Sentencing

The German sentences

Of the original 24 defendants, 12 were sentenced to death, seven received prison sentences (three of them, life) and three were acquitted, including the pre-war president of the Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht, and former vice chancellor Franz von Papen. One defendant – the Nazi industrialist Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach – was considered medically unfit for trial because of his dementia (although his son Alfred was later convicted). Another, Robert Ley, head of the German Labour Front, committed suicide before the trial began.

Two of those sentenced to death cheated the hangman. Goering – founder of the Gestapo, head of the Luftwaffe and minister of economic affairs – committed suicide the night before his execution. Martin Bormann's whereabouts were unknown, although it is now believed that he died in May 1945.

Indictments at Nuremberg: 12 defendants sentenced to death by the International Military Tribunal, 1946

* Jodl was posthumously exonerated by a German de-nazification court in 1953.

The Japanese sentences

Two defendants in the Tokyo trial – foreign minister Matsuoka Yosuke and Nagano Osami, who as head of the Japanese navy had ordered the attack on Pearl Harbor – died of natural causes during the trial. Another, the ultra-nationalist writer Okawa Shumei, had a breakdown and was admitted to a psychiatric ward; he was freed in 1948. The remaining 25 were found guilty on several counts. Seven were sentenced to death by hanging, 16 to life imprisonment and two to lighter sentences (20 and 7 years, respectively).

Three defendants who received life sentences died in prison, but the other 13 were all paroled within eight years. Former ambassador and foreign minister, Mamoru Shigemitsu, who was convicted on five counts of waging aggressive war and of deliberately and recklessly disregarding his duty to prevent atrocities, was paroled in 1950 and, four years later, was reappointed foreign minister.

Indictments at Tokyo: seven defendants sentenced to death by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, 1948

The ones who got away

Most of the first group of Nuremberg defendants served full prison sentences. However, as the Cold War with the Soviet Union developed, those in subsequent trials benefited from the United States' increasingly explicit desire for a strong economic and strategic alliance with post-war West Germany. By 1951, several death sentences had been commuted to prison terms, many prison terms had been drastically reduced and some convicted Nazis had been granted amnesty.

Particular lenience was shown towards Nazi industrialists, who were then returned to top positions in West German society. (This was not the case in East Germany, where former Nazis were removed from positions of influence.)

A number of Nazi scientists who were war criminals escaped justice altogether. As beneficiaries of the secret Project Paperclip, they – along with almost 500 other scientists – were spirited out of Germany and later emerged on the payroll of American agencies (including, later, NASA). Some papers relating to this project still remain hidden from public scrutiny.

In Japan, a group of war criminals were also granted immunity by the US in exchange for providing the Americans with experimental data. For instance, some of the scientists who ran Unit 731 in north-east China – which was responsible for, among much else, amputating prisoners limb by limb (to study blood loss), testing flame throwers on humans and spinning prisoners in centrifuges until they died – later became part of Japan's medical establishment.

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