Nuremberg’s Last Night: October 16, 1946

The defendants sit beneath the eyes of military guards in Courtroom 600. In the front row, from left, are Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop and Wilhelm Keitel; behind them are Karl Dönitz, Erich Raeder, Baldur von Schirach and Fritz Sauckel. This photograph was made during the 1945–46 trial, not on the night of the executions.

By October 1, 1946, the tribunal had delivered its verdicts. Twelve defendants received death sentences, including the absent Martin Bormann. Among the men pictured here, Hess, Dönitz, Raeder and Schirach received prison terms. The courtroom image brings them together; the judgments separated their futures.

Three American sergeants—George Cullette, Marvin Moebius and Guy Reppert Jr.—leave the cell-block area inside Nuremberg prison. The narrow, covered passage shows the guarded world behind the public courtroom. The source identifies the men but does not establish the day this photograph was taken.

The prison and Palace of Justice were protected by the 6850th Internal Security Detachment under Colonel Burton C. Andrus. After Robert Ley died by suicide in October 1945, each prisoner was placed under a guard’s continuous observation. By the evening of October 15, 1946, this security system had to oversee the final hours of the condemned men.

Hermann Göring reads in his Nuremberg cell on December 21, 1945. Family photographs stand on the table beside him. The image records his imprisonment early in the trial; it does not show his final evening.

On October 15, 1946, hours before his scheduled hanging, Göring died by suicide using cyanide. His death reduced the number of men awaiting execution from eleven to ten. In his report to Robert H. Jackson four days later, Whitney R. Harris described the discovery of the poisoning and acknowledged that the source of the cyanide remained unresolved at the time. The photograph’s quiet domestic details belong to an earlier moment; the death came almost ten months later.

The Palace of Justice fills the foreground of this aerial view; the prison complex extends behind it. The Memorium Nuremberg Trials identifies the small gymnasium to the right of the cell block as the place where the death sentences were carried out. Its caption dates the view to winter 1945–46, while its credit line gives November 20, 1945. In either case, the image predates the executions.

Shortly after 1 a.m. on October 16, 1946, Joachim von Ribbentrop entered the execution chamber first. Wilhelm Keitel, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Wilhelm Frick, Julius Streicher, Fritz Sauckel, Alfred Jodl and Arthur Seyss-Inquart followed. Harris’s report places Seyss-Inquart’s death at 2:57 a.m.

The bodies were subsequently taken to Munich and cremated; the ashes were scattered in a tributary of the Isar. The trial’s final night had unfolded inside an ordinary prison building, only a short distance from the courtroom that had commanded the world’s attention.