The courtroom in Nuremberg fell silent. In the docket sat twenty-one men who had once commanded the might of the Third Reich; now they faced a new kind of justice. Robert H. Jackson, chief prosecutor from the United States, rose and looked directly at them.
“The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating,” he said, “that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated. ”
Four great nations had chosen law over vengeance. The war was over, but the reckoning had just begun. When Germany surrendered in May 1945, Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels had already escaped through suicide.
But thousands of their collaborators remained alive: generals, ministers, industrialists, and the administrators of death camps. Some Allied leaders wanted to simply shoot the top Nazis, but the alternative they chose was unprecedented: an international tribunal where even sovereign officials would answer for their crimes under the rule of law. The groundwork had been laid in London. In August 1945, representatives of the four Allied powers signed the London Charter, creating the International Military Tribunal.
For the first time in history, the law recognized crimes against peace—the waging of aggressive war—alongside war crimes and a new category: crimes against humanity. These included murder, enslavement, deportation, and persecution on political, racial, or religious grounds. A fourth charge, conspiracy, let prosecutors hold the planners accountable alongside the men who carried out their orders. The city of Nuremberg was chosen deliberately.
The Palace of Justice had survived the bombing and included a prison complex. But the city also carried deep meaning as the spiritual home of the Nazi movement, where massive rallies and the infamous race laws had marked the regime’s rise. The Allies wanted the city that had celebrated Nazi triumph to witness its complete judgment. Courtroom 600 was expanded for the historic proceedings.
Interpreters worked in glass booths, translating testimony into four languages in real time. Journalists from around the world filed daily reports, and German cinemas were required to show footage of the trial so the population would learn the truth about the regime they had supported. Twenty-four defendants were initially indicted. They included Hermann Göring, Hitler’s designated successor and the most powerful Nazi still alive; Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s former deputy; Joachim von Ribbentrop, the foreign minister; military leaders like Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel; economic figures like Albert Speer; and brutal administrators like Hans Frank, who had presided over occupied Poland.
One defendant, Robert Ley, hanged himself in his cell before proceedings began. Martin Bormann was tried in absentia, and Gustav Krupp was ruled unfit to stand trial. That left twenty-one men in the dock. Jackson’s strategy was clear.
“We will show you their own films,” he promised. The Nazis had been meticulous record-keepers, and their own documents would condemn them. Instead of relying on emotional testimony, the prosecution would present the Germans’ own orders, meeting minutes, and reports. The impact of visual evidence proved devastating.
On November 29, 1945, prosecutor Thomas Dodd introduced an hour-long film compiled from footage shot by Allied cameramen as they liberated Buchenwald, Dachau, and Bergen-Belsen. The film showed mass graves, emaciated survivors, and the industrial machinery of death. When the lights came up, the courtroom sat in stunned silence. Göring removed his dark glasses and covered his face.
Hans Frank wept openly. The tribunal adjourned early. Over the following weeks, more films followed, showing Hitler’s rise and the planning of military aggression. Soviet prosecutors presented evidence of the destruction of their homeland.
The strategy worked; the visual record of Nazi crimes spoke with undeniable force. The case unfolded over months. The Americans traced the conspiracy to wage aggressive war; the British focused on war crimes at sea; the French documented exploitation in occupied Europe; and the Soviets presented evidence of atrocities, including the deliberate starvation of prisoners and the siege of Leningrad. Key witnesses reinforced the documents.
Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, described the industrial murder of more than a million people with a calm bureaucratic demeanor that shocked observers more than emotional testimony would have. Otto Ohlendorf, commander of Einsatz Group D, admitted that his unit alone had murdered approximately ninety thousand people. The defense faced impossible challenges. The defendants claimed they had only followed orders or denied knowledge of the Final Solution.
But the tribunal’s foundational principle was that individuals bear responsibility for their actions regardless of superior orders. Göring proved the most formidable defendant, challenging Jackson during cross-examination and defending the regime unapologetically. But when confronted with his own signature on orders implementing the persecution of Jews, his defenses crumbled. After 218 days of proceedings, the judges retired to deliberate.
On September 30 and October 1, 1946, the verdicts were read individually. Twelve defendants were sentenced to death by hanging, including Göring, Ribbentrop, Keitel, and Frank. Three received life sentences: Hess, Funk, and Raeder. Four were given prison terms of ten to twenty years.
Three were acquitted—Schacht, Papen, and Fritzsche—a decision that provoked outrage, with the Soviet judge dissenting. Göring cheated the gallows. Hours before his scheduled execution, he bit down on a cyanide capsule smuggled into his cell. His suicide note declared hanging inappropriate for a man of his rank.
The remaining ten condemned men were hanged through the night of October 16, 1946. The executions did not proceed smoothly; some men strangled slowly rather than dying immediately. By morning, all were dead. Their bodies were cremated, and the ashes scattered in an undisclosed river so no grave could become a shrine.
The seven prisoners sentenced to prison terms were transferred to Spandau Prison in Berlin. Stripped of rank and numbered rather than named, they were monitored constantly by rotating Allied guards. Over the years, prisoners were gradually released as sentences were completed. When Albert Speer and Baldur von Schirach were freed in 1966, only Rudolf Hess remained.
For twenty-one years, the massive complex housed a single prisoner. Hess died in 1987 at age ninety-three, found hanged in what was officially ruled a suicide. Within weeks, Spandau prison was demolished, its rubble scattered at sea. Nuremberg was only the beginning.
Between 1946 and 1949, twelve additional trials were held in the same courtroom, conducted solely by American military courts. The Doctors’ Trial put physicians in the dock for murderous medical experiments and the euthanasia program that had killed tens of thousands of disabled Germans. The judgment established the Nuremberg Code, ethical principles for human experimentation that still influence medical research. The Judges’ Trial targeted lawyers who had corrupted the German legal system into an instrument of persecution.
Industrialists were prosecuted for exploiting slave labor. In total, 177 defendants were tried in those subsequent proceedings, and 142 were convicted. But as the Cold War intensified, political pressure mounted for leniency, and most prisoners were released by the mid-1950s. Thousands more trials took place across Europe as each Allied power prosecuted suspected war criminals in its own zone.
The Western Allies prosecuted approximately five thousand Germans, with several hundred executed. German courts also eventually confronted their own past, culminating in the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials of the 1960s, which brought the reality of the death camps into German public consciousness. In 1961, Adolf Eichmann was prosecuted in Jerusalem after Israeli agents captured him in Argentina, the only person ever put to death under Israeli law. The legacy of Nuremberg extended far beyond its specific defendants.
It established that individuals, including heads of state, can be held personally accountable for crimes against humanity. The charter’s definitions became the foundation for the 1948 Genocide Convention and influenced the Geneva Conventions. For decades, the precedent remained largely theoretical. But in the 1990s, ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia and genocide in Rwanda prompted the United Nations to establish tribunals that explicitly drew on Nuremberg principles, leading ultimately to the permanent International Criminal Court in The Hague.
Courtroom 600 is preserved today as a museum, restored to approximately its wartime configuration. Visitors can stand in the space where Göring, Hess, and Speer once sat in the dock. The trial achieved something essential: it created a comprehensive record of Nazi crimes at a moment when denial might otherwise have flourished. It established that obedience to superior orders does not excuse participation in atrocities.
It demonstrated that even the most powerful leaders can be held accountable under international law. “Crimes against international law are committed by men, not by abstract entities,” the judgment declared. Some acts are so terrible that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.
The trial that began in Nuremberg ensured that those who committed such acts would not pass without judgment.
