On October 1, 1946, the International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Nuremberg pronounced its verdicts in the trial of twenty-two high-ranking Nazi leaders. In September 1935, almost exactly eleven years earlier, the city had hosted the Nazi Party Rally and special Reichstag meeting, which passed the racial legislation that embodied the Hitler state's key definitions of Jewishness. On this October day, the presiding American, Soviet, British, and French IMT judges sentenced more than half of the defendants to death by hanging. Among the condemned men were Alfred Rosenberg, Wilhelm Frick, and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the last head of the Reich Security Main Office. In their widely published opinions, the judges found the condemned defendants guilty of all or most points of the indictments, ranging from conspiracy to waging a war of aggression to war crimes. Three defendants, including Hans Fritzsche, a former head of the Propaganda Ministry's press department, were acquitted. Adolf Hitler and SS-chief Heinrich Himmler, the architects of Nazi terror and genocide, had committed suicide to evade capture by the victorious Allied troops in the spring of 1945 and could no longer be punished.
Allied officials prosecuted the Nazi regime's genocide of the German and European Jews by adding the new charge of crimes against humanity, defined as the deportation and destruction of civilians “on the basis of political, racial, and religious grounds.
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