The Nuremberg Trials produced 19 convictions and 3 acquittals among the 22 senior Nazi officials tried before the International Military Tribunal. Twelve defendants were sentenced to death by hanging, and seven received prison terms ranging from 10 years to life. Twelve follow-up trials under U.S. jurisdiction prosecuted another 177 people, yielding 24 more death sentences, 20 life sentences, 98 other prison terms, and 35 acquittals. Beyond the individual verdicts, the proceedings established that following orders is not a defense, that heads of state can be prosecuted for international crimes, and that human experimentation requires informed consent.
Who Was Convicted and Who Walked Free
On October 1, 1946, the tribunal delivered its verdict.1United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg Twenty-four men had been indicted, but Robert Ley killed himself before the trial began and Gustav Krupp was ruled medically unfit, so 22 defendants actually stood trial.
Hermann Göring and Joachim von Ribbentrop were convicted on all four counts of the indictment. Wilhelm Keitel, head of the armed forces, and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the highest-ranking SS officer to survive the war, were found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The prosecution built much of its case on the Nazis’ own paperwork: thousands of captured documents, meeting minutes, orders, and official correspondence, supplemented by survivor testimony.
Three defendants were acquitted. Hjalmar Schacht, the former Economics Minister, and Franz von Papen, the former Vice-Chancellor, were cleared because the prosecution could not prove they had sufficient involvement in planning aggressive war.2United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. International Military Tribunal – The Defendants Hans Fritzsche, a senior propaganda official, was acquitted because his radio broadcasts did not meet the legal threshold for inciting crimes against humanity. The Soviet judge dissented on all three acquittals.3The Avalon Project. Judgment – Dissenting Opinion
The tribunal also declared the SS, the Gestapo, the SD, and the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party to be criminal organizations, though it excluded members who had been drafted by the state or who had no knowledge of criminal activities.4The Avalon Project. Judgement – The Accused Organizations The SA, the Reich Cabinet, and the General Staff were not declared criminal.
The Twelve Death Sentences
Twelve defendants were sentenced to hang: Göring, Ribbentrop, Keitel, Kaltenbrunner, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Julius Streicher, Fritz Sauckel, Alfred Jodl, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, and Martin Bormann, who was tried in absentia.5Memorium Nuremberg Trials. Verdicts
The executions were carried out on October 16, 1946, in the gymnasium of the Nuremberg Prison. Ten men were hanged that night. Bormann could not be located. Göring bit into a cyanide capsule in his cell on the eve of the execution; how he obtained the poison remains disputed. The bodies were transported to Munich, cremated at the Ostfriedhof Cemetery, and the ashes scattered in a tributary of the Isar River to prevent any location from becoming a site of pilgrimage.
The Prison Sentences and Spandau
Seven defendants received prison terms. Rudolf Hess, Walther Funk, and Erich Raeder were sentenced to life. Baldur von Schirach and Albert Speer received 20 years each, Konstantin von Neurath 15 years, and Karl Dönitz 10 years. All seven were transferred in July 1947 to Spandau Prison in Berlin, where the four Allied powers took monthly turns running the facility.
Four prisoners were released between 1954 and 1957 on health or good-conduct grounds. Raeder and Funk, both serving life, were among them, and their sentences were effectively cut short. Speer and Schirach served their full 20 years and were released in 1966. That left Hess as the sole occupant of a prison built for 600, guarded in rotation by American, British, French, and Soviet military personnel until his death there in August 1987 at age 93. Spandau was demolished weeks later.
The Twelve Subsequent Trials
The main trial was only the beginning. Under Control Council Law No. 10, the United States conducted 12 additional proceedings targeting the professionals who had made the Nazi machine run: doctors, judges, military commanders, industrialists, and government officials.6The Avalon Project. Control Council Law No. 10 Of 185 people indicted, 177 stood trial, producing 24 death sentences, 20 life sentences, 98 other prison terms, and 35 acquittals.7United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings
The Doctors’ Trial (Case 1) prosecuted 23 medical professionals for experiments on concentration camp prisoners, including freezing tests, high-altitude pressure experiments, and forced sterilization. Sixteen were convicted, seven acquitted, and seven of the convicted were executed.8Nuremberg Trials Project. NMT Case 1
The Judges’ Trial (Case 3) put 16 members of Germany’s legal establishment on trial for turning the judiciary into an instrument of racial persecution. Ten were convicted, four acquitted, and two never stood trial. Sentences ran from five years to life.9United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Background – Jurists Trial Verdict
The Einsatzgruppen Trial (Case 9) targeted 22 members of the mobile killing squads responsible for mass shootings across Eastern Europe. Every defendant was convicted, and 14 received death sentences.10United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings, Case 9, The Einsatzgruppen Case Only four of those sentences were ultimately carried out.
Industrialists faced prosecution as well. In the Krupp Trial (Case 10), 11 of 12 defendants were convicted of exploiting slave labor, with sentences of 2 to 12 years that were later mostly commuted to time served.11United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings, Case 10 – The Krupp Case The IG Farben Trial (Case 6) prosecuted 23 executives of the chemical conglomerate that manufactured Zyklon B and operated factories staffed by forced labor. Thirteen were convicted with sentences of 18 months to eight years; ten were acquitted.
Clemency and Early Releases
The accountability the trials established eroded quickly. On January 31, 1951, U.S. High Commissioner John J. McCloy announced clemency decisions for 89 German war criminals held at Landsberg Prison. He reduced the sentences of 79 inmates, and those reductions, combined with credit for pretrial detention and good conduct, allowed 32 prisoners to walk free immediately. Industrialist Alfried Krupp was among them. Of 15 remaining death sentences, McCloy affirmed only five, all for Einsatzgruppen members.
The pattern was not confined to the American zone. Cold War pressures and West German political lobbying drove widespread sentence reductions across all occupation zones throughout the early 1950s. Many of the professionals convicted in the subsequent proceedings, including doctors and industrialists, served only a fraction of their sentences.
The Legal Principles the Trials Established
The proceedings created a set of doctrines that had never been applied at this scale before, and those doctrines have shaped international law ever since.
Superior Orders Is Not a Defense
Article 8 of the London Charter stated that following orders from a government or military superior “shall not free him from responsibility, but may be considered in mitigation of punishment.”12The Avalon Project. Charter of the International Military Tribunal The tribunal held that individuals retain a moral choice even under threat of punishment. “I was just following orders” would not shield a defendant when the orders were manifestly criminal.
Individual Responsibility for Officials
Before Nuremberg, sovereign immunity generally protected government officials from foreign courts. The tribunal rejected that protection for international crimes. The Charter was explicit: official position “shall not be considered as freeing him from responsibility or mitigating punishment.” A person’s rank as head of state or senior official would not relieve them of liability.
Command Responsibility
The trials also applied the doctrine of command responsibility, holding military leaders accountable for crimes committed by their subordinates that they knew about, or should have known about, and failed to prevent or punish. The principle extended to civilian officials in positions of authority. Several commanders were convicted on this basis in both the main trial and the subsequent proceedings.
The Nuremberg Code
The judgment in the Doctors’ Trial included 10 principles governing medical experimentation on human subjects, now known as the Nuremberg Code. Its first principle held that “the voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential,” given freely, without coercion, and with full understanding of the risks. The Code also required that experiments avoid unnecessary suffering, that the degree of risk never exceed the humanitarian importance of the problem, and that only qualified scientists conduct the research. These standards became the foundation of modern research ethics.
The Criticisms
The trials were controversial from the start. The most persistent objection was that Nuremberg represented “victor’s justice,” with the defeated nation judged exclusively by the victors who wrote the rules, brought the charges, and sat as judges. The presence of the Soviet Union on the bench drew particular scrutiny, given Soviet atrocities including the Katyn massacre and its own use of forced labor camps.
Critics also pointed to the retroactivity problem. “Crimes against humanity” and “crimes against peace” were not clearly defined in international law before the Charter created them, raising the objection that defendants were being punished under laws that did not exist when they acted. Defenders replied that the acts were so self-evidently criminal that no prior statute was needed, and that the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 had already outlawed aggressive war.
The Institutional Legacy
The United Nations moved quickly to formalize what Nuremberg had established. On December 11, 1946, weeks after the executions, the General Assembly passed Resolution 95(I), affirming the principles of international law recognized in the Charter and judgment.13United Nations. Affirmation of the Principles of International Law Recognized by the Charter of the Nurnberg Tribunal The resolution directed the International Law Commission to codify those principles, which it completed in 1950 as the seven Nuremberg Principles.
The Genocide Convention of 1948, the first human rights treaty adopted by the General Assembly, drew directly on the Nuremberg experience. Before the trials, no widely accepted legal definition of genocide existed. The Convention created binding obligations for member states to prevent and punish genocide, regardless of whether the perpetrators were heads of state, public officials, or private citizens.
The International Criminal Court, established through the Rome Statute of 1998, is the most direct institutional descendant of the tribunal. The ICC builds on Nuremberg’s two core principles: accountability for the most serious international crimes and the importance of fair trials.14International Criminal Court. Applying the Principles of Nuremberg in the ICC Its jurisdiction covers war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, and the crime of aggression. Unlike Nuremberg, the ICC operates as a permanent court of last resort, stepping in only when national justice systems are unwilling or unable to prosecute. The ad hoc tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, established in the 1990s, served as intermediate steps between Nuremberg and the permanent court, each drawing explicitly on the precedents set in the Nuremberg courtroom.