Nuremberg and Tokyo Trials: Crimes, Verdicts, and Criticisms

The Nuremberg and Tokyo trials were the Allied-run international courts that, between 1945 and 1948, prosecuted senior Nazi and Japanese officials for waging aggressive war and committing atrocities. They were the first proceedings in history to hold individual leaders personally liable under international law for state policy, and the legal principles they established still govern how war crimes are prosecuted today.

Nuremberg tried twenty-four major Nazi defendants before a four-power tribunal in Germany. Tokyo tried twenty-eight senior Japanese military and civilian leaders before an eleven-nation panel in Japan. Both used newly written charters that defined three categories of international crime and rejected the defense that officials were only following orders.

How the Two Tribunals Were Created

The legal foundations were not identical. In Europe, the London Agreement of August 8, 1945, signed by the United States, France, Britain, and the Soviet Union, created the International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg.¹ Annexed to that agreement was the Nuremberg Charter, which set out the court’s structure, procedure, and the crimes it could prosecute.² Four sovereign nations pooled their judicial authority to create a temporary international court.

In the Pacific, the founding act came from a single person. General Douglas MacArthur, serving as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, issued a proclamation in January 1946 establishing the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) and annexing its charter.³ The Tokyo Charter borrowed the legal concepts developed at Nuremberg but flowed from the authority of the occupying commander rather than a treaty among governments.

Both charters shared the innovation that mattered most: jurisdiction over individuals rather than states. Before these trials, international law had largely treated governments as abstract entities. The charters declared that a person carrying out state policy could be prosecuted personally, and that holding a government office was no shield.

The Three Categories of Crime

The Nuremberg Charter defined three categories that also appeared in the Tokyo indictments.

Crimes against peace covered planning or launching a war of aggression in violation of international treaties.² Before these trials, starting a war was widely treated as a sovereign right. Charging leaders for the act of waging war itself was a dramatic departure.

War crimes targeted violations of the laws and customs of war: mistreating prisoners, killing hostages, looting, and destroying cities beyond military necessity.² These offenses had longstanding roots in the Geneva and Hague conventions, so the legal ground was more familiar.

Crimes against humanity reached the most far-reaching conduct: atrocities against civilian populations, including murder, extermination, enslavement, and deportation, regardless of whether those acts were legal under the perpetrator’s own domestic law.² This concept would influence the 1948 Genocide Convention, which codified genocide as a distinct crime under international law.

Prosecutors could also charge conspiracy, holding participants in a common plan responsible for all acts performed under it.² That gave them a way to reach senior officials who designed the machinery of violence without personally signing every order.

One defense the charters shut down explicitly was superior orders. Article 8 of the Nuremberg Charter stated that acting on a government’s or superior’s order did not free a defendant from responsibility, though the tribunal could weigh it when deciding punishment.² Before Nuremberg, obeying a command had been widely accepted as an excuse. Neither tribunal accepted it as a basis for acquittal.

Who Was Prosecuted

At Nuremberg, prosecutors indicted twenty-four individuals chosen to represent a cross-section of the Nazi state: military commanders, government ministers, propagandists, and industrialists.⁴ Hermann Göring, head of the Luftwaffe and the most senior surviving Nazi leader, was the highest-profile defendant. Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s former deputy, was also among them.⁵

Nuremberg went further than prosecuting individuals. The IMT also evaluated whether entire organizations should be declared criminal. Six groups were targeted: the Nazi party leadership corps, the Reich Cabinet, the General Staff and High Command, the SA, the SS (including the SD), and the Gestapo. The tribunal convicted three: the Nazi leadership corps, the SS (including the SD), and the Gestapo. Members of those groups could then be arrested and tried individually by Allied occupation courts on the basis of membership alone. The Reich Cabinet, General Staff, and SA were acquitted of the collective charges.⁶

In Tokyo, twenty-eight defendants were indicted from the highest ranks of Japan’s wartime military and civilian government. Hideki Tojo, the former Prime Minister who had led Japan into war, was the most prominent.⁷

The most glaring absence from the Tokyo dock was Emperor Hirohito. MacArthur made a deliberate political decision to shield the Emperor from prosecution, reasoning that his cooperation was essential to stability during the occupation. The IMTFE charter conspicuously omitted any provision allowing the prosecution of heads of state, a pointed contrast with the Nuremberg Charter, which permitted it. Whether that decision served justice or Allied strategic interests remains one of the most debated questions about the Tokyo proceedings.

The Verdicts

Nuremberg

The Nuremberg tribunal delivered its judgments on October 1, 1946.⁸ Twelve defendants were sentenced to death by hanging, including Göring, Ribbentrop, Keitel, and Kaltenbrunner.⁴ Göring avoided the gallows by swallowing a cyanide capsule the night before his execution. The remaining death sentences were carried out on October 16, 1946. Martin Bormann was sentenced to death in absentia.

Three defendants received life imprisonment: Rudolf Hess, Walther Funk, and Erich Raeder. Four others drew prison terms of ten to twenty years: Karl Dönitz, Konstantin von Neurath, Baldur von Schirach, and Albert Speer. All imprisoned defendants served at Spandau Prison in Berlin under joint Allied supervision. Three defendants, Hjalmar Schacht, Franz von Papen, and Hans Fritzsche, were acquitted outright.⁴ Those acquittals mattered. They showed the tribunal was weighing evidence against each defendant rather than issuing a blanket condemnation.

Tokyo

The Tokyo proceedings ran far longer, from May 3, 1946, to November 12, 1948. Of the original twenty-eight defendants, two died during the trial and one was declared mentally unfit, leaving twenty-five to face judgment. All twenty-five were found guilty. Seven were sentenced to death by hanging, including Tojo, and sixteen received life imprisonment.⁷ The remaining two, former Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu and diplomat Shigenori Togo, received seven and twenty years respectively.

The seven death sentences were carried out at Sugamo Prison on December 23, 1948. The absence of any acquittals in Tokyo stood in sharp contrast with Nuremberg and fed the criticism that the proceedings were less balanced. Several of the life sentences were later reduced during the 1950s as Cold War priorities shifted and the United States moved toward rebuilding Japan as a strategic ally.

Beyond the Main Trials

The IMT proceeding of twenty-four major defendants was only the beginning at Nuremberg. Under Allied Control Council Law No. 10, the United States conducted twelve additional trials at Nuremberg between 1946 and 1949, prosecuting 177 defendants before American military tribunals.⁶ These reached deeper into the institutional machinery of the Nazi state: physicians who performed forced medical experiments, judges who had bent the legal system to the regime, industrialists who exploited slave labor, and SS commanders who led mobile killing squads.

Of those 177 defendants, twenty-four were sentenced to death (thirteen executions were carried out), twenty received life sentences, ninety-eight drew shorter prison terms, and twenty-five were acquitted. The subsequent proceedings showed how doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and bureaucrats had all been essential to making the system function, filling in a picture the main trial had only sketched.

The Two Big Criticisms

Retroactive Punishment

The most serious legal challenge defense teams raised was that the charges amounted to retroactive punishment. Crimes against peace and crimes against humanity had no clear precedent as prosecutable offenses under international law before the charters created them. Punishing acts that were not crimes when committed, defense counsel argued, violated a bedrock principle of every major legal system.

The Nuremberg tribunal answered by pointing to the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, in which dozens of nations, including Germany and Japan, had renounced war as an instrument of national policy. Aggression, the tribunal reasoned, had already been condemned by the international community; the charter merely provided the machinery to enforce an existing prohibition. For crimes against humanity, the tribunal argued that the scale of the atrocities placed them beyond what any legal system could have contemplated tolerating. Whether that reasoning fully answers the objection is a question legal scholars still debate.

Victor’s Justice

Both tribunals faced the criticism that they represented the victors punishing the vanquished. Every judge came from an Allied nation. Every prosecutor worked for an Allied government. No Allied leader was charged for the firebombing of Dresden, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or Soviet atrocities on the Eastern Front.

The most forceful dissent came from Indian Justice Radhabinod Pal, who argued that all defendants at Tokyo should be acquitted. Pal contended the charges were legally unsound, that the tribunal applied a double standard by ignoring Allied conduct, and that what was called justice was the exercise of power by the winning side. His dissent remains one of the most cited critiques in international criminal law scholarship. Dutch Judge Bert Röling filed a partial dissent, arguing that some defendants had been convicted on insufficient evidence.

What the Trials Changed in International Law

The legal innovations did not end with the last sentence handed down. In 1950, the United Nations General Assembly directed the International Law Commission to codify what had emerged from Nuremberg. The resulting Nuremberg Principles established that anyone who commits an act constituting a crime under international law bears personal responsibility, that domestic law offering no penalty provides no defense, that heads of state and government officials enjoy no immunity, and that following superior orders does not relieve responsibility when a moral choice was possible.⁹

For nearly five decades, those principles existed without a permanent court to enforce them. When atrocities emerged in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, the UN Security Council created the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in 1993, drawing on the Nuremberg Charter as part of the customary international law that gave it authority.¹⁰ The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda followed in 1994. Both were temporary courts created for specific conflicts, echoing the Nuremberg and Tokyo model.

The permanent solution arrived with the Rome Statute of 1998, which established the International Criminal Court. The Rome Statute codified individual criminal responsibility for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression, categories that trace directly back to the Nuremberg and Tokyo charters. Article 27 declares that official capacity as a head of state or government official does not exempt anyone from criminal responsibility, a provision that reads like a direct translation of Nuremberg Principle III into treaty language.¹¹ The Nuremberg and Tokyo trials were improvised responses to an unprecedented catastrophe, built on imperfect legal foundations under intense political pressure. The system they set in motion has outlasted every criticism leveled against it.

1
The Avalon Project. London Agreement of August 8th 1945
2
The Avalon Project. Charter of the International Military Tribunal
3
Office of the Historian. The Nuremberg Trial and the Tokyo War Crimes Trials (1945-1948)
4
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. International Military Tribunal: The Defendants
5
Nuremberg Trial Judgements. International Military Tribunal Judgment
6
National Archives. The Trial of the Major War Criminals
7
The National WWII Museum. Tokyo War Crimes Trial
8
The Avalon Project. Nuremberg Trial Proceedings Vol. 22
9
United Nations. Principles of International Law Recognized in the Charter of the Nürnberg Tribunal and in the Judgment of the Tribunal
10
International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals. The Evolution of the Mandates of the International Tribunals
11
United Nations. Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, 1998