NUREMBERG TRIAL SENTENCES

                On this day in 1946, the Nuremberg Trials sentenced 12 Nazi leaders to death.  This was the culmination of the International Military Tribunal that began on October 18, 1945.  The judges were from the U.S., Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and France.  They held 216 sessions. The charges were:  1.  crimes against peace  2.  war crimes  3.  crimes against humanity (ex. the Holocaust)  4.  conspiracy to commit those crimes.  Here is the list of the men sentenced to death and I put them in order of evilness.  (This is just my opinion.)

1. Herman Goering – head of the Luftwaffe and Hitler’s second in command.  He committed suicide in prison before he was executed.
2. Martin Bormann – head of administration for the Nazi Party, but essentially Hitler’s private secretary who was his right-hand man.  He was tried in absentia and was probably dead in the rubble of Berlin.
3. Ernst Kaltenbrunner – leader of the Austrian S.S.  and then head of the Gestapo and the concentration camps under Himmler
4. Hans Frank – governor-general of Poland where he implemented executions, confiscations, enslavement, and the ghettoes
5. Fritz Sauckel – chief acquirer of slave labor as commissioner of utilization of manpower
6. Arthur Seyss-Inquart – Chancellor of Austria who encouraged the Anschluss;  later ran the Netherlands where he was guilty of murder, extortion, and mass deportations to places like Auschwitz
7. Alfred Rosenberg – chief ideologist of the Nazi Party;  pushed the idea of racial purity and urged the conquest of Poland and the Soviet Union
8. Alfred Jodl – chief of operations for the military;  signed many orders for the execution of hostages
9. William Keitel – chief of Hitler’s personal military staff;  partner of Jodl;  both were basically yes men
10. Joachim von Ribbentrop – foreign minister;  negotiated creation of the Axis and treaties like the Russo-German Nonaggression Pact
11. Wilhelm Frick – minister of the interior;  helped draft and implement the Holocaust ex. the Nuremberg Laws
12. Julius Streicher – ran an anti-semitic newspaper that was influential in the early years of Hitler’s reign

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-nuremberg-trials

https://www.britannica.com/event/Nurnberg-trials

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