After ten months of testimony and evidence—including newsreel footage of concentration camps that stunned even hardened prosecutors—the Nuremberg tribunal delivered its verdicts. Hermann Göring, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and ten others were sentenced to hang; others received prison terms. It was the first time a defeated nation's leaders faced international judgment for atrocities, establishing precedents still used in war crimes law.
The trial had assembled an unlikely bench: American, British, French, and Soviet judges sharing a courtroom to try men who days earlier had ruled a continent. Defendants sat in a wooden dock listening to translations through primitive headsets, a system so novel that simultaneous interpretation itself was invented largely for this trial.
Hermann Göring, once Hitler's designated successor, tried to dominate proceedings with sardonic wit, but the verdict silenced him. He would cheat the hangman two weeks later by swallowing a smuggled cyanide capsule the night before his scheduled execution—no one ever determined how he obtained it.
The judgment established that 'following orders' was no defense against charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, a principle that echoes through every international tribunal since, from Rwanda to the former Yugoslavia.
Key people: Hermann Göring, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Robert H. Jackson