The tribunal stated in its judgment: ... in this case the defendants are not simply accused of planning or directing wholesale killings through channels.

The presiding judge, Michael Musmanno, explained his rationale for sentencing while testifying at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials in the 1960s.

He had chosen to impose death sentences in all cases where the defendant had actively participated in murder and failed to present mitigating circumstances.

The Nuremberg Military Tribunal in its judgement stated the following: [The facts] are so beyond the experience of normal man and the range of man-made phenomena that only the most complete judicial inquiry, and the most exhaustive trial, could verify and confirm them.

Although the principal accusation is murder, ... the charge of purposeful homicide in this case reaches such fantastic proportions and surpasses such credible limits that believability must be bolstered with assurance a hundred times repeated.

... a crime of such unprecedented brutality and of such inconceivable savagery that the mind rebels against its own thought image and the imagination staggers in the contemplation of a human degradation beyond the power of language to adequately portray.

It is only when this grotesque total is broken down into units capable of mental assimilation that one can understand the monstrousness of the things we are in this trial contemplating.

One must visualize not one million people but only ten persons – men, women, and children, perhaps all of one family – falling before the executioner's guns.