The Nuremberg Trials were the first international criminal proceedings to hold individual leaders personally accountable for waging aggressive war and committing atrocities. The main trial ran from November 20, 1945, to October 1, 1946, at the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, Germany, where 22 of the Nazi regime’s most senior figures faced judges from the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. Twelve defendants were sentenced to death, seven received prison terms, and three were acquitted. The proceedings also established legal principles that still shape international law today.
The Four Charges
The London Agreement, signed on August 8, 1945, by the four Allied powers, created the International Military Tribunal and annexed a charter setting out its jurisdiction and procedures.1The Avalon Project. London Agreement of August 8th 1945 The Charter defined three categories of crimes, and a fourth count tied them together. Every defendant faced some combination of these four counts:
- Conspiracy. Planning or participating in a common scheme to commit any of the other three crimes. This count reached the organizational hierarchy behind the regime’s agenda, allowing prosecutors to charge people who directed strategy even if they never personally carried out the acts.
- Crimes against peace. Planning, preparing, starting, or waging a war of aggression, or a war that violated international treaties.
- War crimes. Violations of the laws and customs of war, including killing or mistreating civilians and prisoners of war, deporting people to forced labor, destroying cities without military justification, and plundering property.
- Crimes against humanity. Extermination, enslavement, deportation, and persecution of civilian populations on political, racial, or religious grounds, whether committed during wartime or before it.
The crimes-against-humanity charge was new. It extended legal protection to a government’s own citizens, meaning leaders could be prosecuted for atrocities committed against people inside their own borders.2The Avalon Project. Charter of the International Military Tribunal
Each signatory nation appointed one judge and one alternate. Article 4 of the Charter required at least three affirmative votes from the four primary judges for any conviction or sentence, a threshold designed to prevent any single nation from controlling the outcome.
Who Stood Trial
Twenty-four individuals were originally indicted in October 1945, but only 22 stood trial. Robert Ley, head of the German Labour Front, hanged himself in his cell on October 25, 1945. Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, the industrialist, was declared medically unfit after a commission found he could not understand court proceedings, and his case was postponed indefinitely.3The Avalon Project. Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression – Chapter IV
Martin Bormann, head of the Nazi Party Chancellery and Hitler’s private secretary, was tried in absentia. His whereabouts were unknown at the time. West German authorities officially declared him dead in 1973 after his remains were identified.4United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Martin Bormann
The defendants who did appear in the dock spanned every branch of the regime. Hermann Göring was the highest-ranking, having commanded the Luftwaffe and held sweeping authority over economic and military planning. Rudolf Hess had served as Deputy Führer until his unauthorized flight to Scotland in 1941. Joachim von Ribbentrop was Foreign Minister and had negotiated the diplomatic agreements preceding Germany’s invasions. Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of the Armed Forces High Command, had signed many of the operational directives that carried out aggressive war. Karl Dönitz commanded the submarine fleet and briefly served as head of state after Hitler’s death. Military commanders sat alongside civilian ministers, propagandists alongside diplomats, by design: the prosecution wanted to show that the crimes were the work of an integrated state apparatus, not one faction.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson took a leave of absence from the bench to serve as Chief Prosecutor. The prosecution’s case leaned heavily on the Nazis’ own captured records — thousands of orders, memoranda, meeting minutes, and policy directives — supplemented by documentary film footage from liberated concentration camps.
Verdicts and Sentences
The tribunal delivered its judgments on October 1, 1946. Of the 22 defendants who stood trial, plus Bormann in absentia, the outcomes were:
- Death by hanging (12): Göring, Ribbentrop, Keitel, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Julius Streicher, Fritz Sauckel, Alfred Jodl, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, and Bormann (in absentia).
- Life imprisonment (3): Hess, Walther Funk, and Erich Raeder.
- 20 years (2): Baldur von Schirach and Albert Speer.
- 15 years (1): Konstantin von Neurath.
- 10 years (1): Dönitz.
- Acquitted (3): Hjalmar Schacht, Franz von Papen, and Hans Fritzsche.
The seven defendants sentenced to prison terms served their time at Spandau Prison in Berlin. The three acquittals were controversial. The Soviet judge filed a formal dissent, arguing that Schacht, von Papen, and Fritzsche should have been convicted.6The Avalon Project. Judgment – Dissenting Opinion
The Executions
The hangings were scheduled for October 16, 1946. The night before, Göring bit down on a concealed glass capsule of potassium cyanide and died in his cell, cheating the gallows. The remaining ten condemned men present at Nuremberg were hanged in the prison gymnasium that morning. The bodies, together with Göring’s, were transported to a crematorium in Munich, and the ashes were scattered into the Isar River to prevent any site from becoming a place of pilgrimage.
Criminal Organizations
The tribunal did not stop at individual defendants. It also evaluated whether specific Nazi organizations should be declared criminal as a whole, and it declared four: the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party, the SS, the Gestapo, and the SD (the regime’s intelligence service). Under Control Council Law No. 10, national courts throughout occupied Germany could then prosecute individuals for membership in any of these organizations, with penalties up to and including death. The declaration did not automatically convict every member; prosecutors still had to prove an individual joined or remained in the organization knowing it was committing crimes.7The Avalon Project. Judgment – The Accused Organizations
Individual Responsibility and the “Just Following Orders” Defense
Before Nuremberg, international law dealt almost exclusively with states, not individuals. The tribunal broke that pattern by holding that people who commit crimes under international law bear personal responsibility, regardless of whether they acted as heads of state or government officials. The 1942 St. James Declaration had already called for the punishment of individuals “who ordered, perpetrated, or participated in” wartime crimes.8Office of the Historian. The Nuremberg Trial and the Tokyo War Crimes Trials
The most common defense at Nuremberg was superior orders, the claim that a defendant was simply following commands from above. Article 8 of the Charter addressed this directly: obeying orders did not free a defendant from responsibility, though a tribunal could consider it as grounds for a lesser sentence. The judges reinforced the point, stating that ordering a soldier to kill or torture civilians had “never been recognised as a defence to such acts of brutality.” The tribunal specifically rejected the superior-orders plea from Keitel and Jodl, both senior military commanders.2The Avalon Project. Charter of the International Military Tribunal
Some defendants also argued that Allied bombing campaigns and other wartime conduct meant the Allies had no standing to prosecute. International courts have never accepted this defense, and the Nuremberg tribunal gave it no weight.
The Subsequent Nuremberg Trials and the Nuremberg Code
After the four-power tribunal concluded, the United States conducted 12 additional trials in Nuremberg between 1946 and 1949 using American military judges rather than an international panel.9United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings In total, 185 individuals were indicted across these 12 cases, of whom 177 stood trial.10Memorium Nuremberg Trials. The Subsequent Nuremberg Trials They targeted specific professional groups that had enabled the regime.
The Medical Case prosecuted doctors who performed lethal experiments on concentration camp prisoners. The Justice Case targeted judges and prosecutors who had weaponized the legal system to enforce discriminatory laws. The Einsatzgruppen Case tried 22 commanders of the mobile killing squads responsible for the murder of between roughly 724,000 and one million people in occupied Eastern Europe; fourteen of those defendants were sentenced to death.11United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings, Case #9, The Einsatzgruppen Case Other cases prosecuted industrialists who used forced labor, military commanders who ordered hostage killings, and senior government ministers.
One lasting product of the Medical Case was the Nuremberg Code, ten principles for ethical human experimentation written into the 1947 judgment. The first and most important principle states that voluntary consent of the research subject is “absolutely essential.” The remaining principles require that experiments serve a genuine societal benefit, avoid unnecessary suffering, be conducted only by qualified scientists, and allow the subject to stop participating at any time. The Code became a cornerstone of modern medical ethics and influenced virtually every subsequent framework for research on human subjects.12Office for Research Integrity. Nuremberg Code – Directives for Human Experimentation
The Lasting Legal Legacy
In 1950, the United Nations International Law Commission codified the tribunal’s reasoning into seven Nuremberg Principles. These established that anyone who commits a crime under international law is personally responsible, that following orders does not eliminate that responsibility if the person had a genuine moral choice, that even heads of state are not immune from prosecution, and that every accused person has the right to a fair trial. Principle VI restated the three categories of international crime — crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity — solidifying definitions the tribunal had applied.13United Nations. Principles of International Law Recognized in the Charter of the Nurnberg Tribunal and in the Judgment of the Tribunal
Those principles sat largely dormant for nearly half a century until the wars in the former Yugoslavia forced the issue. When the UN Security Council created the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in 1993, negotiators drew what one participant called a “straight line” from the London Charter to the new tribunal’s statute. The same framework shaped the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in 1994.14Council on Foreign Relations. A Negotiator’s Reliance on the Nuremberg Legacy
The longest thread runs to the International Criminal Court, established by the Rome Statute in 1998 and operational since 2002. During years of negotiations, the Nuremberg precedent was what one lead negotiator described as “a persistent touchstone of reference and reliance.” The crime of aggression, the charge Justice Jackson had considered the most important at Nuremberg, was eventually defined and added to the ICC’s jurisdiction at a 2010 review conference in Kampala, Uganda. An improvised tribunal in a bombed-out German city became the template for a permanent system of international criminal justice.