At the close of World War II, Hermann Göring surrenders to the United States and enjoys the hospitality of a U.S. Army Air Force base.

Samuel Rosenman, acting on the orders of U.S. President Harry S. Truman, recruits U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson to prepare a war crimes tribunal against Göring and the surviving Nazi leadership.

Jackson negotiates with Allied representatives Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, General Iona Nikitchenko and Henri Donnedieu de Vabres to ensure a unified prosecution.

Göring and the others are stripped of their rank and transferred to the prison in Nuremberg, where they come into conflict with the guards under the command of the strict Colonel Burton C. Andrus.

Maxwell-Fyfe puts forward an emotive eyewitness account of the Nazis' genocidal policies toward Jews and others, while Jackson reads out dry documentation.

As the court begins to tire of Jackson's meticulous approach, Maxwell-Fyfe urges pushing on to the witness interviews, which reveal the horrors of the concentration camps.

Under advice from Maxwell-Fyfe, Jackson returns to the courtroom to confront Göring with evidence of his crimes against the Jews and successfully dismisses the defendant’s denials.

Andrus relaxes the prison rules for Christmas, and Göring shares a friendly drink with his guard, Lt. Tex Wheelis.

Jackson is moved by Gilbert's summation of his examinations – that the source of the evil behind Nazi Germany was a complete lack of empathy – to give an impassioned closing statement.

In reality, Göring, after sending an aide to Brigadier General Robert I. Stack in which he offered to surrender to Dwight D. Eisenhower personally, was discovered and arrested in a traffic jam near Radstadt by a detachment of the Seventh United States Army, which was sent through the German lines to find him and bring him to a secure American position, on May 6, 1945.