The Final Words of Nazi Leaders at the Nuremberg Executions
In the early hours of October 16, 1946, the first and most famous Nuremberg trial reached its final, grim chapter.
One by one, ten senior figures of Nazi Germany were led into a gymnasium inside the Nuremberg prison complex and executed by hanging. They had been convicted by the International Military Tribunal for crimes that included aggressive war, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Twelve defendants had received death sentences. Hermann Göring avoided the gallows by taking cyanide in his cell hours before his scheduled execution. Martin Bormann had been tried and sentenced in absentia. The remaining ten were hanged shortly after midnight.
Before the trapdoors opened, each condemned man was given an opportunity to speak.
Their words did not amount to confessions. Most did not speak of the millions who had been murdered, deported, enslaved or displaced by the regime they had served. Instead, they spoke of Germany, God, their families, military sacrifice and their own approaching deaths.
The Four Charges at Nuremberg
The defendants before the International Military Tribunal faced as many as four principal charges:
Count One: Conspiracy or a common plan to commit the other crimes.
Count Two: Crimes against peace, including the planning and launching of aggressive war.
Count Three: War crimes committed against prisoners, civilians and occupied populations.
Count Four: Crimes against humanity, including murder, deportation, persecution and other systematic atrocities against civilian populations.
Not every defendant was convicted on every count. The tribunal examined the individual position, actions and responsibility of each man rather than treating the entire Nazi leadership as a single undifferentiated group.
Joachim von Ribbentrop
Joachim von Ribbentrop served as Nazi Germany’s foreign minister from 1938 until the collapse of the regime.
He participated in the diplomatic preparations that allowed Hitler to pursue expansion and aggressive war. The tribunal concluded that his collaboration with Hitler and the other defendants had been wholehearted and found him guilty on all four counts.
Standing on the gallows, Ribbentrop said:
“God protect Germany. God have mercy on my soul. My last wish is that German unity be preserved, that understanding between East and West be achieved, and that peace may prevail in the world.”
His appeal for peace stood in striking contrast to his role in the foreign policy of a regime that had invaded neighboring countries and plunged Europe into war.
There was no acknowledgement of the civilians murdered under German occupation, the nations destroyed by Nazi aggression or the victims deported through agreements negotiated by the government he represented.
Wilhelm Keitel
Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel was the head of the Armed Forces High Command, known as the OKW.
Although Keitel later portrayed himself as a soldier carrying out orders, his signature appeared on criminal directives that enabled executions, reprisals, forced labor and the brutal treatment of prisoners and civilians. The tribunal found him guilty on all four counts.
His final statement was:
“I call on Almighty God to have mercy on the German people. More than two million German soldiers went to their deaths for the fatherland before me. I now follow my sons. All for Germany.”
Keitel framed his death as part of the military sacrifice of Germany and placed himself among the German soldiers killed during the war.
But his words contained no reference to the criminal orders issued through the command structure he helped direct, nor to the millions of non-German victims who had died as a result of Nazi occupation and warfare.
Julius Streicher
Julius Streicher was different from many of the military and political officials condemned at Nuremberg.
He had not commanded armies or managed the machinery of deportation. Instead, his principal weapon had been propaganda.
Streicher founded and published Der Stürmer, an intensely antisemitic newspaper that portrayed Jewish people as dangerous, diseased and subhuman. Its articles and illustrations helped normalize persecution and encouraged violence long before the mass murder of European Jews reached its height.
The tribunal concluded that Streicher’s sustained incitement to murder and extermination constituted a crime against humanity. He was acquitted on Count One but convicted on Count Four and sentenced to death.
Eyewitness accounts described Streicher as the most openly defiant of the condemned men. Guards reportedly had to force him toward the scaffold.
As he climbed the stairs, he shouted:
“Heil Hitler!”
He then turned toward the witnesses and cried:
“Purim Festival, 1946!”
Purim is a Jewish holiday based on the Book of Esther. In the biblical account, Haman plots the destruction of the Jewish people, but his plan fails, and Haman and his ten sons are ultimately hanged.
Streicher appeared to be drawing a deliberately antisemitic comparison between the ten Nazi officials executed that morning and the ten sons of Haman. Even in his final moments, he presented the executions not as punishment for documented crimes but as an act of Jewish vengeance.
His words were therefore more than a historical or religious reference. They were a final expression of the worldview that had defined his political career.
Arthur Seyss-Inquart
Arthur Seyss-Inquart played a central role in Nazi rule over Austria and later served as Reich Commissioner for the occupied Netherlands.
Under the occupation administration, Jewish residents were registered, isolated, dispossessed and deported. Of approximately 140,000 Jews living in the Netherlands before the deportations, almost 120,000 were sent away, many of them to Auschwitz and other killing centers.
The tribunal found Seyss-Inquart to have been a knowing and voluntary participant in war crimes and crimes against humanity. He was convicted on Counts Two, Three and Four but acquitted on Count One.
He was the final man executed that morning.
His last statement was:
“I hope that this execution will be the last act in the tragedy of the Second World War, and that the lesson learned from this war will be that peace and understanding must exist among peoples. I believe in Germany.”
Like Ribbentrop, Seyss-Inquart invoked peace and understanding only when standing before his own execution.
He did not mention the communities destroyed during the occupation of the Netherlands or the people deported under the government he administered.
Adolf Eichmann: A Separate Trial and a Disputed Final Sentence
Adolf Eichmann was not one of the defendants tried at Nuremberg.
After the war, he escaped Europe and lived in Argentina under a false identity. Israeli agents captured him in 1960 and brought him to Jerusalem, where he was tried publicly in 1961.
Eichmann had directed and coordinated key parts of the Nazi deportation system, helping transport Jewish communities from across Europe toward ghettos, concentration camps and killing centers. He was convicted of crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity and war crimes and was executed shortly after midnight on June 1, 1962.
The precise wording of his final statement remains disputed.
Contemporary accounts generally describe Eichmann delivering a longer statement in which he saluted Germany, Austria and Argentina, greeted his family and declared that he would die believing in God.
However, Rafi Eitan, the Israeli intelligence officer who had helped capture Eichmann and accompanied him to the execution chamber, later recalled that Eichmann murmured one additional sentence:
“I hope that all of you will follow me.”
Eitan publicly recounted this memory decades after the execution. The sentence should therefore be understood as a reported final murmur rather than an uncontested transcript of Eichmann’s formal last statement.
What Their Final Words Reveal
The final words spoken at Nuremberg are sometimes presented as mysterious glimpses into the minds of condemned men.
What they reveal most clearly, however, is the persistence of denial.
Ribbentrop spoke of peace. Keitel spoke of German soldiers and his sons. Seyss-Inquart spoke of understanding between nations. Streicher remained openly loyal to Hitler and returned to antisemitic conspiracy in his final moments.
Almost none of them directly addressed the people who had been murdered, starved, deported, enslaved or persecuted by the system they had helped create and sustain.
Their final statements cannot be separated from the judgments delivered against them. Nor should those few sentences overshadow the enormous documentary record presented at Nuremberg: government correspondence, military orders, photographs, films, captured records and testimony documenting the crimes of the Nazi regime.
Their last words were about themselves.
The Nuremberg record was about their victims—and about the principle that political and military power does not place an individual beyond the reach of law.