The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg That Tried 22 Senior Nazi Officials Between November 1945 and October 1946 and Hanged Ten of Them

The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg was established by the four-power London Agreement of 8 August 1945. The tribunal tried 22 senior Nazi defendants between 20 November 1945 and 1 October 1946 on four counts: conspiracy to commit aggressive war, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

The judges were one each from the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and the Soviet Union, each with an alternate. The chief American prosecutor Robert Jackson took leave from the US Supreme Court to lead the prosecution.

The defendants

The 22 living defendants in the dock included:

— Hermann Göring — Reichsmarschall, Hitler’s designated successor until April 1945 — Rudolf Hess — former Deputy Führer, who had flown to Scotland in May 1941 on a private peace mission — Joachim von Ribbentrop — Foreign Minister — Albert Speer — Minister of Armaments — Karl Dönitz — Grand Admiral of the Navy, briefly President after Hitler’s suicide — Wilhelm Keitel, Alfred Jodl — senior military commanders — Julius Streicher — publisher of the antisemitic newspaper Der Stürmer — Plus 14 others, including industrialists, bureaucrats, and lawyers

Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels had all committed suicide in April-May 1945. Bormann was tried in absentia; his death in May 1945 was confirmed only in 1972 from the recovery of his skeleton in Berlin.

The verdicts

The Tribunal delivered its verdicts on 1 October 1946:

— Hanging: Göring, Ribbentrop, Keitel, Kaltenbrunner, Rosenberg, Frank, Frick, Streicher, Sauckel, Jodl, Seyss-Inquart, Bormann (in absentia) — Life imprisonment: Hess, Funk, Raeder — 20 years: Speer, Schirach — 15 years: Neurath — 10 years: Dönitz — Acquitted: Schacht, Papen, Fritzsche

The three acquittals produced controversy. Schacht (the pre-war finance minister) and Papen (the Weimar-era chancellor who had assisted Hitler’s appointment) were widely considered morally culpable but the Tribunal found that the prosecution had not proved the specific criminal charges against them.

16 October 1946

The ten hanging-sentence defendants (Bormann in absentia) were scheduled to be executed at 1:00 a.m. on 16 October 1946 at the Nuremberg prison gymnasium.

Hermann Göring committed suicide in his cell on the evening of 15 October 1946 with a cyanide capsule. The source of the capsule has been disputed since; the leading 21st-century reconstruction (Ben Swearingen, 1985) is that a sympathetic American prison guard had passed it to him.

The remaining ten — including Bormann’s empty space — were hanged across three hours. The American hangman John C. Woods conducted the executions. The trap-door depths were reportedly set short, producing slow-strangulation deaths rather than instantaneous broken necks; the Woods subsequently denied intentional sabotage but the pattern has been documented.