Fantasies of Nuremberg

No, never judgment. Just the abyss into which all acts are thrown down, and the terrible white silence in which judgment either endures or burns. | Watch all my exclusive videos by joining Nebula at https://go.nebula.tv/jacob-geller

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*Sources*
Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial (Joseph Persico, 1995)
After Nuremberg: American Clemency for Nazi War Criminals (Robert Hutchinson, 2022)
American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes (Rebecca Gordon, 2016)
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Hannah Arendt, 1963)
Letters from Nuremberg (Janet Flanner, 1945-1946, The New Yorker)
Hitler’s Elite: Biographical Sketches Of Nazis Who Shaped The Third Reich (Louis Snyder, 1989)
Speer: Hitler’s Architect (Martin Kitchen, 2015)
Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl, 1935)
Nuremberg as the “City of Nazi Party Rallies” (Museen der Stadt Nürnberg, https://museums.nuernberg.de/documentation-center/nazi-party-rallies/nuremberg-city-of-nazi-party-rallies)
Robert Jackson’s Nuremberg Opening Statement (https://www.roberthjackson.org/speech-and-writing/opening-statement-before-the-international-military-tribunal/)
The Origins Of Crimes Against Humanity: From Nuremberg To Rome (Sümeyra TEKİN, https://dergipark.org.tr/en/download/article-file/426221)
Charter of the International Military Tribunal, Article 6 (https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/nuremberg-tribunal-charter-1945/article-6b)
Testimony of Hans Frank (https://web.archive.org/web/20160303191932/http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/nuremberg/franktest.html)
Final Statement of Hans Frank (https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/08-31-46.asp)
“A Profound, Abiding Hatred”: An Analysis of Hermann Goering’s Alleged Morphine Addiction (Turner et. al., 2023 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10144812)
Tribunal Verdict on Hermann Göring (https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/10-01-46.asp)
The Soldier, His Sweetheart And The Suicide Of Hermann Goering (David Usborne, 2005 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/the-soldier-his-sweetheart-and-the-suicide-of-hermann-goering-5386315.html)
The U.S. War Crimes Tribunals at the Former Dachau Concentration Camp (Durwood Riedel, 2006 https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/Dacahu_trials_Riedel.pdf)
Criticism of Clemency in the Trials (The Guardian, 1951 https://theguardian.newspapers.com/image/259404223/?match=1&terms=%22treason%20against%20the%20common%20good%22)
The Eichmann Trial (Yad Vashem https://wwv.yadvashem.org/yv/en/exhibitions/eichmann/operation-eichmann.asp#)
If the Nuremberg Laws were Applied… (Noam Chomsky, 1990 https://chomsky.info/1990____-2/)
Germany’s far-right AfD co-leader Alice Weidel vows to ‘close borders completely’ (AFP, 2025 https://youtu.be/PC9uZTjQ1Rk?si=QjmNXv4ByhqsXvwN)
Germany joins US in rejecting Amnesty’s ‘genocide’ accusation against Israel (Times of Israel, 2024 (https://www.timesofisrael.com/germany-joins-us-in-rejecting-amnestys-genocide-accusation-against-israel/)
How Germany bends international law to continue selling arms to Israel (Engelcke & Pfeifer, 2024 https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/germany-israel-bends-international-law-continue-selling-arms)
Punched, Choked, Kicked: German Police Crack Down On Student Protests (Ruari Casey, 2024 https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2024/5/25/punched-choked-kicked-german-police-crack-down-on-student-protests)

Music Used (chronologically): A Massive Mist (Ethan Sloan), A Somber View (Andres Cantu), Revelation (Anna Dager), Tvivel (Hanna Ekstrom), Fallow Deer (Martin Klem), Abandoning Sendai (John Barzetti), Barren (Martin Klem), Tokyo Screams (Farrell Wooten), Indigo (Christophe Gorman), Remorse of a Murderer (Anna Dager), Bitter Swirl (Line Neesgard), A Cold Wind (Savvun), Talking Without Speaking (Martin Klem), Générique (Cover by Henry Walsh)

Music and sound effects from Epidemic Sound
Additional footage from Reuters Archive and Getty Images

Thumbnail and Graphic Design by https://twitter.com/HotCyder
Description credit: “Update on the Last Judgment” by Ellen Hinsey
“Judgment Day” by David Kapp

I kneel before you
God of men
Tell me Tell me
Tell me again.
Where are your messengers?
Are your messengers
Men?

[“The most famous trials were those held at-”]
Nuremberg is the 14th-largest city in Germany. It has a reconstructed thousand-year-old castle, 
some lovely looking canals, a number of fine dining options. But recently, when I’ve looked 
at a person presiding over an act of unimaginable cruelty and thought “they need to be Nuremberged,” 
I’m not referring to a Bavarian vacation. This is not a thought I’m particularly happy about 
having. It’s not a historically informed thought, really. Almost more of a tic, an impulse. 
I see something, some decision made, some photo-op performed, that seems motivated by 
such vicious inhumanity that my brain, reeling, searches back to find some instance, 
any instance, of political justice, punishment. Of consequence. Of 
someone not getting away with it. And in that semi-staggered state, I latched onto 
Nuremberg — specifically, the Nuremberg trials, after World War II. It’s a historical event I knew 
very little about. I only really knew the outcome: a bunch of Nazis are put on trial for their 
crimes against humanity, a bunch of Nazis are   found guilty, a bunch of Nazis get hanged. 
In a way, the haziness of my understanding helped make this an appealing target to point to. 
Without getting bogged down in facts and details, “Nuremberg” could just exist as an idea to me, an 
actual representation of that elusive feeling of justice. I could even brush aside its obvious 
contradictions with my own ideology, including the fact that I am notably opposed to capital 
punishment. By leaving it so uninvestigated, Nuremberg remained…a fantasy, a vague notion 
that one day, history’s villains will be held to task for the monsters they create.
But historical fantasies are no place to take refuge in. Some loose sense of prior justice 
serves no purpose without a deeper understanding. And so, over the past several months, I have 
read, and read, and read about the Nuremberg Trials. I’ve read contemporaneous reporting 
and modern retrospectives. Over this period I’ve been a…really fun guy to spend time with, 
and had really normal conversations. And on the other side of my research, the Nuremberg 
trials no longer exist as a fantasy to me; they are an immensely complicated historical 
phenomena, quite impressive in some ways and yet deeply flawed in many others.
At the conclusion of his tome, “Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial,” Joseph Persico adapts a quote 
by scientist Thomas Huxley. “The example of Nuremberg,” Persico writes, was “a beautiful idea 
murdered by a gang of ugly facts.” It’s a striking note to leave us on — which parts of the idea were 
“beautiful”? Do those facts puncture its concept, or (forgive me,) its execution? And in 2025, 
what does it mean to yearn for Nuremberg? Nuremberg’s history within World War II started 
far before the trials. Beginning in 1923, the city was home to the “Nuremberg rallies,” 
massive campaign and propaganda events for   the Nazi party. It was in Nuremberg that Leni 
Riefenstahl filmed “Triumph of the Will,” one of the most famous propaganda films of all time. 
It was during one of these rallies that the Nazis passed the “Nuremberg Laws,” which stripped Jews 
(and shortly after, Blacks, and Romani) of their rights and declared each group “enemies of the 
race-based state.” The Nazis chose Nuremberg to begin with as part of their historical mythmaking 
effort — the city had previously been a crucial part of the Holy Roman Empire, a gathering place 
for the “Reichstag,” and, even pre-World War II, carried out several pogroms against its Jewish 
population. On the back of this history, the Nazis promised to build Germany’s greatest empire.
Instead, the city was blown to bits. During the war, the allies dropped thousands upon thousands 
of bombs on Nuremberg — in a survey afterwards, the US described the city as “91% destroyed.” 
It literally stank from thousands of bodies trapped beneath the rubble. But, in a feat 
of great historical irony, one of the few buildings still standing was Nuremberg’s massive 
courthouse and its attached jail. A courthouse, a site of supposed justice among the ruins. 
The city had provided the infrastructure for the next chapter of its history.
That’s not to say everyone agreed that the Nazis should be given a formal trial. FDR and 
Churchill had both, at different points in time, leaned towards immediate, summary executions 
of Nazi leaders. Henry Morgenthau, the US’s Treasury Secretary, suggested — in addition to 
shooting leaders on sight — that they exile Nazi party members a la Napoleon, while using POWs 
to completely strip Germany of its industry and return it to an agrarian society.
And if nothing else, why not at least try the Nazis outside of Germany? Luxembourg, for example, 
could host the trials — a “neutral territory,” not shattered by aerial bombing nor clouded by the 
stench of death. But eventually, the US, UK, France, and the Soviet Union agreed. The answer 
would be trials, they would be legitimate, and they would be in Germany. The Chief American 
prosecutor, Robert Jackson, felt that “German criminality” must be tried in its home country. 
He said that it was massively significant 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.” Many also hoped that the trials would reveal the scale of the Nazi 
horrors to both the German people and the world. Telford Taylor, an American prosecutor, 
envisioned the trials as “classrooms,” which   would “[quash] any German political or cultural 
tendencies to whitewash the Third Reich.” This idea of a classroom, while not as 
broadly retributive as “returning Germany to an agrarian society,” still raises one of the 
most important questions of the trials: that is, were they just for show? A “classroom” seems 
to represent a predetermined outcome, not an even balance of power. Also not representative 
of an even balance of power: the victor of a war occupying the loser’s country. This was one of the 
biggest criticisms of the trials, both while they happened and in the decades since: how could they 
possibly be fair? Would this just be a show trial, essentially a punishment levied against the 
Germans for “losing the war”? But in all my research, what’s continually surprised me is 
the overwhelming fairness, borderline leniency, that the Nazi defendants were treated with.
In the first and most famous of the Nuremberg Trials, twenty four men were charged by the 
newly-formed International Military Tribunal, or IMT. Each defendant was allowed to choose 
his own lawyer. The IMT, in fact, paid for these lawyers, who were often themselves Nazis. 
The lawyers were given complete access to the prosecutor’s documents, much as they would be in 
a typical domestic trial, as well as secretaries,   stenographers, translation services, and 
“virtually unlimited” time with their clients. One aide remarked that they wished “the 
average defendant in an American court” had access to the type of assistance given to the Nazis. In 
court, the Nazis were allowed to enter virtually any material as defense, including thousands of 
pages of philosophy that had to be translated for everyone in the court. Prosecutors were prevented 
from cutting off the defendants’ responses, turning what should have been hard-hitting 
interrogations into opportunities for the   Nazis to wax rhapsodic about their lives and 
virtues. Each defendant was allowed hours, even days, to regale the court with their own 
life stories — and at the end of the trial, multiple men were fully acquitted.
The larger issue with the trials, from a legal standpoint, wasn’t 
how the defendants were treated:   it was the trial’s very premise. No matter the 
defense resources given to the Nazis on trial, the fact remained that the categories of crimes 
the defendants were charged with — including   crimes against peace and crimes against humanity 
— were “created” for the Nuremberg trials. Some argued that it was unfair to retroactively 
charge the Nazis with newly created laws. There are a couple counters to this claim 
though. Germany had previously signed several   international pacts outlawing war, treaties from 
the Hague and Geneva about the rules of warfare, and peace agreements with Poland and the 
Soviet Union. This was where the charge   of “crimes against peace” came from, as 
well as the definitions of the many war crimes committed by the German army.
“Crimes against humanity” was not drawn from previously agreed upon treaties, however. 
It is a category at once more legally tenuous and also more morally obvious. The IMT defined 
crimes against humanity as the, and I quote, “murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, 
and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population… or persecutions on political, 
racial, or religious grounds” qualified as crimes against humanity, quote, “whether or not in 
violation of the domestic law of the country where perpetrated.” The IMT stated that, even 
if technically legal within a country, these horrors could not be allowed. In a refreshing 
break from legalese, prosecutor Jackson said “let’s not be derailed by legal hair-splitters. 
Aren’t murder, torture, and enslavement crimes recognized by all civilized people? What we 
propose is to punish acts which have been regarded as criminal since the time of Cain and 
have been so written in every civilized code.” There is a sense of natural law in this 
explanation, of some things being so base and self-evident that they needn’t be spelled out for 
us to know them. It’s an easy idea to understand, as Jackson said, “regarded as criminal since 
the time of Cain.” It is the innate gut reflex of morality, that there are actions that cannot be 
allowed, no matter the letter of the law. And yet, this was a fraught concept to introduce to 
a court in 1945. The allies had, of course, killed many civilians over the course of World 
War II — the trials took place in a city still stinking from people buried under the rubble. 
Before the end of the year, Americans would drop the largest bombs ever created on urban 
centers. Moreover, many other “crimes against humanity” perpetrated by the members of the IMT 
were still within living memory, including British colonialism and the American racial hierarchy 
that had explicitly inspired Nazi eugenics. The solution to this problem within Nuremberg was 
blunt: the IMT decided the trials would not allow “tu quoque,” or “what about you?” defenses. The 
Nazis on trial would not be allowed to say “well, you did this too” as justification 
for their actions. It makes sense, as a kind of legal necessity — Jackson pointed 
out that it implied if some murderers go free, all must go free. But that particular defense 
being barred from court was also a tacit admission in the fallibility of the prosecuting countries — 
if said countries had recognized civilian torture, slavery, murder, and deportation, as criminal 
“since the time of Cain,” why was it so easy to “tu quoque” them in the first place?
I guess — let’s talk about who was in that first, most notable trial. Or maybe we’ll talk about 
who wasn’t there. The award for the most notable missing guest would probably go to Adolf Hitler, 
who rinsed out his head with a bullet earlier in 1945. Also absent: Head of the SS Himmler and 
Chief Propagandist Goebbels, who had followed their leader by offing themselves, and Holocaust 
architect Adolf Eichmann, who had (temporarily) escaped to Argentina. Finally, two of the men 
originally intended to be tried at Nuremberg — Leonardo Conti and Robert Ley — managed to 
kill themselves in jail before the trials. The problem of the captured Nazis killing 
themselves was treated seriously. The IMT was determined to create a suicide-less jail. 
Every defendant was watched around the clock,   guards in the jails instructed to literally 
never take their eyes off the prisoners. And yet they failed in this task more than once. 
This failure prompts strange questions about the very notion of justice sought by the IMT. Wasn’t 
the end result of this trial the executions of a bunch of Nazis? Is it such a failure that multiple 
of them skipped straight to the finale? Well, yes. Because the trials were not summary 
executions, and the goal was not simply a dead Nazi. In an ideal world, the trials would end 
with true admissions of guilt — the prosecutor having perfectly proven the crimes of each 
defendant, the Nazis would be forced to face   a mirror and recognize the monstrosity of their 
participation in the Reich. Suicide within a jail cell made that admission impossible. But if 
what you wanted was self-reflection by the Nazis, you weren’t likely to find a lot of 
satisfaction in the trials anyway. Twenty two of those first slate of defendants 
lived long enough to make it to trial. Some were politicians or ministers, some were military 
leaders, and some were just prominent members of   the party. It was an interesting batch; their 
varied positions meant that multiple types of guilt were up for debate. Fritz Sauckel, for 
instance, who was in charge of deporting millions of civilians from German-occupied territories for 
forced labor, held a different kind of guilt than Julius Streicher, who didn’t directly exert force 
over people but instead published the blindingly anti-semitic newspaper Der Stürmer, a vital tool 
in the Nazis’ dehumanization of the Jews. Inevitably, the Nazis would argue that their 
particular position should exempt them from   guilt and responsibility. Sauckel would 
argue that he was merely providing workers, that he couldn’t be responsible for the slave 
labor the civilians he deported were forced to do. Streicher would argue — well he would argue that 
all the rancid propaganda he published was true, that it wasn’t fair for his judges to be Jews, 
but also that he was powerless to Hitler’s power of hypnotic suggestion. Hitler, in absentia, was 
blamed for virtually every decision made by every defendant. In 1946, Janet Flanner wrote for the 
New Yorker, quote, “Hitler’s absence from the courtroom has been scarcely less troubling than 
his presence would have been. Absent, he has been,   in a sense, both the murderer and the murdered. 
He has been the alibi and the corpse.” Ultimately, the decision to bar “tu quoque” 
defenses didn’t seem to play a huge role in the trial, because almost none of the defendants 
were interested in actually defending the “crimes against humanity” of the reich. They instead 
breathlessly described how they had no knowledge of the worst crimes, and/or they were powerless to 
stop the crimes and/or they actually HAD tried to stop the crimes and/or they were good actually and 
why were they on trial and not that other guy? This is not really an exaggeration. In “After 
Nuremberg,” Robert Hutchinson writes about Paul Blobel, a commander of a death squad that 
killed at least 60,000 people. Hutchinson summarizes his snivelling defense like this:
“So, in sum, Blobel was forced to serve in the East against his will, much to his anguish, but he 
never received any illegal orders or committed any illegal acts, and even if he did (which 
he could not have done, either because of   manpower limitations or his own ill health), he 
would have been completely justified in doing so because of the brutality of the enemy and 
the dangers to his family if he refused.” Flanner, in contemporaneous reporting for the 
trials, wrote “It is a fact that the twenty-two Nazis there helped put millions of people to 
death, quickly or slowly, by torture, murder, or starvation. But not one of them seemed to want 
to die for the thing they killed the millions for. Nobody said he would be proud to hang for his 
belief in the bloodthirsty ideology that cost the millions their lives … For the twelve years — 
and especially the last, terrible six — that these men in the box were in power, the world thought 
that they meant it. Then, as this trial went on, it became clear that they didn’t mean anything 
except their desire to fight for their skins.” There were a few notable exceptions to this 
trend, what Hutchinson refers to as a “psychosis of blamelessness.” Hans Frank, a Nazi who 
served as the governor of occupied Poland during the war, admitted that he took part in 
the “annihilation of the Jews.” He said, “I myself have never installed 
an extermination camp for Jews,   or promoted the existence of such camps; but if 
Adolf Hitler personally has laid that dreadful responsibility on his people, then it is mine 
too … A thousand years will pass and still Germany’s guilt will not have been erased.”
This is a moment when the actual trial matches my imagination of what it could be. An admission 
by a war criminal of not just guilt but shame, a recognition of their complicity as a part of the 
whole monstrous machine. The dream of any trial, I would imagine, is not just that the judge or the 
jury holds a guilty defendant responsible — it’s that the trial could actually cause the defendant 
to clearly see their guilt for the first time. Unfortunately, it’s hard to say this is what 
happened with Hans Frank. In his final statement   before the verdict, he absolved both himself and 
Germany of their burden — “I said a thousand years would not suffice to erase the guilt brought upon 
our people because of Hitler’s conduct in this   war. Every possible guilt incurred by our nation 
has already been completely wiped out today, not only by the conduct of our war-time enemies 
towards our nation … but also by the tremendous mass crimes … committed against Germans by 
Russians, Poles, and Czechs.” Not even four months later, Frank decided Germany’s “thousand 
years of guilt” had been completely paid off. Probably the best performance at 
the trial came from Albert Speer,   a Nazi architect promoted to minister of war 
production during World War II. Speer managed to walk a delicate line on the stand; he was 
deeply regretful of Germany’s actions during the war and dismayed by Hitler’s commands. At the 
same time, he claimed to be completely ignorant of the country’s worst atrocities, and had no 
knowledge of what was happening in the camps. Speer deflected his most damning charges with 
equally exciting stories — did the court know he once tried to assassinate Hitler?
In his final speech, Speer virtually ignored the fact that he was on trial at 
all, and instead delivered a warning to   modern civilization — that Hitler’s message spread 
because of the technological innovations of the radio and the telephone. That the next war, with 
chemical weapons and precisely targeted rockets, would end human civilization. Therefore, he hoped 
this trial could prevent such wars in the future, and establish rules “whereby human 
beings can live together.” In Speer’s speech, he didn’t express 
regret, shame, or guilt. In fact, he positioned himself as more high-minded, 
the war having taught him sacred lessons that he was now disseminating to the court.
And for Speer, it worked — worked somewhat marvelously. He was charged with war crimes 
and crimes against humanity, but his sentence was a relatively light imprisonment for 
20 years. In Nuremberg, and afterwards, he cultivated the idea of having been a “good 
Nazi,” one who only wanted the best for Germany. Martin Kitchen writes, “[Speer] provided a thick 
coating of whitewash to millions of old Nazis. This was a man who was closer to Hitler than any 
other, yet who maintained his personal integrity as an apolitical technocrat … if a man so close 
to Hiter, with such immense power and with close connections to all the leading figures in the 
Third Reich, was unaware of the mass murder   of the European Jews, how could the myriad 
of lesser figures possibly have known?” In truth, Speer did not escape the gallows because 
of his wisdom and honesty learned through the   horrors of war. He escaped because of a far 
more common Nazi trait: being a fucking liar. Speer, his own letters would later reveal, had 
been literally in the room when Heinrich Himmler announced the plan to exterminate all Jews. He had 
personally ordered the eviction of Jews from their homes in Berlin, and profited hugely via the theft 
of stolen art and property. // Albert Speer- he was photographed in front of the camps, he was 
smiling, can you imagine, a smile in front of a concentration camp, proud of the machinery, proud 
of the tracks, the structures, the slave labor, he claimed to not know, they all claimed to not know, 
as the ash filled their lungs and burned their eyes and buried their streets they smiled in front 
of them and they didn’t know they couldn’t have known we didn’t know we couldn’t have known //
Albert Speer was not a well-meaning man put in a situation beyond his control. He 
was an aggressive participant in the   worst of the Reich’s crimes. His “plot to 
assassinate Hitler” was patently absurd, at best a half-tossed out idea never acted 
upon, at worst (and more accurately) a total fabrication cooked up in his jail cell.
Some proof of Speer’s crimes emerged later, after his sentencing, even after his death in 1981. 
But much of it — his participation in the camps, for instance — was actually presented as evidence 
in Nuremberg. It’s hard not to wonder if Speer’s release from the gallows was because he presented 
his wartime experience as a proof of his value, his “wisdom” not compelling despite his 
closeness to Hitler but because of it. Or maybe, the prosecution was just doing a bad 
job. This was a consistent source of frustration, both internally and from outside observers. 
You’d think the prosecution had the easiest job in the world, demonstrating that Nazis carried out 
crimes against peace, war, and humanity. And yet, they struggled to be compelling. Part of this was 
due to American Prosecutor Jackson’s plan to call no witnesses, and simply use the Nazis’ 
own documentation against them. This was, intellectually, a compelling strategy. He planned 
to use this hard evidence to unequivocally prove the guilt of the defendants and reveal the scale 
of Germany’s crimes. The documents he would use   as evidence had no chance of courtroom perjury 
or poor performance under cross-examination, and they were written by the Nazis themselves. 
But in practice… reading documents doesn’t make for an electrifying courtroom, and it gave 
the Nazis plenty of opportunities to quibble   with specifics. Flanner wrote in 1945, “On the 
whole, our lawyers have succeeded in making the world’s most completely planned and horribly 
melodramatic war dull and incoherent.” There were dramatic moments on the stand, when the 
defendants seemed to crumble under overwhelming evidence of their crimes. There were also moments, 
however, when the prosecution seemed to crumble. This was most evident in dealing with the 
“main character” of the first Nuremberg   trials, if there was one: Hermann Göring.
The Allies were proud to have nabbed Göring. He was, basically, the highest level Nazi leader 
who hadn’t already killed himself. Actually, Göring wasn’t captured at all — he turned himself 
in, alongside many suitcases stuffed with stolen art and one stuffed with over 20,000 paracodeine 
pills, of which he was taking more than 100 a day. And yet, Göring was also the sharpest, 
most “dangerous” defendant of the trial. Not dangerous in that he would physically attack 
anyone, but in that he was capable of exerting   tremendous influence over the other imprisoned 
Nazis, coordinating strategy and coaching them on their narratives from within jail. The IMT 
was so fearful of this coordination that they attempted to completely isolate Göring — and 
yet even from within his cell, he made friends, with the men charged with watching him 24 
hours a day, even with the jail physician. Within the court, seemingly everyone turned to 
Göring for his reaction to every event. Was he satisfied by another defendant’s testimony? Was 
he shaken by the footage of the death camps? When Göring took the stand, he largely 
bowled over Jackson’s cross-examination,   using his time instead to narrate the “epic” 
course of his own life — Flanner wrote, “On the witness stand, he didn’t wait to be 
asked questions by the Allied prosecution; he   told them the German answers first. [Göring] made 
Machiavelli’s Prince look like a dull apologist; Göring was decidedly more amoral, and funnier.” 
He seemed to be better informed about Europe’s history than the prosecutors, more agile in his 
defense than they were in their attack, more   interested in eloquently telling his own personal 
epic than even, really, defending himself. Flanner concluded, “it was the complicated 
narrative of a brain without a conscience.” Göring, unlike Speer or Streicher, had no doubt he 
would be executed. Before the trial even started, Göring said he would be willing to testify 
against many of the other defendants if he could   buy himself execution via firing squad instead 
of the noose. In context of this certainty, his performance at the trial wasn’t a plea for mercy 
but a continuation of his own personal mythmaking, an individual enactment of the fascist dream of an 
eternal empire. “We will be martyrs,” Göring said. “Even if it takes fifty years, the German people 
will recognize us as heroes. They’ll put our bones   in marble caskets in a great national shrine.”
Of the 22 Nazis tried at the first Nuremberg trials, ten of them were executed. 
Seven were given prison sentences,   and three were fully acquitted. That leaves 
two men unaccounted for: Martin Bormann was tried in absentia, and had, unbeknownst to 
the IMT, actually died earlier that year. The other unaccounted man was Hermann Göring .
Göring was, very much, sentenced to death. Persico writes that it took more time to type the verdict 
than it did for the court to reach it. “There is   nothing to be said in mitigation,” his judgment 
read. “His guilt is unique in its enormity.” But on the day of the scheduled execution 
— mere hours before eleven men were set to   be walked to the gallows — Göring bit into 
a cyanide capsule in his cell, convulsed, frothed at the mouth, and died. In his suicide 
note, Göring claims he possessed the pill the whole time. Others theorize he had outside help 
— in 2005, a 78-year-old former American guard unverifiably confessed to sneaking the pill 
into Göring’s cell. In any case, the suicide was a final denial of the trials’ legitimacy. He 
did not accept guilt, he did not accept shame, and he would not accept the judge’s ruling.
It is, depending on your perspective, the climax or the anticlimax of the trial. Göring outwits 
the IMT at the last second; Göring sucks the air out of the trial’s punchline. Which is…kind of 
ridiculous, right? Because the end result is that he died a few hours earlier than he was supposed 
to. Göring faced trial, was judged guilty, and died the night he was sentenced to die.
Reading about the remaining ten executions, I personally experience a sort of deflation, a 
reminder of what I already knew, that there is no peace or virtue to be found in enacting a death 
sentence. The ten Nazis were hung, one at a time, from a gallows built in the Nuremberg gymnasium. 
It was done between the hours of 1:30 and 3 o’clock AM. About 50 people in total were in 
attendance. There were no revelations that day, no necessary truths. Some went to their deaths 
quietly, some attempted honor. Wilhelm Keitel, the former chief of the Oberkommando, said he 
would follow all the German soldiers who had died   for their fatherland. Streicher, the publisher of 
Der Stürmer who claimed he had been under Hitler’s hypnosis, apparently fell under the dead Führer’s 
spell once again, screaming Heil Hitler and “Purimfest 1946,” before dying slowly at the end 
of the noose. Staff laid Göring’s body next to the ten other corpses. 3:05am on October 16, eleven 
dead Nazis in a gymnasium. Justice served. “Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that 
it was nothing more than misfortune that made you a willing instrument in the organization 
of mass murder; there still remains the fact   that you have carried out, and therefore actively 
supported, a policy of mass murder. For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and 
Support are the same. And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share 
the earth with the Jewish people and the people of   a number of other nations — as though you and 
your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world 
— we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to 
share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.”
The bodies, along with their nooses, were cremated. The ashes were tossed into a 
river, the urns themselves were smashed. Göring’s prediction would not come to pass, at least not 
literally. There are still no marble caskets, no national shrines, no bones to recover. There 
are, instead, the thoughts and opinions and memories of the survivors of the war. What 
do they think? What did Germany think? Reporting is… mixed, to say the least. Obviously a 
country’s people are not a monolith. Flanner wrote that in her experience, the 1945 German public 
didn’t particularly care about the trials one way or another: they were too shellshocked from 
the war, too long flooded by misinformation to believe anything, too sick of hearing about 
the particular men on trial. She reports, “they think the trial is an effort at propaganda 
rather than justice, a myth they have forgotten   about and so no longer believe in.”
Persico writes that rich German families were eager to describe their mistreatment 
during the war and denounce the reich.   “One never seemed to meet a Nazi in 
Germany these days,” he notes dryly, “except for the few in the dock at Nuremberg.”
Polls — themselves, of course, a fallible instrument — paint a slightly different picture, 
one of brief agreement with the actions of the   allies, followed by increasing frustration. In 
1946, a reported 78% of the population thought of the trials as fair — by 1950, this had dropped 40 
full points to a mere 38%. Perhaps more alarming, in 1947, more than half the population said 
they thought Nazism was “a good idea badly carried out,” a proportion that would increase 
in Germany over the next couple years. These narratives were encouraged 
by Nazi sympathizers in America,   some of whom held prominent government positions. 
Joseph McCarthy, for instance, amplified the idea that these trials were an example of “Jewish 
vengeance”; his senate colleague William Langer declared that the trials were a communist 
plot designed to seize the property of   innocent German bankers and industrialists.
And if this was the full arc of the Nuremberg trials, it would be a strange, knotty story of 
the beginnings of international justice — some men hanged, some men imprisoned, some men 
freed, a world unsure of what to think. But the stranger story of the Nuremberg trials is 
that they didn’t conclude the day of the hanging. Rather, the international court disbanded but 
the trials continued, both within Nuremberg   and at Dachau, the concentration camp turned 
into a massive prosecutorial apparatus. Both of these were held by the U.S. alone, rather than 
with the cooperation of other allied countries. The following trials held at Nuremberg tried 
185 Nazi leaders — the ones at Dachau tried 1,672 lower-ranking soldiers charged with 
war crimes. These trials originally handed out a total of 438 death sentences, 207 life 
sentences, and 868 shorter imprisonments. This is a much larger sentencing, over 
a much larger swath of the Nazi party,   with generally much less attention 
paid by local or international press. But the real notability is what happened to those 
sentences. From 1946 to 1951, the US military hanged 252 condemned prisoners at the same prison 
where the original Nuremberg executions were held. But not only were the remaining 186 death 
sentences commuted, by 1958, virtually every other convicted Nazi at the subsequent Nuremberg 
and Dachau trials, whether sentenced to death, life, or otherwise walked free. Even of the seven 
imprisoned after the original Nuremberg trials, only one — Rudolph Hess — served an 
actual life sentence in prison. It’s hard to find a single reason that 
explains these commutations. Legally, the courts for these subsequent trials seemed 
to move away from Nuremberg’s most famous   determination. While the original trial may 
have ruled that “just following orders” didn’t absolve anyone of responsibility, the subsequent 
trials and releases often seemed to do just that. Hutchinson writes that this advisory board that 
determined clemency for German war criminals “systematically questioned the parameters 
of individual guilt or responsibility as   established by the tribunals.” In other 
words, the courts decided that maybe it WAS a reasonable excuse that the Nazis were just 
following orders. But these legal determinations were also perhaps influenced by the larger 
political context of Germany in the 50s. Logistically, the US didn’t want to be locked into 
the responsibility of monitoring the sentences of every Nazi imprisoned in Germany. Politically, 
the next war — the cold war — was imminent, and the US may have been more interested in 
building a new allyship with Germany than   maintaining the sentences of its war criminals. 
Ethically, the continued imprisonment of Nazis called into question the purpose of prisons 
writ large. That is to say: why, exactly, were the Nazis being held? Was it the risk of 
recidivism, that once released they would be a danger unto others? That seemed…improbable. 
Their crimes, though performed as individuals, were done as part of a collective. No lone Nazi, 
released free back into Germany, was likely to try and rebuild a death camp. So why shouldn’t 
they get out early for good behavior? Whatever the reasons that prompted the US to so 
dramatically reduce the sentences of these Nazis, the German public took the news as a 
referendum on the Nuremberg trials as a   whole. The near-universal commutations suggested 
that “something had gone fundamentally wrong at Nuremberg.” It implied that the trials had in 
fact been the vengeance of a conquering country. This was reflected in German public opinion 
— by 1952, 60% disapproved of the handling of the trials by foreign powers, and only 9% of 
those surveyed believed that the still-imprisoned Nazi Generals were, in fact, guilty.
The risk of recidivism is not the only reason to imprison war criminals. The more compelling 
rationale might be as a sort of message to the world: the continued imprisonment of Nazi war 
criminals could demonstrate that their crimes,   and crimes of a similar nature, must be 
taken seriously. That there was no situation, not peace or war or economic ruin, that could 
justify mass deportations, enslavements, or genocide. It is hard to imagine that the 
way the trials did end, with a limp admission of the logistical difficulty of continuing 
consequence, sent that same message. While the international community 
was generally less fascinated by the   subsequent trials the US held in Germany, 
they certainly reacted strongly to its shrug of an ending. All sides of the 
political spectrum in France, the UK,   and the United States were incensed. They called 
it a complete reversal of a fundamental goal of the Allies. Newspapers said the commutations 
were a “treason against the common good.” One powerful criticism read “A would-be war 
criminal of the future need not be discouraged by the Nuremberg Trials from indulging in similar 
genocidal excesses.” That retort came from, oh, interesting, the Israeli government.
In 1960, fifteen years after the first trials, Israeli agents would go to Argentina and find 
Adolf Eichmann, one of the Nazi leaders that   evaded judgment at Nuremberg. The agents 
then abducted him; they captured him, snuck him through airport security and put him on 
a plane to Israel. This was a very clear violation of several UN treaties — at first, Israel absurdly 
claimed that the abduction had been carried out by unaffiliated “volunteers.” Later, it admitted 
Mossad planned the whole operation with the knowledge and support of the Prime Minister. No 
matter the logistics, once Eichmann was in Israel, the plan was clear: he would stand 
trial and he would ultimately hang. Eichmann protested in the same manner as the 
Nazis had at Nuremberg — that he had not been   a decisionmaker, just a cog in the Nazi machine. 
He said he didn’t have anything personally against the Jews — he didn’t have an anti-semitic 
bone in his body. It was this trial, in fact, that gave us the most indelible phrase of this 
whole saga of history: “the banality of evil.” It was coined by holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt, 
who chronicled Eichmann’s trial for The New   Yorker. She wrote, “Eichmann was not Iago and not 
Macbeth … Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had 
no motives at all.” This banality did not preclude him from overseeing the murder of millions of 
people — in all likelihood it enabled it. What did Israel hope to gain from the 
trial? Admission, guilt, shame? No, I doubt anyone thought they would wring these from 
Eichmann. Arendt thought the desire was more base: “We refuse, and consider as barbaric,” she 
writes, “the propositions ‘that a great crime offends nature, so that the very earth cries 
out for vengeance; that evil violates a natural harmony which only retribution can restore … 
And yet I think it is undeniable that it was precisely on the ground of these long-forgotten 
propositions that Eichmann was brought to justice to begin with, and that they were, in fact, the 
supreme justification for the death penalty.” This is the feeling that sits in the center 
of my chest, like a stone, like an anchor, as I watch intolerable cruelty around me and 
fantasize of Nuremberg. That the earth cries out for vengeance. That this cannot just happen 
and then we move on, that we cannot simply “look forward as opposed to looking backward,” 
that we cannot let this go unpunished and thus   unacknowledged and thus forgotten. There must be a 
consequence, an inchoate scream that echoes around my skull. God I wish for you hell existed, but 
it does not, so there must be a consequence. –
I have this feeling now. I had it   reading about Nuremberg. And then when I reached 
that climactic chapter, their sentence delivered, ten genocidal necks snapped in a prison gymnasium, 
I felt…nothing at all. No relief, No less hollow, no natural harmony restored. The earth did not 
cry out for vengeance, the earth just cries. Did the trials deter anything? If punishment 
does not heal the soul, and it never ever does, did the trials at least prevent more crimes 
against humanity? It is impossible to prove a negative, I can’t point at the past 80 
years for proof of what didn’t happen. But the world did not stop its march of 
atrocities. I mean the US alone… In 1990, Noam Chomsky said “If the Nuremberg laws 
were applied, then every post-war American   president would have been hanged.” In 1990 he 
said that. In Germany, Nazism was largely made illegal, though it’s hard to attribute 
this effort to the efficacy of the trials,   especially given the note of resignation on 
which they ended. Nor can one look at Germany today and be proud of the “lack of Nazism,” 
or its commitment to preventing genocides. Of course, the most irrational thing about 
yearning for a new Nuremberg is that a trial is necessarily reactive. It punishes a thing 
that has already happened, the damage has already occurred. If my concern is with humans, 
and not some unmeasurable karmic sense of justice, Nuremberg represents a situation in which the 
worst possible thing is already a foregone conclusion. In 1945 and today, I’d trade the 
sentences of every responsible Nazi in return for one fewer civilian death, one family not forever 
shattered. It’s this I try to remind myself of most of all. The point cannot be retribution; 
the point is to help each other survive. –
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