What were the Nuremberg trials? Judging the Nazi leaders

The Nuremberg trials were a series of trials of Nazi Germany's leaders and officials, held in the German city of Nuremberg after the Second World War. The best known, before an International Military Tribunal set up by the four victorious Allies, tried 22 of the most senior Nazi leaders, one of them in his absence, from November 1945 to October 1946. Twelve further trials followed. They were the first time individuals were tried before an international court for crimes against peace and crimes against humanity.

In short

• The four Allied powers tried the regime's leaders, not the German nation, on four charges, from planning aggressive war to the murder of civilians.
• Of the 22 defendants, 12 were sentenced to death, 7 to prison and 3 were acquitted.
• The trials set rules that still stand: individuals answer for crimes under international law, and "following orders" is no defense.

Why were the Nazi leaders put on trial?

By 1945 the Allies knew the scale of what Germany had done, from wars of conquest across Europe to the Holocaust. The question was what to do with the men at the top. Winston Churchill at first favored executing leading Nazis without a trial; the Soviet leadership wanted trials whose outcome was certain. The United States, with its Secretary of War Henry Stimson and the Supreme Court justice Robert H. Jackson, pressed for a real trial with evidence and defense lawyers, so that the record would stand for history.

That view won. On 8 August 1945, the United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union signed the London Charter, which created the International Military Tribunal and defined the crimes it would try. Each power supplied a judge, an alternate and a prosecution team. Nuremberg was chosen in part because its Palace of Justice had survived the bombing with a prison attached, and in part for its symbolism: it had been the site of the Nazi Party's great rallies and gave its name to the Nuremberg race laws of 1935.

Jackson, the chief US prosecutor, framed the stakes in his opening statement on 21 November 1945: that "four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason," as the Robert H. Jackson Center's text records.

What were the defendants charged with?

The indictment had four counts, set out in the Charter:

1. Conspiracy: taking part in a common plan to commit any of the crimes below.
2. Crimes against peace: planning and waging a war of aggression.
3. War crimes: breaking the laws and customs of war, such as murdering prisoners of war or civilians in occupied territory, and plundering property.
4. Crimes against humanity: murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and persecution on political, racial or religious grounds against civilian populations, before or during the war.

The last charge was new. It allowed the court to judge what the regime had done to its own citizens, including German Jews, which the older laws of war did not reach. The tribunal applied it only to acts connected with the war, so persecution before 1939 went unpunished as such, the USHMM notes.

Who was tried, and what were the verdicts?

Twenty-four men were indicted. One, the labor leader Robert Ley, killed himself before the trial, and the industrialist Gustav Krupp was ruled too ill to be tried. Martin Bormann, Hitler's secretary, was tried in his absence; he was later found to have died in Berlin in 1945. The trial ran from 20 November 1945 to 1 October 1946, and the court heard both the prosecution's mass of captured German documents and the defense's witnesses. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum gives the outcome:

Sentence	Defendants
Death (12)	Hermann Göring, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Julius Streicher, Fritz Sauckel, Alfred Jodl, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Martin Bormann (in absentia)
Life imprisonment (3)	Rudolf Hess, Walther Funk, Erich Raeder
20 years (2)	Albert Speer, Baldur von Schirach
15 years (1)	Konstantin von Neurath
10 years (1)	Karl Dönitz
Acquitted (3)	Hjalmar Schacht, Franz von Papen, Hans Fritzsche

Ten of the condemned were hanged on 16 October 1946. Göring killed himself the night before. The tribunal also declared four Nazi organizations criminal, the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party, the SS, the SD and the Gestapo, while refusing to condemn others, such as the SA and the General Staff. Membership alone did not make a person guilty; each member still had to be tried.

What were the later Nuremberg trials?

Between December 1946 and April 1949, American military tribunals held 12 further trials in the same Palace of Justice, under a law of the Allied occupation authority, Control Council Law No. 10. They tried the people who had run the system below the leaders: doctors who carried out experiments on prisoners, judges and lawyers, SS economic administrators, industrialists from Krupp, Flick and IG Farben, generals, diplomats and the commanders of the Einsatzgruppen killing squads. According to the USHMM, 185 people were indicted and 177 tried; 24 were sentenced to death, 20 to life and 98 to other prison terms, and 35 were acquitted. Many sentences were later reduced. The Doctors' Trial produced the Nuremberg Code of 1947, ten rules for experiments on human beings, beginning with voluntary consent, that shaped medical ethics.

What did the Nuremberg trials change?

Nuremberg established that international law binds people, not only states. In 1950 the UN's International Law Commission wrote the tribunal's rules down as the Nuremberg Principles. Principle I says that anyone who commits a crime under international law "is responsible therefor and liable to punishment". Principle III says being a head of state is no excuse. Principle IV says acting on a superior's orders "does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him".

Those ideas fed directly into what came after: the 1948 convention against genocide, the tribunal at Tokyo for Japan's leaders, the UN tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s, and the permanent International Criminal Court, which opened in 2002. The documents gathered as evidence also became one of the foundations of Holocaust history.

Still argued

Was Nuremberg "victors' justice"? Critics at the time and since have made three main points. Only the losers were tried: Allied acts such as the bombing of German cities went unexamined, and the Soviet Union, which had invaded Poland in 1939 alongside Germany, sat in judgment, even pressing a charge over the Katyn massacre of Polish officers that its own forces had committed; the tribunal left Katyn out of its judgment. Second, the charge of crimes against peace had not clearly been a crime for individuals before 1945, which looks like punishing acts after the fact. Third, the judges came from the prosecuting powers. Defenders reply that the defendants had lawyers, saw the evidence, could call witnesses and were sometimes acquitted; that the core crimes, mass murder and the abuse of prisoners, were crimes under every legal system before the war; and that the alternative on offer was execution without trial. Historians and lawyers still weigh both sides; many accept the flaws while judging the trials a large advance on what came before.

The trials returned to wide public attention with the film Nuremberg, released in the United States on 7 November 2025, which drew on the story of the US Army psychiatrist who examined Göring. The trials are where the story of the Second World War meets the history of international law.

Check yourself

• Without looking back: name the four charges at Nuremberg, and say which one was new and why it mattered.
• Why did the tribunal declare organizations such as the SS criminal, and what did that mean for their members?
• State the "victors' justice" objection and the strongest reply to it.

Sources

• International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
• Subsequent Nuremberg proceedings — United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
• Charter of the International Military Tribunal — Avalon Project, Yale Law School, 1945
• Principles of International Law Recognized in the Charter of the Nürnberg Tribunal — International Law Commission, United Nations, 1950
• Opening statement before the International Military Tribunal — Robert H. Jackson Center, 1945
• Nuremberg trials — Wikipedia