Nuremberg Trial Results: Verdicts, Sentences, and Legal Impact

The Nuremberg trial results, delivered by the International Military Tribunal on October 1, 1946, convicted 19 of the 22 defendants who stood trial. Twelve were sentenced to death, three received life in prison, four received shorter prison terms, and three were acquitted. Ten of the death sentences were carried out on October 16, 1946; one defendant killed himself the night before, and one had been condemned in absentia.

Who Was Sentenced to Death

Twelve of the defendants were sentenced to hang.¹ They were Hermann Göring, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Julius Streicher, Fritz Sauckel, Alfred Jodl, and Arthur Seyss-Inquart. Martin Bormann, whose whereabouts were unknown, was tried and condemned in absentia.²

Two of the originally indicted 24 never faced the tribunal at all. Robert Ley killed himself in his cell before proceedings began, and Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach was ruled too ill to stand trial.³

Prison Sentences

Three defendants received life sentences: Rudolf Hess, Walther Funk, and Erich Raeder. Four more received fixed terms. Albert Speer and Baldur von Schirach were each sentenced to 20 years, Konstantin von Neurath to 15 years, and Karl Dönitz to 10 years.¹

Who Was Acquitted

Three defendants were acquitted: Hjalmar Schacht, Franz von Papen, and Hans Fritzsche. The judges concluded the prosecution’s evidence fell short of the threshold for conviction in each case.⁴ Acquittal did not always mean freedom. Fritzsche, for example, was rearrested and brought before German denazification courts.

What Happened to the Condemned

Hermann Göring never reached the gallows. On the night before his scheduled execution, he swallowed cyanide in his cell.⁵ The remaining ten death sentences were carried out on October 16, 1946, in the gymnasium of Nuremberg Prison.

The Allied authorities were determined not to create gravesites that could become shrines. After the hangings, the bodies were driven to Munich and cremated at the Ostfriedhof Cemetery crematorium, and the ashes were scattered in a tributary of the Isar River.¹

Where the Prisoners Served Their Time

All seven imprisoned defendants were transferred in July 1947 to Spandau Prison in West Berlin. A rotating guard system reflected the divided politics of occupied Germany. Each month, one of the four Allied powers took charge of the facility, providing soldiers for the watchtowers and the exterior perimeter.¹

What They Were Convicted Of

The prosecution charged defendants under four counts drawn from the London Charter, signed on August 8, 1945.⁶ Not every defendant faced every count, and the tribunal assessed each person’s liability individually.

Count 1 charged participation in a common plan or conspiracy to wage aggressive war. The judges read it narrowly, requiring proof of personal involvement in concrete planning rather than mere presence in government. Count 2 covered the actual waging of aggressive war. The tribunal called the initiation of a war of aggression “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”⁷

Count 3 addressed war crimes: violations of the laws and customs of war, including mistreatment of prisoners and destruction of civilian property without military justification. Many convictions rested on captured documents linking specific defendants to orders that produced prohibited acts. Thirty-three witnesses testified in person against individual defendants.⁷

Count 4 covered crimes against humanity: murder, extermination, enslavement, and deportation of civilian populations, and persecution on political, racial, or religious grounds.⁶ The tribunal generally required a connection between these acts and the war itself, but the count broke new legal ground by establishing that state-sponsored violence against civilians could be punished under international law regardless of what domestic law permitted.

Two defenses raised repeatedly were rejected. Article 8 of the Charter provided that acting on superior orders did not free a defendant from responsibility, though it could be considered in sentencing. Article 7 eliminated head-of-state immunity, providing that a defendant’s official position would neither shield them nor reduce their sentence.⁶

Organizations Declared Criminal

The tribunal’s judgment also ruled on entire organizations. Under Article 10 of the Charter, once an organization was declared criminal, that status could not be challenged in later proceedings, and any signatory nation could try individual members for the crime of membership.⁸

Three organizations were declared criminal: the SS, the SD (its intelligence arm), and the Gestapo. In each case, the judges found members were involved in war crimes and crimes against humanity connected with the war, and that membership generally came with knowledge of the organization’s criminal activities. The tribunal excluded people who had left before September 1, 1939, and people conscripted by the state without a genuine choice unless they personally took part in criminal acts. The judgment noted that “membership alone is not enough.”⁸

Four other organizations were not declared criminal. The SA, once a violent force, had after a 1934 internal purge been “reduced to the status of a group of unimportant Nazi hangers-on,” and the judges concluded most members neither participated in nor knew about the crimes committed by some units.⁷ The Reich Cabinet had not functioned as a genuine group after 1931, and its small membership meant individual trials were practical. The General Staff and High Command of the armed forces were treated as a professional classification rather than a cohesive criminal organization.⁸

The Twelve Follow-On Trials

After the main tribunal ended, the United States conducted twelve additional trials at Nuremberg under Control Council Law No. 10, targeting mid-level officials, doctors, judges, industrialists, and military commanders. Of 185 people indicted, 177 stood trial. The tallies: 24 death sentences, 20 life sentences, 98 other prison terms, and 35 acquittals.⁹ Many sentences were later reduced through postwar clemency reviews.

Among the more prominent proceedings, the Doctors Trial sentenced seven physicians and medical administrators to death for concentration camp experiments and acquitted seven others.¹⁰ The Einsatzgruppen Case convicted all 22 defendants who led the mobile killing squads that operated behind the German army in Eastern Europe, sentencing 14 to death.¹¹ The IG Farben Case convicted 13 of 23 chemical conglomerate executives on charges tied to slave labor, with sentences ranging from 18 months to 8 years.¹²

Lasting Legal Impact

On December 11, 1946, roughly two months after the verdicts, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution affirming the principles of international law recognized in the Nuremberg Charter and judgment.¹³ In 1950, the UN International Law Commission distilled the tribunal’s reasoning into seven formal principles: anyone who commits a crime under international law is personally responsible regardless of what domestic law says, official position confers no immunity, superior orders do not erase responsibility where a moral choice was possible, and every accused person has the right to a fair trial.¹⁴

Those principles shaped the international criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s, and ultimately the permanent International Criminal Court in The Hague, which the Memorium Nuremberg Trials describes as directly modeled on the original tribunal.¹³

1
Memorium Nuremberg Trials. Verdicts
2
Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum. Justice at Nuremberg
3
The Avalon Project. Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression – Chapter IV
4
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. International Military Tribunal – The Defendants
5
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Hermann Goering
6
Yale Law School. Charter of the International Military Tribunal
7
International Military Tribunal. Nuremberg Judgment of 1 October 1946
8
The Avalon Project. Judgment – The Accused Organizations
9
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings
10
Harvard Law School Nuremberg Trials Project. NMT Case 1
11
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings, Case 9, The Einsatzgruppen Case
12
Harvard Law School Nuremberg Trials Project. Case 6 – The IG Farben Case
13
Memorium Nuremberg Trials. Birth of International Criminal Law
14
United Nations. Principles of International Law Recognized in the Charter of the Nurnberg Tribunal and in the Judgment of the Tribunal