In 1940, the British, French, and Polish governments were already drawing attention to Nazi Germany’s violations of international law in Poland. The Allies were still at war when they pledged to bring the perpetrators to justice. The most well-known statement on this subject is the Moscow Declaration of October 30, 1943. The persons responsible for crimes committed in the occupied countries were to be extradited to those countries and tried under their national laws. Persons whose crimes were not confined to a clearly defined geographical area such as a specific state but instead encompassed the whole of Europe, for example, were to be tried in proceedings held jointly by the Allies. This intention was reaffirmed at various conferences, the last of which was the Potsdam Conference, which took place after the end of the war. The legal basis for the trials was the London Four-Power Agreement of August 8, 1945.
The initial plan was to hold the International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Berlin, but no suitable premises could be found in the ruined city, which also had to accommodate the Allied Control Council. After an opening session in Berlin on October 18, 1945, the trial continued in Nuremberg, in the U.S. occupation zone, on November 20, 1945; this venue was chosen because the courthouse was connected to a prison. The former imperial city of Nuremberg had hosted the Nazi Party’s rallies, and the notorious Nuremberg Laws‘ had been enacted there in 1935. The Allies believed that it would be highly symbolic to bring Nazism to justice in the place where Hitler and the Nazi Party had glorified themselves. The trial followed American procedural law. The defendants had German defense attorneys.
The trial brought charges against the highest-ranking political, military, and economic leaders in the Third Reich. It was known that many Nazi leaders had committed suicide towards the end of the war or had gone into hiding and could no longer be brought to justice. Although a number of important Nazi functionaries were assembled in the dock, they represented only a small number of the state, party, and military elite during the Third Reich.
The persons on trial were Hermann Göring (Reich Marshall), Rudolf Hess (Hitler’s deputy in the Nazi Party), Joachim von Ribbentrop (Foreign Minister), Wilhelm Keitel (Armed Forces High Command), Ernst Kaltenbrunner (Reich Security Main Office), Alfred Rosenberg (Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories), Hans Frank (Governor-General of Poland), Wilhelm Frick (Reich Minister of the Interior), Julius Streicher (editor of the antisemitic tabloid ‘Der Stürmer’), Fritz Sauckel (General Plenipotentiary for Labor Deployment), Alfred Jodl (Wehrmacht chief), Franz von Papen (Hitler’s Vice-Chancellor, diplomat), Arthur Seyss-Inquart (Reich Representative in Austria, Reich Minister without portfolio), Albert Speer (Reich Minister of Armaments and Munitions), Count Konstantin von Neurath (Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia), Hjalmar Schacht (President of the Reichsbank until 1939), Walther Funk (President of the Reichsbank after 1939), Karl Dönitz (Supreme Commander of the Navy, Hitler’s successor as Reich President after the latter’s suicide), Erich Raeder (Supreme Commander of the Navy before 1943), Baldur von Schirach (Regional Leader (Gauleiter)) of Vienna, Reich Youth Leader, and Hans Fritzsche (Head of the Radio Division of the Reich Propaganda Ministry). Two defendants had already been eliminated before the trial began: Robert Ley (Reich Organizational Administrator of the Nazi Party) had committed suicide, and armaments manufacturer Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach was unable to stand trial due to illness. Martin Bormann (Head of the Nazi Party Chancellery) was indicted in absentia.
The charges were crimes against peace (planning, initiating, and waging a war of aggression), war crimes, crimes against humanity, and participating in a common plan or conspiracy to accomplish the crimes mentioned. The verdicts were announced on September 30, 1946 and October 1, 1946. Göring, Ribbentrop, Keitel, Kaltenbrunner, Rosenberg, Frank, Frick, Streicher, Sauckel, Jodl and Seyss-Inquart were sentenced to death, as was Bormann in absentia. Göring committed suicide shortly before his sentence was enforced, as a result of which only nine of the condemned were executed on October 16, 1946. Hess, Funk, and Raeder were sentenced to lifelong imprisonment, while Speer, Neurath, Dönitz, and Schirach received prison sentences ranging from 10 to 20 years. Von Papen, Schacht, and Fritzsche were acquitted.
The main Nuremberg war trial is unique in its scale and significance. This was the first time that the leaders of a criminal regime had been brought to justice before an international court. Representatives of the government, army, Nazi leadership, and ministries stood before a court consisting of citizens of the U.S., the Soviet Union, Britain, and France, while two representatives of each of the four victorious Allied powers were on the bench. For the prosecution, there was one chief prosecutor for each of the four Allies, the most well-known of whom was probably Robert H. Jackson (USA). An enormous investigative apparatus, consisting of representatives of each of the four Allied powers, the German-occupied territories, and the World Jewish Congress as the representative of the Jewish people, spent more than a year assembling evidence, securing documents, and interrogating witnesses. Documents and statements were translated into the four languages used at the trial, i.e. English, French, Russian, and German, while simultaneous interpreters were present at every hearing. Newsreels and newspaper articles by numerous journalists reported on the proceedings.
Despite the court’s innovative character, the indictment and verdict were conventional and based on irrefutable facts. The culpability of each defendant was examined separately. The difference in the verdicts (from acquittal to the death penalty) illustrates how each individual’s contribution to the criminal activity was scrutinized. Germany had attacked other nations; this was proof that the country had intended to wage a war of aggression. However, wars of aggression were proscribed by the international community and banned by international treaties. The other charges (war crimes, crimes against humanity, conspiracy to accomplish these crimes) played a secondary role in the verdicts since they were rooted in the crime of the war of aggression. The verdict also proscribed membership of a criminal organization. This applied to some Nazi organizations but by no means all. The political leaderships of the Nazi Party, the SS, the SD and the Gestapo were classified as criminal organizations. In contrast, the Reich government, the General Staff, the High Command of the Wehrmacht, and the SA were not.
The trial is commemorated in Courtroom 600 in Nuremberg’s Palace of Justice, which is still in judicial use. The Memorium Nuremberg Trials center houses a permanent exhibition at the actual location. To this day, the documents from the main Nuremberg war trial, i.e. the evidential material (Nuremberg documents) and the transcripts of the proceedings (more than 16,000 pages), which were published in 15 volumes by the Americans in the early 1950s, are still an indispensable resource for both the crimes committed in the Third Reich and their judicial punishment by the international community.
