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Nuremberg Trials: Indictments, Trial Transcripts, Documentary Evidence

62,033 pages of documents concerning the Nuremberg Trials of perpetrators of the Holocaust and other war crimes.

Twenty-four major political and military leaders of Nazi Germany, indicted for aggressive war, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, were brought to trial before the International Military Tribunal. More than 180 additional defendants, representing many sectors of German society, were tried before the United States Nuremberg Military Tribunals in a series of 12 trials known as “Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings.”
 

This Collection Includes:

The Official Proceedings of the Trial of the Major War Criminals

Documentary Evidence and Guide Materials from the Official Proceedings of the Trial of the Major War Criminals

Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings Indictments

The Official Condensed Record of the Subsequent Trials

Final Report on all the war crimes trials held in Nuremberg, Germany, from 1945 to 1949.

Selected reports, translations, and document analyses by the Office of the U.S. Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality

Selected Nuremberg Related Trial Materials from the Office of the U.S. Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality

Department of Defense Studies and Histories concerning the history and current legacy of the Nuremburg Trials

History Volumes


Following World War II, the Allied governments established the first international criminal tribunals to prosecute high-level political officials and military authorities for war crimes and other wartime atrocities. The four major Allied powers—France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States—set up the International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Nuremberg, Germany, to prosecute and punish “the major war criminals of the European Axis.” The IMT presided over a combined trial of senior Nazi political and military leaders, as well as several Nazi organizations.

The origins, composition, and jurisdiction of the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals differed in several important respects beyond their geographical differences and personalities. Plans to prosecute German political and military leaders were announced in the 1942 St. James Declaration. In the declaration, the United States joined Australia, Canada, China, India, New Zealand, the Union of South Africa, the Soviet Union, and nine exiled governments of German-occupied countries to condemn Germany’s “policy of aggression.” The Declaration stated that these governments “placed among their principal war aims the punishment, through the channel of organized justice, of those guilty of or responsible for these crimes, whether they have ordered them, perpetrated them or participated in them.”

 In August 1945, the four major Allied powers signed the 1945 London Agreement, which established the IMT. The following additional countries subsequently “adhered” to the agreement to show their support: Australia, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Ethiopia, Greece, Haiti, Honduras, India, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Poland, Uruguay, and Yugoslavia.

The Charter of the International Military Tribunal (or Nuremberg Charter) was annexed to the 1945 London Agreement and outlined the tribunal’s constitution, functions, and jurisdiction. The Nuremberg tribunal consisted of one judge from each of the Allied powers, which each also supplied a prosecution team. The Nuremberg Charter also provided that the IMT had the authority to try and punish persons who “committed any of the following crimes:

(a) Crimes Against Peace: namely, planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a Common Plan or Conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing;

b) War Crimes: namely, violations of the laws or customs of war. Such violations shall include, but not be limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labor or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity;

(c) Crimes Against Humanity: namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of domestic law of the country where perpetrated.

The IMT prosecutors indicted twenty-two senior German political and military leaders, including Hermann Goering, Rudolph Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Alfred Rosenberg, and Albert Speer. Nazi leader Adolf Hitler was not indicted because he had committed suicide in April 1945, in the final days before Germany’s surrender. Seven Nazi organizations also were indicted. The prosecutors sought to have the tribunal declare that these organizations were “criminal organizations” in order to facilitate the later prosecution of their members by other tribunals or courts.

The Nuremberg Trial lasted from November 1945 to October 1946. The tribunal found nineteen individual defendants guilty and sentenced them to punishments that ranged from death by hanging to fifteen years’ imprisonment. Three defendants were found not guilty, one committed suicide prior to trial, and one did not stand trial due to physical or mental illness. The Nuremberg Tribunal also concluded that three of the seven indicted Nazi organizations were “criminal organizations” under the terms of the Charter: the Leadership Corps of the Nazi party; the elite “SS” unit, which carried out the forced transfer, enslavement, and extermination of millions of persons in concentration camps; and the Nazi security police and the Nazi secret police, commonly known as the ‘SD’ and ‘Gestapo,’ respectively, which had instituted slave labor programs and deported Jews, political opponents, and other civilians to concentration camps.
 

Contents:

The Official Proceedings of the Trial of the Major War Criminals

42-volumes of the official record of the trial of the major civilian and military leaders of Nazi Germany who were accused of war crimes. The accused were: Hermann Wilhelm Göring, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Robert Ley, Wilhelm Keitel, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Julius Streicher, Walter Funk, Hjalmar Schacht, Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, Karl Dönitz, Erich Raeder, Baldur von Schirach, Fritz Sauckel, Alfred Jodl, Martin Bormann, Franz von Papen, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Albert Speer, Constantin von Neurath, and Hans Fritzsche.

 The International Military Tribunal (IMT), under the jurisdiction of the Allied Control Authority for Germany, directed the publication of this series.  The London Agreement of 8 August 1945 established the tribunal, which was composed of one member and an alternate from each of the four Allied countries: the French Republic, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the United States of America.  English, French, German, and Russian were the languages used throughout the hearings. Documents entered into evidence were reproduced in this series only in the original language, but as the result of the absence of a Soviet editorial staff, none of the Russian-language documents were published.

 
Documentary Evidence and Guide Materials from the Official Proceedings of the Trial of the Major War Criminals

 12,460-page collection of documentary evidence and guide materials prepared by the American and British prosecuting staffs for presentation before the International Military Tribunal at Nurnberg, Germany. Consists of indexed samplings of the evidence used to support the charges made against the major Nazi war criminals in their trial at Nuremberg, Germany, 1945-1946.  Includes an overarching guide for these materials. Essays that summarize and link together the documents. A glossary along with short biographies of the German defendants, as well as summaries of the individual cases against them.

 
Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings Materials

In addition to the twenty-four major political and military leaders of Nazi Germany, tried before the International Military Tribunal, 185 other defendants, from many sectors of German society, also were brought to trial. This second group of defendants was brought before the United States Nuremberg Military Tribunals in a series of twelve trials known as the “Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings.” The defendants were grouped according to their main area of activity: medical, legal, ethnological, economic, or political.

 The defendants included: diplomats, politicians and jurists, such as Ernst von Weizsaecker, the State Secretary of the Foreign Office, cabinet ministers Schwerin von Krosigk and Hans Lammers, and the Acting Minister of Justice Franz Schlegelberger; military leaders, including Field Marshals Wilhelm von Leeb, Wilhelm List, and Georg von Küchler; SS (Schutzstaffel) leaders, such as Otto Ohlendorf and Oswald Pohl; leading industrialists, such as Friedrich Flick, Alfred Krupp, and the directors of I. G. Farben; and physicians, such as Gerhard Rose.

 
Subsequent Nuremberg Proceedings Indictments

323 pages of indictments for the Subsequent Trials.

The Office of Military Government for Germany (US), also known as OMGUS, published each indictment as a separate document.

The indictments were:

Case 1: U.S. v. Karl Brandt et al. ("Medical Case"), 1946-47

Case 2: U.S. v. Erhard Milch et al. ("Milch Case"), 1946-47

Case 3: U.S. v. Josef Altstoetter et al. ("Justice Case"), 1947

Case 4: U.S. v. Oswald Pohl et al. ("Pohl Case"), 1947-48

Case 5: U.S. v. Friedrich Flick et al. ("Flick Case"), 1947

Case 6: U.S. v. Carl Krauch et al. ("I.G. Farben Case"), 1947-48

Case 7: U.S. v. Wilhelm List et al. ("Hostage Case"), 1947-48

Case 8: U.S. v. Ulrich Greifeldt et al. ("RuSHA Case"), 1947-48

Case 9: U.S. v. Otto Ohlendorf et al. ("Einsatzgruppen Case"), 1947-48

Case 10: U.S. v. Alfried Krupp et al. ("Krupp Case"), 1947-48

Case 11: U.S. v. Ernst von Weizsaecker et al. ("Ministries Case"), 1947-48

Case 12: U.S. v. Wilhelm von Leeb et al. ("High Command Case"), 1947-48

 
The Official Condensed Record of the Subsequent Trials - Trials of War Criminals Before The Nuremberg Military Tribunals Under Control Council Law No. 10

 19,451 pages of records of the 12 trials of 185 defendants. The trial proceedings, conducted in English and German, were carried out under the direct authority of the Allied Control Council, Law No. 10, the text of which is included in Volume I of this series.  The trials lasted two and a half years and produced more than 300,000 pages of testimony and evidence. This publication by the United States Government Printing Office is the official abridged record of the individual indictments and judgments, as well as the administrative materials that were common to all the trials.

 
Final Report to the Secretary of the Army on the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials Under Control Council Law No. 10

The Office, Chief of Counsel for War Crimes (OCCWC) was officially established on October 24, 1946 and formally deactivated on June 20, 1949. The OCCWC was established in the Office of Military Government for Germany (U.S.) [OMGUS], by General Order 301, Headquarters U.S. Forces in Europe, and was the successor to the Subsequent Proceedings Division of the Office of the U.S. Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality. In this report on the Nuremberg war crimes trials, which were conducted under the authority of Control Council Law No. 10, Brigadier General Telford Taylor, Chief of Counsel for War Crimes, also describes the creation, organization, and functioning of the OCCWC. His report covers the period from the beginnings of the OCCWC in October 1945 to its deactivation in 1949.

 
Selected Reports, Translations, and Document Analyses

Selected reports, translations, and document analyses by the Office of the U.S. Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality. Topics include: "Myth of the XXth Century." SS Police Leader Krueger and report on the deportation, expropriation, and execution of Jews in Galicia (in Poland). Diary of Alfred Rosenberg covering the period from 2 January 1940 to 7 May 1940. Extracts, concerning freezing, typhus, hepatitis epidemica, and war nephritis, from a report of a conference of consulting physicians. Handwritten Alfred Rosenberg Diary for the 14 May, 1934 - 18 March, 1935. Journal of work at the Ahnenrbe institute concerning various research projects [malaria, polygal, and other experiments]. Notes of Heinrich Himmler, Chief of Nazi Guard (SS), for a Speech to SS Generals, 10-4-1943. Report on German wartime medical research Neuropathology and Neurophysiology, including Electro-encephalography, in Wartime Germany. Report to SS officials on the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto. Translation of a Speech Excerpt in which Himmler Defines Evacuation of the Jews as Extermination.

 
Selected Nuremberg Related Trial Materials from the Office of the U.S. Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality

Includes letters written by Hjalmar Schacht, Hans Fritzsche, and Baldur von Schirach while held for the trial. Four letters written by Herman Göring before his suicide before his scheduled execution. The report of the Commission of the Inquiry on the Suicide of Herman Göring.

 
Selected OSS CIC Documents Used by Nuremberg Prosecuteurs for Trial Preparation - Office of Chief Counsel's (OCC)          

Documents Include: Olga Schaub Ravensbrueck camp experience report, Ernst Kaltenbrunner's statement on concentration camps, November 1938 Pogrom, Murder of captured Allied airmen, Murder of commandos, Relationship of the German Churches to Hitler and Gestapo agent Kremer, a.k.a. V-Mann Sixtus.

 
Jeannette Hahlo Papers

Transcription of a diary kept by Jeannette "Jet" Hahlo during her time in Germany where she served as an interpreter with the United States government during the Nuremberg trials. The diary consists of transcribed correspondence written by Hahlo to her sister, Sylvia Hahlo.

 
Department of Defense Published Works

Department of Defense Studies and Histories concerning the history and current legacy og the Nuremburg Trials. Includes:
                                            
Enemy War Crimes How to Investigate and Prosecute (1988)

An Individual Study Project by Colonel Steven F. Lancaster
 
Abstract: When the subject of enemy war crimes is mentioned, most people think of the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials, but few are familiar with the overall U.S. Army war crimes trials efforts in World War II or what, if any, was done concerning enemy war crimes during Korea or Vietnam. This article reviews the history of the Army's involvement in investigating and prosecuting enemy war crimes from World War II to the present. It includes a section on lessons learned and a review of the current Judge Advocate General's Corps organization for investigating and prosecuting enemy war crimes

 
From Nuremberg To The Hague: A Contrasting Study of War Crimes Tribunals (1998)

A thesis by Joseph A. Ellenbecker, Lieutenant, United States Navy

ABSTRACT - On May 25, 1993 the United Nations established a war crimes tribunal at The Hague for the former Yugoslavia - the first such institution since Nuremberg. As the Hague Tribunal gathers evidence and hears cases, every aspect of its establishment, structure, and mode of operation is being compared to the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal (IMT). Many people expect that the principles used to convict the accused at Nuremberg will be just as successfully applied at the Hague Tribunal. However, the cases differ in two important ways.

 
Somewhere in the Middle: The Nuremberg and Tokyo Trials as a Model For Postwar Trials In Iraq (2004)

A Monograph by MAJ Thomas A. Crowson, United States Army


Selected Procedural Safeguards in Federal, Military, and International Courts (2006)

This Congressional Research Service (CRS) report provides a brief overview of procedural rules applicable in selected historical and contemporary tribunals for the trials of war crimes suspects. The chart that follows compares selected procedural safeguards employed in criminal trials in federal criminal court with parallel protective measures in military general courts martial, international military tribunals used after World War II, including the International Military Tribunal (IMT or “Nuremberg Tribunal”), and the International Criminal Courts for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and Rwanda (ICTR).

Abstract - This study concludes that Post World War II trials provide a valid historical reference for the creation of a court for war criminals in Iraq. Differences in the creation and conduct of the two trials give insight into lessons that must be inculcated into a modern trial. Additionally, they have become instilled in the judiciary of the United Nations with the Selected Procedural Safeguards in Federal, Military, and International Courts


Nuremberg Trials History Volumes

1,728 pages in 10 volumes of historical works.

 Volumes include:

The Nuremberg Trials in International Law by Robert K. Woetzel

Robert Kurt Woetzel (December 5, 1930 – September 6, 1991), professor of international law, was for many years a leading proponent for the establishment of the International Criminal Court.
In The Nuremberg Trials in International Law, his objective was to defend the basis of the Nuremberg trials in international law, opposing legal scholars who had argued that the trials were ex post facto and illegal. However, he also expressed the hope that the Nuremberg trials would eventually lead to the establishment of an international criminal court.

 

Final Judgment: The Story of Nuremberg, by Victor H. Bernstein (1947)

A journalistic interpretation of the evolution of Nazism as revealed in the documents placed before the court at Nuremberg.

Abstract:

Using documents from German sources that have become available only in the past year, this book is a revealing X-ray of the whole political, economic, and moral system that the Nazis built up. It uses the Nuremberg trials as its starting point. But it peels away, one after another, the layers of meaning behind Nuremberg.

Anyone who followed the reports of the trials in the American press must have been dismayed by their fragmentary and superficial character. All we got were bits and pieces of the Nazi story. Millions of words were, of course, cabled from Nuremberg by correspondents to the twelve corners of the world--especially in the first few days. But mainly they were color stuff, portraying the trial as a spectacle. There were pictures of the defendants and detailed accounts of their behavior in jail. There were excerpts from United States Prosecutor Robert H. Jackson's opening indictment, and some scattered debate on the international law at the basis of the trial. And at the end there was a sensational flare-up of think-pieces about how Goering managed to cheat the gallows by concealing his lethal poison. It is some kind of commentary on our press and our ways of thought that the most important trial of our era should have ended on the cheap note of a mystery thriller entitled The Case of the Hidden Poison. Nuremberg is still the Trial Nobody Knows.

In contrast with this surface stuff, Victor Bernstein has written an attack-in-depth on what the Nazis did, and the techniques they used, and what Nazism did to them. The book is a scalpel-dissection of the whole Nazi disease of which the Nuremberg criminals were only the more ulcerous outcroppings. As a good newspaperman--and he is one of the best I have ever encountered--the author does not omit the elements of personal drama.

 

The Nuremberg Trial and Aggressive War. By Sheldon Glueck

Sheldon Glueck (August 15, 1896 – March 10, 1980) was a Polish-American criminologist. He and his wife Eleanor Glueck collaborated extensively on research related to juvenile delinquency and developed the "Social Prediction Tables" model for predicting the likelihood of delinquent behavior in youth. They were the first criminologists to perform studies of chronic juvenile offenders and among the first to examine the effects of psychopathy among the more serious delinquents.

During the aftermath of the Holocaust he was one of the leading advocates for the creation of an international criminal court to punish crimes against humanity.

In his earlier book, “War Criminals: Their Prosecution and Punishment,” he developed the legal bases for the prosecution of those who were to be accused of violations of the laws and customs of war. In that book of 1944, however, Professor Glueck was not yet convinced of the legal feasibility of prosecuting the National-Socialist leaders for the arch crime of aggressive war. "I was not at all certain that the acts of launching and conducting an aggressive war could be regarded as 'international crimes.' I finally decided against such a view, largely on the basis of a strict interpretation of the Treaty for the Renunciation of War (Briand-Kellogg Pact), signed in Paris in 1928."

In this latter book of 1946, Professor Glueck states the opposite view and presents the legal arguments for it. These are based upon the idea that there has developed among civilized nations an international custom to regard aggressive war as an international crime and that the time has arrived to express this international custom as a rule of international law.

 
The Nürnberg Case, as Presented by Robert H. Jackson

Robert Houghwout Jackson (February 13, 1892 – October 9, 1954) was an American attorney and judge who served as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court.  Jackson was also notable for his work as the Chief United States Prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals following World War II.

 

Hitler and his Admirals by Anthony K. Martienssen (1949)

"[Combines] the evidence given at Nuremberg with the material contained in the Fuehrer conferences on the naval affairs."

 

The Nürnberg Judgment: A Summary. by Katherine F. Lincoln

 

 

Operation Murder by Anatole Goldstein (1949)

Published by the Institute of Jewish Affairs, World Jewish Congress

 

The Charter and Judgment of the Nürnberg Tribunal. History and Analysis. Memorandum submitted by the Secretary General (1949)

A Survey of the Nurnberg Charter and trial.

 

Victors’ Justice: A Letter Intended to Have Been Sent to a Friend Recently in Germany. By Montgomery Belgion (1949)

A rewriting of the author's Epitaph on Nuremberg, first pub. in England in 1947.

The 1949 review of this book by International Affairs began, "It does not take many pages of reading to discover that Mr Montgomery Belgion means to write about Victors' Injustice. The author attempts to build up a case proving that the record of the Allies—the West and Russia alike— in and after the late war has robbed them of the right to have staged the Nuremberg Trials. Since two wrongs do not make a right, he implies the case for the prosecution had better been left unwritten and unsaid or, at any rate, staged under different auspices."

The reviewer further stated, "It is difficult to suppress extreme irritation at this book. There is an undercurrent throughout its chapters suggesting that— not to speak of all the alleged Allied misdeeds—German crimes have really been greatly exaggerated abroad. German sources, often as dubious as an unknown novel by an obscure German author, are almost invariably given the benefit of the doubt when Allied and German versions of war-time or post-war events are at variance."

Abstract:

I have no difficulty in holding strong opinions. Some I have held longer than I realize. I have imagined that I was expressing one for the first time, and then have happened to discover that I had only forgotten having expressed it years before. The opinions supported in the following pages I already avowed in 1938. My difficulty is not in holding opinions. My difficulty lies in ascertaining why I hold the particular opinions I do.

In February 1947 I published in England a little book called Epitaph on Nuremberg. It was written between October 1945 and August 1946, at a time, that is to say, when much germane information had not yet become public. A publisher having lately proposed to issue the book in the United States, it occurred to both of us that the opportunity ought to be taken of expanding it. In the process of adding, however, I have been led to rewrite; not because my opinions have changed since 1946, any more than they have since 1938, but because I have discovered for them reasons which were not then apparent to me. This is virtually a new book.

I have had the benefit of reading publications by Dr. H. A. Smith, till 1946 professor of international law in the University of London, and by Mr. Louis Le Fur, formerly professor of law at Paris; and also the text of a lecture delivered at Heidelberg in 1947 by Professor Eduard Wahl. I wish also to acknowledge little helpful acts of kindness by Mr. Peter Baker, Mr. Felix Morley, and Mr. Henry Regnery, and valuable textual suggestions from Mr. Philip N. Starbuck.

But of course, for everything I say in the following pages I alone am responsible.