The Nuremberg Trials: Charges, Verdicts, and Principles

The Nuremberg Trials were a series of military tribunals held by the Allied powers after World War II to prosecute senior leaders of Nazi Germany for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and waging aggressive war. The main proceeding, formally called the International Military Tribunal, ran from November 1945 to October 1946 in the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, Germany.1Office of the Historian. The Nuremberg Trial and the Tokyo War Crimes Trials Twenty-four defendants were indicted, nineteen were found guilty, and twelve were sentenced to death by hanging.2Library of Congress. Nuremberg Trial Verdicts

The Legal Foundation

The tribunal’s authority came from the London Charter, signed on August 8, 1945, by representatives of the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the Provisional Government of France.3The Avalon Project. Charter of the International Military Tribunal The Charter created a temporary court with jurisdiction over individuals who acted in the interests of the European Axis countries, either as individuals or as members of organizations.

Two provisions cut against earlier practice. The Charter eliminated the defense of superior orders, so a defendant could not escape responsibility simply by pointing to a command from above, though obedience could still weigh in sentencing. It also guaranteed each defendant the right to counsel and to present a defense, while granting prosecutors broad latitude on evidence. That was a deliberate rejection of the option some Allied leaders had preferred at the outset: summary execution of captured Nazi officials without any trial.

The Four Charges

Prosecutors organized the case around four counts, each aimed at a different dimension of what the Nazi state had done.4United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. International Military Tribunal: The Defendants

Conspiracy

Count One accused the defendants of participating in a common plan to commit the crimes covered by the other three counts. It was the broadest charge, allowing prosecutors to hold individuals accountable not only for their personal acts but for the collective enterprise of the regime. By targeting the planning stages, the prosecution argued that the atrocities were policy, not battlefield excess.5The Avalon Project. Nuremberg Trial Proceedings Vol. 1 – Count One

Crimes Against Peace

Count Two charged the defendants with planning, preparing, and waging wars of aggression in violation of international agreements. The prosecution leaned on the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, which Germany had signed and which renounced war as an instrument of national policy. The tribunal concluded that a nation resorting to war after signing that pact was acting illegally, and that the individuals responsible for launching such a war were personally criminal.3The Avalon Project. Charter of the International Military Tribunal

War Crimes

Count Three covered the established laws and customs of war: murder or mistreatment of prisoners of war, killing of hostages, plundering of property, and destruction of cities and towns beyond military necessity. These were the most legally conventional charges, grounded in treaties and customs that predated the war by decades.3The Avalon Project. Charter of the International Military Tribunal

Crimes Against Humanity

Count Four introduced a concept without firm precedent in international law. It covered murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and persecution on political, racial, or religious grounds, whether or not those acts violated the domestic laws of the country where they occurred.3The Avalon Project. Charter of the International Military Tribunal The charge was needed because much of what the Nazi regime did to Jewish citizens, Roma, disabled people, and political dissidents happened inside Germany’s own borders or in territories under its authority. Existing military law had no mechanism for a government’s systematic slaughter of populations it controlled.

Who Was on Trial

The 24 individuals indicted were chosen to represent the full apparatus of the Nazi state: political leadership, military command, diplomatic corps, and economic machinery.6United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg Only 21 were present when the trial opened on November 20, 1945. Robert Ley, head of the German Labour Front, killed himself in his cell before proceedings began. Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, the industrialist, was declared medically unfit. Martin Bormann, head of the Nazi Party Chancellery, could not be located and was tried in absentia.7Memorium Nuremberg Trials. The Defendants of the IMT

Prominent defendants included Hermann Göring, commander of the Luftwaffe and widely considered the second most powerful figure in Nazi Germany; Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s former deputy; Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Foreign Minister; Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of the High Command of the Armed Forces; Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and later Minister of Armaments; Karl Dönitz, who briefly succeeded Hitler as head of state; and Julius Streicher, publisher of the antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer.8International Military Tribunal. Judgment of 1 October 1946

Each of the four Allied powers appointed one judge and one alternate. Lord Justice Geoffrey Lawrence of Great Britain served as president of the tribunal.9Memorium Nuremberg Trials. Judges and Prosecutors of the IMT The American prosecution was led by Robert H. Jackson, an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court who took a leave of absence to serve as chief prosecutor.10United States District Court for the Western District of New York. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson Jackson’s opening statement called the decision to hold a trial rather than carry out summary executions “one of the most significant tributes that power has ever paid to reason.”

How the Case Was Proven

The prosecution built its case on documents rather than witness testimony. The Nazi regime had been a meticulous record-keeper, and Allied forces captured millions of pages of meeting minutes, telegrams, official decrees, and internal correspondence. The records told the story in the regime’s own words, which made them harder to discredit than eyewitness accounts would have been. Prosecutors organized the materials into a chronological narrative running from early planning through the Holocaust and the aggressive war.

Film played a role that had no real precedent in a major criminal proceeding. On November 29, 1945, prosecutors screened Nazi Concentration Camps, compiled from footage shot by Allied forces as they liberated the camps.11United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Evidence of the Holocaust Presented at Nuremberg – Historical Film The trial also pioneered simultaneous interpretation at a scale never attempted before, running five audio channels for the original speech and real-time translations in English, Russian, French, and German.12United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Translation in the Courtroom

Verdicts and Sentences

The tribunal delivered judgment on October 1, 1946. Of the 22 defendants whose cases went forward, 19 were found guilty on at least one count.13The Avalon Project. Judgement: Sentences

  • Death by hanging (12): Göring, Ribbentrop, Keitel, Kaltenbrunner, Rosenberg, Frank, Frick, Streicher, Sauckel, Jodl, Seyss-Inquart, and Bormann (in absentia).
  • Life imprisonment (3): Hess, Funk, and Raeder.
  • Fixed prison terms (4): Dönitz received 10 years, Neurath 15 years, and Schirach and Speer 20 years each.
  • Acquitted (3): Schacht, von Papen, and Fritzsche. The Soviet judge dissented from all three acquittals.

The executions took place on October 16, 1946, in the gymnasium attached to the Nuremberg Prison. Hermann Göring cheated the hangman by swallowing a cyanide capsule in his cell hours before his scheduled execution.14Memorium Nuremberg Trials. Verdicts of the IMT The remaining ten death sentences were carried out as ordered. Those given prison terms served their sentences at Spandau Prison in Berlin.

Organizations Declared Criminal

The tribunal also evaluated whether entire Nazi organizations should be branded criminal, so that membership itself could support future prosecutions without relitigating the organization’s character. Three were declared criminal: the SS (including the SD, the regime’s intelligence and security service), the Gestapo, and the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party.15The Avalon Project. Judgment: The Accused Organizations Three others were considered and not so designated: the SA, the Reich Cabinet, and the General Staff and High Command of the German Armed Forces. Individual members of those groups could still be prosecuted for personal conduct.

Criticisms

The trials drew objections even from people who supported holding Nazi leaders accountable. The most fundamental was “victor’s justice.” All four judges came from the winning side. Defense attorneys filed a joint application on November 19, 1945, challenging the composition of the bench, arguing that a legitimate court needed neutral judges or representation from all parties. The tribunal rejected the challenge and proceeded.

The scope of prosecution was also selective. Allied conduct that might have raised its own questions, including the firebombing of German cities and the atomic bombings of Japan, was never examined. Defense teams raised “tu quoque” arguments pointing to comparable Allied acts. The tribunal generally rejected that line, though it partially accepted it in one narrow instance: Admiral Karl Dönitz’s charges on submarine warfare were mitigated because Allied naval forces had engaged in similar practices.

Critics also questioned whether the newer charges, particularly crimes against peace and crimes against humanity, amounted to retroactive law, since neither had been clearly defined in any criminal statute before the Charter created them. Supporters answered that the Kellogg-Briand Pact and existing laws of war provided sufficient legal footing, and that the scale of the atrocities demanded a legal response even where precedent was thin. That tension has never been fully resolved and still animates debate among legal scholars.

The Subsequent Nuremberg Trials

The International Military Tribunal was only the first round. Between 1946 and 1949, the United States conducted 12 further trials at Nuremberg under Control Council Law No. 10, targeting a second tier of the Nazi apparatus: doctors who performed deadly experiments on prisoners, judges who perverted the legal system, industrialists who used slave labor, and SS commanders who led mobile killing units.16United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings

Those trials indicted 185 defendants, of whom 177 stood trial. The results: 24 death sentences, 20 life sentences, 98 other prison terms, and 35 acquittals. The Doctors’ Trial led to the Nuremberg Code governing medical experimentation on human subjects. The Justice Case prosecuted judges and prosecutors who had weaponized the legal system. The Einsatzgruppen Case tried the commanders of mobile killing squads responsible for the murder of over a million people in Eastern Europe.16United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings

Legacy: The Nuremberg Principles and the ICC

In 1950, the United Nations International Law Commission codified seven principles drawn from the Charter and the tribunal’s judgment. The Nuremberg Principles established, for the first time in a formal international document, several ideas now central to international law:17United Nations International Law Commission. Principles of International Law Recognized in the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal

  • Individuals who commit crimes under international law bear personal responsibility, regardless of what their country’s domestic law says.
  • Acting as a head of state or government official provides no shield from prosecution.
  • Following orders does not relieve a person of criminal responsibility, so long as a moral choice was available.
  • Anyone charged with a crime under international law is entitled to a fair trial on the facts and the law.
  • Crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity are punishable under international law, as is complicity in any of them.

These principles shaped the tribunals convened decades later for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and eventually the International Criminal Court, established by the Rome Statute in 1998 and operational from 2002. ICC judges have described their court as “the historical continuance of this landmark Tribunal of Nuremberg.”18International Criminal Court. Statement of ICC Judges on the Occasion of Their Judicial Retreat in Nuremberg As of 2025, 125 countries are members of the ICC.19International Criminal Court. The States Parties to the Rome Statute

For all the objections raised against them, the Nuremberg Trials established something no earlier proceeding had enforced at this scale: that the leaders of a sovereign nation could be held personally accountable in a court of law for the crimes they ordered, organized, or enabled. The alternative, as Justice Jackson put it in his opening statement, was to leave such crimes “to the judgment of history.” Nuremberg chose the judgment of law instead.