Lessons from Nuremberg

Prof. Andrew Corbett-Nolan argues the case for governance that makes the surrender of moral choice impossible

I have spent years helping boards navigate the grey areas where rules, targets and contractual obligations collide with basic human decency. The release of the excellent film Nuremberg (2025), starring Russell Crowe as Hermann Göring and Michael Shannon as the chief American prosecutor Justice Robert H. Jackson, has brought the trials back into sharp focus.

It is a film that leaves one with a feeling of moral unease. What began as a reckoning with unimaginable evil established a principle that remains profoundly relevant to ordinary leadership today: no one can legitimately hide behind the legality or accepted norms of the system they serve when that system demands immoral acts. I explore the relevance of this to leadership and indeed followership in our public purpose organisations of today.

We all know the phrase ‘I was only following orders’ – the so-called Nuremberg defence. What is often forgotten is that the International Military Tribunal categorically rejected it. In his opening address on 20 November 1945, Justice Jackson warned: "The real complaining party at your bar is civilisation… civilisation asks whether law is so laggard as to be utterly helpless to deal with crimes of this magnitude by criminals of this order of importance.”

The tribunal’s judgment was even more explicit: “The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”

And in the later ‘Doctors’ Trial’ (1946–47), the judges formulated what became known as the Nuremberg Code on medical ethics, stating: “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential… The duty and responsibility for ascertaining the quality of the consent rests upon each individual who initiates, directs or engages in the experiment.”

What the defendants actually said

The transcripts are chilling in their familiarity.

• Hermann Göring, cross-examined by Jackson: “I considered the Führer’s orders as being legally binding… Everything I did was in accordance with the laws of the Reich at the time.”
• Wilhelm Keitel, when shown the Commando Order authorising the shooting of captured Allied commandos: “I signed it as a soldier obeying the Führer’s command. It was a military order.”
• Ernst Kaltenbrunner, successor to Reinhard Heydrich as head of the Reich Security Main Office: “I was never informed of any extermination programme. I only executed the laws and decrees that reached my desk.”

Most clung to the system. One man, however, broke the pattern.

Rudolf Hoess, the former Commandant of Auschwitz, testified as a defence witness for Kaltenbrunner on 15 April 1946. What the court – and the world – expected was another routine denial or deflection. Instead, Hoess gave calm, precise, horrifyingly matter-of-fact testimony that removed any remaining doubt about the scale and deliberate nature of the human extermination programme. He described the selection process, the gas chambers, the crematoria and the murder of more than a million people under his direct command.

Only later, in Polish captivity while awaiting execution, did Hoess confront the full moral dimension of his actions. In his autobiography (written February–March 1947) and especially in his final declaration to the Polish State Prosecutor on 15/16 April 1947 – the day before he was hanged at Auschwitz – he wrote:

“My conscience compels me to make the following statement. In the solitude of my prison cell I have come to the bitter recognition that I have sinned gravely against humanity… I caused unspeakable suffering to countless human beings… Let the public continue to regard me as a bloodthirsty beast, a cruel sadist and a mass murderer; the victims’ children cannot think otherwise. But may my own children and their descendants know that their father was not an evil man at heart.” (Final Declaration, 15/16 April 1947).

He earlier had explicitly rejected the ‘superior orders’ defence in his closing reflections: “I personally never hated the Jews… I regarded it as a duty… Today I realise the monstrousness of such an attitude.”

Hoess’s testimony helped seal the fate of many defendants; his late, private reckoning – written after he had returned to the Catholic faith and received the sacraments – stands as one of the rare instances in which a perpetrator acknowledged that obedience to a criminal system does not absolve the individual conscience. His honesty, however belated, underlined the tribunal’s central finding: moral choice is always possible, even under the most extreme pressure.

The myth of evil people?

Because the film Nuremburg describes extraordinary circumstances it is easy to dismiss its application to our own moral choices of today. The film brings out the wretched fact that those involved in the Holocaust were chillingly ordinary people. It is disturbing how, when confronted with a moral choice, so many chose to go along with the group.

Before ‘The Final Solution’ the Nazis exterminated several million European jews in mass shootings. In several documented cases, particularly involving police battalions rather than core SS Einsatzgruppen (death squads), commanders explicitly offered soldiers the choice to step aside from direct participation in shootings. Those who refused typically faced no formal punishment, such as court-martial, imprisonment, or execution. Instead, they were often reassigned to other duties like guarding perimeters, transporting victims, or administrative tasks.

Refusal was rare and usually only a small minority (5–10%) took the option. In the most famous case (Reserve Police Battalion 101 - Józefów Massacre, July 1942 detailed in Christopher R Browning's Ordinary Men) a battalion, composed of middle-aged Hamburg reservists, was ordered to round up and shoot about 1,500 Jews in the Polish village of Józefów. Before the operation, the commander Major Wilhelm Trapp addressed his men tearfully and offered an explicit opt-out: "If any of the older men among them did not feel up to the task that lay before him, he could step out." About 10–12 men (out of roughly 500) did so. The refusers were assigned alternative tasks (e.g., guarding the marketplace or trucks). Trapp himself appeared reluctant and avoided direct involvement. No one was punished, demoted, or transferred punitively.

Browning's analysis, based on postwar interrogations of battalion members, shows that this pattern was repeated in later actions (e.g., at Łomazy in August 1942), where opt-outs were allowed but few took them due to escalating group pressure and desensitisation.

Milgram obedience experiments: a chilling echo of the agentic state

The Nuremberg Tribunal’s rejection of the ‘superior orders’ defence rested on a simple but profound assertion: moral choice is always possible. Yet just 15 years after the trials ended, a young psychologist at Yale set out to test whether ordinary people, under pressure from authority, would indeed make that moral choice – or surrender it entirely.

In Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments (1961–1963), participants believed they were taking part in a study on learning and memory. Each was assigned the role of teacher and instructed by a stern experimenter in a white lab coat to administer what they thought were increasingly painful electric shocks to a learner (an actor) in the next room whenever a wrong answer was given. The shock generator ranged from 15 volts (‘slight shock’) to 450 volts (marked ‘XXX – danger’).

As the learner began to scream, pound on the wall, complain of a heart condition and eventually fall silent, participants grew distressed – sweating, trembling, laughing nervously. Many pleaded to stop. The experimenter’s response was calm and scripted:

• “Please continue.”
• “The experiment requires that you continue.”
• “It is absolutely essential that you continue.”
• “You have no other choice; you must go on.”

The results stunned the world: 65% of participants obeyed all the way to the maximum 450-volt shock, even after the learner had apparently become unconscious or worse. No one stopped before the 300-volt mark once the experimenter insisted.

One participant, when the learner screamed “Get me out of here! My heart’s bothering me!”, protested: “I can’t do this… You accept all responsibility?” The experimenter replied: “The responsibility is mine. Please continue.” The participant continued.

Milgram’s conclusion was stark: when authority figures take responsibility and issue incremental commands, ordinary people can shift into an ‘agentic state’ – seeing themselves not as moral actors but as instruments carrying out orders. Conscience is outsourced.

The parallels with the ‘I was only following orders’ defence are unmistakable. Milgram himself drew the link explicitly, writing that his studies illuminated “the capacity for man to abandon his humanity… as he merges his unique personality into larger institutional structures.” Subsequent replications (including a 2008 partial replication by Jerry Burger) have produced obedience rates of 70–80% under similar conditions.

For leaders today, Milgram’s work is a sobering reminder: the psychological mechanisms that allowed ordinary people to participate in atrocity are not confined to history. They can surface whenever authority or culture, incremental pressure and diffused responsibility combine, whether in a laboratory, a boardroom, a ward, or a care home.

This is why ethical stress-testing matters. If 65% of Milgram’s participants obeyed an authority figure they had known for minutes, imagine how much stronger the pull is when the ‘experimenter’ is a long-trusted executive, a senior clinician, a vice-chancellor, a regulator or a government minister and the consequences are measured not in screams but in delayed diagnoses, unsafe buildings, a toxic workplace culture or wrongful prosecutions.

Nuremberg told us that moral choice must remain possible. Milgram showed us how easily it can be surrendered. Good governance demands that we design systems, and develop leaders, who refuse to let it happen.

The principle for everyday leadership

Nuremberg dealt with genocide. Most of us will never face anything remotely comparable. Yet the core idea – that ethical responsibility can override legal permission or regulatory obligation – is directly applicable to the quieter failures we see in public-purpose organisations. Indeed, we often see situations where leaders have become desensitised to either following the rules or, more dangerously, a toxic culture that has gradually built up over time. In these circumstances decent people can find themselves permitting, or at least ignoring, morally repugnant behaviours. When the system itself becomes toxic, compliance with the rules of the implicit culture is not going to provide the morally correct answer.

Contemporary echoes

Importantly, the cases below are in no way presented as being comparable in scale or moral gravity to the crimes tried at Nuremberg.

They are simply modern illustrations of the same principle – that ‘we were following the rules, guidance or law of the time’ or ‘it was just the way things were done’ has repeatedly been rejected as a sufficient defence when harm results.

1. Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust: Staff and managers met every target, followed every protocol, and stayed within budget. Patients died unnecessarily. Sir Robert Francis QC, chair of the Public Inquiry, rejected the implicit “compliance” defence, stating: “A culture had developed in which the business of the system was put ahead of the priority that should have been given to the protection of patients.” (Francis Report, 2013)
   
   
2. The Post Office Horizon scandal Executives prosecuted subpostmasters under laws and policies they insisted were lawful, repeatedly relying on assurances and legal advice. Mr Justice Fraser, in his landmark 2019 judgment, dismissed the Post Office’s institutional stance: “The Post Office’s approach… can only be described as institutional obstinacy or refusal to consider that there could be anything wrong with the Horizon system… bordering on the offensive.” (Bates & Others v Post Office Ltd [2019] EWHC 3408 (QB))
   
   
3. Grenfell Tower Building regulations, testing regimes and contractual clauses were all technically compliant at the time. The Grenfell Tower Inquiry Phase 2 report (2024) condemned the widespread deference to compliance, noting that Studio E (architects), Rydon (main contractor) and Harley Facades (subcontractor):“failed to identify their own responsibilities for important aspects of the design and in each case assumed that someone else was responsible for matters affecting fire safety.” (Grenfell Tower Inquiry Phase 2 Report, Volume 4, Chapter 23)
   
   
4. Certain care home decisions during COVID-19 Some providers followed national guidance to the letter when accepting untested hospital discharges. Others paused, citing ethical duty. In R (Gardner & Harris) v Secretary of State for Health and Social Care [2022] EWHC 967 (Admin), the Divisional Court ruled aspects of the March and April 2020 policies unlawful, holding that: “It was irrational… in failing to advise that where an asymptomatic patient (other than one who had tested negative) was admitted to a care home, he or she should, so far as practicable, be kept apart from other residents for 14 days.” (Judgment, para 269)

The leadership question

The Nuremberg Principle – amplified by Hoess’s eventual reckoning – distils into a single, uncomfortable test for any director, trustee or governor:

If this decision later proves to have caused harm, will ‘I was complying with the rules / guidance / contract / target / pervading work culture’ be a defence I can live with?

Good governance demands more than legal literacy. It demands moral courage – the willingness to say ‘this is wrong’ even when the regulator, the contract, the performance framework or the predominant work culture deems it is permissible.

A practical ethic for today

The Nuremberg judges did not leave us without guidance. Justice Jackson’s closing words remain a benchmark: “The common sense of mankind demands that law shall not stop with the punishment of petty crimes by little people. It must also reach men who possess themselves of great power and make deliberate and concerted use of it to set in motion evils which leave no home untouched.”

In ordinary times, that translates into three questions every board should ask before major decisions:

1. Is this lawful and compliant?
2. Is it ethical by the standards a reasonable outsider would apply?
3. If it later causes harm, will I be able to defend my role with pride?

Only when the answer to all three is yes can a board proceed with genuine confidence.

Nuremberg was about the worst of humanity. Yet it gave us one of the strongest defences against the everyday erosion of decency: no leader can outsource their conscience to the system.