The Nuremberg trials: who among the Nazis did not live to see the trial

Not all figures of the Third Reich appeared before the international tribunal in Nuremberg. Many of them committed suicide, were killed or disappeared under unclear circumstances in the last weeks of the war, and this deprived the world of the opportunity to establish the full picture of the crimes of Nazism. For more information, see the Izvestia article.

Evidence not taken to the grave

Before the Nuremberg trials took place, the Soviet side insisted on holding an open public trial in order to reveal the crimes of Nazism to the whole world, said Dmitry Surzhik, chief specialist of the expert and analytical department of the National Center for Historical Memory under the President of the Russian Federation. The Soviet Union sought to present all the evidence as evidence-based as possible, so that no one could later say that this was a "trial of the victors over the vanquished."

— It was an adversarial, open, transparent trial, in which the defendants even launched, let's say, a counterattack several times. As for the absence of the main war criminals: Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler, including Bormann, who was convicted in absentia, the evidence base and evidence, including Paulus, who participated in the development of the Barbarossa plan, was enough to create an integrated legal system, — said Dmitry Surzhik.

The Fuhrer and his inner circle

Adolf Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945, in a bunker under the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. His death marked the symbolic end of the Third Reich and "spared" him from the trial that was supposed to be the main event of the Nuremberg trials. Next to him were Hermann Goering, Joseph Goebbels and other top officials. Goebbels decided to follow Hitler's example.

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According to the published archival documents of the FSB: "it followed from the testimony of eyewitnesses that Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun, who had married him on the eve of marriage, committed suicide on April 30, 1945, and on May 1 they were followed by Joseph and Magda Goebbels, who had previously killed six of their children."

Heinrich Himmler, who led the SS and organized the concentration camp system, did not fall into the hands of the Allies alive. After the end of the war, he was detained by the British under an assumed name and committed suicide by crushing an ampoule of cyanide before the interrogation began.

Top military leaders and ideologues of the regime

Adolf Hitler's personal secretary Martin Bormann, who headed the NSDAP party office, disappeared in May 1945 while trying to leave Berlin. He was tried in absentia and sentenced to death by hanging. It was only decades later that it was established that he had died while fleeing the city.

Hermann Wilhelm Goering was initially arrested alive and taken to Nuremberg, but committed suicide by poisoning himself with cyanide a day before his execution. His death became one of the most high-profile incidents around the tribunal.

The SA Obergruppenfuhrer, Reichsleiter, head of the NSDAP organizational department, and head of the German Labor Front, Robert Ley, was charged with all counts of the Nuremberg trials. Shortly before it began, he committed suicide in prison.

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