The Nuremberg Trials were a series of military tribunals held after World War II to prosecute senior Nazi leaders for waging aggressive war, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. This Nuremberg Trials summary covers the main International Military Tribunal, which opened on November 20, 1945, and delivered verdicts on October 1, 1946, along with the twelve follow-on cases that ran through 1949.1Memorium Nuremberg Trials. Verdicts of the IMT Twenty-four individuals were indicted before the main tribunal, twenty-one stood trial, twelve were sentenced to hang, and the framework the judges applied still shapes international criminal law today.
The Court That Tried Them
The legal authority for the main trial came from the London Charter, signed on August 8, 1945 by the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and France. The agreement created the International Military Tribunal and gave it jurisdiction over crimes that had no single geographic home.2The Avalon Project. London Agreement of August 8th 1945 Each of the four powers appointed one primary judge and one alternate, producing an eight-member bench that blended continental European and Anglo-American traditions into something new.3Memorium Nuremberg Trials. The Tribunal
Two provisions in the charter did most of the heavy lifting. Article 7 said a defendant’s official position, even as head of state, would not shield him from responsibility or reduce his punishment.4International Committee of the Red Cross. Charter of the International Military Tribunal – Article 7 Article 8 said following orders from a government or a superior officer would not excuse a defendant either, though the tribunal could consider obedience in setting the sentence.5The Avalon Project. Charter of the International Military Tribunal Between them, those two articles removed the shields that had historically kept government officials out of foreign courtrooms.
The Four Charges
Prosecutors organized their case around four counts, each aimed at a different category of conduct.6The Avalon Project. Nuremberg Trial Proceedings Vol 1 – Indictment
- Count One, conspiracy: participation in a common plan to commit crimes against peace. This reached people who helped plan illegal acts without personally carrying out violence.
- Count Two, crimes against peace: planning or waging a war of aggression in violation of international treaties.
- Count Three, war crimes: violations of the established laws and customs of war, including mistreatment of prisoners, killing of hostages, and destruction beyond what military necessity could justify.
- Count Four, crimes against humanity: atrocities against civilian populations, including mass killing, enslavement, deportation, and persecution on political, racial, or religious grounds.7The Avalon Project. Nuremberg Trial Proceedings Vol 1 – Indictment Count Four
The line between war crimes and crimes against humanity mattered. War crimes had been recognized under international conventions for decades. Crimes against humanity was a newer concept, and it did something the older category could not: it reached acts a government committed against its own citizens, and acts committed before the war began.
Who Stood Trial
Twenty-four individuals were indicted, but only twenty-one sat in the dock.8Harvard Law School Library. Nuremberg Trials Martin Bormann, Hitler’s private secretary, was tried in absentia because his whereabouts were unknown.9United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Martin Bormann Robert Ley, head of the German Labour Front, killed himself before the trial opened. Industrialist Gustav Krupp was declared medically unfit.
Hermann Göring, commander of the Luftwaffe and one of the most powerful figures in the Nazi hierarchy, was the highest-profile defendant. Rudolf Hess, formerly Hitler’s deputy, sat alongside military leaders Wilhelm Keitel and Alfred Jodl, foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, and propagandist Julius Streicher.10Memorium Nuremberg Trials. The Defendants The mix was deliberate. The prosecution wanted the entire machinery of the Nazi state in the dock, not just its generals.
Verdicts and Executions
After roughly ten months of proceedings, the tribunal read its verdicts on September 30 and October 1, 1946.1Memorium Nuremberg Trials. Verdicts of the IMT Twelve defendants received death sentences, including Ribbentrop, Keitel, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, and Ernst Kaltenbrunner. Bormann was sentenced to death in absentia. Three defendants received life imprisonment and four received terms of ten to twenty years.11Office of the Historian. The Nuremberg Trial and the Tokyo War Crimes Trials 1945-1948 Hjalmar Schacht, Franz von Papen, and Hans Fritzsche were acquitted.
The hangings were carried out on October 16, 1946, in the gymnasium of the Nuremberg Prison. Göring did not face the gallows. He bit into a cyanide capsule in his cell on the night of October 15 and died before the sentence could be carried out.
The tribunal also declared several Nazi organizations criminal, including the SS, the SD, and the Gestapo. That designation meant later prosecutions could treat membership in those groups as a basis for charges without relitigating whether the organization itself was criminal.12The Avalon Project. Judgment – The Accused Organizations
Why the Common Defenses Failed
Two arguments came up again and again. The first was the superior orders defense: defendants claimed they had simply followed commands from Hitler or other superiors and should not bear personal responsibility. Article 8 anticipated this argument and rejected it outright. Following orders could soften a sentence but never excuse the act.5The Avalon Project. Charter of the International Military Tribunal None of the twenty-one defendants was excused on those grounds.
The second was tu quoque, Latin for “you too.” Defense counsel argued that Allied forces had committed similar acts, pointing to events like the Allied bombing of civilian areas. The tribunal rejected this reasoning. Violations by others did not make the defendants’ conduct lawful. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia later ruled explicitly that tu quoque has no place in international humanitarian law.
Defense teams also challenged the tribunal’s legitimacy on the first day, arguing that judges drawn only from the victors could not deliver impartial justice. The tribunal overruled the motion and continued.
The Subsequent Nuremberg Trials
The main trial was only the beginning. Between 1946 and 1949, American military tribunals held twelve additional proceedings in the same courtroom, collectively known as the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials. Those cases reached 185 defendants across a wider cross-section of German society: physicians who ran forced experiments on concentration camp prisoners, judges who had weaponized the legal system, industrialists who used slave labor, and SS commanders who led mobile killing units.13United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings
The most influential was the Doctors’ Trial, in which twenty-three defendants faced charges for medical experiments on camp inmates. The verdict produced the Nuremberg Code, ten principles governing human experimentation that became foundational to modern medical ethics. Its core requirements: voluntary informed consent from every subject, the right to end participation at any time, and a prohibition on experiments where death or disabling injury was the expected outcome. The Code did not carry the force of law on its own, but it shaped every major research ethics framework that followed.
Criticisms of the Trials
The proceedings were not universally praised, and some of the objections raised then are still debated. The most persistent was “victor’s justice.” The Allies wrote the rules, appointed the judges, led the prosecution, and faced no scrutiny for their own wartime conduct. The tribunal rejected the challenge but never produced a fully satisfying answer to it.
Critics also argued that the charges were partly retroactive. Crimes against humanity and crimes against peace had not been clearly defined as individual criminal offenses before the London Charter. Defenders countered that aggressive war and atrocities against civilians had long been condemned in international treaties and customary law, even without a court to enforce them. The tension between legal innovation and the principle against punishing conduct that was not criminal when committed runs through the entire record.
Soviet participation drew particular scrutiny. The Soviet Union had invaded Poland alongside Germany in 1939 and carried out its own atrocities, including the Katyn massacre of Polish officers. Having Soviet judges sit in judgment of Germans for waging aggressive war struck many observers as hypocritical.
The Legal Legacy
In 1950 the United Nations International Law Commission distilled the tribunal’s reasoning into seven formal principles, known as the Nuremberg Principles.14United Nations International Law Commission. Principles of International Law Recognized in the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal They established that anyone who commits a crime under international law is personally responsible; that no domestic law can override that responsibility; that heads of state enjoy no immunity; and that obedience to orders is not a defense where a moral choice was possible. They also affirmed the right to a fair trial.
Those principles turned out to be more than an academic exercise. When ethnic cleansing erupted in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s and genocide swept Rwanda in 1994, the United Nations created ad hoc tribunals that drew directly on Nuremberg precedents. Those tribunals in turn helped build the case for a permanent institution. In 1998, 120 countries adopted the Rome Statute, and in 2002 the International Criminal Court began operations in The Hague with jurisdiction over genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and crimes of aggression, the same categories the Nuremberg prosecutors had defined more than half a century earlier.