The 22 men stood accused of the mass murder of more than a million people—people deemed “racially undesirable” by Adolf Hitler. This week, at Nürnberg’s Palace of Justice, Presiding Judge Michael A.

Dressed in the scarlet death-cell garb, the seven condemned Nazis waited in Landsberg prison for their midnight appointment with the hangman. The hearses with the empty coffins were ready to take the ...