Nuremberg Trials 1945: Charges, Defendants, and Verdicts

The Nuremberg Trials of 1945 were the first international criminal proceedings in history, opening on November 20, 1945, in the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, Germany. The International Military Tribunal, staffed by judges and prosecutors from the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union, tried 24 senior leaders of Nazi Germany on four counts covering conspiracy, aggressive war, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. When the tribunal delivered its judgment on September 30 and October 1, 1946, 19 defendants were convicted, 12 were sentenced to death, and international law had a new foundation for holding individuals personally responsible for atrocities.¹

The Four Charges

The indictment organized the prosecution around four counts. A defendant could be convicted on any combination of them.

Count One charged conspiracy: participation in a common plan to commit any of the crimes named in the other counts. It targeted the deliberate, coordinated nature of Nazi leadership over many years.² This charge was controversial among the Allies themselves. Conspiracy as a standalone criminal concept came from Anglo-American common law and was largely unfamiliar in the civil law systems of France and the Soviet Union, and its inclusion required significant negotiation before all four nations agreed on its scope.

Count Two, crimes against peace, covered the planning, preparation, and launching of wars that violated international treaties. The prosecution argued that the invasions of Poland, Denmark, Norway, and other nations were calculated aggression rather than defensive action.

Count Three, war crimes, addressed violations of established wartime rules: the murder and mistreatment of prisoners of war, the killing of hostages, and the deliberate destruction of cities without military justification.

Count Four, crimes against humanity, encompassed murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and persecution of civilians on political, racial, or religious grounds. This was a new legal category, crafted specifically to address the Holocaust and the regime’s systematic brutality against its own citizens and those of occupied nations.³

Who Sat in the Dock

The prosecution indicted 24 individuals drawn from the highest levels of the Nazi regime’s military, diplomatic, and economic hierarchies. Only 21 appeared in the courtroom on opening day. Robert Ley, head of the German Labour Front, killed himself in his cell before the trial began. Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, the industrialist, was ruled medically unfit. Martin Bormann, Hitler’s private secretary, was tried in absentia after his whereabouts could not be determined.⁴

Those in the dock included Hermann Göring, commander of the Luftwaffe and the highest-ranking Nazi to face the tribunal; Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s former deputy; Joachim von Ribbentrop, the foreign minister; and Albert Speer, the armaments minister who ran the regime’s forced-labor programs. The defendants collectively represented the full apparatus of the Nazi state: military command, propaganda machine, diplomatic service, and the industrial base that fueled the war.⁵

The indictment also charged six organizations as criminal entities: the SS (including the SD security service), the Gestapo, the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party, the SA, the Reich Cabinet, and the General Staff and High Command of the armed forces.⁶ Declaring an organization criminal carried real consequences, providing a legal basis for prosecuting individual members throughout occupied Germany. The tribunal found three organizations criminal — the Leadership Corps, the SS and SD, and the Gestapo — and acquitted the SA, the Reich Cabinet, and the General Staff.⁷

The Legal Authority Behind the Trial

The four Allied nations signed the Agreement for the Prosecution and Punishment of the Major War Criminals of the European Axis on August 8, 1945, in London. The agreement created the International Military Tribunal and annexed a charter spelling out its jurisdiction, structure, and procedures.⁸

Two provisions of the charter broke sharply with prior legal tradition. Article 7 eliminated sovereign immunity, declaring that a defendant’s position as head of state or senior official would neither shield them from prosecution nor reduce their sentence. Article 8 addressed the “I was just following orders” defense: obeying a superior’s command did not excuse criminal conduct, though judges could weigh it in deciding punishment.⁹ These provisions established that individuals bear personal responsibility for atrocities regardless of rank or orders, a principle that had no binding precedent in international law before 1945.

The charter also required each signatory to appoint one judge and one alternate, so no single nation controlled the bench. Its jurisdiction covered acts committed throughout the war, even when those acts were legal under the domestic law of the country where they occurred.¹⁰

How the Trial Was Run

The bench consisted of four primary judges and four alternates, one pair from each signatory nation. The British judge, Sir Geoffrey Lawrence, served as president of the tribunal. Decisions and sentences required a majority vote, with the president casting the deciding vote in a tie.¹¹

Each nation fielded its own prosecution team led by a chief prosecutor. The American team, headed by Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, delivered the trial’s defining opening statement. Jackson framed the proceedings not as vengeance but as a deliberate choice to “stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law.” He described the defendants as “living symbols of racial hatreds, of terrorism and violence, and of the arrogance and cruelty of power.”¹²

Defendants had specific procedural rights guaranteed by the charter: a copy of the indictment translated into their language, the right to conduct their own defense or use counsel, the right to present evidence and cross-examine prosecution witnesses, and the right to offer any explanation relevant to the charges.¹³ Every defendant received a German defense attorney, and several mounted aggressive challenges to the tribunal’s authority.

The Evidence

Jackson built the case on the Nazis’ own paperwork rather than on witness testimony that defendants could dismiss as unreliable or vengeful. Allied forces advancing across Europe had captured enormous quantities of official documents — orders, memoranda, diplomatic cables, meeting minutes, and personal diaries — that the regime failed to destroy. Thousands of the most incriminating pieces entered the trial record.

The strategy gave prosecutors a powerful advantage. When a defendant claimed ignorance, prosecutors could produce a document bearing their signature. When a defendant denied involvement in a policy, their own correspondence often placed them at the meeting where it was decided.

The trial was also one of the first proceedings to use film as courtroom evidence. The prosecution screened footage shot by Allied military photographers as they liberated concentration camps, showing conditions in graphic detail. The films did double duty: evidence of the crimes and a record for the world.¹⁴ Some defendants visibly recoiled in the courtroom; others looked away.

What the Defense Argued

Defense teams mounted several legal challenges to the tribunal’s authority. The most consequential invoked the principle nullum crimen sine lege: no punishment without a pre-existing law. Counsel argued that no sovereign power had criminalized aggressive war when the defendants acted, no statute defined it, no penalty existed for it, and no court had jurisdiction over it.¹⁵

The tribunal rejected the argument directly. The judges acknowledged the principle but ruled it was not an absolute limitation on sovereignty. It was a principle of justice. Given the defendants’ senior positions, they knew about the international treaties outlawing aggressive war and understood they were acting in defiance of international law. The principle did not shield people who knowingly violated existing international obligations.¹⁵

Defendants also tried variations of the tu quoque defense, essentially “you did it too.” The strategy tried to shift attention to Allied conduct, especially Soviet actions, and to frame the proceedings as victors’ justice. The tribunal treated this as legally irrelevant. Whether Allied nations had committed their own violations did not excuse the defendants’ conduct.

The Verdicts and Sentences

The tribunal delivered judgment on September 30 and October 1, 1946. Of the 22 defendants whose cases reached a verdict, 19 were found guilty on at least one count. Three were acquitted: Hjalmar Schacht, the former economics minister; Franz von Papen, a diplomat; and Hans Fritzsche, a propaganda official. The Soviet judge dissented from all three acquittals, arguing that the evidence supported conviction.¹¹⁶

Twelve defendants received death sentences. The executions were carried out by hanging in the gymnasium of Nuremberg Prison on October 16, 1946, with one exception. Hermann Göring killed himself hours before his scheduled execution by biting down on a concealed cyanide capsule in his cell.¹⁷

The remaining convicted defendants received prison sentences. Rudolf Hess, Walther Funk, and Erich Raeder were sentenced to life imprisonment. Albert Speer and Baldur von Schirach received 20 years. Konstantin von Neurath received 15 years. Karl Dönitz received 10 years. All seven were transferred to Spandau Prison in West Berlin, where they served under the joint supervision of the four Allied powers. Speer and Schirach were released in 1966 after completing their full terms. Hess remained the prison’s sole inmate for over two decades until his death in 1987.⁶

What Came After the Main Trial

The International Military Tribunal was only the beginning. Control Council Law No. 10, enacted in December 1945, authorized each occupying power to prosecute war criminals within its zone. Under that authority, the United States conducted 12 additional trials at Nuremberg between 1946 and 1949, reaching deeper layers of the Nazi apparatus.¹⁸

These subsequent trials brought 177 defendants before U.S. military tribunals: physicians who conducted lethal experiments on concentration camp prisoners, judges who perverted the German legal system to enforce racial persecution, industrialists who profited from slave labor, and commanders of the mobile killing squads that murdered over a million people in Eastern Europe.¹⁹

The Doctors’ Trial produced a legacy that reached far beyond the courtroom. Its verdict included ten principles governing permissible medical experiments on human subjects, now known as the Nuremberg Code. The first and most famous states that “the voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.” The Code also required that experiments produce results beneficial to society and unobtainable by other means, that subjects be free to end their participation at any time, and that researchers terminate any experiment where they had reason to believe it would cause injury or death.²⁰ The Code became the foundation of modern research ethics.

Lasting Legal Legacy

In 1950, the United Nations International Law Commission distilled the tribunal’s reasoning into seven formal principles. The Nuremberg Principles established that anyone who commits a crime under international law bears personal responsibility for it, that domestic law cannot override international criminal liability, that neither a head-of-state position nor obedience to superior orders provides a defense (provided a moral choice was possible), and that every person charged with an international crime has the right to a fair trial.²¹

The sixth principle codified the three Nuremberg crime categories — crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity — as punishable under international law. The seventh made complicity in any of them a crime in itself.²¹

Building a permanent institution took decades. The spirit of Nuremberg persisted through ad hoc tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s and led to the adoption of the Rome Statute on July 17, 1998, creating the International Criminal Court. The ICC’s own judges have described the court as the “historical continuance” of the Nuremberg tribunal.²²

1
Harvard Law School Library. International Military Tribunal
2
The Avalon Project. Nuremberg Trial Proceedings Vol 1 – Indictment Count One
3
The Avalon Project. Nuremberg Trial Proceedings Vol 1 – Indictment Count Four
4
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5
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6
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7
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8
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9
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10
University of Minnesota Human Rights Library. Agreement for the Prosecution and Punishment of the Major War Criminals of the European Axis
11
Memorium Nuremberg Trials. The International Military Tribunal – The Judges
12
Robert H. Jackson Center. Opening Statement before the International Military Tribunal
13
The Avalon Project. Charter of the International Military Tribunal
14
Imperial War Museums. Nuremberg Trials: Films that Brought the Nazis to Justice
15
Portland State University. Nuremberg Tribunal Documents
16
The Avalon Project. Judgment – Dissenting Opinion
17
Memorium Nuremberg Trials. Verdicts of the IMT
18
The Avalon Project. Control Council Law No 10
19
Memorium Nuremberg Trials. The Subsequent Nuremberg Trials
20
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The Nuremberg Code
21
United Nations International Law Commission. Principles of International Law Recognized in the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal
22
International Criminal Court. Nuremberg Statement of ICC Judges