The judgment of the International Military Tribunal was read out across two days, 30 September and 1 October 1946. The four presiding judges took turns. Sir Geoffrey Lawrence read the central legal sections, including the rejection of the defence arguments on retroactivity and superior orders. Francis Biddle, the American judge, read the section on the personal responsibility of each defendant. Henri Donnedieu de Vabres, the French judge, read the section on the criminal organisations. Iona Nikitchenko, the Soviet judge, read the dissents. The full judgment ran to about 250 typed pages. The reading filled both court days. The defendants were brought into the dock individually on the second day to hear sentence pronounced. They wore their best clothes. Most stood to attention. Several saluted as they were led out. None of those sentenced to death made a public statement when sentence was read. The hangings were carried out two weeks later.
This page sets out what the court found and what it ordered, defendant by defendant. It is the working summary of the IMT verdict. The fuller treatment of individual defendants, where they have their own pages on this site, runs alongside this one and gives the substance of what each man had done and what the case against him had been.
Sentenced to death by hanging
Hermann Göring, Reichsmarschall, designated successor to Hitler, head of the Luftwaffe, founder of the Gestapo, plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan. Convicted on all four counts. The judgment described him as the leading war aggressor and stated that there is nothing to be said in mitigation. He committed suicide in his cell on the evening of 15 October 1946, two hours before he was due to be hanged, by swallowing a cyanide capsule whose source has never been definitively established.
Joachim von Ribbentrop, Foreign Minister 1938 to 1945. Convicted on all four counts. The judgment found that he had played an important part in Hitler’s final solution of the Jewish question through his pressure on Vichy France, Hungary, Italy and Slovakia to deport their Jewish populations. Hanged 16 October 1946.
Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of the Wehrmacht High Command. Convicted on all four counts. The judgment held that he had signed and transmitted the Commissar Order, the Barbarossa Decree, the Night and Fog Decree, and dozens of subsidiary orders that violated the laws of war. Asked at sentence whether he had any final statement he requested, in the dignified style of a German officer, to be granted the soldier’s death by firing squad rather than the hangman’s rope. The bench refused. Hanged 16 October 1946.
Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Chief of the Reich Security Main Office from January 1943, Heydrich’s successor. Convicted on Counts Three and Four (war crimes and crimes against humanity). The judgment found that the murderous activities of the Gestapo and SD were known to the defendant. Hanged 16 October 1946.
Alfred Rosenberg, the regime’s chief racial theorist, Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories from July 1941. Convicted on all four counts. Hanged 16 October 1946.
Hans Frank, Governor-General of occupied Poland from October 1939. Convicted on Counts Three and Four. The diary Frank had kept for the duration of his Polish governorship, which ran to forty-three volumes and which the prosecution had introduced into evidence in full, recorded in his own hand the deportations and killings he had supervised. Frank made a remarkable courtroom statement in his closing days at the trial, saying that a thousand years will pass and the guilt of Germany will not be erased. He converted to Catholicism in his cell. Hanged 16 October 1946.
Wilhelm Frick, Reich Interior Minister 1933 to 1943, Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia 1943 to 1945. Convicted on Counts Two, Three and Four. The judgment found that he had drafted, signed and administered the Nuremberg racial laws and had been responsible for the legal framework of the persecution. Hanged 16 October 1946.
Julius Streicher, publisher of Der Stürmer, the regime’s principal antisemitic propaganda weekly. Convicted on Count Four. Streicher’s case was unusual; he had held no official position since 1940 and had not personally administered any killings. The judgment held that his sustained incitement of antisemitic hatred over twenty-three years had been a substantial element in the climate that had made the killings possible. He shouted Heil Hitler on the scaffold. Hanged 16 October 1946.
Fritz Sauckel, Plenipotentiary General for Labour Deployment from March 1942. Convicted on Counts Three and Four. Sauckel had run the slave-labour programme that brought five million workers from occupied Europe into the German war economy under conditions amounting in many cases to slavery. Hanged 16 October 1946.
Alfred Jodl, Chief of Operations at the Wehrmacht High Command. Convicted on all four counts. Jodl, like Keitel, had signed and transmitted the orders that condemned Soviet POWs and political officers to summary execution. Hanged 16 October 1946. The German Federal Court posthumously vacated the conviction in February 1953 on the grounds that the IMT had insufficient jurisdiction over a serving German officer; the vacation was reversed in 1969.
Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Reich Commissioner for the occupied Netherlands from May 1940. Convicted on Counts Two, Three and Four. The judgment found that he had supervised the deportation of approximately 117,000 Dutch Jews to the killing centres in the East, of whom only about 5,500 had returned. Hanged 16 October 1946.
Martin Bormann, Hitler’s secretary and head of the Party Chancellery. Convicted in absentia on Counts Three and Four. Bormann had not been found at the end of the war. The IMT had proceeded on the working assumption that he was alive. He was not. His remains were excavated in Berlin in 1972 and identified by dental records as those of a man who had committed suicide on the night of 1 May 1945 within a few hundred yards of the Reich Chancellery bunker.
Sentenced to life imprisonment
Rudolf Hess, Deputy Führer until his flight to Scotland in May 1941. Convicted on Counts One and Two. The judgment found him guilty of conspiracy to wage aggressive war and of the planning of the war. Hess maintained throughout the trial that he could not remember major sections of his own pre-1941 career; the bench’s medical panel had divided on his fitness to stand trial. He served his sentence at Spandau Prison in West Berlin. After the release of Speer and Schirach in 1966 he was the only prisoner. He committed suicide in the prison’s reading room on 17 August 1987 at the age of ninety-three. He was the longest-serving prisoner of the IMT verdict.
Walther Funk, President of the Reichsbank from 1939, Reich Minister of Economics from 1938. Convicted on Counts Two, Three and Four. Funk had administered the special account named Max Heiliger into which gold and dental fillings from the killing centres had been credited. Released on grounds of ill health in May 1957 and died in Düsseldorf in 1960.
Erich Raeder, Commander-in-Chief of the German Navy 1928 to 1943. Convicted on Counts One, Two and Three. Raeder, like Funk, was released on grounds of ill health in 1955 and died in 1960.
Terms of years
Albert Speer, Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production from 1942. Twenty years. Speer’s defence had been that he had served his country as a technocrat and had lost his moral way; he had accepted what he called collective responsibility while denying personal knowledge of the killing. The judgment accepted his account because the documents available at the time did not directly contradict it. Subsequent research, particularly Gitta Sereny’s Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth (1995), has established that Speer knew far more than he had admitted. He served his full sentence at Spandau, was released on 30 September 1966, and lived as a prosperous author until his death in London in 1981. His memoirs, Inside the Third Reich (1969), became a bestseller.
Baldur von Schirach, Reich Youth Leader 1933 to 1940, Gauleiter of Vienna 1940 to 1945. Twenty years. Schirach had supervised the deportation of approximately 65,000 Jews from Vienna. He served his full sentence at Spandau and was released the same day as Speer.
Konstantin von Neurath, Foreign Minister 1932 to 1938, Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia 1939 to 1941. Fifteen years. Released on grounds of ill health in 1954 and died in 1956.
Karl Dönitz, Commander-in-Chief of the German Navy from 1943, Reich President for the eight days between Hitler’s death and the unconditional surrender. Ten years. Dönitz had succeeded Hitler under the latter’s political testament and had ordered the surrender. The judgment convicted him on Counts Two and Three for unrestricted submarine warfare and for failing to provide for survivors of torpedoed merchant ships. He served his full sentence and was released in 1956. He died in 1980.
Acquittals
Hjalmar Schacht, Reich Minister of Economics 1934 to 1937, President of the Reichsbank 1933 to 1939. Acquitted on all counts. Schacht had broken with Hitler in 1937 over rearmament financing and had been imprisoned by the regime in 1944 in connection with the 20 July plot. The judgment found that he had not been part of the conspiracy to wage aggressive war.
Franz von Papen, Vice-Chancellor 1933 to 1934, Ambassador to Austria 1934 to 1938 and to Turkey 1939 to 1944. Acquitted on all counts. Papen had handed Hitler the chancellorship in January 1933 in the political bargain that historians have since identified as the decisive enabling act of the Nazi seizure of power. The judgment found that the prosecution had not established a specific criminal act within the IMT’s jurisdiction.
Hans Fritzsche, senior radio propagandist. Acquitted on all counts. Fritzsche had been included in the indictment principally as a placeholder for Goebbels, who had committed suicide in May 1945. The judgment found that he had not exercised independent control over propaganda policy and that his speeches did not amount to incitement to war crimes.
The acquittals were the proof that the trial had been a trial. Iona Nikitchenko issued a dissenting opinion arguing for conviction of all three. The American, British and French judges held that the prosecution had not made the case beyond reasonable doubt. The journalist William Shirer, who covered the trial for CBS, wrote in his published despatches that the acquittals had done more for the moral standing of the proceedings than any of the convictions. He was right.
The criminal organisations
The IMT also ruled on the criminal status of six Nazi organisations: the SS, the Gestapo, the SD, the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party, the SA, and the Reich Cabinet. The first four were declared criminal organisations under Article 9 of the Charter. The SA and the Reich Cabinet were not. The declarations had legal consequence: members of the criminal organisations who had taken substantive part in their work were liable to prosecution by the occupying authorities or by domestic German courts under the abbreviated procedures of Control Council Law No. 10. The declarations were the legal foundation of the denazification proceedings that followed in the four occupation zones.
See also
Sources
- International Military Tribunal, Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, vol I (judgment), Nuremberg, 1947
- Bradley F. Smith, Reaching Judgment at Nuremberg, Basic Books, 1977
- Robert E. Conot, Justice at Nuremberg, Harper and Row, 1983
- Ann Tusa and John Tusa, The Nuremberg Trial, Macmillan, 1983
- Joseph E. Persico, Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial, Viking, 1994
- Werner Maser, Nuremberg: A Nation on Trial, Penguin, 1979
- Gitta Sereny, Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth, Macmillan, 1995