Nuremberg Trials Defendants, Verdicts, and Sentences

Twenty-four senior figures of Nazi Germany were indicted before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, and the defendants, verdicts, and sentences of the Nuremberg Trials broke down as follows: twelve death sentences, three life sentences, four fixed prison terms between ten and twenty years, three acquittals, one suicide before trial, one defendant excused as too ill, and one tried in absentia. The tribunal delivered its judgments on September 30 and October 1, 1946, after proceedings that had opened on November 20, 1945.

Every Defendant, Every Verdict, Every Sentence

The prosecutors built the defendant list to put the whole machinery of the Nazi state in one dock: foreign ministry, armed forces, economic ministries, party leadership, propaganda, and security services. The tribunal weighed each defendant against four counts (detailed further below) and issued individual verdicts rather than a blanket judgment.¹

Death Sentences

Hermann Göring, Commander of the Luftwaffe and Director of the Four Year Plan. Guilty on all four counts. Sentenced to death; committed suicide by cyanide on October 15, 1946, the night before his scheduled hanging.
Joachim von Ribbentrop, Foreign Minister. Guilty on all four counts. Hanged.
Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of the Armed Forces High Command. Guilty on all four counts. Hanged.
Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Chief of the Reich Security Main Office and Security Police. Guilty on Counts 3 and 4. Hanged.
Alfred Rosenberg, Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories. Guilty on all four counts. Hanged.
Hans Frank, Governor General of occupied Poland. Guilty on Counts 3 and 4. Hanged.
Wilhelm Frick, Reich Minister of the Interior. Guilty on Counts 2, 3, and 4. Hanged.
Julius Streicher, editor of the antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer. Guilty on Count 4. Hanged.
Fritz Sauckel, Plenipotentiary General for Labor Deployment. Guilty on Counts 3 and 4. Hanged.
Alfred Jodl, Chief of the Armed Forces Operational Staff. Guilty on all four counts. Hanged.
Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Reich Governor of Austria and Commissioner of the occupied Netherlands. Guilty on Counts 2, 3, and 4. Hanged.
Martin Bormann, Head of the Party Chancellery. Guilty on Counts 3 and 4. Sentenced to death by hanging in absentia; never located.

Life Imprisonment

Rudolf Hess, Deputy Leader of the Nazi Party. Guilty on Counts 1 and 2; acquitted on 3 and 4 because his May 1941 flight to Scotland and subsequent British captivity removed him from wartime atrocities.
Walther Funk, Minister of Economics and President of the Reichsbank. Guilty on Counts 2, 3, and 4.
Erich Raeder, Commander in Chief of the Navy. Guilty on Counts 1, 2, and 3.

Fixed Prison Terms

Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments and Munitions. Guilty on Counts 3 and 4. Twenty years.
Baldur von Schirach, Head of the Hitler Youth and Governor of Vienna. Guilty on Count 4. Twenty years.
Konstantin von Neurath, Foreign Minister before Ribbentrop and Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. Guilty on all four counts. Fifteen years.
Karl Dönitz, Commander of the submarine fleet and, briefly after Hitler’s death, head of state. Guilty on Counts 2 and 3. Ten years.

Acquittals

Hjalmar Schacht, former Reichsbank president and economic planner.
Franz von Papen, former Chancellor and diplomat.
Hans Fritzsche, Head of the Radio Division in the Propaganda Ministry.

The Soviet judge filed a formal dissent arguing that all three acquitted defendants should have been convicted. Some were later prosecuted by German courts under domestic denazification proceedings.

The Four Counts Behind Every Verdict

The London Charter of August 8, 1945, created the tribunal and defined the categories of offenses, and the indictment structured the case around four counts.² Reading a defendant’s verdict means reading which of these counts the tribunal found proven against them.

Count 1, Conspiracy. Participating in a common plan to commit the crimes charged in the other counts. This let prosecutors reach planners and organizers who did not personally commit violence.
Count 2, Crimes against peace. Planning, preparing, or launching wars of aggression in violation of international agreements, particularly the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact under which signatory nations had renounced war as an instrument of national policy.³
Count 3, War crimes. Violations of the laws and customs of warfare under the Hague and Geneva Conventions, including mistreatment of prisoners of war and destruction of civilian areas beyond military need.⁴
Count 4, Crimes against humanity. Murder, enslavement, deportation, and persecution of civilians on political, racial, or religious grounds, including acts committed by a government against people within its own borders.²

Not every defendant faced all four counts, and the tribunal did not treat conviction as all-or-nothing. Streicher, for instance, was convicted only under Count 4 for antisemitic propaganda the tribunal found had incited persecution and murder, despite his holding no government office at the time of the crimes. Dönitz was convicted on only two counts and drew a ten-year sentence. Speer’s admission of general responsibility, together with his insistence that he had not known about the extermination camps, is widely credited with saving him from the gallows; he received twenty years despite his role in a wartime labor system that relied on millions of coerced workers.⁵

Defense Arguments the Tribunal Rejected

Most defendants argued they were following orders. Article 8 of the London Charter had anticipated this and stated that superior orders did not free a defendant from responsibility, though the tribunal could weigh them in setting punishment. Several defendants also pointed to Allied bombing and Soviet conduct in Eastern Europe; the tribunal held that one party’s misconduct did not excuse another’s. A few claimed ignorance of the worst crimes. Hess claimed memory loss, and his mental fitness was debated throughout. Göring took the opposite approach, defending the regime in cross-examination and treating the trial as a stage.

The Three Indicted Defendants Who Never Received a Verdict

The gap between the twenty-four indicted and the twenty-two who received verdicts reflects three specific cases:

Robert Ley, head of the German Labor Front, killed himself in his cell shortly before the proceedings began.
Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, chairman of the Reich Association of Industry, was deemed too ill to face the court.
Martin Bormann, head of the Party Chancellery, was tried in absentia after his whereabouts could not be confirmed. He was convicted on Counts 3 and 4 and sentenced to death, but was never located.

What Happened After Sentencing

The ten executions were carried out on October 16, 1946, in a gymnasium inside the Nuremberg prison complex. Göring’s suicide the previous night, together with Bormann’s absence, reduced the number actually hanged from twelve to ten. The method was hanging rather than a military firing squad, chosen to mark the defendants as criminals rather than soldiers.⁶

Those given prison terms were first held in Nuremberg and transferred in July 1947 to the Allied War Criminals Prison at Berlin-Spandau. Hess would eventually become its sole remaining inmate. Speer served his full twenty years and was released in 1966.¹

Roles Behind the Names

The sentences track power. Göring held more authority than anyone in the regime other than Hitler, having been named as Hitler’s successor and holding an extraordinary stack of positions from Commander in Chief of the Luftwaffe to President of the Reichstag to Director of the Four Year Plan that reshaped Germany’s economy for war.⁷⁸

Ribbentrop’s diplomacy paved the way for Germany’s expansion: pressuring Austria into annexation, helping dismantle Czechoslovakia, and negotiating the nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union whose secret protocol carved up Eastern Europe before the invasion of Poland.⁹¹⁰ He was the first defendant hanged.

Keitel signed orders authorizing the execution of captured commandos and the brutal treatment of Soviet prisoners of war. Kaltenbrunner was the highest-ranking SS officer to face the tribunal, having overseen the Gestapo, the SD, and the concentration camp system in the war’s final years. Frank kept a diary detailing his rule over occupied Poland, and prosecutors used it against him.¹

Hess’s case is the clearest illustration of why the count structure mattered. His flight to Scotland in May 1941, apparently in hope of negotiating a peace deal with Britain, put him in British captivity for the rest of the war. The tribunal convicted him on the conspiracy and crimes-against-peace counts that predated his flight and acquitted him on the war crimes and crimes-against-humanity counts committed while he was already a prisoner.¹¹

Verdicts on the Six Nazi Organizations

Alongside the individuals, the tribunal ruled on whether six organizations should be declared criminal as such, a status that would allow later prosecutions to treat membership itself as grounds for charges.¹²

Three organizations were declared criminal:

The SS, including the SD intelligence service.
The Gestapo, the Secret State Police.
The Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party.

Three were not:

The SA, which the tribunal found had been sidelined after the 1934 purge.
The Reich Cabinet, which the judges concluded had stopped functioning as a real governing body after 1937.
The General Staff and High Command, which the tribunal ruled was not a true organization but a shifting group of individual officers.

Even for the groups declared criminal, the tribunal excluded members who had been drafted involuntarily and had not personally participated in crimes.¹³ These organizational rulings applied only to the main tribunal and its immediate follow-on proceedings; they were not a general finding of guilt on every person who had ever worn the uniform.

1
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. International Military Tribunal – The Defendants
2
Avalon Project. Charter of the International Military Tribunal
3
The Avalon Project. Kellogg-Briand Pact 1928
4
International Committee of the Red Cross. Hague Convention (IV) Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land
5
Avalon Project. The Slave Labor Program, The Illegal Use of Prisoners of War
6
Memorium Nuremberg Trials. Verdicts
7
Harvard Law School Library. List of Goerings Positions in the Nazi Party, Government, and Military (1922-45)
8
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Hermann Goring
9
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Joachim von Ribbentrop
10
Avalon Project. Treaty of Nonaggression Between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
11
Memorium Nuremberg Trials. The Defendants
12
Avalon Project. Nuremberg Trial Proceedings Vol 1 – Indictment
13
Avalon Project. Judgment – The Accused Organizations