Ten of the Nazi leaders condemned at Nuremberg were hanged on October 16, 1946, in the gymnasium of the prison where they had been held for the trial. They included Joachim von Ribbentrop, the foreign minister, Wilhelm Keitel, the head of the armed forces command, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the head of the Reich security office, and Alfred Rosenberg, the party's chief ideologist. Hermann Goering had killed himself with cyanide the night before, and his body was laid out to be checked against the list.
The trial ran a year. Eleven months. Twenty-two of the senior figures of the Nazi state had been charged. The court, made up of judges from the United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union, had convicted nineteen of them. The sentences were death, imprisonment and, for three, acquittal. The charges were new: crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, the last written into law for the first time, because what had happened in the camps and the occupied east had no name in any code. It needed one.
The executions themselves were clumsy in the telling. Ten men went to the gallows in the small hours. The accounts of the night, kept by the American officer who supervised, record the last words and the missteps, and the rope that was too short for one of them, and the argument afterwards about whether the bodies should be photographed. The bodies were cremated and the ashes scattered, so that no grave would become a shrine.
What was built that night outlasted the men who were hanged. The tribunal's judgement set down the principle that following orders is not a defence, and that a head of state can be tried. The Nuremberg principles became the foundation of the later courts for Yugoslavia and Rwanda and the permanent International Criminal Court. The hanging of ten men in a prison gymnasium is the date the idea of international criminal law is usually dated from.