On the morning of November 20, 1945, in a courtroom in the bombed-out German city of Nuremberg, the most significant trial in history began. Twenty-four of the most powerful men of Nazi Germany — field marshals, ministers, industrialists, and ideologues — sat in a double row of the defendants' dock, earphones on their heads, facing four judges from four Allied nations. The charges: conspiracy to wage aggressive war, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
Nothing quite like this had ever happened before. Never had a group of nations convened an international tribunal to judge the leaders of a defeated enemy for acts committed before and during a war. The Nuremberg Trials were improvised, legally contested, and politically fraught — and they changed the world.
The Road to Nuremberg
As the war drew toward its end and Allied forces liberated the Nazi camps, the question of what to do with the perpetrators became urgent. Some Allied leaders, most notably Winston Churchill, favored summary execution: shoot the top Nazis without trial. Stalin proposed a show trial, its outcome predetermined. It was the Americans, led by Secretary of War Henry Stimson and Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who insisted on a proper judicial proceeding.
Their reasoning was both principled and strategic. A fair trial, they argued, would create a historical record that future generations could not dismiss as propaganda. It would establish the legal principle that aggressive war and mass murder were crimes under international law — not merely acts of a defeated enemy. "We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow," Jackson told the court in his opening statement.
The legal framework was created under the London Charter of August 8, 1945, signed by the United States, United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union. It defined the tribunal's jurisdiction and established the four categories of charges. It was, by necessity, law made after the fact — which troubled some legal scholars then and since. But the Allies argued that aggressive war and genocide were already recognized as violations of international norms, if not codified crimes.
The Defendants
The men who sat in the dock represented nearly every arm of the Nazi state. Hermann Göring, founder of the Gestapo and commander of the Luftwaffe, was the most prominent — and the most defiant. He sparred with prosecutors, attempted to dominate the proceedings, and never expressed remorse. Rudolf Hess, Hitler's former deputy, claimed amnesia and spent the trial in a state of theatrical disorientation. Joachim von Ribbentrop, the foreign minister, seemed bewildered that signing international agreements to dismember neighboring countries could be considered a crime.
Others presented themselves as mere functionaries: men following orders, cogs in a machine they did not design. Albert Speer, the armaments minister who had used slave labor from the concentration camps, cultivated an image of a technocrat who had not known the full extent of the killing — and was rewarded with a prison sentence rather than death. Wilhelm Keitel and Alfred Jodl, the senior military commanders, insisted they had been soldiers, not murderers, and that military obedience was not a crime.
The proceedings were conducted in four languages — English, French, Russian, and German — with simultaneous interpretation, a technological first. The trial lasted 218 days. The prosecution presented 2,630 documents and called 33 witnesses. The defense called 61 witnesses and submitted 143 more documents.
The Evidence
What made the Nuremberg trial extraordinary was not the legal arguments but the evidence. The Nazis had been meticulous record-keepers, and when Allied forces swept through Germany they captured millions of documents: orders for mass shootings, reports on the progress of extermination, correspondence between officials debating the most efficient methods of killing. The Einsatzgruppen reports alone — detailed field accounts of mobile killing squads operating in the East — documented the murder of over a million Jews in the first year of the invasion of the Soviet Union.
There was also film footage: of the camps as they were liberated, of emaciated survivors, of mountains of corpses. When the prosecution screened a documentary of the liberated concentration camps in the Nuremberg courtroom, some defendants looked away. Others stared in apparent disbelief. Hans Frank, the Nazi governor of occupied Poland, wept. "We didn't know!" was a common refrain from the dock. The documents said otherwise.
Survivors testified. Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, was called not as a victim but as a witness — a perpetrator who testified matter-of-factly about the mechanics of the killing operation he had administered. He estimated that 2.5 million people had been killed at Auschwitz under his command (historians now put the figure at approximately 1.1 million). His calm, bureaucratic testimony was among the most chilling moments of the trial.
The Verdicts
On October 1, 1946, the verdicts were read. Twelve defendants were sentenced to death by hanging: Göring, Ribbentrop, Keitel, Jodl, Ernst Kaltenbrunner (the head of the SS security apparatus), Alfred Rosenberg (the Nazi racial ideologist), Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Julius Streicher (the virulently antisemitic propagandist), Fritz Sauckel (the forced labor administrator), Arthur Seyss-Inquart (the Reich Commissioner of the Netherlands), and Martin Bormann (tried in absentia).
Three were acquitted: Franz von Papen, Hjalmar Schacht, and Hans Fritzsche. Seven received prison sentences ranging from ten years to life. Rudolf Hess received life imprisonment and would remain in Spandau Prison until his death in 1987, the last survivor of the defendants' dock.
Göring cheated the hangman. Hours before his scheduled execution on October 16, 1946, he swallowed a cyanide capsule that he had somehow kept hidden throughout the trial. The remaining ten were hanged in the Nuremberg prison gymnasium in the early hours of the morning. Their bodies, along with Göring's, were cremated and the ashes scattered in the Isar River.
The Legacy
The Nuremberg Trials did not end with the International Military Tribunal. Between 1946 and 1949, American authorities conducted twelve additional trials in the same Nuremberg courtroom — the "Subsequent Nuremberg Trials" — targeting doctors who had conducted medical experiments on prisoners, judges who had perverted the law in service of the Nazi state, industrialists who had used slave labor, and SS commanders who had overseen mass shootings. These trials further developed the legal principles established in the first proceeding.
The principles articulated at Nuremberg became the foundation of modern international criminal law. The Nuremberg Charter's definition of crimes against humanity — acts "committed against any civilian population, before or during the war" — was incorporated into the 1948 Genocide Convention, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and eventually the Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court in 2002. The Nuremberg precedent — that individuals, including heads of state, could be held criminally responsible for atrocities — has been invoked in every subsequent international criminal tribunal, from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia to the Special Court for Sierra Leone.
The trials were not without critics, then and since. The charge of "crimes against peace" troubled many legal scholars as ex post facto law — criminalizing acts that were not clearly illegal under existing law at the time they were committed. The presence of Soviet judges on the tribunal, while the Soviet Union was itself responsible for mass atrocities, struck many as hypocritical. The acquittals were controversial: some felt the defendants who were freed should have been convicted; others felt the convictions of men like Streicher (a propagandist, not a direct killer) stretched the definition of criminal responsibility too far.
But for all their imperfections, the Nuremberg Trials established something essential: that there is no crime so terrible that its perpetrators can escape accountability by invoking the authority of a state, the orders of a superior, or the claim that what they did was legal under the laws of their own country. In the words of the tribunal's judgment: "Crimes against international law are committed by men, not by abstract entities, and only by punishing individuals who commit such crimes can the provisions of international law be enforced."
The courtroom in Nuremberg — Courtroom 600 in the Palace of Justice — still stands. It is still used as an active court. On the days when it is not in session, visitors can walk in and sit in the gallery where the world watched history being made. The defendants' dock is still there. So is the judges' bench. The room is quiet now, and ordinary-looking. But something happened here that had never happened before — and the world has not been the same since.