Nuremberg Trials Sentences: 12 Deaths, 7 Prison, 3 Acquittals

The Nuremberg trials sentences handed down by the International Military Tribunal on October 1, 1946 fell into three groups: 12 defendants were condemned to death by hanging, 7 received prison terms ranging from 10 years to life, and 3 were acquitted. Twenty-two men stood in the dock when judgment was read, after nearly a year of proceedings against the senior political and military leaders of Nazi Germany.

What the Defendants Were Charged With

The London Charter of August 1945 created the tribunal and set out the categories of crime it could try.¹ The indictment was organized into four counts: Count 1, conspiracy to commit the other crimes; Count 2, crimes against peace (planning and waging aggressive war); Count 3, war crimes against prisoners and civilians in occupied territories; and Count 4, crimes against humanity, meaning murder, enslavement, and deportation of civilian populations on a massive scale.²

Which counts a defendant was convicted on shaped the sentence. The tribunal ruled that the Charter “does not define as a separate crime any conspiracy except the one set out in Article 6(a), dealing with Crimes Against Peace,” so several defendants were acquitted on the conspiracy count even where they were convicted on others. Judges from the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and France sat on the bench, with a primary and an alternate from each nation.³

Two of the original 24 indicted never faced the bench. Robert Ley, head of the German Labour Front, committed suicide in his cell on October 25, 1945, before proceedings opened. Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach was found physically and mentally unfit, and his case was indefinitely postponed.⁴

The 12 Death Sentences

Each of the twelve men sentenced to hang was convicted on at least two of the four counts, and most on three or all four.

Hermann Göring — commander of the Luftwaffe and Hitler’s designated successor. Convicted on all four counts. He was the highest-ranking defendant and bore responsibility for the air war, the exploitation of occupied economies, and the early persecution campaigns.⁵
Joachim von Ribbentrop — Foreign Minister. Convicted on all four counts, including for his role in pressuring allied governments to deport Jewish populations.
Wilhelm Keitel — Chief of the High Command of the Armed Forces. Convicted on all four counts for signing orders authorizing the killing of captured commandos, reprisals against civilian families, and the secret “Night and Fog” decree.
Alfred Jodl — Chief of Operations for the High Command, involved in planning the invasions of Norway, the Low Countries, Yugoslavia, Greece, and the Soviet Union. Convicted on all four counts.
Ernst Kaltenbrunner — the highest-ranking SS leader to stand trial, head of the Reich Main Security Office. Convicted on Counts 3 and 4.
Hans Frank — Governor-General of occupied Poland. Convicted on Counts 3 and 4.
Wilhelm Frick — Interior Minister and later Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, who drafted and signed the Nuremberg racial laws. Convicted on Counts 2, 3, and 4.
Julius Streicher — publisher of the antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer. He held no government office during the war but was convicted on Count 4 for inciting persecution and murder through decades of propaganda.
Arthur Seyss-Inquart — Reich Commissioner for the occupied Netherlands, who oversaw the deportation of Dutch Jews and the economic plundering of the country. Convicted on Counts 2, 3, and 4.
Fritz Sauckel — Plenipotentiary General for Labor Deployment, who organized the forced-labor program that uprooted millions. Convicted on Counts 3 and 4.
Alfred Rosenberg — the party’s chief ideologist and Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories. Convicted on all four counts.
Martin Bormann — head of the Party Chancellery and Hitler’s private secretary. Tried and convicted in absentia on Counts 3 and 4. His fate was unknown at the time; his remains were identified in Berlin in 1972.⁶

How the Executions Were Carried Out

The hangings took place in the early morning hours of October 16, 1946, in the gymnasium of the Nuremberg prison.⁶ Joachim von Ribbentrop was the first to hang, followed by the remaining condemned men in sequence. Representatives from all four Allied powers witnessed each execution. Military defendants had asked for a firing squad on the grounds that hanging was dishonorable; the tribunal rejected those requests.

Hermann Göring never reached the gallows. He swallowed a cyanide capsule in his cell hours before the executions were scheduled to begin.⁵ How he obtained the poison has never been conclusively established. His body was cremated with those of the executed men, and the ashes of all the condemned were scattered in a tributary of the Isar River so no gravesite could become a shrine.⁶

The Seven Prison Sentences

Seven defendants received prison terms. All seven were transferred to Spandau Prison in Berlin on July 18, 1947.⁶

Rudolf Hess — life imprisonment. Hitler’s former deputy, convicted on Counts 1 and 2 for his role in the regime’s early aggressive planning. He had flown to Scotland in 1941 on an unauthorized peace mission and spent the rest of the war in British custody.
Erich Raeder — life imprisonment. Grand Admiral and commander of the Navy until 1943. Convicted on Counts 1, 2, and 3 for building up the fleet in violation of the Versailles Treaty and planning naval warfare.
Walther Funk — life imprisonment. Minister of Economics and president of the Reichsbank. Convicted on Counts 2, 3, and 4 for financing the war effort and receiving looted assets, including valuables seized from concentration camp victims.
Albert Speer — 20 years. Minister of Armaments and War Production. Convicted on Counts 3 and 4 for his extensive use of forced labor in weapons manufacturing.
Baldur von Schirach — 20 years. Head of the Hitler Youth and later Gauleiter of Vienna. Convicted on Count 4 for his role in the deportation of Viennese Jews.
Konstantin von Neurath — 15 years. Foreign Minister before Ribbentrop and later Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia. Convicted on all four counts for early diplomatic aggression and the suppression of Czech resistance.
Karl Dönitz — 10 years. Raeder’s successor as head of the Navy and briefly Hitler’s successor as head of state. Convicted on Counts 2 and 3 for his conduct of unrestricted submarine warfare.⁶

How the Prison Sentences Played Out at Spandau

Spandau had been built for over a hundred inmates and held only seven. The four Allied powers rotated administrative control monthly, each providing soldiers for the watchtowers during its assigned month. Even routine decisions, such as transferring a sick prisoner to a hospital, required the approval of all four powers.⁷

Four of the seven were released between 1954 and 1957 as sentences expired or health declined. Speer and von Schirach were freed in 1966 after completing their full 20-year terms. Rudolf Hess remained the sole inmate for roughly two decades and died at Spandau on August 17, 1987, at age 93. The prison was demolished shortly afterward to prevent it from becoming a pilgrimage site.⁷

The Three Acquittals

Hjalmar Schacht, Franz von Papen, and Hans Fritzsche were the only defendants found not guilty.⁸

Schacht, former president of the Reichsbank and Minister of Economics, had rebuilt Germany’s economy in the 1930s. The tribunal concluded that his financial activities, while they strengthened the regime, predated the concrete planning of aggressive war and did not cross the threshold for criminal liability. Von Papen, a diplomat and former Chancellor, was charged with conspiracy and crimes against peace for his role in maneuvering Hitler into power and later serving as ambassador to Austria and Turkey. The judges ruled that his political scheming did not amount to criminal conspiracy under the Charter’s definitions.

Fritzsche was a mid-level radio propagandist, not a policymaker. He was included in the dock partly because the real propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, was dead, and partly because the Soviet delegation held him in custody. The tribunal found that Fritzsche never controlled propaganda policy and lacked the authority or intent to incite the specific crimes charged.⁸ All three acquitted men were later arrested by German denazification courts and received lesser penalties domestically. Soviet Judge Iona Nikitchenko filed dissenting opinions against all three acquittals.

Organizations Declared Criminal

The tribunal did not only judge individuals. It also evaluated whether six Nazi organizations should be declared criminal, a designation that could expose their members to prosecution in later proceedings. Three received that designation: the SS, the Gestapo and SD (the security and intelligence services), and the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party.⁹

Three were not. The SA had been largely sidelined after 1934 and was not found to have participated as an organization in wartime crimes. The Reich Cabinet had effectively ceased to function as a deliberative body after 1937. The General Staff and High Command was spared on the grounds that it was not a true “organization” in the Charter’s sense but a loose grouping of high-ranking officers.⁹

The Sentences in the 12 Later Nuremberg Trials

The sentences above all come from the International Military Tribunal, which tried only the senior leadership. Between December 1946 and April 1949, the United States conducted 12 additional military tribunals at the same courthouse, prosecuting 177 further defendants: physicians who conducted lethal experiments on concentration camp prisoners, judges who enforced racial persecution, industrialists who used slave labor, and commanders of the mobile killing units in Eastern Europe.¹⁰

Across those 12 proceedings, 24 defendants were sentenced to death, 20 to life imprisonment, and 98 received other prison terms. Twenty-five were acquitted. As the Cold War intensified, many of the imprisoned defendants received clemency or early release during the 1950s, and only 13 of the 24 death sentences were actually carried out.¹⁰

1
Avalon Project. Charter of the International Military Tribunal
2
International Committee of the Red Cross. Agreement for the Prosecution and Punishment of the Major War Criminals of the European Axis, and Charter of the International Military Tribunal
3
Memorium Nuremberg Trials. The International Military Tribunal – Section: The Judges
4
Avalon Project. Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression – Chapter IV
5
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Hermann Göring
6
Memorium Nuremberg Trials. Verdicts
7
Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. 134 Cells, One Inmate: The Closure of Spandau Prison
8
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. International Military Tribunal: The Defendants
9
Avalon Project. Judgment: The Accused Organizations
10
The National WWII Museum. The Nuremberg Trials