Thank you so much for purchasing this resource!

I have had a lot of success with it over the years and am sure
that it will work well in your classes as well! I conclude my Holocaust unit with this activity so students already
have the background on the atrocities that occurred. I have students work in groups or “juries” of 4 to charge each
Nazi and then issue him a sentence. I give them about 25 minutes to debate and finalize their sentences before we
then discuss it as a group.

A good extension of the class debate is to discuss whether the death camp soldiers, doctors, and nurses should be
charged as well or if they were just following orders.

Are you in a paperless classroom? You can access the Google Drive Version of this resource here:
 This link goes to the worksheet for students to complete of their charges and sentences. This page
includes links to information pages on each defendant at the Jewish Virtual Library. These are very
in-depth pages and might be more than you need. However, I included them as an option you may
want as a resource.
 This link goes to the biographies of the accused Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg. These are digital
versions of the pages here.
These links will have you make copies of the Google Doc, so be sure to be signed in to your Google
account. The answer key is not included there, so you can share directly with your students.
If you are interested in more Google Digital Resources, check out my Digital Interactive Notebooks
here. Here are some additional resources that you might enjoy as well:

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Name ____________________________________________________

The Nuremberg Trial of Major War Criminals prosecuted 24 of the most important captured leaders of Nazi Germany.
The trials were held in the city of Nuremberg, Germany, from 1945 to 1949, at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice.
You have been selected to serve on a jury that will decide some of their fates. Read the
court-provided briefs of 6 of these 24 Nazi Party members. Decide what they are to be You are summoned
charged with. to report for official
All of them were charged with one or more of the following: jury duty. Follow
A. Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of a crime
against peace
these simple steps
B. Planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression and other crimes against peace to ensure you are
C. War crimes
D. Crimes against humanity
in compliance with
the law!
After charging them with crimes, decide on an appropriate sentence. This can range
from a prison term to the death penalty.

Name Charged With Sentence

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 Göring was perhaps the most influential
person, next to Hitler, in the Nazi organization.
He was one of only 12 Nazis elected to the
Reichstag, or German legislative body, in 1928.
Although he fell out of favor with Hitler in
1945, he was originally Hitler’s designated
successor in power. In the mid-1930's Goering
was in charge of the confiscation of Jewish
property, a policy which extended to Jews
throughout Europe.

He founded the Gestapo or secret police which

was feared throughout Germany. Goering was
influential in the planning and execution of
Kristallnacht, a crucial turning point in
Germany’s policy regarding Jews. This “Night
of Broken Glass” was the first organized
widespread violent attack on Jews and may be considered as the actual beginning of the
Holocaust. Throughout the war Göring was involved in mass amounts of plundering and
confiscating mass amounts of priceless works of art and other property.

Göring emphasized his loyalty to Hitler and that he was always simply following Hitler’s
order. He claimed to know nothing about what had happened in the concentration camps,
which were under Heinrich Himmler's power. He gave evasive answers to all direct questions
and had plausible excuses for all his actions during the war. He used the witness stand as a
venue to expound at great length on his own role in the Reich, attempting to present himself as
a peacemaker and diplomat before the outbreak of the war.

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Rudolph Hess served as Hitler's deputy
minister and was next in line to rule in Nazi
Germany if Herman Goering should be
unavailable for any reason.

Hess administered the preparatory schools that

trained the Nazi guards and officers who
worked at the concentration camps where
millions were killed under their control. These
camps experimented with various gasses and
injections on prisoners and photographed the
effect. Without these Nazi guards, the
genocide could never have taken place.

Just before war with the Soviet Union began in

1941, Hess flew by himself to Scotland in
attempt to broker peace with Great Britain. Hitler of any other higher ranking Nazis were
completely unaware of this flight until after he left. Hess was arrested and placed into the
Tower of London for the duration of World War II. There were claims in Germany that he
was suffering from mental disorders and hallucinations which caused him to flee to England.
At the time of the Nuremberg Trials, Hess was claiming to suffer from amnesia and that he
had no memory of his time in Germany before the war. He spent his time in court reading and
occasionally laughing.

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 Kaltenbrunner was the highest surviving SS-leader and he
also served as commander of the Einsatzgruppen. The
Einsatzgruppen were the Nazi death squads who were
responsible for the mass killing across Europe. The units
targeted mostly Jews but also other political enemies of the
3rd Reich as well.

Kaltenbrunner was a life-long fanatical Nazi. He had much

to do with developing the Mauthausen concentration camp
and visited it frequently. He agreed with Himmler on the
establishment of gas-chambers for execution 1942, became
head of the security police 1943, and sent millions of Jews
and political suspects to their deaths in the concentration
camps. He was also responsible for orders sanctioning the
murder of prisoners of war.

Kaltenbrunner said during the trial that all decrees and legal documents which bore his
signature were “rubber-stamped” and filed by his assistants. He insisted that he was only
following the orders of Heinrich Himmler and it was Himmler that was culpable for the
atrocities committed. During the trial he stressed that his position existed only in title and was
only committed to matters of espionage and intelligence.

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 Höss was commandant of the Auschwitz
concentration camp, where the estimates of people
killed range from 1 to 2.5 million. He planned,
organized, and streamlined the techniques of mass
murder which would allow the Nazis to implement
the Final Solution.

It was Höss who was the first to introduce the poison

gas Zyklon B on prisoners. It was this process of
gassing prisoners at the camp that directly led to so
many being killed. In fact, in just one day - May 8,
1944 - he supervised the killing of 430,000
Hungarian Jews.

When accused of murdering three and a half million

people, Höss replied, “No. Only two and one half
million – the rest died from disease and starvation.”
A psychologist who interviewed him in prison said, “Höss is quite matter-of-fact and
apathetic, shows some belated interest in the enormity of his crime, but gives the impression
that it never would have occurred to him if somebody hadn't asked him. There is too much
apathy to leave any suggestion of remorse and even the prospect of hanging does not unduly
stress him.

One gets the general impression of a man who is intellectually normal, but with the schizoid
apathy, insensitivity and lack of empathy that could hardly be more extreme in a frank
psychotic.”

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An architect, author and high-ranking Nazi German
government official, Speer was called “the first
architect of the Third Reich”. Speer was Hitler's
chief architect before becoming his Minister for
Armaments during the war. He reformed Germany's
war production to the extent that it continued to
increase for over a year despite increasingly
intensive Allied bombing. He was responsible for
the use of slave labor in captured territory and in
Germany to boost war production. He used Jews
from Germany’s concentration camps, captured
Allied soldiers, and other civilian slave labor in
production of war and defense materials.

At the trials, Speer apologized for Nazi atrocities and the only senior Nazi figure to admit
guilt and express remorse. Speer “made the most straightforward impression of all and ...
during the long trial spoke honestly and with no attempt to shirk his responsibility and his
guilt.”

Speer said he was an artist thrust into political life, who had always remained a non-ideologue
and who had been promised by Hitler that he could return to architecture after the war. He
also claimed that he had planned to kill Hitler in early 1945 by dropping a canister of poison
gas into the bunker's air intake but that a newly built wall prevented him from doing so.

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Dönitz was the leader of Nazi Germany’s Navy and
planned and oversaw their U-boat campaign.
Dönitz broke the rules of warfare by striking at
civilian ships.

It was Dönitz who began unrestricted submarine

warfare in the Atlantic Ocean against the United
States from the first day that nation entered the
war. Merchant ships carrying food and other
supplied from the US to Great Britain were sank
between 1939 and the end of the war.

His high rank and important to Nazi Germany are

seen in that, following Adolf Hitler's death, it was
Dönitz who became President of Germany for 20
days.

Dönitz claimed that accusations of crimes were

only defined as crimes after the war and were more like “victor’s justice”. In his defense
against planning the course of the war with Hitler, Dönitz said, “Now I ask them in heaven’s
name, how could an admiral do otherwise with his country's head of state in a time of war?”

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Name ______________________________________

The Nuremberg Trial of Major War Criminals prosecuted 24 of the most important
captured leaders of Nazi Germany. The trials were held in the city of Nuremberg,
Germany, from 1945 to 1949, at the Nuremberg Palace of Justice.
You have been selected to serve on a jury that will decide some of their fates.
Read the bios of 6 of these 24 Nazi Party members. Decide what they are to be
charged with. All of them were charged with one or more of the following:
E. Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of a
crime against peace
F. Planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression and other crimes
against peace
G. War crimes
H. Crimes against humanity
After charging them with crimes, decide on an appropriate sentence. This can
range from a prison term to the death penalty.

Name Charged With Sentence

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 The Nuremberg Trials Answer Key
Students are free to determine their own sentences, but the following is
what each was ultimately found guilty of and sentenced to by the
Nuremberg jury.

Name Found Guilty of Sentence

Karl Dönitz B&C 10 Years in Prison

Albert Speer C&D 20 Years in Prison

Hermann Goering A, B, C, & D The Death Penalty

Rudolph Höss A&D The Death Penalty

Ernst Kaltenbrunner C&D The Death Penalty

Rudolph Hess A&B Life in Prison

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