What Was Hermann Göring Charged With at Nuremberg?

At the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, Hermann Göring was charged with four counts: participation in a common plan or conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The tribunal convicted him on all four on October 1, 1946, and sentenced him to death by hanging.¹ He killed himself with cyanide the night before the scheduled execution.

Göring was the highest-ranking Nazi to stand trial. The indictment listed his titles at length: President of the Reichstag, Minister of the Interior of Prussia, Chief of the Prussian Secret State Police, head of the Four Year Plan, Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, President of the Council of Ministers for the Defense of the Reich, head of the Hermann Göring Industrial Combine, and Hitler’s designated successor from 1939 onward.² The tribunal’s judgment described him as “often, indeed almost always, the moving force, second only to his leader.”¹

The charges rested on the London Charter, signed August 8, 1945, by France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The Charter defined three categories of crimes: crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.³ When the chief prosecutors filed the indictment on October 18, 1945, they added a conspiracy count, producing the four charges Göring faced.⁴

Count One: Common Plan or Conspiracy

The first count accused Göring of participating in a common plan or conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.⁵ The charge reached back years before the war.

The prosecution pointed to Göring’s role in rearming Germany in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. As Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, he built the air force from nothing. In 1936, Hitler placed him in charge of the Four Year Plan, a program to make Germany economically self-sufficient and war-ready within four years. That role made him the effective economic dictator of the Reich, controlling labor mobilization, raw materials, wages, prices, and imports.⁶

Göring also played a direct part in prewar expansion. In March 1938 he helped engineer the annexation of Austria by pressuring its leaders into compliance. A year later he threatened to bomb Prague unless Czechoslovakia submitted to occupation, allowing Germany to take the remaining Czech lands without a fight.⁶

Count Two: Crimes Against Peace

The second count covered the actual waging of aggressive war. The London Charter defined crimes against peace as the “planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties.”⁷

Göring commanded the Luftwaffe during the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, and every aggressive campaign that followed. The tribunal noted that even where Göring claimed to have privately opposed certain operations, including the invasions of Norway and the Soviet Union, his objections were strategic. Once Hitler decided, he followed. On the stand he acknowledged: “My point of view was decided by political and military reasons only.”¹

Count Three: War Crimes

The third count charged violations of the laws and customs of war, including the murder and mistreatment of civilians, deportation to slave labor, plunder, and wanton destruction beyond military necessity.⁷

Slave Labor

The tribunal identified Göring as “the director of the slave labour programme.”¹ As head of the Four Year Plan he sat atop the entire forced-labor apparatus. Fritz Sauckel, who carried out the day-to-day recruitment and deportation of foreign workers, answered to him. In March 1942, Göring formally delegated labor allocation to Sauckel while retaining ultimate control.⁸

The evidence showed Göring personally directing exploitation of prisoners. He ordered that 100,000 French prisoners of war be reassigned to armament factories. In February 1944, he wrote to Himmler requesting “as great a number of concentration camp convicts as possible for air armament,” noting that such labor had “proved to be very useful according to previous experience.”⁸ More than half a million forced laborers worked in factories and mines belonging to the Hermann Göring Works alone.⁶

Plunder

Göring was also directly involved in the systematic plunder of occupied territories. As Germany conquered Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938 and 1939, he seized industries and folded them into his personal industrial empire.⁶ The looting extended to art. The Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, the primary Nazi agency for confiscating cultural property in occupied countries, stripped more than a million items from collections across Europe, and Göring personally selected works for his private collection at Carinhall. Art recovered from one of his villas at the end of the war was estimated at $500 million at the time.

Prisoners of War

The prosecution also placed Göring’s treatment of Allied captives within the war crimes count. Minutes from a January 1945 meeting about 10,000 Allied prisoners of war held near Sagan recorded his response to the question of what to do with them: “Take their pants and boots off so that they cannot walk in the snow.”⁹

Count Four: Crimes Against Humanity

The fourth count addressed persecution and atrocities against civilian populations on political, racial, or religious grounds.⁷ The tribunal called Göring “the creator of the oppressive programme against the Jews and other races, at home and abroad.”¹

He proclaimed the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935, stripping Jews of German citizenship. Under the Four Year Plan, he issued decrees in April 1938 requiring Jews to register their property, along with penalties for disguising Jewish ownership of businesses. After the November 1938 pogrom, in which 191 synagogues were set on fire and 20,000 Jews arrested, Göring imposed a collective fine of one billion Reichsmarks on the entire Jewish population of Germany.¹ Days later, he chaired a meeting on November 12, 1938, directing the seizure of Jewish businesses and instructing that purchase prices paid to Jewish owners be set “as low as possible.”⁹

The single most devastating document was dated July 31, 1941, entered as Prosecution Exhibit PS-710. In it, Göring ordered Reinhard Heydrich to make “all necessary preparations” for “bringing about a complete solution of the Jewish question within the area of German influence in Europe.”¹⁰ Although day-to-day implementation of extermination sat with Himmler, the tribunal found Göring “was far from disinterested or inactive, despite his protestations in the witness box.”¹ Between 1939 and 1941 he signed multiple decrees extending the Reich’s racial laws to occupied territories.

The Evidence Against Him

The case rested largely on documents Göring had signed himself. Chief prosecutor Robert Jackson confronted him during cross-examination with decree after decree bearing his signature, closing off any claim of ignorance.⁹

Jackson introduced minutes from the Reich Defense Council, records of the November 1938 meeting on seizing Jewish property, the July 1941 order to Heydrich, and an October 26, 1942, decree ordering that all available men and women in occupied territories be “forcibly recruited” for labor, with separate camps organized for children.

Göring’s Defense

Göring attacked the tribunal itself. His central argument was that international law should apply equally to victors and vanquished. If Allied powers could dismantle German industry and confiscate property under occupation, then Germany’s earlier actions in occupied countries “cannot have been criminal according to international law either.”¹¹

He added three points. Germany was a sovereign state whose domestic legislation was “not subject to the jurisdiction of foreign countries.” The charges were retroactive, since no foreign power had ever warned Germany that National Socialism would be treated as criminal. And much of the prosecution’s documentary evidence, he argued, contained statements “reported and written down at third and fourth hand” without his having had a chance to correct errors.¹¹

He also denied personal responsibility outright: “I have never decreed the murder of a single individual at any time, and neither did I decree any other atrocities or tolerate them, while I had the power and the knowledge to prevent them.” The tribunal was not persuaded.

Verdict, Sentence, and Suicide

The trial began on November 20, 1945, and ran nearly a year. On October 1, 1946, the tribunal found Göring guilty on all four counts and sentenced him to death by hanging.¹²

He never reached the gallows. On the night of October 15, 1946, hours before the scheduled executions, he killed himself in his cell by biting down on a concealed cyanide capsule.³ Göring left a note claiming he had arrived at the prison with the capsule hidden in a jar of hair cream. The official investigation accepted that account, though it has never been definitively established how he obtained it.

1
The Avalon Project. Judgment: Goering
2
The Avalon Project. Indictment: Appendix A
3
Holocaust Encyclopedia. International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg
4
The National WWII Museum. The Nuremberg Trials
5
The Avalon Project. Count One: The Common Plan or Conspiracy
6
Holocaust Encyclopedia. Hermann Göring
7
Wikisource. London Charter of the International Military Tribunal
8
The Avalon Project. Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression – Chapter X: The Slave Labor Program
9
The Avalon Project. Nuremberg Trial Proceedings Vol. 9 – Eighty-Sixth Day
10
Harvard Law School Library. Instructions to Heydrich to Prepare Organizational and Financial Arrangements for the Final Solution
11
The Avalon Project. Nuremberg Trial Proceedings Vol. 22 – Saturday, 31 August 1946
12
Memorium Nuremberg Trials. Verdicts