The Postwar Trials

Why this Chapter exists

Much of what we know about the Holocaust, we know because of these trials.

Much of the detailed knowledge of the Holocaust (the orders, the numbers, the machinery of it) comes from evidence gathered for trials in the years right after the war. Captured Nazi files, the testimony of survivors and of perpetrators, and the findings that judges wrote down were placed under oath and tested in open court. That trial record is one of the foundations of Holocaust history.

The trials also gave new legal terms force. “Crimes against humanity” and “crimes against peace” had never been tried in an international court before 1945. “Genocide” became a crime in international law with the 1948 Genocide Convention. The Nuremberg proceedings helped establish them as foundational concepts of modern international criminal law. Later international courts, for Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone, and Cambodia, and the permanent International Criminal Court, built on the law first applied at Nuremberg. The last defendants were tried in their nineties, in the 2020s. Lawyers and historians still argue over whether the trials were fair and whether any court could answer a crime on this scale (What the trials did not do).

The Nuremberg tribunal · 1945–46

The first time a country’s leaders were tried for crimes against humanity.

The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, usually just called the IMT, was the first major trial of the top leaders of a defeated nation for what its founding document named “crimes against humanity.” It ran under the London Charter, signed by the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, and France on August 8, 1945. The Charter set out three crimes. They were crimes against peace (planning and waging a war of aggression), war crimes (breaking the laws of war), and crimes against humanity (the deliberate targeting of civilians, including the persecution and murder of Jews and other groups). The Charter reached crimes against humanity only “in execution of or in connection with” the court’s other crimes. The judges therefore declined to declare the persecution before 1939 a crime against humanity, because that connection had not been proved. A fourth charge, a common plan or conspiracy, was added, and the judges accepted it only for crimes against peace. The Charter also ruled out obeying orders as a defense, though the judges could weigh orders when setting a sentence.

The trial opened on November 20, 1945, in the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, and the choice of city was deliberate. Nuremberg was where the Nazi Party had held its giant rallies, and where the 1935 race laws that stripped Jews of their rights had been announced. Twenty-four men were named in the indictment. Twenty-one actually sat in the dock. Martin Bormann was tried in his absence (he had died in Berlin in May 1945, though that was not confirmed until 1972). Robert Ley killed himself before the trial began. Gustav Krupp was ruled too ill. Hermann Göring, the most senior surviving Nazi, was the main defendant.

The American chief prosecutor was Robert H. Jackson, a sitting Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court who stepped away from the bench to lead the case. He opened the prosecution case on November 21, 1945. “The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.” Britain’s chief prosecutor was Sir Hartley Shawcross. France’s was François de Menthon and later Auguste Champetier de Ribes. The Soviet Union’s was Roman Rudenko.

The trial ran 218 days. The prosecution built much of its case on the Nazis’ own paperwork. The regime had kept detailed records, and a great deal of its archive was captured intact in the last months of the war. On November 29, 1945, the court screened Nazi Concentration Camps, a film the U.S. Army had assembled from footage shot at the liberated camps.

The verdicts. On October 1, 1946, the Tribunal delivered its judgments. Twelve men were sentenced to hang: Göring, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Julius Streicher, Fritz Sauckel, Alfred Jodl, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, and Bormann in absentia. Three got life in prison: Rudolf Hess, Walther Funk, and Erich Raeder. Four got fixed terms: Karl Dönitz (10 years), Baldur von Schirach (20), Albert Speer (20), and Konstantin von Neurath (15). Three were acquitted outright: Hjalmar Schacht, Franz von Papen, and Hans Fritzsche. The tribunal also declared four Nazi bodies criminal organizations: the Leadership Corps of the Nazi Party, the Gestapo, the SS, and the SD, the SS intelligence service.

The executions were carried out on October 16, 1946, in the gymnasium of Nuremberg Prison. Göring killed himself with smuggled cyanide the night before his scheduled hanging. The bodies were cremated and the ashes scattered in a stream that flows into the Isar River, so that no grave could become a shrine. The official record, transcript and documents, fills 42 volumes, all public documents, readable today through Yale Law School’s Avalon Project and the Library of Congress.

The twelve successor trials · 1946–49

Trying the doctors, the judges, the businessmen, the killing units.

The famous tribunal tried the men at the very top. But the genocide had been carried out by tens of thousands of others. After the IMT closed, the United States held twelve more trials at Nuremberg, the Nuremberg Military Tribunals. They ran from October 1946 to April 1949 under Telford Taylor, who had been Jackson’s deputy. Each one took on a different kind of perpetrator:

• The Doctors’ Trial. Twenty-three defendants, mostly physicians, for lethal “experiments” on camp prisoners and for running the T-4 “euthanasia” murders of disabled people. Seven were sentenced to death. Out of this trial came the Nuremberg Code, the rule that no one may be experimented on without their informed, voluntary consent. It remains a founding document of medical research ethics.
• The Justice Trial. Sixteen judges, prosecutors, and Justice Ministry officials, charged with running the Nazi persecution through the ordinary court system. The judgment found that “the dagger of the assassin was concealed beneath the robe of the jurist.”
• The Pohl Trial. Eighteen men from the SS Economic-Administrative Main Office, the branch of the SS (the Nazi Party’s own armed corps) that ran the camp system and the slave-labor economy. Oswald Pohl, who led it, was executed in 1951.
• The IG Farben Trial. Executives of the chemical giant that ran a slave-labor plant at Auschwitz and held a large minority stake in Degesch, the firm that controlled the Zyklon B gas supplied to the killing centers. Thirteen were convicted, ten acquitted, a split that historians have argued over ever since.
• The Einsatzgruppen Trial. Twenty-four commanders of the mobile killing squads, the Einsatzgruppen, were indicted for the murder of between 723,661 and one million people. Twenty-two were tried. The wider shooting campaign across the occupied Soviet territories, carried out with police battalions, army units, and local auxiliaries, killed roughly 1.5 to 2 million Jews and others, the “Holocaust by bullets.” The lead defendant, Otto Ohlendorf, had calmly described the shootings he commanded when he testified at the main Nuremberg trial in January 1946. His testimony remains one of the most important records of how the mass shootings worked. Fourteen defendants were sentenced to death. Four, Ohlendorf among them, were hanged in 1951.
• The other seven were the Milch, Flick, Hostages, RuSHA, Krupp, Ministries, and High Command cases, reaching field marshals, industrialists, race-office bureaucrats who had kidnapped children for “Germanization,” and senior army officers.

An abridged official record fills fifteen volumes, the “Green Series,” also public documents. In 1951, the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany, John J. McCloy, sharply reduced many of these sentences in a clemency program. Defeated Germany had been divided by its occupiers into two states in 1949: West Germany, allied with the United States, and communist East Germany (they reunified in 1990). The clemency came as the early Cold War, the emerging standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union, pushed America to want West Germany as an ally. Historians, and Taylor himself, sharply criticized it. All the remaining Einsatzgruppen convicts were free by 1958.

Trials beyond Nuremberg · 1945–49

The thousands of other trials across Europe.

Nuremberg was the most visible reckoning, but far from the only one. Across their occupation zones and the lands the Nazis had occupied, the four Allied powers held thousands more trials. A few that mattered most:

• The Belsen Trial (Lüneburg, 1945). A British military court tried forty-five defendants for crimes at Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz: thirty-five SS men and women and ten former prisoner-functionaries (Kapos). Among them were Josef Kramer, “the Beast of Belsen,” and Irma Grese. It was one of the first big trials of camp personnel. Eleven defendants were sentenced to death, and fourteen were acquitted.
• The Höss Trial (Warsaw, 1947). Rudolf Höss, the longest-serving commandant of Auschwitz, tried by Poland. While awaiting trial he wrote a detailed memoir that remains a key source on how the camp’s killing worked. He was hanged at Auschwitz itself, on a gallows built next to the crematorium of the original camp.
• The Dachau Trials (U.S. Army, 1945–48). The U.S. Army alone held 489 trials at the Dachau site, with about 1,672 defendants, camp staff and others.
• The French trials. France tried thousands of collaborators, including the heads of France’s collaborationist wartime government: Pierre Laval (executed 1945) and Marshal Philippe Pétain (death sentence commuted to life). The role of French officials in the deportation of about 76,000 Jews from France, most of them to Auschwitz, was not fully faced in court until the 1990s. About 2,500 of the deported survived. In 1987 a French court convicted Klaus Barbie, the German Gestapo chief in Lyon, of crimes against humanity. Paul Touvier, an officer of the Vichy militia, followed in 1994, the first Frenchman convicted of the charge. Maurice Papon, a Vichy official at Bordeaux, was convicted in 1998.
• The Soviet trials. The Soviet Union held its own war-crimes trials (at Riga, Minsk, and Kiev in early 1946) for German crimes on Soviet soil.

The Eichmann trial · 1961

The man who organized the deportations, in a glass booth in Jerusalem.

Adolf Eichmann was the SS officer who managed the logistics of the deportations: the trains, the schedules, the paperwork that moved Jewish communities to the killing centers. At the end of the war he slipped out of American custody and made his way through Italy under a false name. By mid-1950 he was living in Argentina as “Ricardo Klement.” From 1959 he worked at a Mercedes-Benz plant near Buenos Aires.

The trail reached Israel in 1957 through an unlikely thread: a German Jewish refugee in Argentina, Lothar Hermann, himself blind, whose daughter was dating one of Eichmann’s sons. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion approved the operation. In May 1960, agents of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, seized Eichmann on a Buenos Aires street, held him in a safe house, and flew him to Israel aboard an El Al plane. Argentina protested to the UN Security Council that its sovereignty had been violated, and the dispute was later settled. Eichmann was not returned.

The trial opened on April 11, 1961, in a Jerusalem auditorium, before three judges led by Moshe Landau. The prosecutor was Israel’s attorney general, Gideon Hausner. Eichmann was tried under Israel’s Nazis and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law of 1950, on fifteen counts that included crimes against the Jewish people and crimes against humanity. He sat through the trial inside a bulletproof glass booth, built so that no one could kill him before the verdict, and the image of the man in the glass box became one of the defining pictures of postwar memory.

What set this trial apart was the witnesses. The prosecution prepared a list of 108 survivor witnesses, along with historians and other experts, and drew on some 1,600 documents, most of them bearing Eichmann’s signature. The survivors told a courtroom and a listening country what had been done to them and to the people they came from. Their testimony, broadcast on Israeli radio and reported around the world, was for many Israelis the first time they had heard survivors speak at length in public. Many historians credit the trial with changing how the Holocaust was remembered, in Israel and far beyond it.

Eichmann’s defense was that he had only been a functionary following orders, that he had killed no one with his own hands, that he held no personal hatred of Jews. The court rejected it. The verdict was read on December 11 and 12, 1961, and the death sentence followed on December 15. He was hanged on the night of May 31 to June 1, 1962, the only execution in the history of the State of Israel carried out after a civilian trial. His ashes were scattered at sea, beyond Israel’s waters. The political thinker Hannah Arendt covered the trial and drew from it her famous, fiercely argued book about “the banality of evil,” the subject of the Hannah Arendt Chapter. Bettina Stangneth, in Eichmann Before Jerusalem, later drew on far more of Eichmann’s Argentine-era writings and taped interviews than the court ever saw. She found a committed antisemite, far from the meek clerk he played in court.

The Frankfurt Auschwitz trial · 1963–65

When Germany finally put Auschwitz on trial itself.

For nearly two decades, the big trials had been run by others: the Allies, the Poles, the Israelis. The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, which opened on December 20, 1963 and ran 183 days, was different. It was West German prosecutors trying Auschwitz staff before a West German court. Its driving force was Fritz Bauer, the attorney general of the state of Hesse. He pressed the case against strong resistance in a legal and political establishment that still included many former Nazis.

Bauer was himself a Jewish German who had survived an early concentration camp and fled to Scandinavia during the war. He was also, quietly, the man who had passed Eichmann’s location to Israeli intelligence. He died in 1968.

Twenty-two defendants stood trial, from a senior adjutant down to mid-level SS men. The prosecution called 360 witnesses, 211 of them survivors, and built a detailed record of how Auschwitz actually operated: the selections on the arrival ramp, the gas chambers, the experiments, the everyday cruelty. Two defendants left the trial for health reasons. On August 19, 1965, seventeen of the remaining twenty were convicted, and six got life. The sentences were lighter than the prosecution wanted, because German law mostly convicted these men as accessories to murder rather than as the murderers themselves, the legal theory being that the true principals were the dead leaders at the top.

For the first time, German society followed a long public account of Auschwitz, told in its own courts. The playwright Peter Weiss sat in the gallery and turned the testimony into a documentary drama, The Investigation (1965), performed around the world ever since.

The long German reckoning

About 6,500 convictions, out of more than 200,000 perpetrators.

West Germany, and after 1990 unified Germany, kept prosecuting Nazi crimes for the rest of the century. A central office set up in Ludwigsburg in 1958 by the West German state justice ministries coordinated the effort, and German judicial authorities investigated roughly 106,000 people over the following decades. Out of all of that came about 6,500 West German convictions. Historians who count perpetrators broadly (camp staff, the killing units, the deportation and slave-labor administrators, the wide network of people who made the genocide run) estimate them at well over 200,000. German courts reached about three percent of them. Most were never tried in any court.

Much of that gap came from one legal problem: time limits. Under German law, manslaughter and lesser charges had expired by 1960, and even murder carried a time limit until the law changed. The Bundestag, West Germany’s parliament, debated this for decades and finally, in 1979, removed the time limit on murder entirely, so that murder charges from the Nazi years could always be brought.

Major later trials included the Düsseldorf Treblinka Trial (1964–65), which reached Kurt Franz, Treblinka’s last commandant. The Düsseldorf Majdanek Trial (1975–81) was the longest criminal trial in West German history, at five and a half years. There were also cases for Sobibór and Bełżec. The Bełżec case was especially hard to bring, because almost none of that camp’s prisoners had survived to testify.

Perpetrators who settled abroad

Some fled to new countries. Some of those countries later went looking.

Many perpetrators never had to run. They lived openly in their home countries and went back to their old professions. Some changed their identities and left Europe.

South America. Adolf Eichmann lived in Argentina under a false name until 1960 (above). Josef Mengele, the SS doctor at Auschwitz, was a U.S. prisoner of war in 1945. The army released him, unaware that he was on a list of wanted war criminals. He moved to Argentina in 1949, to Paraguay in 1959, and then to Brazil. He drowned there in 1979 and was never brought to justice.

Franz Stangl, the commandant of Sobibór and Treblinka, lived in Brazil under his own name from 1951. He was arrested in 1967, sent to West Germany for trial, and sentenced to life in prison for the murder of 400,000 people. Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo chief in Lyon, worked for U.S. Army intelligence after the war, and it helped him reach South America in 1951. He lived in Bolivia as “Klaus Altmann” until he was handed over to France in 1983 (above). Walther Rauff, the SS officer who had helped develop the gas vans used to murder Jews (see The Holocaust in the Middle East and North Africa), settled in Chile. In 1963 Chile’s Supreme Court turned down West Germany’s request to hand him over. Later requests failed too, and he died in Chile in 1984.

The Middle East. Alois Brunner organized the deportation of 128,500 Jews from Austria, Greece, France, and Slovakia to the death camps, by the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s count. He lived in Syria for decades under the government’s protection. Syria never handed him over. Aribert Heim, who performed medical experiments on prisoners at Mauthausen, changed his identity and lived in Egypt. In 2012 a German court closed his case, finding no doubt that he had died in Cairo in 1992.

The countries that went looking. Others entered Western countries as ordinary immigrants and became citizens. From 1979 on, several of those countries set out to find them.

The United States. In Queens, New York, a housewife known as Mrs. Russell Ryan turned out to have been Hermine Braunsteiner, a guard at the Majdanek and Ravensbrück camps. West Germany asked the United States to hand her over for trial. The case led to charges that many more were living freely in the country. In 1979 the Attorney General set up the Office of Special Investigations in the Justice Department. American courts could not try crimes committed in wartime Europe, so the office used immigration law to strip citizenship and deport. In 31 years it won cases against 108 participants in Nazi persecution and kept more than 180 suspects out of the country. John Demjanjuk was one of its cases (below).

Canada. In January 1985 a member of Parliament said Josef Mengele might be living in Canada. That year the government appointed a commission of inquiry under Justice Jules Deschênes. It found that suspected Nazi war criminals were living in Canada, that some estimates of their number were exaggerated, and that Canadian law could not reach them. It recommended changing the Criminal Code and the rules for removing citizenship and deporting. Parliament changed the Criminal Code in 1987. Imre Finta, the first man tried under it, was accused of confining 8,617 Jews in Szeged, Hungary, in 1944. They were then deported to Auschwitz and other camps, where most were murdered. A jury acquitted him in 1990, and in 1994 the Supreme Court upheld the acquittal by four votes to three.

Australia. A 1988 law let Australian courts try war crimes committed in Europe. None of the men charged under it was convicted. In 1993 a jury acquitted Ivan Polyukhovich, accused of murder in Nazi-occupied Ukraine.

Britain. Parliament passed the War Crimes Act in 1991. Its first trial ended in 1999 with the conviction of Anthony Sawoniuk. He had joined the local police the Nazis set up in the village of Domachevo, in Belarus. He was convicted of murdering Jews there and given two life sentences.

The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum sums up where this leaves the search: it “continues, but as nearly all have died, only a small minority will ever have been brought to justice.”

The last Nazis on trial

Trials into the 2020s.

The legal ground shifted in 2011, with the conviction of John Demjanjuk in Munich. Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian-born former Soviet prisoner of war who had served as a guard at the Sobibór killing center, had been tried once before, in Israel in the late 1980s, accused of being “Ivan the Terrible” of Treblinka. He was convicted and sentenced to death, but Israel’s Supreme Court overturned it in 1993 when new evidence showed the identification was not certain. He was sent back to the United States. Later investigation placed him at Sobibór instead.

Germany tried him again. On May 12, 2011, the Munich court convicted him as an accessory to the murder of 28,060 people at Sobibór. It applied a new legal theory: that serving at a death camp at all made a person an accessory to the murders committed there, without needing to prove any one specific act. Demjanjuk died in 2012 with his appeal still pending, so the conviction never became final in German law, but the courts kept the theory.

A short series of late trials followed, of the last surviving camp staff:

• Oskar Gröning, the “Bookkeeper of Auschwitz,” convicted in 2015, at 94, as an accessory to 300,000 murders. He had given interviews about his service. His own words helped convict him.
• Reinhold Hanning, an Auschwitz guard, convicted in 2016 as an accessory to 170,000 murders.
• Bruno Dey, a Stutthof guard, convicted in 2020. Because he had been 17 or 18 at the time, he was tried in juvenile court and given a suspended sentence.
• Irmgard Furchner, a Stutthof camp secretary, convicted in 2022 at age 97 as an accessory to 10,505 murders, one of the last perpetrators alive to be tried.

People argue about what these trials were for. Most defendants were extremely old, and their sentences were often suspended or never served. Some see the cases as the law finally reaching people who had escaped it for seventy years. Others see them as mostly symbolic.

The law it left behind

The law that followed Nuremberg.

In the years after the trials, international law changed:

• The Genocide Convention (1948). Driven through the United Nations by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer who had coined the word “genocide” in 1944 and lobbied delegates for years, this treaty made genocide a specific crime in international law. It defines genocide as acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” As of October 2026, 154 countries are parties to it.
• The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Drafted by a committee chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt and adopted by the UN General Assembly, it set out rights that belong to every person, whatever the laws of their own country.
• The four Geneva Conventions (1949). Revised after the Second World War to protect the wounded, prisoners, and civilians. The fourth convention, new in 1949, protects civilians in wartime, including people living under occupation.
• The Yugoslavia and Rwanda tribunals (1990s–2010s). Two UN courts, direct descendants of Nuremberg, were set up to try the crimes of the Balkan wars and the Rwandan genocide. Between them they convicted more than 150 people and sharpened the law on command responsibility and on sexual violence as a war crime.
• The International Criminal Court (created 1998, working since 2002). The first permanent world court for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The court lists 125 member states. Several major powers, including the United States, Russia, China, India, and Israel, have stayed out.

What the trials did not do

What historians still debate.

Scholars and lawyers still debate several questions about the trials:

• Victors’ justice. The first tribunal was run by the winners against the losers. The rules it enforced were not applied to the winners’ own conduct: the Soviet occupation of Poland and the Baltics, the Allied bombing of German cities, the atomic bombings of Japan. Soviet prosecutors even blamed German forces for the Katyn massacre of Polish officers, which the Soviet secret police had carried out in 1940. The tribunal’s judgment did not adopt that charge. Whether the trials were genuine law or dressed-up revenge has been argued from every side. Defenders point to the published evidence, the defense lawyers, and the three acquittals. Critics point to who sat in judgment.
• Laws written after the fact. “Crimes against humanity” and “crimes against peace” did not exist as written-down crimes before the Charter created them, so the defendants were tried under categories that were not law when they acted. The tribunal answered that the Charter was “the expression of international law existing at the time of its creation.” On aggressive war it cited the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, in which Germany had renounced war as an instrument of national policy, and held that “it would be unjust if his wrong were allowed to go unpunished.” The debate continues.
• The scale problem. Time limits, Cold War politics, former Nazis still in office, and perpetrators who died or fled all help explain the gap between about 6,500 West German convictions and well over 200,000 perpetrators. How to judge that gap remains disputed.
• Whether a courtroom could ever be enough. A trial establishes facts and assigns guilt. Whether it can bring any wider repair is disputed.

Where the record lives

The archives that hold the trials.

Key takeaways

• Much of what is known about the Holocaust is known because of the trials: evidence gathered, tested in court, and entered into a permanent public record.
• The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (1945–46) tried a defeated nation’s leaders for “crimes against humanity” for the first time.
• Twelve successor trials prosecuted the doctors, judges, businessmen, and killing units. Thousands more trials ran across Europe.
• The Eichmann trial of 1961 put the organizer of the deportations in a Jerusalem courtroom and moved survivor testimony to the center of the record.
• Germany’s own reckoning came late and stayed incomplete: roughly 106,000 people investigated, about 6,500 convictions, out of an estimated 200,000 or more perpetrators.
• Some perpetrators escaped to South America and the Middle East. Others settled in Western countries, which from 1979 used immigration law and new war crimes laws to pursue them.
• The 2011 Demjanjuk ruling reopened prosecutions of camp personnel into the 2020s.
• The law the trials left behind runs from the Genocide Convention of 1948 through the international criminal courts that followed.

Object Spotlight

Twenty-one men in a wooden dock, November 1945.

Two wooden rows, like church pews or a jury box, and in them sit two rows of men in suits and uniforms, twenty-one defendants in all. Some look bored, some defiant, one or two have their heads in their hands. Standing behind them are white-helmeted American military police. No one is shouting. It is just men sitting in a room, waiting.

The U.S. Army Signal Corps took the photograph in Courtroom 600 of the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, during the trial that opened in November 1945. The Corps photographed the trial so that the world would have a permanent visual record, as army cameramen had recorded the liberated camps a few months earlier. The men in the rows are the surviving leadership of a state that had, a few years earlier, controlled most of a continent. By the trial’s seating, Hermann Göring sat at the front-row left, Rudolf Hess beside him, then Joachim von Ribbentrop, and on down the rows.

The picture exists because of a choice. The Allies could have executed these men without trial, and Winston Churchill had at one point favored summary execution. Instead they chose a courtroom. Robert Jackson, the American prosecutor, explained why in his opening statement. “That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.”

Photographs of the dock have been printed in textbooks and newspapers around the world. The room itself, Courtroom 600, is now part of a museum, the Memorium Nuremberg Trials.

Holding: photographs of the Nuremberg tribunal are held by the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, among others. The trial transcripts are at Yale’s Avalon Project and the Library of Congress.

The archives that hold the photographic and documentary record of the trials are listed on the Sources page.

Read the documents

The record itself.

• Documents. The Nuremberg trial record: the indictments, transcripts, and judgments, in full. Avalon Project, Yale Law School ↗
• Archive. The Nuremberg materials in the USHMM collections: documents, photographs, and film. USHMM Collections ↗

Discussion questions

Working from the evidence.

Classroom Connections

Where this Chapter fits.

Teaching Connections

• World History. The Nuremberg trials, the Eichmann trial, and the later prosecutions belong to the postwar legal order, the birth of international criminal law and the human-rights framework built after 1945.
• Classroom Applications. Students can:
  • evaluate legal evidence and sworn testimony
  • trace the origins of international criminal law (the meaning of “crimes against humanity” and “genocide”)
  • weigh individual responsibility against the “following orders” defense
  • analyze how a trial builds a documentary record historians still rely on
  • compare Nuremberg with later tribunals (Eichmann, Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, the International Criminal Court)
  • construct evidence-based arguments using primary and secondary sources.
• International Classroom Relevance. Because this Chapter examines international criminal law, transitional justice, and individual accountability, it supports Holocaust education, genocide studies, legal and civic education, human rights education, and source-based historical inquiry.

Standards Alignment

• NYS Social Studies Framework: NY Global History 10.10 (Human Rights Violations).
• NYS Holocaust Education Mandate, Education Law §801. Supports Holocaust instruction by examining how the crimes of 1933–1945 were documented, prosecuted, and entered into a permanent public record.
• Common Core RH.11–12.6 & RH.11–12.9. Students analyze indictments, trial transcripts, captured German documents, sworn affidavits, defense arguments, and historical scholarship while evaluating perspective, purpose, and corroboration across sources.
• C3 Framework, D2.His.1 & D2.His.14. Students investigate chronology, causation, and evidence-based interpretation while examining how a court assembles a historical record that historians still use.

For further classroom use

• For teachers: The Avalon Project at Yale and the USHMM collections are the main free resources. Robert Jackson’s opening statement, read in class against a section of the documentary evidence, works well as an upper-grade primary-source exercise.
• Unit 6 anchor: The Postwar Trials pair with the Hannah Arendt Chapter, which covers the Eichmann trial and the argument it set off. They also pair with the Nostra Aetate Chapter (the Catholic reckoning that ran in parallel with the German legal one).