Hans Frank was the Nazi Party’s pet lawyer, personal counsel to Hitler from the earliest days, and marcher in the farcical Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. Appointed governor-general of Poland, Frank systematically looted the country and exterminated what remained of its leadership. As for the Jews, he was utterly merciless, declaring: "They will have to go….We must destroy the Jews wherever we meet them…."

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Wilhelm Frick was a doctor of laws, and an early Nazi who used his position to help Nazi criminals escape trial. Sentenced to 15 months in prison for his part in the 1923 putsch, in the surreal Germany of the time Frick nevertheless continued as chief of the Munich criminal police. Frick served as minister of the interior, in which job he did nothing to curb the brutalities of the SS and Gestapo. Appointed Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia in 1943, he presided over the death camps in his "protectorate," although his subordinate, Karl-Hermann Frank, did most of the actual dirty work.

Goebbels, the Nazis’ clever chief of propaganda, had poisoned his six children before he died outside the Berlin bunker with his pitiful wife. He was beyond the reach of the Tribunal, but one of his lesser deputies was not. Hans Fritzsche held several responsible posts in Goebbels’ ministry, and during the war was a widely heard radio commentator.

Close to Fritzsche sat Constantin Freiherr von Neurath, a 73-year-old career diplomat. Neurath, a conservative rather than a passionate Nazi, had been foreign minister until 1938, when he was removed from office after he was unwilling to endorse Hitler’s plans for stealing Austria and Czechoslovakia and making war on the Western powers. After a series of meaningless jobs, he was appointed protector of Bohemia and Moravia in 1939–only to be removed from that job, too,in 1941.

Fritz Sauckel spent most of the war years as plenipotentiary-general for labor mobilization, in which capacity he was responsible for the rounding up of some 5 million workers for the German war machine. As a sidelight, he supervised the extermination of thousands of Jewish laborers in Poland.

In stark contrast to the crude Sauckel was sophisticated Franz von Papen. Pompous scion of an old aristocratic family, he became chancellor of Germany in 1932. A believer in the strong totalitarian state, he had immediately abolished the ban on the SA (Sturm Abteilung), Hitler’s private army, and had begun firing republican officials. Conspiring with Hitler–in hopes of controlling him–Papen served as vice chancellor for a while but criticized extreme Nazi philosophy and was very nearly murdered along with Ernst Röhm and the leaders of the SA in 1934. Thereafter he served as ambassador to Austria, and, for most of the war years, to Turkey.

Last, but not least, was Hjalmar Schacht, banking wizard and financial manager of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. An ardent nationalist, Schacht said, "I wish a great and strong Germany; to achieve it I would enter an alliance with the Devil." And he did. Schacht organized support for Hitler among the industrial giants of Germany, Krupp, I.G. Farben and the rest. Schact was fired as president of the Reichsbank in 1939 when he opposed full-scale war preparation on the grounds that Germany could not economically support a long conflict. He was also, apparently, upset by the organized anti-Jewish repression of 1938 and the purge of the army leadership. Arrested after the failed July 20, 1944, plot to kill Hitler, Schacht was sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, and later was held at Flossenbürg and Dachau.

There had been 24 Nuremberg defendants at the start. In addition to the men already mentioned, the accused included Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach. Head of the Krupp works that supplied so much of Germany’s armaments, Gustav Krupp used thousands of slave laborers, many of whom did not survive. He did not stand trial, however, because a stroke had reduced him to incompetence.

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