Nuremberg Trials
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
49 free Nuremberg Trials trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
The Nuremberg trials were the first time the leaders of a defeated state were put in the dock by an international court. Between November 1945 and October 1946, judges from France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States tried 22 of the most senior surviving figures of Nazi Germany, plus six organisations, in the city that had hosted the Nazi rallies. Twelve further trials, run by the United States alone, followed in the same courtroom. These 49 questions cover how the tribunal came about, from the Moscow Declaration and the London Conference to the charter signed in August 1945; who prosecuted and who judged; the four charges and which ones held up; the films and documents entered as evidence; the defence arguments the court refused to hear; and the sentences, from the ten hangings to the seven men sent to Spandau. There are also questions on the later US trials, the first use of simultaneous interpretation, and the afterlife in the Tokyo tribunal and the International Criminal Court. Easy questions cover the city and the powers involved; the hardest ask about individual judges. Every answer is cited to the page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which country joined the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union in running the Nuremberg trials?
France
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.
Q 02Nuremberg was chosen for the trials partly as a symbol, because the city was famous for which Nazi events?
The party rallies
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.
Q 03Which of these leading Nazis was still alive to face the judges when the Nuremberg trials began?
Ribbentrop
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.
Q 04How did every Nazi leader in the dock plead when the Nuremberg trial opened in November 1945?
Not guilty
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.
Q 05Besides the men in the dock, what else did the Nuremberg prosecutors put on trial?
Whole Nazi organisations
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.
Q 06The Doctors Trial, first of twelve later American trials at Nuremberg, made which principle the first rule of human experiments?
Voluntary consent
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.
Q 07Which crime did the Nuremberg judges call 'the supreme international crime', because it contained the evil of all the others?
Waging aggressive war
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.
Q 08Before the Nuremberg trials were agreed, what did Winston Churchill at first favour for the captured Nazi leaders?
Execution without trial
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.
Q 09What evidence did the Nuremberg prosecutors lean on most, using the Nazis' own words against them?
Captured German documents
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.
Q 10Which three Allied leaders vowed in 1943 to pursue Nazi war criminals 'to the uttermost ends of the earth'?
Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin
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.
Q 11US Army officer Douglas Kelley saw the Nuremberg defendants in their cells before the trial; in what role?
Psychiatrist
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.
Q 12Which US president, newly in office, chose a Supreme Court justice to lead the American prosecution at Nuremberg?
Harry Truman
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.
Q 13In which Allied capital did lawyers from the four powers spend the summer of 1945 drafting the Nuremberg trials' charter?
London
Q 21One man sentenced to death at Nuremberg cheated the executioner by a few hours; how?
He swallowed cyanide
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.
Q 22One Nuremberg defendant had been held captive since 1941, when he flew alone to which country hoping to make peace?
Scotland
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.
Q 23Early in the Nuremberg trial, one defendant admitted he had been faking which condition?
Memory loss
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.
Q 14The charter for the Nuremberg trials was signed on 8 August 1945, two days after which event?
The bombing of Hiroshima
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.
Q 15Which American took leave from his seat on the Supreme Court to lead the US prosecution at the Nuremberg trials?
Robert H. Jackson
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'.
Q 16The Nuremberg charter said which common defence could soften a sentence but never clear a defendant?
Following superior orders
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.
Q 17Nuremberg's Palace of Justice was picked for the trials partly because it had come through the bombing with what attached?
A prison
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.
Q 18Which measures, proclaimed in Nuremberg in 1935, carried the city's name long before the trials did?
Anti-Jewish race laws
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.
Q 19Julius 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
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.
Q 20Hitler's will named as his successor a man who later sat in the Nuremberg dock; what had that man commanded?
The navy
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.
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.
Q 24One later Nuremberg trial judged commanders of the Einsatzgruppen; what were these units?
Mobile killing squads
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.
Q 25Which man was the highest-ranking Nazi official in the Nuremberg dock and the prosecution's chief target?
Hermann Göring
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.
Q 26Which Nazi leader was tried at Nuremberg in his absence, because the Allies did not know he was already dead?
Martin Bormann
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.
Q 27Which arms industrialist was indicted at Nuremberg but never tried, because he was found too ill to follow the case?
Gustav Krupp
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.
Q 28When the Nuremberg court announced its findings in October 1946, what did three of the 22 defendants receive?
Acquittal
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.
Q 29How were the Nuremberg death sentences carried out, by a US Army sergeant working through the early hours of 16 October 1946?
Hanging
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.
Q 30What became of the bodies of the Nazi leaders executed at Nuremberg in October 1946?
Cremated and scattered in a river
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.