The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg ended on 1 October 1946 with the sentencing of twenty-two senior leaders of the Third Reich. The killing of six million Jews and millions of others had needed many more than twenty-two men. The doctors who had selected on the ramps and run experiments on prisoners had not been tried. The judges who had handed down racial death sentences had not been tried. The directors of IG Farben, Krupp and Flick, who had used slave labour in their factories, had not been tried. The Einsatzgruppen officers who had shot more than a million people in pits had not been tried. The Foreign Office officials who had arranged the deportations had not been tried. The Wehrmacht generals who had ordered the Commissar Order and the starvation of Soviet POWs had not been tried.
The four-power agreement at the London Conference in summer 1945 had anticipated that further trials would follow, with each occupying power conducting cases in its own zone. The Soviet zone proceedings produced the Sachsenhausen trial of 1947 and a number of others over the following decade. The British zone proceedings produced the Bergen-Belsen trial of 1945 and the Stutthof and Ravensbrück trials of 1946 to 1947. The French zone proceedings produced the Rastatt trials of 1946 to 1949. None of these came close in scale to what the Americans did. Between December 1946 and April 1949 the United States conducted twelve major trials at Nuremberg under Control Council Law No. 10. They are known collectively as the Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings, or the Nuremberg Military Tribunals, or the NMT cases. They put 185 defendants in the dock. They produced 142 convictions. They generated the fifteen volumes of Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals, the green series, that run to over thirty thousand pages and that historians have been mining ever since. This page is the working summary of the twelve cases. The fuller parent page, Subsequent Trials and Prosecutions, gives the substantive narrative.
The twelve cases
Case 1: The Doctors’ Trial (United States v. Karl Brandt et al.). December 1946 to August 1947. Twenty-three defendants, twenty of them physicians, charged with medical experiments at Auschwitz, Dachau, Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald, and with the killing of disabled Germans under the T4 framework. Sixteen convicted, seven sentenced to death and hanged at Landsberg in June 1948, including Karl Brandt (Hitler’s escorting physician) and Viktor Brack (T4). The Nuremberg Code on medical experimentation was drafted into the judgment.
Case 2: The Milch case (United States v. Erhard Milch). January to April 1947. Single defendant. Field Marshal Erhard Milch, deputy to Göring at the Air Ministry, charged with running the slave-labour programme that fed the Luftwaffe’s factories. Convicted on slave labour and prisoner-of-war counts. Sentenced to life imprisonment, commuted by John J. McCloy in 1951 to fifteen years; released in 1954.
Case 3: The Justice case (United States v. Josef Altstötter et al.). January to December 1947. Sixteen defendants, all lawyers, judges or Reich Ministry of Justice officials. The case put on trial the corruption of the German legal profession under the regime: the special courts that handed down racial death sentences, the implementation of the Night and Fog Decree, the drafting and application of the Nuremberg racial laws. Ten convicted, four to life imprisonment, six to lesser terms. The case is the source of Telford Taylor’s image of the dagger of the assassin concealed beneath the robe of the jurist.
Case 4: The Pohl case (United States v. Oswald Pohl et al.). April to November 1947. Eighteen defendants from the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office, which ran the concentration camp system and managed slave labour. Pohl himself, who had administered the camps from 1942, was sentenced to death and hanged at Landsberg on 7 June 1951. Three other death sentences were commuted by McCloy.
Case 5: The Flick case (United States v. Friedrich Flick et al.). April to December 1947. Six defendants, executives of the Flick group of coal and steel companies, charged with slave labour, plunder and SS membership. Flick himself, the seventy-four-year-old founder of the company, drew seven years and walked out of Landsberg in 1950 a free billionaire.
Case 6: The IG Farben case (United States v. Carl Krauch et al.). August 1947 to July 1948. Twenty-four defendants, directors of the chemical conglomerate that had built and operated the synthetic rubber and fuel plant at Auschwitz III and that had supplied Zyklon B to the SS through its subsidiary Degesch. Thirteen convicted on slave-labour or plunder counts, sentences from eighteen months to eight years. Otto Ambros, who had run the Monowitz plant and the production of the nerve gas Sarin, drew eight years; he was released in 1951 and resumed senior consulting work in the German chemical industry.
Case 7: The Hostages case (United States v. Wilhelm List et al.). July 1947 to February 1948. Twelve senior officers, mostly generals, charged with the killing of civilians and prisoners as reprisals in occupied Yugoslavia, Greece, Albania and Norway. Eight convicted. List drew life; Lothar Rendulic, who had ordered the burning of much of northern Norway in late 1944, drew twenty years.
Case 8: The RuSHA case (United States v. Ulrich Greifelt et al.). October 1947 to March 1948. Fourteen defendants from the SS Race and Settlement Main Office, charged with the kidnapping of racially suitable children from occupied Poland and the Czech lands, the forced abortions for foreign labourers, and the deportation of populations under Generalplan Ost. Greifelt drew life.
Case 9: The Einsatzgruppen case (United States v. Otto Ohlendorf et al.). September 1947 to April 1948. Twenty-four officers of the mobile killing units that had killed over a million people on Soviet territory. The case the prosecution called the largest murder trial in history. Fourteen sentenced to death, of whom four (Ohlendorf, Erich Naumann, Werner Braune, Paul Blobel) were hanged at Landsberg on 7 June 1951. The other ten death sentences were commuted by McCloy. The case was prosecuted by Benjamin Ferencz, then twenty-seven years old, in his first trial.
Case 10: The Krupp case (United States v. Alfried Krupp et al.). December 1947 to July 1948. Twelve defendants, executives of the Krupp steel and arms firm, charged with slave labour and plunder. Alfried Krupp drew twelve years and the confiscation of his fortune. McCloy commuted the sentence in January 1951 and restored the property; Krupp was free within three years and resumed running the firm. He died in 1967 at the head of the largest industrial concern in Europe.
Case 11: The Ministries case (United States v. Ernst von Weizsäcker et al.). January 1948 to April 1949. The longest and broadest of the twelve cases. Twenty-one defendants from the Foreign Office, the Reich Chancellery, the ministries of finance and economics, and the Reichsbank. The case put on trial the German civil service: the men who had drafted the deportation arrangements, signed the diplomatic notes that arranged the killing of French Jews, and balanced the Reichsbank gold accounts. Weizsäcker, the State Secretary at the Foreign Office, drew seven years; Hans Lammers, head of the Reich Chancellery, drew twenty.
Case 12: The High Command case (United States v. Wilhelm von Leeb et al.). December 1947 to October 1948. Fourteen senior Wehrmacht officers, including Field Marshal von Leeb, who had commanded Army Group North during the siege of Leningrad. The case put on trial the proposition that the German army had been a clean institution separate from SS crimes. The court rejected the proposition, finding that the army had transmitted the Commissar Order, the Barbarossa Decree and the orders that condemned Soviet POWs to death by starvation. Eleven convicted; sentences were generally short.
The arithmetic
Of the 185 defendants, 142 were convicted. Twenty-five received the death penalty; twelve of those were carried out, all on a single morning at Landsberg on 7 June 1951. Twenty drew life imprisonment; ninety-eight drew lesser terms; thirty-five were acquitted; four committed suicide and four were ruled unfit to stand trial. By the end of 1958, every man convicted in the Subsequent Proceedings had been released.
The clemency
The unmaking of the Subsequent Proceedings sentences was the work of John J. McCloy, the United States High Commissioner for Germany from 1949 to 1952. McCloy commuted most of the remaining death sentences in his major clemency decisions of January 1951 and reduced almost every prison term. He restored property to Alfried Krupp. The clemency was a political decision driven by the demands of the Cold War. It is judged today, including by McCloy’s own biographer Kai Bird and by historians sympathetic to the wider American policy of supporting West Germany, as a moral mistake. The men whose sentences were commuted had been convicted on full records of the killings they had personally ordered or carried out. The Cold War rebuilding of Germany did not require their release. The releases happened because the political pressure to release them was sustained and because McCloy and his successors lacked the political appetite to resist it. By the late 1950s the books were closed. The men were home.
What the twelve cases produced
The twelve cases produced the most detailed legal record of the workings of the Third Reich that exists. They named the corporate boards, the medical faculties, the judicial benches, the diplomatic desks. They showed that the murder of six million Jews and millions of others had needed bankers, chemists, lawyers, generals, civil servants, professors and doctors. The fifteen volumes of the green series are the foundational archive. Every serious work of Holocaust scholarship since 1949 has drawn on them. The Nuremberg Code on medical experimentation, the doctrine of corporate officer liability for war crimes, the application of the superior orders rule to senior military officers, the principle of command responsibility for civilian massacres, the application of the law of crimes against humanity to the bureaucratic machinery of mass killing, all came out of the Subsequent Proceedings or were sharpened in them. The clemency took the men. The record stayed.
Sources
- Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, the Green Series, 15 vols, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 to 1953
- Telford Taylor, Final Report to the Secretary of the Army on the Nuernberg War Crimes Trials Under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949
- Kim Christian Priemel and Alexa Stiller, eds, Reassessing the Nuremberg Military Tribunals: Transitional Justice, Trial Narratives, and Historiography, Berghahn, 2012
- Hilary Earl, The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945 to 1958, Cambridge University Press, 2009
- Frank M. Buscher, The U.S. War Crimes Trial Program in Germany, 1946 to 1955, Greenwood, 1989
- Kai Bird, The Chairman: John J. McCloy and the Making of the American Establishment, Simon and Schuster, 1992