49 Fun Facts About Nuremberg Trials

Which country joined the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union in running the Nuremberg trials?

France took the fourth seat on the bench, although it had spent most of the war under German occupation. Each of the four powers supplied a judge, an alternate judge and a team of prosecutors.

Nuremberg was chosen for the trials partly as a symbol, because the city was famous for which Nazi events?

The party rallies had packed Nuremberg with marching crowds year after year, and the Allies wanted the same city to witness the regime's end.

Which of these leading Nazis was still alive to face the judges when the Nuremberg trials began?

Ribbentrop, the foreign minister, sat in the dock. Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler had all killed themselves in the spring of 1945, so the dictator and two of his closest associates never faced a court.

How did every Nazi leader in the dock plead when the Nuremberg trial opened in November 1945?

Not guilty, every one of them. One defendant answered with a bare 'No', which the presiding judge entered as a plea of not guilty while the courtroom laughed.

Besides the men in the dock, what else did the Nuremberg prosecutors put on trial?

Whole Nazi organisations stood accused. Once the judges branded a group criminal, its knowing, willing members could be tried later for belonging, though the judges spared conscripts.

The Doctors Trial, first of twelve later American trials at Nuremberg, made which principle the first rule of human experiments?

Voluntary consent heads the ten-point code the judges wrote into their verdict, after hearing how Nazi physicians had experimented on camp inmates. It still underpins the ethics of medical research.

Which crime did the Nuremberg judges call 'the supreme international crime', because it contained the evil of all the others?

Waging aggressive war had never before put a national leader in the dock, which is why defence lawyers attacked the charge as a law invented after the fact.

Before the Nuremberg trials were agreed, what did Winston Churchill at first favour for the captured Nazi leaders?

Execution without trial was Churchill's first instinct for the top Nazis. It was Washington that pressed for a courtroom, where the evidence would go on record beyond dispute.

What evidence did the Nuremberg prosecutors lean on most, using the Nazis' own words against them?

Captured German documents, thousands of them, formed the core of the case. The prosecutors trusted the regime's own files over eyewitnesses, whose testimony could be attacked as biased.

Which three Allied leaders vowed in 1943 to pursue Nazi war criminals 'to the uttermost ends of the earth'?

Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin signed the pledge in the Moscow Declaration. Most offenders were to be sent back to the scene of their crimes, but the top leaders were kept for a joint Allied decision.

US Army officer Douglas Kelley saw the Nuremberg defendants in their cells before the trial; in what role?

Psychiatrist Kelley had to judge whether the captured leaders were fit to stand trial. He went looking for what made them evil and decided they were not special men at all.

Which US president, newly in office, chose a Supreme Court justice to lead the American prosecution at Nuremberg?

Harry Truman made the appointment on 2 May 1945, less than three weeks into his presidency. His choice took a leave of absence from the Court and spent the next year and a half on the case.

In which Allied capital did lawyers from the four powers spend the summer of 1945 drafting the Nuremberg trials' charter?

London hosted the talks, where the delegates argued over whose courtroom style to follow. The adversarial trial familiar to the Americans and British won out over the judge-led model that the French and Soviets preferred.

The charter for the Nuremberg trials was signed on 8 August 1945, two days after which event?

The bombing of Hiroshima came on 6 August, and Nagasaki was hit the day after the signing. The rules for judging the top Nazis were settled while the war with Japan was still being fought.

Which American took leave from his seat on the Supreme Court to lead the US prosecution at the Nuremberg trials?

Robert H. Jackson opened the case with a speech of nearly 25,000 words, calling the Allies' decision to put their captives before a court 'one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason'.

The Nuremberg charter said which common defence could soften a sentence but never clear a defendant?

Following superior orders was ruled out as an excuse by Article 8 of the charter. The judges said the true test was not whether an order existed but whether moral choice was in fact possible.

Nuremberg's Palace of Justice was picked for the trials partly because it had come through the bombing with what attached?

A prison wing adjoined the courthouse, so the defendants could be held under guard on the spot. The building itself still needed repairs for bomb damage before the trial could open.

Which measures, proclaimed in Nuremberg in 1935, carried the city's name long before the trials did?

Anti-Jewish race laws proclaimed there stripped German Jews of their citizenship and restricted whom they could marry. A decade later the Allies picked the same city to put the regime's leaders on trial.

Julius Streicher planned no invasions and never sat in Hitler's inner circle, yet the Nuremberg judges sentenced him to death for what?

Publishing hate propaganda was his whole crime: for over twenty years his newspaper Der Stürmer had urged Germans to persecute Jews. The judges ruled that incitement alone made him guilty of crimes against humanity.

Hitler's will named as his successor a man who later sat in the Nuremberg dock; what had that man commanded?

The navy had been Karl Dönitz's command, first its U-boats and then the whole fleet. He led Germany through its final days, negotiated the surrender, and was given ten years by the judges.

One man sentenced to death at Nuremberg cheated the executioner by a few hours; how?

He swallowed cyanide in his cell the night before the sentences were due to be carried out. He managed it under a round-the-clock watch and was dead within minutes of a guard noticing.

One Nuremberg defendant had been held captive since 1941, when he flew alone to which country hoping to make peace?

Scotland is where Hitler's deputy came down in May 1941, hoping to arrange peace with Britain. He was arrested at once, and Hitler disowned him as deluded.

Early in the Nuremberg trial, one defendant admitted he had been faking which condition?

Memory loss was the claim his lawyer had used to argue he was unfit to be tried. With the judges about to rule, he stood up and announced that it had been a tactic, and the trial went on with him in the dock.

One later Nuremberg trial judged commanders of the Einsatzgruppen; what were these units?

Mobile killing squads followed the German army into the Soviet Union and shot more than a million people, most of them Jews. Their commanders were convicted on the units' own reports, in a case led by Ben Ferencz, a prosecutor of just 27.

Which man was the highest-ranking Nazi official in the Nuremberg dock and the prosecution's chief target?

Hermann Göring was, in the judges' words, 'often, indeed almost always, the moving force, second only to his leader'. They found nothing to say in mitigation and convicted him on all four counts.

Which Nazi leader was tried at Nuremberg in his absence, because the Allies did not know he was already dead?

Martin Bormann, Hitler's powerful secretary, was sentenced to death in his absence. He had in fact died trying to get out of Berlin in May 1945, which was proved only when his remains were identified decades later.

Which arms industrialist was indicted at Nuremberg but never tried, because he was found too ill to follow the case?

Gustav Krupp, whose firm had made heavy use of forced labour, died in 1950 without ever facing a court. Other Krupp bosses were tried in 1947, in a later American case at Nuremberg.

When the Nuremberg court announced its findings in October 1946, what did three of the 22 defendants receive?

Acquittal brought the three little freedom. German denazification courts went on to sentence every one of them to labour camps or prison, though all were out by 1950.

How were the Nuremberg death sentences carried out, by a US Army sergeant working through the early hours of 16 October 1946?

Hanging was the sentence, carried out on gallows set up in the courthouse gymnasium. Master Sergeant John Woods put ten men to death in under two hours, which he later described as fast work.

What became of the bodies of the Nazi leaders executed at Nuremberg in October 1946?

Cremated and scattered in a river, the executed men were left without a grave. Their ashes went into the Isar, the river that runs through Munich.

Where were the seven Nuremberg defendants who received jail terms sent to serve them?

Spandau, in Berlin, held only these seven from 1947, guarded by the four powers in monthly turns. It was torn down once the last of them was gone, so that it could never become a Nazi shrine.

Which Nuremberg defendant stayed locked up until his death in 1987, at the age of 93?

Rudolf Hess spent his last two decades as the jail's only inmate, because Moscow blocked every attempt to win him an early release. He took his own life there in August 1987.

The Nuremberg charter served as the model for a second Allied tribunal, which opened in 1946 to try whom?

Japan's wartime leaders were tried in Tokyo from 1946 to 1948, by a court that General Douglas MacArthur set up with the Nuremberg charter as its template.

Who acted as defence lawyers for the accused at the Nuremberg trials?

German lawyers took the job, and the court let former Nazi Party members serve among them.

Nuremberg set a precedent for the 1961 Jerusalem trial of which Nazi, seized in Argentina by Israeli agents?

Adolf Eichmann, who had organised the deportation of Jews to the death camps, slipped out of American custody in 1946 and lived in Argentina under a false name. He was executed in 1962.

Field Marshal Friedrich Paulus testified against his old comrades at Nuremberg as a Soviet witness; where had the Red Army captured him?

Stalingrad was where he had fallen into Soviet hands. In February 1946 their prosecutors produced him in court, and he named men sitting in the dock as those most to blame for the war.

Which American admiral's written answers helped the defence of U-boat chief Karl Dönitz at Nuremberg?

Chester Nimitz confirmed that American submarines had sunk ships without warning in the Pacific from the first day of the war. The judges therefore declined to punish Dönitz for his own submarine campaign.

At Nuremberg, Soviet prosecutors blamed Germany for which massacre of Polish officers that Stalin's own secret police had carried out?

Katyn was where mass graves were found in 1943; nearly 22,000 Polish officers and officials had been shot in 1940. The judges left the charge out of their verdict, and Moscow admitted the truth only in 1990.

On the eighth day of the Nuremberg trial, what did prosecutors present that some observers called its most powerful evidence?

Film of the liberated camps, shot by Allied military cameramen as their armies advanced, was shown on 29 November 1945. It visibly shocked several of the accused in the dock.

Rudolf Höss, a defence witness at Nuremberg, ended up helping the prosecution by describing mass murder at which camp he had run?

Auschwitz had been his command, and it was Ernst Kaltenbrunner's lawyer who called him. Handed over to Poland, he was hanged in 1947 at the camp he had run.

Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin got a word he had coined in 1944 written into the Nuremberg indictment; which word?

Genocide made it into the indictment but not the verdict, and the UN adopted its Genocide Convention in 1948. Lemkin had lost 49 relatives to the killing he named.

The Nuremberg charter refused to recognise the 'tu quoque' defence, in which a defendant argues what?

You did it too was a plea the charter did not recognise. Defence counsel kept trying versions of it anyway, and the judges turned nearly all of them down, the U-boat admiral's case being a rare exception.

Opening the Nuremberg trial, America's chief prosecutor said four great nations had chosen to 'stay the hand of' what?

Vengeance, he warned, would taint those who took it. 'To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice', he told the judges, 'is to put it to our own lips as well.'

Which Nuremberg defendant accepted a share of the blame in court and received 20 years rather than a death sentence?

Albert Speer, the armaments minister, won credit from the judges for telling Hitler the war was lost and for blocking his scorched-earth orders. Fritz Sauckel, who rounded up forced labour for the war factories, was sentenced to death.

Which technique, never before used on this scale, let the Nuremberg trial be heard in four languages?

Simultaneous interpretation reached every headset in the room through equipment that IBM supplied. Had each speech been repeated language by language, the trial would have lasted four times as long.

As the Cold War deepened in 1951, America's High Commissioner reviewed the later Nuremberg trials' sentences; what did he do with most?

He reduced them, sparing ten of the fifteen men condemned to die and cutting terms so that 32 prisoners could walk free at once.

Which standing court, set up in 2002, carries on the work the Nuremberg tribunal began?

International Criminal Court judges sit in The Hague, where the older International Court of Justice tries no individuals. The United States, one of Nuremberg's four prosecuting powers, has never joined it.

Which 1961 Hollywood film, starring Spencer Tracy, dramatised one of the later American-run trials of Nazi-era officials?

Judgment at Nuremberg put four German jurists in the dock, accused of bending the law to serve the regime. Maximilian Schell, playing their defence counsel, beat his co-star Tracy to the Best Actor Oscar.

Defendant Hjalmar Schacht reached the Nuremberg dock after months in a Nazi concentration camp; why had the regime locked him up?

Contacts with the resistance landed Hitler's former economics minister in the camps after the failed 1944 attempt on the dictator's life. He later recalled hearing people marched out to be shot there, and called it beastly.