The outcome of the Nuremberg trials was this: of the twenty-two senior Nazi leaders who stood trial before the International Military Tribunal, twelve were sentenced to death, seven received prison terms ranging from ten years to life, and three were acquitted. Four Nazi organizations were declared criminal, the defense of “just following orders” was rejected, and the tribunal established that individuals bear personal responsibility for crimes under international law regardless of their official position. Those rulings went on to shape the Genocide Convention, the International Criminal Court, and the modern law of universal jurisdiction.
The Verdicts and Sentences
Twenty-four senior Nazi officials were originally indicted on four counts: conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.1The Avalon Project. Nuremberg Trial Proceedings Vol. 1 – Indictment Two never stood trial. Robert Ley took his own life in his cell on October 25, 1945, and Gustav Krupp was deemed medically unfit, leaving twenty-two defendants before the tribunal.2International Military Tribunal. Judgment of 1 October 1946
Twelve defendants were sentenced to death.3United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. International Military Tribunal: The Defendants Eleven were to hang: Hermann Göring, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Julius Streicher, Fritz Sauckel, Alfred Jodl, and Arthur Seyss-Inquart. Martin Bormann, Hitler’s private secretary, was tried in absentia, convicted on the war crimes and crimes against humanity counts, and sentenced to death.
Three defendants received life imprisonment: Rudolf Hess, Walther Funk, and Erich Raeder. Four received fixed terms: Karl Dönitz, ten years; Konstantin von Neurath, fifteen; Albert Speer and Baldur von Schirach, twenty years each.3United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. International Military Tribunal: The Defendants The tribunal treated administrative roles differently from direct orchestration of mass killings, which is reflected in the range of those sentences.
Three defendants were acquitted: Hjalmar Schacht, Franz von Papen, and Hans Fritzsche.4The Avalon Project. Judgment: Dissenting Opinion The Soviet judge, I.T. Nikitchenko, filed a formal dissent arguing that all three should have been convicted, pointing to Schacht’s role in financing German rearmament, von Papen’s maneuvering to install Hitler as chancellor, and Fritzsche’s direction of wartime propaganda. The majority found the evidence insufficient to tie them to the specific crimes defined in the London Charter. Those acquittals showed the tribunal was applying an evidentiary standard rather than convicting anyone who had held a prominent position in the Third Reich.
What Happened to Those Convicted
On October 16, 1946, ten of the condemned men were hanged in the gymnasium of the Nuremberg courthouse.5The National WWII Museum. The Nuremberg Trials Göring swallowed a cyanide capsule in his cell hours before his scheduled execution.6Memorium Nuremberg Trials. Verdicts Bormann’s sentence was never carried out; his remains were not identified until decades later.
The seven imprisoned defendants served their sentences at Spandau Prison in West Berlin, jointly administered by the four occupying powers. Four were released between 1954 and 1957. Speer and von Schirach served the full twenty years and were freed in 1966. That left Rudolf Hess alone in a facility built for 600 prisoners. He remained there until his death at age 93 in 1987, after which Spandau was demolished to prevent it from becoming a pilgrimage site.
Organizations Declared Criminal
The tribunal also ruled on the prosecution’s request to declare Nazi institutions criminal organizations. Four groups received that designation: the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party, the Gestapo, the SD (security service), and the SS.6Memorium Nuremberg Trials. Verdicts Membership alone could then serve as the basis for prosecution in later proceedings, with penalties up to and including death.7The Avalon Project. Judgment: The Accused Organizations
The tribunal added a safeguard: prosecutors still had to show that the individual joined voluntarily and knew about the organization’s criminal activities. Membership by itself was “not enough to come within the scope of these declarations” without that additional proof.7The Avalon Project. Judgment: The Accused Organizations
Three organizations escaped the criminal label. The tribunal declined to designate the SA (the brownshirt paramilitary), the Reich Cabinet, or the General Staff and High Command of the German Armed Forces. The SA had been sidelined as a power center after 1934, and the military high command was treated as too loosely organized to qualify as a single cohesive criminal entity.
The Legal Principles the Trials Established
The tribunal’s judgment articulated doctrines later codified by the United Nations International Law Commission in 1950 as seven formal Nuremberg Principles.8United Nations. Principles of International Law Recognized in the Charter of the Nurnberg Tribunal and in the Judgment of the Tribunal 1950 Two changed international law permanently.
The first was individual criminal responsibility. Principle I holds that anyone who commits a crime under international law is personally liable. Principle III adds that being a head of state or a government official provides no shield.8United Nations. Principles of International Law Recognized in the Charter of the Nurnberg Tribunal and in the Judgment of the Tribunal 1950 Before Nuremberg, sovereign immunity had effectively placed government leaders beyond the reach of international courts. The judgment contained what became one of the most quoted lines in international criminal law: crimes against international law are committed by people, not by abstract entities, and only by punishing individuals can the law be enforced.
The second was the rejection of the “superior orders” defense. Principle IV holds that following government or military orders does not relieve a person of responsibility, provided a moral choice to refuse was possible.8United Nations. Principles of International Law Recognized in the Charter of the Nurnberg Tribunal and in the Judgment of the Tribunal 1950 The London Charter that established the tribunal had already anticipated this, providing that obedience to orders could be considered when deciding punishment but could not excuse the crime.9Avalon Project. Charter of the International Military Tribunal The rule has since been adopted across international humanitarian law.10International Committee of the Red Cross. Customary IHL – Rule 155. Defence of Superior Orders
The remaining principles established that the absence of a penalty in domestic law does not excuse international crimes (II), that defendants have the right to a fair trial (V), that crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity are punishable under international law (VI), and that complicity in any of these is itself a crime (VII).
The Later Nuremberg Proceedings
The main trial was not the end. Twelve additional proceedings followed under Control Council Law No. 10, which established a legal basis for prosecuting war criminals other than those tried by the International Military Tribunal.11The Avalon Project. Control Council Law No. 10 These cases were run by United States military tribunals. In total, 185 individuals were indicted, and 177 stood trial.12United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings
The Doctors’ Trial opened in December 1946 against twenty-three physicians and medical administrators. The charges covered forced medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners and participation in the Nazi euthanasia program.13United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The Doctors Trial: The Medical Case of the Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings Sixteen were convicted; seven were executed on June 2, 1948, and nine received prison terms.14Harvard Law School Library. Nuremberg – People – U.S.A. v. Karl Brandt et al.: The Doctors Trial The proceeding also produced the Nuremberg Code, ten principles governing human medical experimentation. Its first and most important requirement is that voluntary, informed consent of the subject is “absolutely essential.”15United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The Nuremberg Code It became the foundation for modern research ethics worldwide.
The Einsatzgruppen Trial prosecuted twenty-two leaders of the mobile killing units that operated behind the Eastern Front. All twenty-two were convicted; fourteen received death sentences.16United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings, Case 9, The Einsatzgruppen Case Other proceedings examined judges who enforced Nazi racial laws, industrialists at companies such as IG Farben and Krupp who profited from forced labor, senior government officials, and military commanders who ordered massacres.
Across all twelve subsequent trials, the totals were 24 death sentences, 20 life sentences, 98 other prison terms, and 35 acquittals.12United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings By prosecuting doctors, judges, diplomats, bankers, and corporate executives alongside military officers, these tribunals established that criminal liability for atrocities extends well beyond the political leadership that gives the orders.
Lasting Effect on International Law
The most immediate downstream effect was the Genocide Convention. The tribunal’s judgment had treated systematic extermination as a “crime against humanity” but limited that category to acts committed after the war began in September 1939. The failure to condemn “peacetime genocide” prompted the United Nations General Assembly to adopt Resolution 96(I) in December 1946, affirming that genocide is a crime under international law in both war and peace. That resolution led directly to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted in 1948.17United Nations Audiovisual Library of International Law. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
Nuremberg also provided the precedent for universal jurisdiction, which allows any nation to prosecute certain grave crimes regardless of where they occurred or the nationality of the perpetrator. The most prominent early test came in 1961, when Israel captured Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and tried him in Jerusalem. Israel’s Supreme Court upheld its jurisdiction based on the “universal character” of his crimes, relying explicitly on definitions from the Nuremberg Charter and the tribunal’s ruling on criminal organizations.
The longest-term legacy is the International Criminal Court. Established by the Rome Statute in 1998 and operational since 2002, the ICC is the first permanent international court with jurisdiction over genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression.18International Criminal Court. How the Court Works Those four categories track the framework the Nuremberg tribunal pioneered. Individual criminal responsibility and the rejection of “superior orders” as an absolute defense are embedded in the ICC’s founding treaty, as they were in the international tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia that preceded it.
Criticisms That Followed
The trials were not universally praised at the time, and some criticisms have never fully gone away. The most persistent is the charge of “victor’s justice.” The Soviet Union sat in judgment while its own forces had committed large-scale atrocities, most conspicuously the Katyn Forest massacre, in which Soviet secret police executed thousands of Polish officers. Soviet prosecutors attempted to charge the German defendants with Katyn; the tribunal quietly dropped the matter, and the final judgment contains no mention of it.
The second major criticism is retroactivity. The principle of nullum crimen sine lege — no crime without a preexisting law — holds that people should not be punished for conduct that was not criminal when they engaged in it. Critics argued that “crimes against peace” and “crimes against humanity” were categories invented after the fact. The tribunal addressed this with respect to crimes against peace by pointing to the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact and other prewar agreements that had already outlawed aggressive war. The legal lineage was thinner for crimes against humanity. Defenders of the tribunal argued that the underlying acts (mass murder, enslavement, torture) had always been recognized as criminal, even if the formal categories were new.
Those criticisms did not prevent the Nuremberg framework from becoming the bedrock of international criminal law, but they did shape how later courts were structured. The ICC was established by multilateral treaty rather than by the victors of a particular conflict, and its jurisdiction is limited to crimes committed after the Rome Statute entered into force. Both design choices reflect lessons drawn from what Nuremberg got right and where it was open to attack.