The prosecution and defense finished in late August 1946, and the defendants gave their final statements. The judges then deliberated in private for about a month. On 30 September and 1 October 1946, the tribunal delivered its judgment.
The judgment
The judgment, hundreds of pages long, reviewed the history of the Nazi regime, its plans for war, its crimes in occupied territories, and the murder of the Jews. It declared that aggressive war was “the supreme international crime,” differing from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole. It upheld the charter's principles on official position and superior orders, and it insisted that international law applies to individuals: crimes against international law, it said, are committed by men, not by abstract entities, and only by punishing individuals who commit such crimes can the law be enforced.
The tribunal narrowed the conspiracy charge, limiting it to the conspiracy to wage aggressive war, and it limited crimes against humanity largely to acts connected with the war, so that some prewar persecution of German Jews fell outside its judgment.
The sentences
Of the twenty-two defendants tried:
- Twelve were sentenced to death by hanging, including Göring, Ribbentrop, Keitel, Jodl, Kaltenbrunner, Frank, Streicher and, in his absence, Bormann.
- Three received life imprisonment: Rudolf Hess, the economics minister Walther Funk and Admiral Erich Raeder.
- Four received prison terms: Albert Speer and the Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach, twenty years each; the former foreign minister Konstantin von Neurath, fifteen years; and Dönitz, ten years.
- Three were acquitted: the banker Hjalmar Schacht, the diplomat Franz von Papen and the radio propagandist Hans Fritzsche.
Streicher's case was notable: he held no military or government office during the war, and he was convicted of crimes against humanity for incitement, for using his newspaper to call for the extermination of Jews. His case became an early precedent for holding propagandists responsible for inciting mass murder.
The organizations
The tribunal declared four organizations criminal: the SS, the Gestapo, the SD (the SS security service) and the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party. Members who had joined voluntarily knowing of the organization's crimes could be prosecuted in later trials. The tribunal declined to declare the SA, the Reich Cabinet and the General Staff and High Command of the armed forces criminal organizations, though it condemned many of their members' actions.
The Soviet dissent
The Soviet judge, Nikitchenko, issued a dissent, disagreeing with the three acquittals, with Hess's life sentence instead of death, and with the refusal to declare the Reich Cabinet and the General Staff criminal. The other judges' willingness to acquit, over Soviet objections, has often been cited as evidence that the trial was not simply a show trial with a predetermined result.
The executions
On the night before the executions, Göring killed himself in his cell with a cyanide capsule he had somehow kept hidden. On 16 October 1946, the other ten men sentenced to death and present in Nuremberg were hanged in the prison gymnasium. Their bodies were cremated and the ashes scattered secretly, so that no grave could become a shrine.
Last words in court
Before the judgment, each defendant was allowed a final statement. Most denied guilt or blamed Hitler and Himmler. A few came closer to acknowledging responsibility. Hans Frank had earlier told the court, in his testimony, that a thousand years would pass and the guilt of Germany would not be erased; in his final statement he partly walked this back, blaming the crimes committed against Germans as well. Speer warned of the dangers of modern technology in the hands of a dictatorship. The statements showed how few of the accused were willing to face what they had done.
Afterward
The prisoners sentenced to imprisonment were held in Spandau Prison in Berlin, guarded by the four powers in rotation. Some were released early for ill health. Rudolf Hess remained there alone for more than twenty years and died in 1987, aged ninety-three. The prison was demolished soon after.
Worked example: why acquit anyone?
The three acquittals surprised many people, especially in the Soviet Union and among victims of the Nazis. Consider the case of Hjalmar Schacht and why the court acquitted him.
- The charge. Schacht, as president of the central bank and economics minister in the 1930s, had financed German rearmament. The prosecution argued that he helped prepare for aggressive war.
- The defense. Schacht argued that rearmament was not itself a crime, that he had opposed war, that he lost his posts as Hitler moved toward it, and that he was later imprisoned in a concentration camp after being suspected of links to the 1944 plot against Hitler.
- The court's reasoning. Rearmament alone was not criminal, and the evidence did not prove beyond reasonable doubt that Schacht knew of and joined the plans for aggressive war.
Many people believed Schacht bore heavy moral responsibility. But a court must judge each defendant on the evidence about his own acts and knowledge, not on public anger or association. The acquittals were among the strongest signs that Nuremberg was a real trial. A court that can only convict is not a court. The willingness to acquit, even the unpopular, is part of what distinguishes justice from vengeance.