The Nuremberg Trials: Justice After the Holocaust

The Reckoning

On November 20, 1945 — six months after Nazi Germany’s unconditional surrender — twenty-one of the most powerful men in the Third Reich sat in the defendants’ dock of a courtroom in Nuremberg, Germany. Before them sat judges from four nations: the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. Around them, a world devastated by the most destructive war in human history watched and waited.

The International Military Tribunal (IMT) at Nuremberg was unprecedented. Never before had the leaders of a sovereign nation been put on trial by an international body for crimes committed during wartime. The trials sought to answer a question that had no precedent: How do you hold individuals accountable for atrocities committed on an industrial scale — for the Holocaust, for a war that killed tens of millions, for crimes so vast they required a new word: genocide?

The Legal Framework

Creating New Law

The Allies faced an immediate problem: there was no existing legal mechanism for trying government leaders for the systematic murder of millions. International law in 1945 dealt primarily with relations between states, not with the criminal liability of individuals.

The London Charter, signed on August 8, 1945, by the four Allied powers, established the tribunal and defined three categories of crimes:

1. Crimes Against Peace — Planning, initiating, and waging wars of aggression in violation of international treaties
2. War Crimes — Violations of the laws and customs of war, including murder, ill-treatment, and deportation of civilian populations, murder of prisoners of war, and destruction of cities and towns
3. Crimes Against Humanity — Murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against civilian populations, including persecution on racial, religious, or political grounds

The third category — crimes against humanity — was a legal innovation. It established that a government’s treatment of its own citizens was a matter of international concern and that “following orders” was not a valid defense.

The Defendants

Who Stood Trial?

The twenty-one defendants at the main Nuremberg trial represented the upper echelons of the Nazi regime. They included:

• Hermann Göring — Commander of the Luftwaffe, Hitler’s designated successor, and the highest-ranking Nazi official captured alive
• Rudolf Hess — Hitler’s former deputy
• Joachim von Ribbentrop — Foreign Minister
• Wilhelm Keitel — Chief of the Armed Forces High Command
• Ernst Kaltenbrunner — Head of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), overseeing the Gestapo and the concentration camp system
• Alfred Rosenberg — Chief ideologist of the Nazi Party and Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories
• Hans Frank — Governor-General of occupied Poland
• Julius Streicher — Publisher of the virulently antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer
• Albert Speer — Minister of Armaments and War Production, Hitler’s architect
• Fritz Sauckel — Director of the forced labor program

Notably absent was Adolf Hitler, who had committed suicide in his Berlin bunker in April 1945, along with Joseph Goebbels (propaganda minister) and Heinrich Himmler (head of the SS), both of whom also died before capture.

The Trial

Prosecution and Evidence

The trial lasted from November 1945 to October 1946 — nearly eleven months. The prosecution presented an overwhelming volume of evidence: captured Nazi documents, film footage of concentration camps, photographs, orders signed by the defendants, and testimony from survivors and witnesses.

Among the most devastating evidence:

• The Wannsee Conference minutes — documenting the bureaucratic planning of the “Final Solution” to exterminate European Jewry
• Film footage from liberated camps — showing the skeletal survivors, mass graves, and gas chambers of Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau, and others
• Testimony from survivors — including accounts of medical experiments, mass shootings, and the systematic dehumanization of millions
• The defendants’ own documents — orders, memos, and speeches demonstrating their knowledge of and participation in atrocities

The American chief prosecutor, Justice Robert H. Jackson, delivered an opening statement that has become one of the most quoted legal speeches in history: “The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.”

Defense Arguments

The defendants employed various strategies:

• “Following orders” — Many claimed they were merely carrying out Hitler’s commands and had no personal culpability
• Ignorance — Some claimed they did not know about the extermination camps or the scale of the killings
• Tu quoque (“you also”) — Defense attorneys pointed to Allied actions (the bombing of Dresden, the Soviet massacre at Katyn) as moral equivalents
• Legal objections — Some argued that the tribunal was applying laws retroactively (ex post facto) and that the victors had no right to judge the vanquished

The Verdicts

On October 1, 1946, the tribunal delivered its judgments:

• 12 defendants sentenced to death by hanging: Göring, Ribbentrop, Keitel, Kaltenbrunner, Rosenberg, Frank, Frick, Streicher, Sauckel, Jodl, Seyss-Inquart, and (in absentia) Martin Bormann
• 3 sentenced to life imprisonment: Hess, Funk, Raeder
• 4 sentenced to prison terms of 10–20 years: Dönitz, Schirach, Speer, Neurath
• 3 acquitted: Schacht, Papen, Fritzsche

Göring cheated the hangman by swallowing a cyanide capsule the night before his scheduled execution. The remaining condemned men were hanged on October 16, 1946.

The Subsequent Trials

Twelve More Proceedings

The IMT was followed by twelve additional trials held by the United States at Nuremberg between 1946 and 1949, collectively known as the Subsequent Nuremberg Trials. These targeted specific sectors of Nazi society:

• The Doctors’ Trial — prosecuting physicians who conducted medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners
• The Judges’ Trial — prosecuting jurists who perverted the law to serve Nazi ideology
• The Einsatzgruppen Trial — prosecuting leaders of the mobile killing units that murdered over a million Jews in Eastern Europe
• The Industrialists’ Trials — prosecuting executives of Krupp, I.G. Farben, and Flick for using slave labor

These subsequent trials broadened the scope of accountability beyond the top leadership to include the professionals, bureaucrats, and industrialists who made the Nazi machine function.

Legacy and Significance

For International Law

The Nuremberg Trials established principles that transformed international law:

• Individual criminal responsibility: Government officials and military leaders can be held personally accountable for atrocities, regardless of their position
• “Following orders” is not a defense: Individuals have a duty to refuse manifestly illegal orders
• Crimes against humanity: A state’s treatment of its own citizens is a legitimate concern of the international community
• The Nuremberg Principles: Codified by the United Nations in 1950, these principles became the foundation for the Geneva Conventions, the International Criminal Court (ICC), and the prosecution of genocide in Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, and elsewhere

For Jewish History

For the Jewish people, the Nuremberg Trials represented a partial reckoning — accountability, if not full justice, for the murder of six million. The trials documented the Holocaust for the historical record with meticulous detail, making denial difficult (though not impossible). They affirmed that the victims’ suffering was not invisible to the world.

Yet many survivors and historians have noted the limitations of Nuremberg. The vast majority of perpetrators — the guards, the bureaucrats, the collaborators, the neighbors who turned in their Jewish acquaintances — were never tried. Justice, in the wake of the Holocaust, could only ever be partial.

Criticisms

The trials were not without controversy:

• Victor’s justice: Critics argued that the Allies were in no position to judge, given their own wartime actions (firebombing of cities, Soviet atrocities, the atomic bombings of Japan)
• Retroactive law: The crimes charged had no precise legal precedent, raising questions about fairness
• Soviet participation: The inclusion of Soviet judges was controversial, given Stalin’s own mass atrocities

Despite these criticisms, the Nuremberg Trials remain a landmark in the history of international justice — an imperfect but essential attempt to hold power accountable for its worst excesses.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many people were tried at Nuremberg in total? The main IMT trial tried 22 defendants (one in absentia). The twelve subsequent U.S. military tribunals tried an additional 185 defendants. In total, 199 defendants were tried at Nuremberg, with 161 convicted and 37 sentenced to death.

Why was Nuremberg chosen as the location? Nuremberg was chosen for both practical and symbolic reasons. Practically, its Palace of Justice was one of the few large courthouses in Germany that had survived Allied bombing relatively intact. Symbolically, Nuremberg had been the site of the massive Nazi Party rallies and the 1935 Nuremberg Laws that stripped Jews of citizenship — holding the trials there carried powerful significance.

Did the Nuremberg Trials lead to the creation of the International Criminal Court? Yes, directly. The principles established at Nuremberg — that individuals can be held criminally responsible for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide — became the intellectual and legal foundation for the ICC, which was established by the Rome Statute in 1998 and began operations in 2002.