted and the ambassador was acquitted; the judgement was revised to convict all the defendants with harsher penalties, up to ten years imprisonment with hard labor. The convicts were treated leniently in prison and all were released by 1949. International Military Tribunal The Nuremberg Charter defined crimes against peace as The International Military Tribunal agreed with the prosecution that aggression was the gravest charge against the accused, stating in its judgement that because war in general is evil, "To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." These words, originally written in a letter by British judge Robert Wright, have been widely quoted. The judgement found that there was a premeditated conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, whose goals were "the disruption of the European order as it had existed since the Treaty of Versailles" and "the creation of a Greater Germany beyond the frontiers of 1914". The planning of aggression was traced to Hitler's 1925 book Mein Kampf and specific secret meetings held on 5 November 1937, 23 May 1939, 22 August 1939, and 23 November 1939. The court considered the planning of acts of aggression against Austria and Czechoslovakia, as well as wars of aggressions against Poland, Denmark and Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, Yugoslavia, Greece, and the Soviet Union, as well as the declaration of war on the United States and prior encouragement of Japanese aggression against the United States. Although the court did not rule on acts of aggression short of war, it does not preclude the criminality of aggression for less large-scale actions than World War II. All 22 defendants were charged with crimes against peace, and 12 were convicted: Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel, Alfred Rosenberg, Wilhelm Frick, Walther Funk, Karl Dönitz, Erich