Nuremberg Trials 1947: Doctors, Judges, and Industrialists

The Nuremberg trials of 1947 were a series of American military tribunals held in the same courthouse that had housed the International Military Tribunal the year before, targeting the professionals and institutions that made the Nazi regime function: physicians who ran lethal experiments, judges who turned the courts into killing tools, corporate executives who bought slave labor, SS administrators who managed the camps, and the commanders of mobile killing units that shot civilians across Eastern Europe. More than 170 defendants stood trial across twelve subsequent proceedings, several of which began, ended, or delivered their verdicts during 1947. The year’s most consequential product was the Nuremberg Code, ten principles on human experimentation that still govern medical research.

Why These Were American Trials

Two legal instruments shaped the 1947 proceedings. Control Council Law No. 10, enacted by the four Allied occupying powers, gave each power authority to prosecute war criminals in its own zone.¹ The United States was the only one that used that authority on a large scale, running all twelve subsequent proceedings in Nuremberg. Military Government Ordinance No. 7 laid out how the American tribunals would work: at least three judges on each panel, all required to be lawyers with at least five years of practice before American courts, with defendants entitled to counsel, to the indictment in their own language, and to cross-examine prosecution witnesses.² Indictments came from the Office of the Chief of Counsel for War Crimes, headed by Brigadier General Telford Taylor.

Control Council Law No. 10 defined four categories of offense: crimes against peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and membership in organizations the International Military Tribunal had already declared criminal, such as the SS.¹ That structure gave prosecutors a way to reach beyond battlefield commanders to the doctors, judges, and corporate boards whose work sustained the regime.

The Doctors’ Trial and Its August 1947 Verdict

The first subsequent proceeding, United States v. Karl Brandt et al., had opened in December 1946 and delivered its verdict on August 20, 1947. Twenty-three defendants, all physicians or medical administrators, faced charges tied to human experimentation and the systematic killing of disabled people.³ Karl Brandt had been Hitler’s personal physician since 1934 and co-directed the T-4 euthanasia program, which killed tens of thousands of people with disabilities in gas chambers disguised as showers.

The experiments prosecuted were extreme. At Dachau, prisoners were sealed in low-pressure chambers to simulate high-altitude conditions until their lungs ruptured. Others were submerged in freezing water for hours or left naked outdoors in winter. Prisoners were infected with typhus, sterilized with radiation, injected with seawater, or subjected to bone transplants between subjects. None consented.

The tribunal convicted sixteen defendants and acquitted seven. Seven of the convicted received death sentences and were executed on June 2, 1948; the other nine received prison terms.⁴ The trial ran 140 days, heard 85 witnesses, and processed nearly 1,500 documents.³

The Nuremberg Code

Embedded in the August 1947 judgment were ten principles governing permissible medical experimentation on human subjects, since known as the Nuremberg Code.⁵ The first principle declared that the voluntary consent of the human subject is “absolutely essential.” The subject must have legal capacity to consent, must be free from coercion, and must understand the nature, purpose, duration, and risks of the experiment before agreeing.

The other principles required that experiments produce results beneficial to society and unobtainable by other means, that they be grounded in prior animal research, and that they avoid unnecessary suffering. No experiment should proceed where death or disabling injury was expected, and the risk had to be proportionate to the humanitarian importance of the problem. Subjects had to be free to end the experiment at any time, and the researcher in charge had to stop it if continuation appeared likely to cause harm.⁵ These principles became the foundation of modern research ethics and shaped every major code that followed, including the Declaration of Helsinki.

The Justice Trial

Case No. 3 put the German legal system on trial. Sixteen former judges and officials from the Reich Ministry of Justice were indicted for warping the courts into instruments of persecution and political murder.⁶ Nine had worked inside the ministry; the rest served on special courts that imposed politically motivated sentences. Prosecutors argued that these officials enforced racial laws stripping entire populations of civil rights and property, and imposed death sentences for trivial offenses to demonstrate loyalty.

Central to the case was the Night and Fog decree of December 1941, which authorized the secret abduction of people from occupied territories deemed threatening to German security. Those seized were taken to Germany and disappeared, with families told nothing about their fate.⁷ The Justice Trial showed how the defendants ran that program through their courts, bypassing conventional legal protections.

Judgment came in early December 1947. One defendant had died and one was too ill to attend, leaving fourteen to face verdicts. Ten were convicted and four acquitted, with four life sentences and six prison terms between five and ten years.⁶ The case established that judges and prosecutors who use the law as a weapon bear personal criminal responsibility for what follows.

The Pohl Case

Case No. 4 targeted the bureaucrats who ran the concentration camp system as a business. Oswald Pohl headed the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office (WVHA), which took control of all concentration camps in spring 1942 and managed them for forced labor and plundered wealth.⁸ The defendants were charged with war crimes, crimes against humanity, and membership in the SS. The tribunal dropped a conspiracy count but convicted on the rest. Pohl was sentenced to death and executed in 1951.

The Industrialist Trials

Three cases in 1947 confronted the role of German corporations in wartime atrocities.

Flick

Case No. 5 prosecuted Friedrich Flick and five associates from his industrial conglomerate, running from April through December 1947 on charges of plundering occupied territories and using slave labor.⁹ On December 22 the tribunal acquitted three defendants and convicted Flick of plunder and slave labor, sentencing him to seven years. Steinbrinck got five years and Weiss two and a half. The convictions confirmed that private industrialists who profited from forced labor could be held personally accountable under international criminal law.

I.G. Farben

Case No. 6 opened on August 27, 1947, against the chemical conglomerate I.G. Farben.¹⁰ Twenty-four executives were charged with plunder and the use of concentration camp labor. Farben operated a synthetic rubber and fuel plant at Auschwitz III-Monowitz, where prisoners worked under conditions that routinely killed them, and held a 42.5 percent stake in the company that manufactured and distributed Zyklon B. The trial continued into 1948, ending with thirteen convictions and ten acquittals. The longest sentences were eight years, given to two defendants convicted on slave labor charges; several others got two years or less.¹¹ No defendant was convicted for the Zyklon B connection; the tribunal found the evidence insufficient to prove individual knowledge of its use in mass murder.

Krupp

Case No. 10 opened on August 16, 1947, against Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach and eleven officials of the Krupp armaments empire, on charges of plunder and slave labor drawn from concentration camps and prisoner-of-war facilities.¹² The judges rejected the defense that the defendants had used forced labor only because government policy compelled them to. Alfried Krupp was convicted and sentenced to twelve years, with forfeiture of his industrial holdings ordered as well. Other convicted executives received sentences from time served to twelve years.

The Einsatzgruppen Case

Case No. 9 opened on September 10, 1947, against twenty-four defendants who had commanded the SS mobile killing units that swept through Eastern Europe behind the German army, shooting Jewish communities, political opponents, and Roma populations. The indictment charged them with murdering between 723,661 and one million people as part of a systematic program of genocide.¹³

The chief prosecutor was twenty-seven-year-old Ben Ferencz, who called no witnesses at all. He built the entire case on the operational reports the killing units had written themselves, documenting the dates, locations, and body counts of their massacres. In his opening statement Ferencz told the tribunal that the slaughter “was dictated, not by military necessity, but by that supreme perversion of thought, the Nazi theory of the master race.”¹³ The defendants’ own paperwork was so detailed that survivor testimony was unnecessary. The trial continued into 1948. One defendant killed himself, and another was severed from the case for illness. Of the twenty-two who received verdicts, twenty were convicted; fourteen received death sentences, the largest number of any Nuremberg proceeding.¹⁴ Only four were actually executed in 1951, the rest having their sentences commuted.

Other Cases Running in 1947

Several other proceedings were active during the year. Case No. 2, the Milch Trial, prosecuted Field Marshal Erhard Milch for slave labor and a connection to medical experiments. He was acquitted on the experimentation charges but convicted of slave labor and sentenced to life, later commuted to fifteen years.¹⁵

Case No. 7, the Hostage Case, indicted twelve German generals for the mass killing of civilians in Greece, Yugoslavia, and Albania, detailing a reprisal policy under which up to one hundred civilians were executed for every German soldier killed, with twenty-three specific massacres cited in the indictment.¹⁶ Case No. 8, the RuSHA Trial, targeted officials from the SS Race and Resettlement Main Office and related agencies on charges covering the kidnapping of children from occupied territories for “Germanization,” forced abortions on Eastern European women, property seizures from deported populations, and the persecution and extermination of Jewish communities.¹⁷ Both trials continued into 1948.

What Happened to the Sentences

The sentences from 1947 looked severe on paper but did not hold. By January 1951, eighty-nine people convicted across all twelve subsequent trials remained in prison at Landsberg. U.S. High Commissioner for Germany John J. McCloy reviewed their cases and granted clemency to seventy-eight of them. Ten of the fifteen remaining death sentences were commuted. Thirty-two prisoners, including Alfried Krupp and eight of his co-defendants, became eligible for immediate release, and twenty-nine walked out together on the morning of February 3, 1951.¹⁸ Krupp also recovered his industrial empire.

Cold War politics drove much of this. By the early 1950s, West Germany was becoming a critical ally against the Soviet Union, and American officials were reluctant to keep German elites in prison when their cooperation was wanted. Friedrich Flick, released early, rebuilt his fortune. The legal principles set in 1947, particularly the Nuremberg Code and the doctrine that professionals bear personal responsibility for atrocities they facilitate, proved more durable than the individual punishments imposed that year.

1
University of Minnesota Human Rights Library. Control Council Law No. 10 – Punishment of Persons Guilty of War Crimes, Crimes Against Peace and Against Humanity
2
The Avalon Project. Nuremberg Trials Final Report Appendix L – Ordinance No. 7
3
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The Doctors Trial – The Medical Case of the Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings
4
Harvard Law School Library. U.S.A. v. Karl Brandt et al. – The Doctors’ Trial
5
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The Nuremberg Code
6
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings, Case #3, The Justice Case
7
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Night and Fog Decree
8
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings, Case #4, The Pohl Case
9
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings, Case #5 – The Flick Case
10
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings, Case #6, The IG Farben Case
11
Harvard Law School Library. Case 6 – The IG Farben Case
12
Harvard Law School Library. Case 10 – The Krupp Case
13
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings, Case #9, The Einsatzgruppen Case
14
Harvard Law School Library. The Einsatzgruppen Case
15
Harvard Law School Library. NMT Case 2 – The Milch Case
16
Harvard Law School Library. NMT Case 7 – The Hostage Case
17
Harvard Law School Library. Case 8 – The RuSHA Case
18
The National WWII Museum. The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and American Justice