On October 1, 1946, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg finished the trial it had opened on November 20, 1945, and sentenced 12 of the 22 men in the dock to death by hanging. Three were given life sentences, four prison terms of 10 to 20 years, and three were acquitted. Hangings followed on October 16. Goering took a cyanide capsule the night before.
The trial was the first time an international court had tried people for waging aggressive war and for what the charter called crimes against humanity, and the defence argued that this was new law applied after the fact. The tribunal's answer was that the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928 had already made aggressive war illegal and that the murder of civilians was a crime in every legal system represented at the bar. Judges sat from the United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union, and the Soviet judge dissented from the acquittals and from the life sentence given to Hess.
The case rested on documents. The prosecution had the German government's own paper: the minutes of the Wannsee Conference, the orders governing the treatment of prisoners, the Einsatzgruppen reports with their running tallies of people shot. About 100,000 captured documents were entered. That is what has made the record hard to argue with since.
Three of the acquittals mattered to lawyers. Hjalmar Schacht, the economics minister, and Franz von Papen went free, and so did Hans Fritzsche, who had run radio propaganda. Albert Speer, who directed armaments production using forced labour, got 20 years. The tribunal had drawn a line between planning the war and running a department inside it, and that line has been argued about ever since.
Only 22 men were tried. Control Council Law No. 10 let the occupying powers try others in their own zones, and the Americans did that at Nuremberg too, in the 12 subsequent trials of doctors, judges, industrialists and Einsatzgruppen commanders that ran to 1949. The principles the tribunal wrote down were adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in December 1946 and became the basis for the Genocide Convention and, six decades later, for the International Criminal Court.