The Nuremberg Trials: the real history behind the post-WW2 tribunal that brought Nazi leaders to justice

In the autumn of 1945, in a bombed-out Germany still reeling from defeat and occupation, the victorious Allies launched a remarkable experiment in international justice: the Nuremberg Trials.

The first of these, conducted by the International Military Tribunal (IMT) between 20 November 1945 and 1 October 1946, was convened by the four major Allied powers: the United States, the United Kingdom, France and the Soviet Union. It was established under the London Agreement and Charter of 8 August 1945, which created the IMT and defined its authority.

What were the Nuremberg Trials?

The purpose of the Nuremberg Trials was to hold the senior surviving leaders of the defeated German Reich accountable for their crimes: for aggressive war-making, gross violations of the laws of war (war crimes) and for what was then – in international law – a new category: “crimes against humanity”.

In essence, the Nuremberg Trials represented a watershed in the history of international justice. Their significance lies not only in the punishment of high‐profile Nazi leaders but in the very idea that state actors and military commanders could be held to account before a tribunal created by victorious powers, under new international legal standards.

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They raised profound questions about justice, victors’ rights, legal innovation and moral precedent. They were not simple theatrical show trials, nor were they flawless, but they marked a deliberate choice by the Allies to pursue legality over vengeance, to document evil rather than simply bury it, and to assert that even leaders are not above the law.

Their legacy is significant: they laid the foundation for international criminal law, inspired the later Genocide Convention (adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948), and provided a public accounting for the Third Reich’s atrocities.

The trials, which opened in November 1945, are also the subject of a new film entitled Nuremberg, starring Rami Malek and Russell Crowe.

Who was on trial at Nuremberg?

At the first and most famous of the Nuremberg Trials (the IMT), 24 major figures from the military and political elite of the Third Reich were indicted.

Among them were:

• Hermann Göring, Reichsmarschall, head of the Luftwaffe and Hitler’s designated successor
• Joachim von Ribbentrop, foreign minister
• Rudolf Hess, the former deputy führer
• Wilhelm Keitel, field marshal and chief of the OKW (Armed Forces High Command)
• Ernst Kaltenbrunner, senior SS officer and head of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA)
• Alfred Rosenberg, ideologue of the Nazi regime
• Hans Frank, governor-general of occupied Poland
• Wilhelm Frick, interior minister of Nazi Germany and then Reich protector for Bohemia and Moravia
• Julius Streicher, former editor of the newspaper Der Stürmer and a rabid Nazi propagandist
• Albert Speer, minister for armaments and war production
• Fritz Sauckel, plenipotentiary for labour deployment, responsible for Germany’s forced labour procurement
• Karl Dönitz, former head of the navy and Hitler’s successor as head of state of Nazi Germany

Of the 24 names originally indicted, three were absent when the trial started. Martin Bormann, Hitler’s former Nazi party secretary, had not been found (in truth, he had died in the battle for Berlin) and so was tried in absentia. Meanwhile Robert Ley, head of the German Labour Front, took his own life before the trial started, and Gustav Krupp, head of the Krupp industrial conglomerate, was deemed unfit to stand on the grounds of senility.

Why were the Nuremberg Trials held in Nuremberg?

The decision to hold the trials in the city of Nuremberg (known as Nürnberg in German) was both practical and deeply symbolic. On one hand, the city’s Palace of Justice had survived the war relatively intact, with a large courtroom capable of holding the proceedings and an adjacent prison in which the accused could be securely housed.

On the other hand, Nuremberg had been the site of the Nazi party’s huge annual rallies and thus one of the locations most synonymous with the Nazi movement and its propaganda. In addition, holding the trial in the heart of former German territory – rather than abroad – reinforced the idea of a public accounting for Nazi crimes.

The Nuremberg Trials were intended to make a deliberate political and moral statement: the former epicentre of the Nazi regime would become the place of judgment.

Were the verdicts in the Nuremberg Trials a foregone conclusion?

The question of whether the verdicts of the Nuremberg Trials were inevitable is a complex one. Of course, the scale of evidence assembled by the prosecutors was overwhelming: including film footage, photographs, documents and the material gleaned from the cross-examination of survivors and witnesses.

Nonetheless, the legal machinery of the trial was novel. International law for crimes against humanity and aggressive war had never previously been applied in this way, so the legal basis was less than entirely sound. Some have argued that the trial invented post-facto standards (i.e. crimes defined after the events) or stretched legal concepts. Indeed, critics at the time and since have questioned whether full impartiality was even possible, given the severity of the crimes under consideration and the fact that the victors were also sitting as judges and prosecutors.

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Pragmatically, though, the notion of a ‘foregone conclusion’ must be qualified: among the 22 defendants tried by the IMT, three were acquitted. Furthermore, the sentences handed down for the remainder ranged from death to long prison terms. So there was clearly scope for a degree of differentiation in the judgments.

Overall, given the nature of the crimes and the vengeful political climate, there was always a strong likelihood that convictions would follow. Yet the trial still required enormous research, the preparation and presentation of evidence, legal argument and defence representation. Though the expectation of guilt for many of the defendants was high, the verdicts were not a foregone conclusion.

Why didn’t they just summarily execute the Nazis?

There were, perhaps, some compelling arguments at the time for immediate execution or summary justice – after all, the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime were immense, and their crimes had often been blatant. But the Allies rejected this route, and for a number of reasons.

The first was that of legitimacy. Stalin famously told Churchill at the Teheran Conference in 1943 that he favoured the summary execution of as many as 100,000 leading Nazis so that Germany would be unable to plan another war. Instead of such a brutal course of action, however, the victorious Allies opted for a very public trial so as to ensure that the Germans would not be able to claim that the admission of war guilt had been extracted from them under duress.

Then there was the rule of law. The London Agreement and Charter, which had established the legal and procedural basis for the trials, had emphasised that due process would be applied. The Allies were adamant that – unlike the regime whose surviving representatives they were trying – they were wedded to the principle of lawful justice, not simple vengeance.

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Thirdly, the Allies found themselves restrained by moral and political caution. Collective punishment or mass executions without trial would violate the foundational principles that they hoped to represent and would risk a backlash, which could in turn undermine the postwar reconstruction of Germany. Put simply, the mass execution of SS or Gestapo members would have constituted a crime that would have fundamentally undermined the moral superiority that the Allies had claimed for themselves.

Lastly, the Allies saw that there was a need for the collection and presentation of evidence of Nazi atrocities. The trial allowed for the Nazi leadership’s crimes to be publicly documented, recorded and exhibited for posterity. The visual evidence, the courtroom transcripts and the verdicts were all to be added to the historical record.

So, rather than a swift vengeance, the Allies chose the path of legal process: trial, judgment, execution or imprisonment. This was not intended to relativise the crimes, or to lessen the moral weight of the sentences handed down; if anything, it amplified them by setting a solid legal precedent.

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Did any of the defendants get acquitted?

Yes. Of the 22 defendants who stood trial at the IMT, 12 received death sentences, seven received long prison sentences and three were acquitted. The latter category comprised Hjalmar Schacht, an economist and banker who had largely been responsible for the German economic recovery after 1933; Franz von Papen, a former diplomat and chancellor of Germany, who had belonged to the conservative clique that had brought Hitler to power; and Hans Fritzsche, a renowned broadcaster and the former head of radio propaganda.

These acquittals demonstrated that the tribunal did not simply rubber-stamp guilty verdicts across the board. Importantly, the judgments handed down showed a degree of objectivity and impartiality.

How quickly were the trials carried out?

By modern standards, the timing of the IMT’s proceedings is striking. The trial began on 20 November 1945 and the verdicts were handed down between 30 September and 1 October 1946.

In that sense, then, the trial moved extraordinarily swiftly given the magnitude of the task at hand, which included assembling the necessary evidence, interrogating and cross-examining the defendants and organising the necessary interpreters to translate the court sessions into English, Russian, French and German.

Following the verdicts, the executions of the condemned took place on 16 October 1946. This means that the major war criminals were tried, judged and executed within roughly a year – a remarkable speed for such landmark international legal proceedings.

It is worth noting that the later Nuremberg trials – the US military tribunals held in the city between 1946 and 1949 – considerably extended the timeframe foreseen.

What happened to the bodies of the executed Nazis?

The bodies were handled with deliberate care and secrecy by the Allied authorities, in part to prevent them becoming objects of glorification or martyrdom. After the IMT verdicts, 12 defendants were sentenced to death. On the morning of 16 October 1946, 10 men were executed by hanging in the gymnasium of Nuremberg prison. Of the remaining two: Martin Bormann was sentenced in absentia, and Hermann Göring had escaped the noose by taking his own life the night before his scheduled execution, using a cyanide capsule that had been smuggled into his cell.

Following the hangings, the bodies of the dead were transported to the crematorium of Ostfriedhof cemetery in Munich, where they were cremated. Their ashes were then scattered in the Isar river – a method of disposal that was both pragmatic and symbolic. There were to be no tombs, no monuments and no headstones.

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The reason for this elaborate procedure was to deny the executed Nazis a grave or resting place that might become a shrine for neo-Nazis or other extremist admirers. It was to prove a prescient precaution. In 1988, the body of former deputy führer Rudolf Hess – who had died while serving a life sentence the previous year – was interred in a provincial cemetery in Bavaria. However, the attentions of fanatics and neo-Nazis meant that his remains were removed in 2011 and subsequently cremated. His grave was then destroyed.

Was anyone else tried after Nuremberg?

Yes. While the first IMT trial is certainly the most famous, it was by no means the only one that took place in the wake of the war. From December 1946 to April 1949, the United States (in its occupation zone) conducted 12 further trials of war criminals in the same courthouse in Nuremberg. These are collectively known as the ‘Subsequent Nuremberg Trials’ or the Nuremberg Military Tribunals (NMT).

These trials covered a broader range of defendants: SS and police leaders, industrialists (e.g. those who had used forced labour), judges (in the Judges’ Trial), doctors (the Doctors’ Trial), bureaucrats (the Ministries’ Trial) and others. All of them were people who, in various ways, had enabled the machinery of Nazi genocide and oppression.

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In total, some 199 defendants were tried at Nuremberg (IMT and NMT), resulting in 161 convictions and 37 death sentences.

Moreover, war crimes trials continued elsewhere and for decades: in West Germany, in eastern Europe, and, in the most recent years, in the prosecutions of the last surviving perpetrators for their roles in Nazi crimes.

The legal legacy of Nuremberg thus continues to this day. The trials set in motion global efforts to hold individuals accountable for the crimes committed by numerous odious regimes, and many more similar trials have followed.

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