Taylor led the prosecution's case against the German High Command--the generals and admirals who directed Nazi Germany's military conquests. Those conquests put vast numbers of European Jews under Nazi domination and enabled the Einsatzgruppen, the SS, and the German Army itself to carry out a "war against the Jews." Taylor's explicit task was not to show that members of the German High Command were also Holocaust perpetrators; his aim was to document that Nazi Germany's military professionals had waged war in criminal ways.

When the verdicts were announced on October 1, 1946, 19 of the Nuremberg defendants--including Martin Bormann, head of the Nazi Party Chancellery, who was tried in absentia--were found guilty. Three men were acquitted: Hjalmar Schacht, former minister of economics; Franz von Papen, first vice-chancellor of the Nazi government; and Hans Fritzsche, chief of the Propaganda Ministry's Radio Division. Taylor achieved his goal, however, when the guilty verdicts included Nazi military leaders Wilhelm Keitel, chief of staff of the Wehrmacht High Command, and Alfred Jodl, chief of the Wehrmacht Operations Staff.

Seven defendants received prison sentences that ranged from ten years to life. Twelve defendants--Keitel and Jodl among them--were condemned to death by hanging. Ten executions took place in the early hours of October 16, 1946. Having been tried in absentia, Bormann was missing from the group of the condemned. Shortly before Hermann Göring, the commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, was to be hanged, he escaped the gallows when he killed himself by swallowing cyanide.