The Nuremberg Trials — International Military Tribunal (1945-1946)

Case at a Glance

What Were the Nuremberg Trials?

The Nuremberg Trials were the first international criminal tribunals in history, held in Nuremberg, Germany, between November 1945 and October 1946. They prosecuted 22 surviving high-ranking political, military, and industrial leaders of Nazi Germany for crimes committed before and during World War II.

Before Nuremberg, the idea that individuals could be held criminally liable under international law for starting a war or for state-ordered atrocities was legally untested. The victorious Allied powers - the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union - could have executed the Nazi leaders by summary order. Instead, they chose to hold a public trial with defense counsel, documentary evidence, cross-examination, and reasoned judgments. That choice created the foundation of modern international criminal law.

Why Were the Trials Held in Nuremberg?

Nuremberg was chosen for 3 practical and symbolic reasons:

• The Palace of Justice in Nuremberg was one of the few large, intact court complexes in Germany after Allied bombing. It had capacity for the enormous number of people required for a major international trial.
• Nuremberg had been the symbolic heart of Nazi power, the city where the Nazi Party held its enormous annual rallies and where the Nuremberg Race Laws stripping Jewish people of citizenship were enacted in 1935. Holding the trial where Nazi ideology had been most publicly celebrated carried powerful symbolic weight.
• An adjacent prison complex could house the defendants securely throughout the proceedings.

The 4 Counts at Nuremberg

The IMT indicted each defendant on 1 or more of 4 counts:

Count 1: Conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. This charged the defendants with participating in a common plan to achieve Nazi aims through illegal means.

Count 2: Crimes against peace. This covered planning, initiating, and waging aggressive wars in violation of international treaties and agreements, including the invasion of Poland in September 1939.

Count 3: War crimes. These included murder, ill-treatment, and deportation of civilian populations in occupied territories; murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war; plunder of public or private property; wanton destruction of cities, towns, and villages; and devastation not justified by military necessity.

Count 4: Crimes against humanity. This new category in international law covered murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and persecution on political, racial, or religious grounds. Crimes against humanity specifically encompassed the Holocaust.

The Defendants: Who Was Tried at Nuremberg?

The 24 original defendants represented a cross-section of Nazi Germany's leadership across 4 domains:

• Political leaders: including Joachim von Ribbentrop (Foreign Minister), Hans Frank (Governor-General of occupied Poland), Wilhelm Frick (Interior Minister), Arthur Seyss-Inquart (Reichskommissar for the Netherlands), and Alfred Rosenberg (Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories)
• Military leaders: including Wilhelm Keitel (Chief of the OKW), Alfred Jodl (Chief of OKW Operations), Karl Dönitz (Grand Admiral and briefly Hitler's successor), and Erich Raeder (Grand Admiral, commander of the German navy)
• Economic and industrial leaders: including Albert Speer (Reich Minister of Armaments), Fritz Sauckel (Plenipotentiary General for Labour Deployment), and Hjalmar Schacht (former Reichsbank president)
• Other senior Nazis: including Hermann Göring (Reichsmarschall, head of the Luftwaffe, designated Hitler's successor), Rudolf Hess (Deputy Führer), Julius Streicher (publisher of the antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer), and Ernst Kaltenbrunner (head of the RSHA, successor to Reinhard Heydrich)

2 defendants were excluded from trial. Robert Ley, leader of the German Labour Front, committed suicide on October 25, 1945, before proceedings began. Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, the industrialist, was deemed too ill physically and mentally to stand trial. Martin Bormann, Hitler's private secretary, was tried in absentia and condemned to death; his death in the Berlin bunker in 1945 was later confirmed.

The Prosecution: Building the Case

The American team, led by U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Robert H. Jackson, devised the prosecution's core strategy: wherever possible, prove the defendants' crimes using Nazi Germany's own documents. The Allies had captured enormous archives of German government, military, and party records. Jackson argued this documentary approach would be more powerful and less vulnerable to credibility attacks than witness testimony alone.

Jackson's opening statement on November 21, 1945 set the tone for the entire prosecution: We will show these defendants to be living symbols of racial hatreds, of terrorism and violence, and of the arrogance and cruelty of power. They are presented to the tribunal as symbols of fierce nationalism and militarism, as ruthless and calculated aggressors... Civilization can afford no compromise with the social forces which would gain renewed strength if we deal ambiguously or indecisively with the men in whom those forces now precariously survive.

Key Defendants and Their Outcomes

Hermann Göring: The Most Defiant Defendant

Hermann Göring was the highest-ranking Nazi defendant. As Reichsmarschall, head of the Luftwaffe, and designated successor to Hitler, he had been the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany. Göring was found guilty on all 4 counts and sentenced to death by hanging. He was intellectually combative throughout the trial, cross-examining witnesses skillfully and defending the Nazi regime with force. The night before his scheduled execution on October 16, 1946, Göring crushed a hidden cyanide capsule between his teeth in his cell and died. He never reached the gallows.

Rudolf Hess: 46 Years in Prison

Rudolf Hess, Hitler's Deputy Führer, had flown solo to Scotland in May 1941 in a strange, apparently unauthorized mission to negotiate a peace deal with Britain. He spent the rest of World War II as a British prisoner. At Nuremberg, Hess was convicted on Counts 1 and 2 (conspiracy and crimes against peace) but acquitted on Counts 3 and 4, reflecting the court's view that he had left Germany before the worst of the wartime atrocities. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. Hess served his sentence at Spandau Prison in West Berlin, where he became its last and then its sole prisoner for decades. He died in Spandau in 1987 at the age of 93, having spent 46 years behind bars.

Albert Speer: The 'Good Nazi' Narrative

Albert Speer, Hitler's Reich Minister of Armaments and close personal friend, was convicted on Counts 3 and 4 (war crimes and crimes against humanity) and sentenced to 20 years in prison. Speer presented himself throughout the trial as a technocrat who claimed not to have known about the Holocaust, a defense that allowed him to escape the death sentence. Historians have subsequently challenged this self-portrait extensively, arguing that Speer knew far more than he claimed. Speer served his full 20-year sentence and was released from Spandau Prison in 1966. He died in 1981.

The 3 Acquittals

3 defendants were acquitted on all charges: Hjalmar Schacht (former Reichsbank president and Economics Minister), Franz von Papen (former German Chancellor who had helped Hitler come to power but resigned in 1934), and Hans Fritzsche (a senior official in Goebbels's propaganda ministry). The acquittals were controversial: the Soviet judge dissented in all 3 cases and wanted convictions. The majority found that the prosecution had not proven beyond reasonable doubt that these men had participated in the criminal conspiracies charged. All 3 were subsequently tried in German denazification courts and received further sentences.

The Executions: October 16, 1946

10 defendants were hanged in the gymnasium of Nuremberg Prison at approximately 1:00 a.m. on October 16, 1946. They were: Joachim von Ribbentrop (Foreign Minister); Wilhelm Keitel (OKW Chief); Ernst Kaltenbrunner (RSHA chief); Alfred Rosenberg (Eastern Territories minister); Hans Frank (Governor of occupied Poland); Wilhelm Frick (Interior Minister); Julius Streicher (Der Stürmer publisher); Fritz Sauckel (slave labour organizer); Alfred Jodl (OKW Operations chief); and Arthur Seyss-Inquart (occupied Netherlands commissioner). The bodies were cremated and the ashes scattered in the Isar River to prevent any site from becoming a neo-Nazi shrine.

The Subsequent Nuremberg Trials (1946-1949)

The International Military Tribunal was the most prominent but not the only set of Nuremberg proceedings. Between December 1946 and April 1949, the United States Military Tribunal conducted 12 additional trials at Nuremberg, under Allied Control Council Law No. 10. These subsequent trials prosecuted a total of 177 defendants from additional categories of Nazi perpetrators, including:

• The Doctors' Trial (medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners)
• The Einsatzgruppen Trial (mobile killing units responsible for approximately 1-2 million murders)
• The IG Farben Trial (the chemical conglomerate that manufactured Zyklon B and used slave labour)
• The Judges' Trial (German judges who used the courts to implement Nazi persecution)
• The High Command Trial (senior military officers)

Of the 177 defendants in the subsequent trials, 24 were sentenced to death, 20 to life imprisonment, and various other prison terms. Many sentences were subsequently reduced during the Korean War era as West Germany's cooperation became strategically important.

The Purpose and Significance of the Nuremberg Trials

Establishing Individual Criminal Responsibility

Before Nuremberg, international law primarily governed states, not individuals. The principle articulated at Nuremberg was revolutionary: individuals bear personal criminal responsibility for international crimes regardless of their official capacity. Nuremberg explicitly rejected the defense that a defendant was merely following orders, holding that following a manifestly criminal order does not absolve the person who executes it. These principles are now embedded in international law as the Nuremberg Principles, codified by the United Nations International Law Commission in 1950.

Creating New Categories of International Crime

The Nuremberg Charter introduced 2 categories of international crime that had not previously existed in codified form: crimes against peace (the planning and waging of aggressive war) and crimes against humanity (large-scale atrocities against civilian populations). The Holocaust was prosecuted under crimes against humanity. These categories have been incorporated into subsequent international criminal law instruments, including the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.

Building the Evidence Record of the Holocaust

Nuremberg created a comprehensive, documented record of Nazi crimes at a time when the full scale of the Holocaust was still being absorbed. The prosecution introduced thousands of documents from Nazi archives, including the Wannsee Conference protocol (the January 1942 meeting at which Nazi officials coordinated the Final Solution), concentration camp records, and internal communications ordering mass murders. This evidentiary record has been foundational for Holocaust scholarship and for rebutting denial.

Laying the Foundation for International Justice

The International Military Tribunal is the direct ancestor of subsequent international criminal courts, including the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), and the permanent International Criminal Court (ICC), established by the Rome Statute in 1998. The basic Nuremberg framework - an independent court, defined crimes, procedural rights for defendants, and documented evidence - runs through all of these institutions.

Frequently Asked Questions

When were the Nuremberg Trials?

The main trial before the International Military Tribunal ran from November 20, 1945 to October 1, 1946, approximately 11 months. The subsequent American Military Tribunals ran from December 1946 to April 1949.

Where were the Nuremberg Trials held?

All sessions of the main trial were held in the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg (Nürnberg), Bavaria, Germany. The first organizational session took place in Berlin on October 18, 1945.

How long did the Nuremberg Trials last?

The International Military Tribunal held 403 open court sessions over approximately 11 months. The subsequent American Military Tribunals added another approximately 2.5 years of proceedings.

Who was tried at Nuremberg?

24 high-ranking Nazi leaders were indicted, representing political, military, industrial, and propaganda leadership of the Third Reich. Verdicts were delivered against 22 of them; 19 were convicted and 3 were acquitted.

What was the outcome of the Nuremberg Trials?

12 defendants were sentenced to death; 3 were acquitted; and the remainder received prison sentences ranging from 10 years to life. 10 were executed by hanging on October 16, 1946. Göring committed suicide the night before his scheduled execution.

Timeline

The Nuremberg Trials represent the most consequential criminal proceedings in modern history, not because of the number of defendants or sentences imposed, but because they established a legal framework that made accountable to law the unlimited violence of the most powerful state.