Judges from the United States, Great Britain, France and the Soviet Union delivered the verdict of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg on Oct. 1, 1946, sentencing 12 of Nazi Germany’s surviving top leaders to death and convicting seven others to prison terms ranging from 10 years to life, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Three defendants were acquitted outright. Eighty years later, historians and legal scholars still point to the trial as the moment individual criminal responsibility for atrocities committed by a state became enforceable under international law, rather than a principle with no court behind it.
Here is the story according to information from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the National WWII Museum and the nonprofit Robert H. Jackson Center, named for the former U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice and chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg.
A Legal Theory That Had Never Been Tried in Court
The tribunal was created under the London Agreement, signed Aug. 8, 1945, by the four Allied powers. The agreement set up a court with one judge and one prosecution team from each nation. The court indicted 24 senior Nazi officials on four counts:
- Conspiracy to commit crimes against peace
- Crimes against peace
- War crimes
- Crimes against humanity
Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels had already died and were not among the defendants. Martin Bormann was tried in absentia; Robert Ley died by suicide before the proceedings began; and Gustav Krupp was excused for health reasons, leaving 22 defendants who appeared when the trial opened in Nuremberg’s Palace of Justice on Nov. 20, 1945.
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Jackson, the chief U.S. prosecutor and a sitting Supreme Court justice on leave to lead the American prosecution team, framed the tribunal’s core argument in his opening statement: that the men could not escape responsibility by claiming they were following orders — and that the same law would apply to any nation in the future, including the Allied powers that were judging them.
“Civilization can afford no compromise on the subject of barbarism,” Jackson told the tribunal, a line the Robert H. Jackson Center still cites as the trial’s defining principle.
The Verdict and the Executions
The tribunal convicted 19 of the 22 defendants who stood trial. Twelve were sentenced to death, including Hermann Göring, Adolf Hitler’s designated successor; former Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop; and military chief Wilhelm Keitel. Göring died by suicide in his cell the night before the executions were carried out. Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s former deputy, was sentenced to life in prison. Hjalmar Schacht, Franz von Papen and Hans Fritzsche were acquitted.
The remaining 10 death sentences were carried out by hanging Oct. 16, 1946, inside the gymnasium of the same Nuremberg prison that had held the defendants during the trial. The executioner was Master Sgt. John C. Woods, a U.S. Army soldier who had claimed prior hanging experience he didn’t have when he volunteered for the assignment. He later called the assignment something he was proud of, though military records showed several of the hangings he carried out took longer than Army regulations allowed.
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The Precedent That Outlasted the Trial
The tribunal’s core innovation was procedural as much as moral: It was the first time an international agreement among sovereign states had been used to prosecute individual people, rather than nations, for conduct committed under government authority, according to the National WWII Museum. That principle — that following a superior’s order is not a defense against a war crime — became a foundation later written into the Nuremberg Principles adopted by the United Nations International Law Commission.
The trial’s influence shows up directly in the legal architecture that followed it. The 1948 Genocide Convention and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights both drew on legal reasoning developed at Nuremberg, and the 1949 Geneva Conventions on the laws and customs of war were negotiated in its immediate aftermath, according to Military.com’s 2015 reporting marking the trial’s 70th anniversary. Decades later, the international tribunals created for the wars in the former Yugoslavia and the Rwandan genocide, along with the permanent International Criminal Court established in 2002, were built on the same legal foundation Nuremberg established: that individuals, not just states, answer for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Why It Still Shapes How U.S. Troops Are Trained
For today’s service members, Nuremberg’s legacy is not confined to a history lesson. The Defense Department’s Law of War Manual, which governs how U.S. forces are trained on the legal boundaries of combat, traces its core framework to the standards Nuremberg established, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice incorporates the same principle that shaped the tribunal’s verdicts: that a service member who commits a war crime cannot point to an order as a complete defense.
That standard still generates real disputes over where the line falls in modern combat. Military.com’s 2015 coverage cited the U.S. airstrike on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, the year before as an example of how the framework Nuremberg established — individual accountability under the law of armed conflict — continues to run up against the operational judgment calls service members make in the field. Eighty years after the verdict, the tribunal’s central premise, that legal accountability for atrocity does not stop at a chain of command, remains the standard the U.S. military trains its troops to meet.
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