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Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial
The Nuremberg trials remain, after nearly a half a century, the benchmark for judging international crimes. Using new sources--ground-breaking research in the papers of the Nuremberg prison psychiatrist and commandant, the letters and journals of the prisoners, and accounts of the judges and prosecutors as they struggled through each day making compromises and steeling their convictions--Joseph Persico retells the story of Nuremberg, combining sweeping history with psychological insight. Here are brilliant, chilling portraits of the Nazi warlords and riveting descriptions of the tensions between law and vengeance, between East and West, and of the friction already present in the early stages of the Cold War.
560 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
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About the author
Joseph E. Persico
37 books37 followersJoseph E. Persico was the author of Roosevelt’s Secret War: FDR and World War II Espionage; Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918–World War I and Its Violent Climax; Piercing the Reich; and Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial, which was made into a television docudrama. He also collaborated with Colin Powell on his autobiography, My American Journey. He lives in Guilderland, New York.
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May 25, 2024
Ex post facto rule making? Revenge? These were issues that haunted prosecutors and other legal minds as the Nuremberg Trials began. Roosevelt and Churchill had stated, late in the war, that the Nazi leadership should be shot out of hand but when Truman became US President, the idea of an International Military Tribunal was decided upon with judges from the US, UK, France, and Russian presiding. And so it began.
I will not cover everything in this all-inclusive book since the author covers every aspect of the proceedings. He also gives a short history of each of the defendants and the role they played in the War, their defense, and their mental stability.
The Holocaust was obviously the major issue of the trial and many of the defendants claimed that they knew nothing about it or that they we just "following orders', which, to say the least, was a weak defense. And as we know, it was not effective.
An interesting fact was the conflict among the judges and among the defendants. The Russian judges were adamant about executing all of those on trial. The defendants, led by Goering, were split.....should they remain loyal to the Nazi credo or admit guilt. Goering chose the former and Albert Speer chose the latter. Goering was sentenced to death (but escaped the hangman by committing suicide just prior to his hanging). Speer went to prison and after he was freed wrote a best selling book about his years as a Nazi.
This is a detailed and revealing book, well written and fascinating. I highly recommend it.
Note My daughter-in-law's father, who was 19 years old at the time, was a guard at the trial. He died before I had a chance to meet him but I do know that he said the he was too young to realize the history of what he was experiencing.
I will not cover everything in this all-inclusive book since the author covers every aspect of the proceedings. He also gives a short history of each of the defendants and the role they played in the War, their defense, and their mental stability.
The Holocaust was obviously the major issue of the trial and many of the defendants claimed that they knew nothing about it or that they we just "following orders', which, to say the least, was a weak defense. And as we know, it was not effective.
An interesting fact was the conflict among the judges and among the defendants. The Russian judges were adamant about executing all of those on trial. The defendants, led by Goering, were split.....should they remain loyal to the Nazi credo or admit guilt. Goering chose the former and Albert Speer chose the latter. Goering was sentenced to death (but escaped the hangman by committing suicide just prior to his hanging). Speer went to prison and after he was freed wrote a best selling book about his years as a Nazi.
This is a detailed and revealing book, well written and fascinating. I highly recommend it.
Note My daughter-in-law's father, who was 19 years old at the time, was a guard at the trial. He died before I had a chance to meet him but I do know that he said the he was too young to realize the history of what he was experiencing.
July 23, 2013
Poor Fritz Sauckel, the Third Reich’s conscript labor organizer. He was short, bald, uneducated and from a working class background, and he persisted in making things even worse by keeping the toothbrush moustache he wore in homage to his Fuehrer. Furthermore, he only scored 116 on his jailers’ IQ test, third-lowest of the Nuremberg 23. Worst of all, he had no real idea what a “western” trial consisted of (neither did some of the trial officials, but that is another story). In contrast, Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and, far worse, German production czar, was handsome, polished, fluent in several languages, and knew exactly what was happening to him and had a pretty good idea what he had to do to avoid the noose. The problem here, as Persico notes (photo caption): “A key trial issue: who was guiltier, Sauckel the slave trader or Speer the slave driver?”
As you can see from the caption quoted above, Persico is refreshingly immune to Speer’s charms, and I for one find that admirable because I have just finished Speer’s “Inside the Third Reich” and “Nuremberg Diary” and I fear I might have had the same problem so many of the justices and staff did at Nuremberg in ’46, for Speer can be a very appealing figure. He was a repentant breast-beater of the most suave and sympathetic sort; he never groveled, was always dignified, articulate, and seemingly unambiguous in his willingness to assume responsibility for the horrors he did so much to perpetuate. And yet as Persico shrewdly outlines, Speer was first and foremost interested in saving his own neck and since judges and lawyers are by definition “professional” men, he knew how to push the buttons of his class. It was masterfully done. Sauckel didn’t have a chance. And yet there were some doubts:
“During the deliberations over Sauckel, Sir Norman Birkett observed that of course the man was a boor; but should one hand for lack of breeding? Speer’s fate sparked a more fierce (sic?) debate. Francis Biddle was deeply troubled by Speer. He read from an analysis that Butch Fisher had prepared: “Sauckel had never had responsibility for any major policy decisions, but was always used to execute policies which had been decided on by more powerful men such as Goring and Speer.” Furthermore, Speer acted with “complete ruthlessness and unfeeling efficiency in the application of a program which took five million into slave labor and countless numbers to their death.” Speer always got his way over Sauckel, Fisher’s analysis went on. “The violence used in recruiting was largely in response to Speer’s high labor demands.” Biddle set the paper aside. There was no doubt in his mind. Speer’s penalty must be death. Nikitchenko immediately concurred. Only one more vote was needed…” (pp. 392-393)
Speer didn’t get the vote, served 20 years in Spandau Prison, and died in 1981 in London, on his way to be on some TV show or another, in a hotel with his mistress. Postmortem photos of nasty old Fritz Sauckel right after the US Army’s botched hanging can be seen on Wikipedia, his little Hitlerian toothbrush moustache still decorating his dead upper lip. Justice was served, but to what extent?
***
There is a lot of debate over whether or not the Nuremberg Trials were valid, if they set a good or bad example for handling crimes against humanity, etc. I won’t go into that too much here - if only because I am somewhat unsure of this myself. But as for how the trial was handled in terms of basic competence, there was a lot to be desired. The chief prosecutor, US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson had spent too many years on the bench to be an effective or even competent lawyer. His cross-examinations (especially of Speer) were appalling - the Europeans (especially the British) were astonished by how incompetent he was. What Jackson was good at - at least by the standards of the day - was high-flown courtroom rhetoric. In this he was considered a success at the time, but reading the excerpts provided by Persico it is hard to see it being much more than an ambitious judge angling for a legacy using an antique Daniel Webster-Atticus Finch approach; many would’ve preferred a vivisection of Albert Speer based on evidence.
Beyond Jackson’s bloviating failures and lack of organization, the entire effort was plagued by a constant turnover based on military “points” and general string-pulling. Administratively, tons of documents and testimony had to be processed by what amounted to a bunch of temps. Some of the temps were brilliant, some not so much. As for the lawyers, lots and lots of youngsters clamored for a chance to be a part of history (and to thereby launch their careers as civilians) and their lack of experience sometimes showed painfully. Persico does a fine job pointing out this stuff, although I blipped over a lot of it, the grinding mill of justice being, well, a grind.
There were frantic little professional hithers and thithers among the psychiatrists as well. Head-shrinking a Nazi bigwig was a real career-maker and all the usual sucking-up and tiny betrayals ensued; Gus Gilbert’s naked career ambitions are particularly egregious. Some of this psychiatry seems pretty obsolete now (Freudian analysis, you know) and some of it bordered on the obstruction of (or meddling with) justice (all those in-depth bouts of the talking-cure). A study on how the shrinks influenced the weaker defendants would be interesting. I will give them credit for one thing though: they published everybody’s IQ and Speer, for all his sophistication, came off near the bottom of the list. Cruel, yes, but the creep deserved it (Wikipedia has a chart of the IQ results in their Nuremberg Trials article).
The jailer’s aspect to the Nuremberg trials makes for an interesting case in itself. The security was, by the standards of the day, tight. But three of the prisoners committed suicide, including Robert Ley (strangled himself while seated on the toilet) and, famously, Herman Goering, who poisoned himself. This is not exactly a brilliant record, despite considerable resources devoted to the preservation of the evil doers. The head jailer was Colonel Bert Andrus, a figure who somehow manages to be only occasionally ridiculous despite his best efforts to be ridiculous all the time. He is perhaps the last high-profile US Army officer to carry a riding crop, and he had his helmet liner lacquered just like General Patton’s. He was a bit of a martinet, and yet he was conscientious and rather shrewd. It is hard not to be amused by his tough-guy self-regard; here is Andrus describing Herman Goering as a fresh fish:
"When Goering came to me at Mondorf, he was a simpering slob with two suitcases full of paracodeine. I thought he was a drug salesman. But we took him off his dope and made a man of him.” (Gilbert’s Nuremberg Diary, page 11).
Unfortunately, a drug-free Goering proved to be a nightmare for the Tribunal, since he was a master of manipulation, capable of apparently overwhelming charm (I know, hard to believe) and was smarter than most of the people trying to hang him. A drug-free Goering was a lot smarter than his jailer too, since despite the elaborate precautions taken after Ley garroted himself, Goering managed to commit suicide. Apparently, Goering managed to charm Lt. Jack G. “Tex” Wheelis with flattery and corny Nazi-porn autographed souvenirs many of the US guards craved. Wheelis went soft on Goering and this is apparently how Goering retrieved his last vial of poison from his luggage (he very shrewdly hid two others that could be easily (but not too easily) found when he was first arrested). The book even features a photo of Lt. Tex with Goering and Persico examines this situation in an appendix, which doesn’t prove Wheelis’ complicity so much as it suggests his gullibility and an overall laxness in security despite Andrus’ spit-n-polish harangues. In Andrus’s defense, his guard staff suffered from the same ridiculously high level of turnover that the legal staff did; again, the Army’s “point” system at work, combined with the fact the men sent to him were sometimes the rejects from other units and the fact that everybody just wanted to go home in 1946.
Finally (and I mean finally), the last instance of Allied incompetence came during the executions. As for the “botched” US Army hanging of Fritz Sauckel noted above, it appears that Sgt. John Woods, despite claims of being an expert hangman, made a real mess of things, miscalculating drops, getting knots wrong and whatever else goes into making an inept hangman. Some of the Nazis strangled (time elapsed before death was pronounced for Ribbentrop was 17 minutes, for Keitel 18 minutes). As awful as this is, the fact the US Army did not have a competent hangman in its ranks at the end of World War II is something all Americans can be proud of, since many of the other combatants were all too good at such things.
***
The book deals with both the judicial proceedings and the personalities and crimes of the accused. It is the latter that interested me most, since legal proceedings are almost by definition characterized by long stretches of incredibly boring procedure. To Persico’s credit he keeps the judges and lawyers from putting me to sleep the way they did Rudolph Hess. Repellent as they are, the Nazi defendants were a pretty interesting bunch. Goering dominated them to various degrees, attempting to mount some sort of unified defense of Nazism. This seemed to be an exercise in warped legacy-mongering since he knew he wasn’t going to escape the noose (although he did, kind of). His constant needling of the weaker defendants was a constant problem for the jailers, who finally had to resort to segregating him from the other prisoners. Goering’s courtroom performance was sometimes masterful, since he seemed both smarter and better prepared than some of his prosecutors. He was also well aware of US-Soviet tensions and made efforts to exploit them. Horrible to behold, but rather interesting to read about.
Speer infuriated Goering with is seemingly frank admission of guilt and responsibility. Goering saw this as hypocrisy of the highest order, and an outright betrayal by a guy who perhaps more than anyone benefited from Hitler’s friendship (if that’s the word). But Speer thought there was a hope of saving his skin, so he struck out on his own. His shrewd sophistries are interesting to follow; take responsibility and admit guilt, but don’t cringe or find the Lord (the way Frank did). Don’t hide behind “duty” the way the military guys did. Only when desperate did Speer pretend he wasn’t aware of what was going on. There is considerable evidence that he visited a concentration camp, something he vigorously denied in order to maintain that he had no idea where Fritz Saukel scrounged up all those workers. My guess is that Speer, like many of the other high-ranking Nazis (including, astonishingly enough, Hitler) did not leave much of a paper trail on purpose. This proved to have been a shrewd move at Nuremberg.
The military men presented a special problem for the Tribunal. The Kreigsmarine (Navy) was being indicted, basically, for submarine warfare, a branch of service not unfamiliar to the Allies, which is why Raeder and Doenitz didn’t hang (and despite the fact Doenitz was Hitler’s hand-picked successor!). But Hitler’s two HQ guys on the ground Keitel and Jodl both got the noose. They are an interesting pair; nobody respected Keitel, who was known for nodding in agreement so much he was called “Hitler’s donkey.” Jodl played the taciturn straight-man to Keitel’s clown, but to keep his job he had to be every bit as obsequious - he was just cooler about it. There was a lot of attempts to blame the military for execution of POW’s that were pretty easy to prove (especially for Soviet POW’s) but outrageously, Stalin insisted that the Katyn Massacre of the Polish officer corps be pinned on the Nazis as well. Everybody knew the Soviets did it, and the audacity of the Soviet intransigence embarrassed virtually everybody on the bench. But there was still plenty to hang Keitel and Jodl, if only because they both knew about the Final Solution and its attendant atrocities (mass starvation of Soviet POWs, slavery, etc.). And yet many in the military had an uneasy feeling about their death sentences, if only because it does seem that being out to sea in a literal sense was also considered the same thing as being out to sea in the metaphorical sense. In one of the stranger episodes of World War II, US Admiral Chester Nimitz, fresh from his victories in the Pacific answered interrogatories about unrestricted submarine warfare that boiled down to an acknowledgement that the good guys did it too. His testimony may have been what was needed to save the necks of both Admirals Raeder and Doenitz.
Then there are the thugs, weirdos and dopes. Saukel (who was apparently for all his shortcomings, an energetic and effective procurer of slaves) was whiney, panicky and clueless in jail. The repellent Julius Streicher (Anti-Semitic agitator and pornographer) was loathed by virtually everyone on either side of the dock at Nuremberg for everything from general nuttiness to personal hygiene (he apparently used to exercise in the nude then wash his face in the toilet afterwards, to the dismay of the guard who had to stand at the door watching him). The lugubrious Hans Frank who vigorously raped Poland and lived so opulently in his stolen castle that it was shocking even by Nazi standards underwent a desperate slob’s jailhouse born-again conversion to Christianity, which delighted the chaplain but disgusted just about everybody else. These guys, especially Streicher, were shunned by the other Nazis in a fashion familiar to anybody who went to middle school. Even Goering didn’t bother much with converting them after a while.
Then there were the failed Nazis, those guys from the early days who hung on, but had lost all their power through incompetence or general befuddlement: Alfred Rosenberg the Anti-Semitic theorist, unreadable scribbler, and failed administrator. Rudolph Hess, perhaps Hitler’s only unselfish true believer whose quixotic flight to England in 1941 led to decades in prison; he feigned insanity so long it appears that it finally became real. Walther Funk (out-maneuvered by Bormann and everyone else, basically drank himself through World War II). Joachim von Ribbentrop was Hitler’s Foreign Minister, universally thought of as a shallow, pompous, yet vicious fool. Of all the defendants, the fall of Hitler and his arrest seemed to truly unhinge Ribbentrop, who spent his last days in a pigsty of a jail cell thumbing through sheaves of scattered papers frantically but incoherently trying to figure out a way to save his skin. Everyone despised Ribbentrop, including Speer, but I am happy to report he scored one IQ point higher than Speer. These guys were low on the popularity scale as well, although again, Goering, the most popular kid on the playground, tried to enlist them into his schemes.
Wilhelm Frick (Minister of the Interior), Ernst Kaltenbrunner (highest-ranking SS guy) and Arthur Seyss-Inquart (helped implement the Austrian Anschluss, then ruled over the Netherlands, which he ransacked and starved) were all to some extent the cool guys on the cell block. At least in that they didn’t engage in too may histrionics or desperate bids for innocence; they all seemed to know they were doomed. Seyss-Inquart did rediscover Catholicism, but didn’t flagellate himself in public about it. They all hanged.
There was a ragbag of other low-level or remaindered Nazis on trial mostly because the Soviets insisted on it. Handsome radio personality Hans Fritsche was on trial as a surrogate for Propaganda Czar Goebbels (and because he was one of the few ranking Nazis the Soviets captured; in 1945 everybody who was anybody in the Third Reich headed west towards the US or UK lines). Franz von Papen was an vile old political schemer who thought he could control Hitler after letting him have power; he basically didn’t have much to do with anything after about 1933. Konstantin von Neurath was Minister of Foreign Affairs before Ribbentrop, lost his job because he disagreed with Hitler back in 1938 before the war even started. Hjalmar Schacht (the economic genius who basically figured out how to fund the Nazis rise to power) also ran afoul of the Nazis (over economic not ideological matters) and was in a concentration camp at the end of the war (Ravensbrück and Dachau; something his lawyers made a lot of use of in his defense). Gustav Krupp was arrested for being son and heir to the “Guns of Krupp” armaments empire; his father was too ill to stand trial. His indictment was rejected by the judges, although he was tried later for slave labor, something pretty much all the factory owners of the Reich were involved with, I think. Your coffee maker might be a Krupp. Not that this makes it okay, but it is weird seeing all those BMWs and Volkswagens driving around sometimes. But I digress… These guys had a pretty good chance at a relatively modest jail sentence or even acquittal, so they shunned Goering and anybody else who was clearly going down. Unfortunately Persico doesn’t spend much time with these guys, which I suspect is a bit of a missed opportunity, the Banality of Evil’s middle management types being somewhat underreported.
***
This is a pretty engaging book despite being somewhat poorly written. Persico has a flinty journalist’s eye and a first class bullshit detector. Unfortunately, he writes in a kind of antique hardboiled journalist’s style left over from World War II that got so bad at one point I had to check the copyright page to make sure it wasn’t originally written in 1948. The other problem is that although he seems to have thoroughly researched everything, he indulges in interior monologues: “The “why” still gnawed at Gus Gilbert after every cell visit…” (p. 188). This sort of thing certainly gooses the narrative, but when reading I am constantly doubting the author’s omniscience: after “every” cell visit he was “gnawed” by this question? Yeah, sure he was.
Another problem is the way Persico works “the banality of evil” angle to death. Human beings, even Nazis, are all pretty much poor forked creatures once you strip off the jack boots and the villas and the stormtrooper body guard. Persico makes the annoying mistake of characterizing the defendants as being “nondescript” or worse - any group of middle-aged men of power and influence suddenly stripped of power, locked in a jail for months, wearing cast-off clothes and put under harsh lights, would look pretty sorry. General Jodl and General Eisenhower would be fairly indistinguishable in these circumstances. Even Patton would be just another pathetic old guy in the Nuremberg dock. By jeering at their appearance, Persico runs the risk of making them pitiable. They weren't.
As you can see from the caption quoted above, Persico is refreshingly immune to Speer’s charms, and I for one find that admirable because I have just finished Speer’s “Inside the Third Reich” and “Nuremberg Diary” and I fear I might have had the same problem so many of the justices and staff did at Nuremberg in ’46, for Speer can be a very appealing figure. He was a repentant breast-beater of the most suave and sympathetic sort; he never groveled, was always dignified, articulate, and seemingly unambiguous in his willingness to assume responsibility for the horrors he did so much to perpetuate. And yet as Persico shrewdly outlines, Speer was first and foremost interested in saving his own neck and since judges and lawyers are by definition “professional” men, he knew how to push the buttons of his class. It was masterfully done. Sauckel didn’t have a chance. And yet there were some doubts:
“During the deliberations over Sauckel, Sir Norman Birkett observed that of course the man was a boor; but should one hand for lack of breeding? Speer’s fate sparked a more fierce (sic?) debate. Francis Biddle was deeply troubled by Speer. He read from an analysis that Butch Fisher had prepared: “Sauckel had never had responsibility for any major policy decisions, but was always used to execute policies which had been decided on by more powerful men such as Goring and Speer.” Furthermore, Speer acted with “complete ruthlessness and unfeeling efficiency in the application of a program which took five million into slave labor and countless numbers to their death.” Speer always got his way over Sauckel, Fisher’s analysis went on. “The violence used in recruiting was largely in response to Speer’s high labor demands.” Biddle set the paper aside. There was no doubt in his mind. Speer’s penalty must be death. Nikitchenko immediately concurred. Only one more vote was needed…” (pp. 392-393)
Speer didn’t get the vote, served 20 years in Spandau Prison, and died in 1981 in London, on his way to be on some TV show or another, in a hotel with his mistress. Postmortem photos of nasty old Fritz Sauckel right after the US Army’s botched hanging can be seen on Wikipedia, his little Hitlerian toothbrush moustache still decorating his dead upper lip. Justice was served, but to what extent?
***
There is a lot of debate over whether or not the Nuremberg Trials were valid, if they set a good or bad example for handling crimes against humanity, etc. I won’t go into that too much here - if only because I am somewhat unsure of this myself. But as for how the trial was handled in terms of basic competence, there was a lot to be desired. The chief prosecutor, US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson had spent too many years on the bench to be an effective or even competent lawyer. His cross-examinations (especially of Speer) were appalling - the Europeans (especially the British) were astonished by how incompetent he was. What Jackson was good at - at least by the standards of the day - was high-flown courtroom rhetoric. In this he was considered a success at the time, but reading the excerpts provided by Persico it is hard to see it being much more than an ambitious judge angling for a legacy using an antique Daniel Webster-Atticus Finch approach; many would’ve preferred a vivisection of Albert Speer based on evidence.
Beyond Jackson’s bloviating failures and lack of organization, the entire effort was plagued by a constant turnover based on military “points” and general string-pulling. Administratively, tons of documents and testimony had to be processed by what amounted to a bunch of temps. Some of the temps were brilliant, some not so much. As for the lawyers, lots and lots of youngsters clamored for a chance to be a part of history (and to thereby launch their careers as civilians) and their lack of experience sometimes showed painfully. Persico does a fine job pointing out this stuff, although I blipped over a lot of it, the grinding mill of justice being, well, a grind.
There were frantic little professional hithers and thithers among the psychiatrists as well. Head-shrinking a Nazi bigwig was a real career-maker and all the usual sucking-up and tiny betrayals ensued; Gus Gilbert’s naked career ambitions are particularly egregious. Some of this psychiatry seems pretty obsolete now (Freudian analysis, you know) and some of it bordered on the obstruction of (or meddling with) justice (all those in-depth bouts of the talking-cure). A study on how the shrinks influenced the weaker defendants would be interesting. I will give them credit for one thing though: they published everybody’s IQ and Speer, for all his sophistication, came off near the bottom of the list. Cruel, yes, but the creep deserved it (Wikipedia has a chart of the IQ results in their Nuremberg Trials article).
The jailer’s aspect to the Nuremberg trials makes for an interesting case in itself. The security was, by the standards of the day, tight. But three of the prisoners committed suicide, including Robert Ley (strangled himself while seated on the toilet) and, famously, Herman Goering, who poisoned himself. This is not exactly a brilliant record, despite considerable resources devoted to the preservation of the evil doers. The head jailer was Colonel Bert Andrus, a figure who somehow manages to be only occasionally ridiculous despite his best efforts to be ridiculous all the time. He is perhaps the last high-profile US Army officer to carry a riding crop, and he had his helmet liner lacquered just like General Patton’s. He was a bit of a martinet, and yet he was conscientious and rather shrewd. It is hard not to be amused by his tough-guy self-regard; here is Andrus describing Herman Goering as a fresh fish:
"When Goering came to me at Mondorf, he was a simpering slob with two suitcases full of paracodeine. I thought he was a drug salesman. But we took him off his dope and made a man of him.” (Gilbert’s Nuremberg Diary, page 11).
Unfortunately, a drug-free Goering proved to be a nightmare for the Tribunal, since he was a master of manipulation, capable of apparently overwhelming charm (I know, hard to believe) and was smarter than most of the people trying to hang him. A drug-free Goering was a lot smarter than his jailer too, since despite the elaborate precautions taken after Ley garroted himself, Goering managed to commit suicide. Apparently, Goering managed to charm Lt. Jack G. “Tex” Wheelis with flattery and corny Nazi-porn autographed souvenirs many of the US guards craved. Wheelis went soft on Goering and this is apparently how Goering retrieved his last vial of poison from his luggage (he very shrewdly hid two others that could be easily (but not too easily) found when he was first arrested). The book even features a photo of Lt. Tex with Goering and Persico examines this situation in an appendix, which doesn’t prove Wheelis’ complicity so much as it suggests his gullibility and an overall laxness in security despite Andrus’ spit-n-polish harangues. In Andrus’s defense, his guard staff suffered from the same ridiculously high level of turnover that the legal staff did; again, the Army’s “point” system at work, combined with the fact the men sent to him were sometimes the rejects from other units and the fact that everybody just wanted to go home in 1946.
Finally (and I mean finally), the last instance of Allied incompetence came during the executions. As for the “botched” US Army hanging of Fritz Sauckel noted above, it appears that Sgt. John Woods, despite claims of being an expert hangman, made a real mess of things, miscalculating drops, getting knots wrong and whatever else goes into making an inept hangman. Some of the Nazis strangled (time elapsed before death was pronounced for Ribbentrop was 17 minutes, for Keitel 18 minutes). As awful as this is, the fact the US Army did not have a competent hangman in its ranks at the end of World War II is something all Americans can be proud of, since many of the other combatants were all too good at such things.
***
The book deals with both the judicial proceedings and the personalities and crimes of the accused. It is the latter that interested me most, since legal proceedings are almost by definition characterized by long stretches of incredibly boring procedure. To Persico’s credit he keeps the judges and lawyers from putting me to sleep the way they did Rudolph Hess. Repellent as they are, the Nazi defendants were a pretty interesting bunch. Goering dominated them to various degrees, attempting to mount some sort of unified defense of Nazism. This seemed to be an exercise in warped legacy-mongering since he knew he wasn’t going to escape the noose (although he did, kind of). His constant needling of the weaker defendants was a constant problem for the jailers, who finally had to resort to segregating him from the other prisoners. Goering’s courtroom performance was sometimes masterful, since he seemed both smarter and better prepared than some of his prosecutors. He was also well aware of US-Soviet tensions and made efforts to exploit them. Horrible to behold, but rather interesting to read about.
Speer infuriated Goering with is seemingly frank admission of guilt and responsibility. Goering saw this as hypocrisy of the highest order, and an outright betrayal by a guy who perhaps more than anyone benefited from Hitler’s friendship (if that’s the word). But Speer thought there was a hope of saving his skin, so he struck out on his own. His shrewd sophistries are interesting to follow; take responsibility and admit guilt, but don’t cringe or find the Lord (the way Frank did). Don’t hide behind “duty” the way the military guys did. Only when desperate did Speer pretend he wasn’t aware of what was going on. There is considerable evidence that he visited a concentration camp, something he vigorously denied in order to maintain that he had no idea where Fritz Saukel scrounged up all those workers. My guess is that Speer, like many of the other high-ranking Nazis (including, astonishingly enough, Hitler) did not leave much of a paper trail on purpose. This proved to have been a shrewd move at Nuremberg.
The military men presented a special problem for the Tribunal. The Kreigsmarine (Navy) was being indicted, basically, for submarine warfare, a branch of service not unfamiliar to the Allies, which is why Raeder and Doenitz didn’t hang (and despite the fact Doenitz was Hitler’s hand-picked successor!). But Hitler’s two HQ guys on the ground Keitel and Jodl both got the noose. They are an interesting pair; nobody respected Keitel, who was known for nodding in agreement so much he was called “Hitler’s donkey.” Jodl played the taciturn straight-man to Keitel’s clown, but to keep his job he had to be every bit as obsequious - he was just cooler about it. There was a lot of attempts to blame the military for execution of POW’s that were pretty easy to prove (especially for Soviet POW’s) but outrageously, Stalin insisted that the Katyn Massacre of the Polish officer corps be pinned on the Nazis as well. Everybody knew the Soviets did it, and the audacity of the Soviet intransigence embarrassed virtually everybody on the bench. But there was still plenty to hang Keitel and Jodl, if only because they both knew about the Final Solution and its attendant atrocities (mass starvation of Soviet POWs, slavery, etc.). And yet many in the military had an uneasy feeling about their death sentences, if only because it does seem that being out to sea in a literal sense was also considered the same thing as being out to sea in the metaphorical sense. In one of the stranger episodes of World War II, US Admiral Chester Nimitz, fresh from his victories in the Pacific answered interrogatories about unrestricted submarine warfare that boiled down to an acknowledgement that the good guys did it too. His testimony may have been what was needed to save the necks of both Admirals Raeder and Doenitz.
Then there are the thugs, weirdos and dopes. Saukel (who was apparently for all his shortcomings, an energetic and effective procurer of slaves) was whiney, panicky and clueless in jail. The repellent Julius Streicher (Anti-Semitic agitator and pornographer) was loathed by virtually everyone on either side of the dock at Nuremberg for everything from general nuttiness to personal hygiene (he apparently used to exercise in the nude then wash his face in the toilet afterwards, to the dismay of the guard who had to stand at the door watching him). The lugubrious Hans Frank who vigorously raped Poland and lived so opulently in his stolen castle that it was shocking even by Nazi standards underwent a desperate slob’s jailhouse born-again conversion to Christianity, which delighted the chaplain but disgusted just about everybody else. These guys, especially Streicher, were shunned by the other Nazis in a fashion familiar to anybody who went to middle school. Even Goering didn’t bother much with converting them after a while.
Then there were the failed Nazis, those guys from the early days who hung on, but had lost all their power through incompetence or general befuddlement: Alfred Rosenberg the Anti-Semitic theorist, unreadable scribbler, and failed administrator. Rudolph Hess, perhaps Hitler’s only unselfish true believer whose quixotic flight to England in 1941 led to decades in prison; he feigned insanity so long it appears that it finally became real. Walther Funk (out-maneuvered by Bormann and everyone else, basically drank himself through World War II). Joachim von Ribbentrop was Hitler’s Foreign Minister, universally thought of as a shallow, pompous, yet vicious fool. Of all the defendants, the fall of Hitler and his arrest seemed to truly unhinge Ribbentrop, who spent his last days in a pigsty of a jail cell thumbing through sheaves of scattered papers frantically but incoherently trying to figure out a way to save his skin. Everyone despised Ribbentrop, including Speer, but I am happy to report he scored one IQ point higher than Speer. These guys were low on the popularity scale as well, although again, Goering, the most popular kid on the playground, tried to enlist them into his schemes.
Wilhelm Frick (Minister of the Interior), Ernst Kaltenbrunner (highest-ranking SS guy) and Arthur Seyss-Inquart (helped implement the Austrian Anschluss, then ruled over the Netherlands, which he ransacked and starved) were all to some extent the cool guys on the cell block. At least in that they didn’t engage in too may histrionics or desperate bids for innocence; they all seemed to know they were doomed. Seyss-Inquart did rediscover Catholicism, but didn’t flagellate himself in public about it. They all hanged.
There was a ragbag of other low-level or remaindered Nazis on trial mostly because the Soviets insisted on it. Handsome radio personality Hans Fritsche was on trial as a surrogate for Propaganda Czar Goebbels (and because he was one of the few ranking Nazis the Soviets captured; in 1945 everybody who was anybody in the Third Reich headed west towards the US or UK lines). Franz von Papen was an vile old political schemer who thought he could control Hitler after letting him have power; he basically didn’t have much to do with anything after about 1933. Konstantin von Neurath was Minister of Foreign Affairs before Ribbentrop, lost his job because he disagreed with Hitler back in 1938 before the war even started. Hjalmar Schacht (the economic genius who basically figured out how to fund the Nazis rise to power) also ran afoul of the Nazis (over economic not ideological matters) and was in a concentration camp at the end of the war (Ravensbrück and Dachau; something his lawyers made a lot of use of in his defense). Gustav Krupp was arrested for being son and heir to the “Guns of Krupp” armaments empire; his father was too ill to stand trial. His indictment was rejected by the judges, although he was tried later for slave labor, something pretty much all the factory owners of the Reich were involved with, I think. Your coffee maker might be a Krupp. Not that this makes it okay, but it is weird seeing all those BMWs and Volkswagens driving around sometimes. But I digress… These guys had a pretty good chance at a relatively modest jail sentence or even acquittal, so they shunned Goering and anybody else who was clearly going down. Unfortunately Persico doesn’t spend much time with these guys, which I suspect is a bit of a missed opportunity, the Banality of Evil’s middle management types being somewhat underreported.
***
This is a pretty engaging book despite being somewhat poorly written. Persico has a flinty journalist’s eye and a first class bullshit detector. Unfortunately, he writes in a kind of antique hardboiled journalist’s style left over from World War II that got so bad at one point I had to check the copyright page to make sure it wasn’t originally written in 1948. The other problem is that although he seems to have thoroughly researched everything, he indulges in interior monologues: “The “why” still gnawed at Gus Gilbert after every cell visit…” (p. 188). This sort of thing certainly gooses the narrative, but when reading I am constantly doubting the author’s omniscience: after “every” cell visit he was “gnawed” by this question? Yeah, sure he was.
Another problem is the way Persico works “the banality of evil” angle to death. Human beings, even Nazis, are all pretty much poor forked creatures once you strip off the jack boots and the villas and the stormtrooper body guard. Persico makes the annoying mistake of characterizing the defendants as being “nondescript” or worse - any group of middle-aged men of power and influence suddenly stripped of power, locked in a jail for months, wearing cast-off clothes and put under harsh lights, would look pretty sorry. General Jodl and General Eisenhower would be fairly indistinguishable in these circumstances. Even Patton would be just another pathetic old guy in the Nuremberg dock. By jeering at their appearance, Persico runs the risk of making them pitiable. They weren't.
September 11, 2024
Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial’ın bitmesi ile beraber 5 aydır gecemi gündüzümü ele geçiren III. Reich hakkında kurgu ya da kurgu dışı her şeyi okuma maratonuma (biraz da akıl sağlığım için) ara veriyorum...
Infamy on Trial, bu maratonun şimdilik sonuncusu olarak okuduğum en iyi kitaplardan birisi oldu. Persico, bütün Nuremberg davasını neden böyle bir uluslararası mahkemenin kurulması gerektiği noktasından alarak, aralarında Göring, Speer, Frank, Hess ve Rosenberg de bulunan 22 savaş suçlusunun hangi suçlarla yargılandığını, Nazi hareketine nasıl ve neden katıldıklarını, kısa biyografilerini, hücrede tutuldukları müddetçe yaşananları da anlatarak neredeyse soluk soluğa okunan bir kitap yazmış. Mahkemenin kurulacağı yer olarak neden Nuremberg’in seçildiği, yargıç ve avukatların nasıl atandığı, iddia ve savunma makamlarının sorgu ve kararlarının nasıl işlediği, 4 asıl ve 4 yedek yargıcın yaklaşık 1 yıl süren mahkeme neticesinde nasıl ve ne şekilde ceza ve infaza karar verdikleri; 11’i asılarak, bir kısmı ömür boyu hapis, bir kısmı 10-20 yıl arası hapis cezası alan, aralarından 2’sinin de serbest bırakıldığı mahkumların arkasından bu davanın gerçekten bir işe yarayıp yaramadığı gibi pek çok detay okuyor ve çok şey öğreniyorsunuz.
Okuması değil ama sebat ederek devam etmesi çok zor bir kitap Infamy on Trial. Nazi döneminde işlenen özellikle “crimes against humanity” suçunun ispatı için sorgulananlar, özellikle toplama ve ölüm kamplarında bulunanların söyledikleri, ve bizzat Nazilerin tutanaklarından ortaya çıkan ve dünya dursa aklımın almayacağı imha yollarının anlatıldığı yerleri okumak yeterince zorken sonrasında bu yolları bulan ve uygulayan/uygulatan mahkumların genellikle de soğukkanlılıkla yaptığı yorumları okumak çoğu noktada beni çok sarstı.
Özellikle cezaevi psikoloğunun, çoğu gayet sofistike ve çok da zeki olan bu mahkumların, örneği görülmemiş bu suçları işleyebilmelerinin “nasıl”ını adım adım keşfetmesi çok ufuk açıcıydı benim için.
Combine unthinking obedience, racism, and a disconnection from the kinship of mankind, and you could produce an Auschwitz commandant.
His arriving at a solution that satisfied the mind served only to depress Gilbert's spirits. Every society had its authority-ridden personalities. Bigots exist all over. And schizoids, dead to normal feeling, walk the streets every day. The latent ingredients could be found everywhere.
The distinction in Nazi Germany had been that these people had not functioned on the margins of society. They had run it.
Infamy on Trial, bu maratonun şimdilik sonuncusu olarak okuduğum en iyi kitaplardan birisi oldu. Persico, bütün Nuremberg davasını neden böyle bir uluslararası mahkemenin kurulması gerektiği noktasından alarak, aralarında Göring, Speer, Frank, Hess ve Rosenberg de bulunan 22 savaş suçlusunun hangi suçlarla yargılandığını, Nazi hareketine nasıl ve neden katıldıklarını, kısa biyografilerini, hücrede tutuldukları müddetçe yaşananları da anlatarak neredeyse soluk soluğa okunan bir kitap yazmış. Mahkemenin kurulacağı yer olarak neden Nuremberg’in seçildiği, yargıç ve avukatların nasıl atandığı, iddia ve savunma makamlarının sorgu ve kararlarının nasıl işlediği, 4 asıl ve 4 yedek yargıcın yaklaşık 1 yıl süren mahkeme neticesinde nasıl ve ne şekilde ceza ve infaza karar verdikleri; 11’i asılarak, bir kısmı ömür boyu hapis, bir kısmı 10-20 yıl arası hapis cezası alan, aralarından 2’sinin de serbest bırakıldığı mahkumların arkasından bu davanın gerçekten bir işe yarayıp yaramadığı gibi pek çok detay okuyor ve çok şey öğreniyorsunuz.
Okuması değil ama sebat ederek devam etmesi çok zor bir kitap Infamy on Trial. Nazi döneminde işlenen özellikle “crimes against humanity” suçunun ispatı için sorgulananlar, özellikle toplama ve ölüm kamplarında bulunanların söyledikleri, ve bizzat Nazilerin tutanaklarından ortaya çıkan ve dünya dursa aklımın almayacağı imha yollarının anlatıldığı yerleri okumak yeterince zorken sonrasında bu yolları bulan ve uygulayan/uygulatan mahkumların genellikle de soğukkanlılıkla yaptığı yorumları okumak çoğu noktada beni çok sarstı.
Özellikle cezaevi psikoloğunun, çoğu gayet sofistike ve çok da zeki olan bu mahkumların, örneği görülmemiş bu suçları işleyebilmelerinin “nasıl”ını adım adım keşfetmesi çok ufuk açıcıydı benim için.
Combine unthinking obedience, racism, and a disconnection from the kinship of mankind, and you could produce an Auschwitz commandant.
His arriving at a solution that satisfied the mind served only to depress Gilbert's spirits. Every society had its authority-ridden personalities. Bigots exist all over. And schizoids, dead to normal feeling, walk the streets every day. The latent ingredients could be found everywhere.
The distinction in Nazi Germany had been that these people had not functioned on the margins of society. They had run it.
February 19, 2020
Because I had a marvelous history teacher, in high school, I thought I knew a lot about the Nuremberg Trials. Because of this book I learned so much more.
This book takes you behind the scenes. Introduces you to all the people behind the trial-
The Justices: They wondered if they were putting the cart before the horse-The laws to judge the Nazi's were cemented in stone after the war had ended. Could they do this? Marvelous look into the legalize of those schooled to uphold the law. Could they judge these men, putting aside their own contempt for them?
The Nazi's: I learned their prior lives, how they grew up, how they ended up following a demented evil soul like Hitler. Were some of them "just following orders" as they pleaded? Or was that just a cover to absolve them of their guilt in the horrific crimes?
The Lawyers, the aides, the psychologist and psychiatrist, the doctors. Joseph E. Persico's looks at all of them and tells a non-fiction tale that reads so easily. There are, of course, hundreds of people who were involved. The book supplies you with a list of all the main principles to refer to, as you read. I was thankful for that. And of course, as with any great non-fiction, at the end there is follow-up telling you what happened to them all.
Highly Recommended if history is your interest.
This book takes you behind the scenes. Introduces you to all the people behind the trial-
The Justices: They wondered if they were putting the cart before the horse-The laws to judge the Nazi's were cemented in stone after the war had ended. Could they do this? Marvelous look into the legalize of those schooled to uphold the law. Could they judge these men, putting aside their own contempt for them?
The Nazi's: I learned their prior lives, how they grew up, how they ended up following a demented evil soul like Hitler. Were some of them "just following orders" as they pleaded? Or was that just a cover to absolve them of their guilt in the horrific crimes?
The Lawyers, the aides, the psychologist and psychiatrist, the doctors. Joseph E. Persico's looks at all of them and tells a non-fiction tale that reads so easily. There are, of course, hundreds of people who were involved. The book supplies you with a list of all the main principles to refer to, as you read. I was thankful for that. And of course, as with any great non-fiction, at the end there is follow-up telling you what happened to them all.
Highly Recommended if history is your interest.
June 16, 2020
“Nuremberg” evokes the quirks and foibles of the Nazis who conquered and ruled Europe with unspeakable cruelty. Goering, for example, is revealed to be a dangerously charming sociopath, a bloodstained voluptuary who showered expensive baubles on his jailers and insisted on sleeping in his favorite blue silk pajamas in an otherwise Spartan cell. Tellingly, when Goering’s young daughter was allowed to visit him shortly before the verdict, she asked: “Daddy, when you come home, will you wear all your medals in the bathtub like everybody says you do?’
Persico invests a good deal of time and effort in describing the little scandals and the petty turf wars that raged within the legal bureaucracy of the International Military Tribunal. Persico suggests, for example, that prosecutor Jackson took advantage of the no-wives-allowed rule to conduct an affair with his secretary. And he gives us a play-by-play account of two American prison psychologists who ruthlessly competed with each other to come out with the first book about the Nuremberg defendants.
Persico also concerns himself with the fine points of the judgment at Nuremberg. Was it proper to hang Julius Streicher, he ponders, whose principal crime was the publication of a newspaper filled with anti-Semitic pornography? And why did the judges impose the death penalty on Fritz Sauckel, a Nazi functionary with a blue-collar background who conscripted slave laborers by the millions, and not on Speer, the cultivated technocrat who worked the slave laborers to death in his arms factories?
“In sending Sauckel to die and allowing Speer to live,” Persico observes, “the court, consciously or unconsciously, made a class judgment.”
Persico weighs the equities of the Nuremberg trial, and--although he is not entirely pleased with the legal procedures or the specific verdicts--he declares his approval of its work: “Nuremberg may have been flawed law,” he concludes, “but it was satisfying justice.”
Lest we forget the crimes of Nazi Germany--and lest we entertain any doubts about the ample evidence of those crimes--Persico’s “Nuremberg” shows us that the defendants never even attempted to dispute that torture, enslavement and murder were conducted on a grotesque scale in concentration camps and killing pits all over Europe. They merely competed with each other to shift the responsibility for their crimes to each other or to Nazis who were conveniently dead.
And that is the single most important function of the Nuremberg war crimes trial and, for that matter, Persico’s book: It’s a pointed reminder that the crimes against humanity committed by the Third Reich were rigorously and repeatedly proven by hard evidence during the trial itself.
Persico invests a good deal of time and effort in describing the little scandals and the petty turf wars that raged within the legal bureaucracy of the International Military Tribunal. Persico suggests, for example, that prosecutor Jackson took advantage of the no-wives-allowed rule to conduct an affair with his secretary. And he gives us a play-by-play account of two American prison psychologists who ruthlessly competed with each other to come out with the first book about the Nuremberg defendants.
Persico also concerns himself with the fine points of the judgment at Nuremberg. Was it proper to hang Julius Streicher, he ponders, whose principal crime was the publication of a newspaper filled with anti-Semitic pornography? And why did the judges impose the death penalty on Fritz Sauckel, a Nazi functionary with a blue-collar background who conscripted slave laborers by the millions, and not on Speer, the cultivated technocrat who worked the slave laborers to death in his arms factories?
“In sending Sauckel to die and allowing Speer to live,” Persico observes, “the court, consciously or unconsciously, made a class judgment.”
Persico weighs the equities of the Nuremberg trial, and--although he is not entirely pleased with the legal procedures or the specific verdicts--he declares his approval of its work: “Nuremberg may have been flawed law,” he concludes, “but it was satisfying justice.”
Lest we forget the crimes of Nazi Germany--and lest we entertain any doubts about the ample evidence of those crimes--Persico’s “Nuremberg” shows us that the defendants never even attempted to dispute that torture, enslavement and murder were conducted on a grotesque scale in concentration camps and killing pits all over Europe. They merely competed with each other to shift the responsibility for their crimes to each other or to Nazis who were conveniently dead.
And that is the single most important function of the Nuremberg war crimes trial and, for that matter, Persico’s book: It’s a pointed reminder that the crimes against humanity committed by the Third Reich were rigorously and repeatedly proven by hard evidence during the trial itself.
January 14, 2010
I'm taking off a star because of a lack of footnotes. There are endnotes, but they are those endnotes that don't have any asterix, making it so you really have to read the endnotes themselves.
Persico gives a huge amount of detail, but keeps the story interesting. It is fasnicating, though not surprising, how much politics came into the Nuermberg trials. My only complanint is that at the end of the book, Persico tells you what happened to the players, but doesn't mention any of the women, some of whom contributed quite a bit to the trial.
Persico gives a huge amount of detail, but keeps the story interesting. It is fasnicating, though not surprising, how much politics came into the Nuermberg trials. My only complanint is that at the end of the book, Persico tells you what happened to the players, but doesn't mention any of the women, some of whom contributed quite a bit to the trial.
February 16, 2014
If there weren't other books on this topic out there I'd have givn it a higher vote, however this one pales in comparison with others (e.g. Telford Taylor's book). The Introductory section is well-written and informative, especially as pertains to the complex moral and jurisdictional issues of the tribunal and trial, which for me is the most important lesson to be learned from Nuremberg anyway. It was NOT about the good guys sitting in judgment of the monsters and Persico does make this clear. Also, if you don't mind a history written in a novelistic style this book is for you. "The smoke from his cigarette curled around his head and he sighed audibly as he contemplated cross-examining Goering." I hate flavored teas and coffee and I like my history straight up as well. Way too much unknowable detail and (to me) unimportant musings about the wives of the men in the dock.
October 13, 2009
The is the best book written on the trials at Nuremberg. The description of the setting, the details of the defendant's role in the horror, the thought process of the prosecutors all broken down between the various stages of the trial were so well written. I would recommend this book to any person interested in the devils behind the Third Reich.
May 29, 2023
It occurred to me recently that while I knew OF the Nuremberg trials, I didn't know many details. I remedied that in part with this book.
It is a fascinating look at not just the trials themselves but also a glimpse of the psyche of the defendants. I think most of us have wondered how decent people could follow such an authoritarian and why. One of the prison psychologists, Gustav Gilbert (he wrote a book about his experience and I will be reading that one, too), felt that he'd deciphered the seemingly indecipherable, after numerous interviews with the defendants.
He felt it was three things: the propensity of the Germans to follow orders; the years of anti-Semitic propaganda that were spewed in the decades prior to Germany's invasion of Poland; and the lack of simple human empathy that many of them seemed to display. They were able to send millions to their deaths because they considered the Jews and others to be sub-human.
The author did not hesitate to discuss the moral ambiguities inherent in this trial. In the midst of war, the Allies perpetrated some of their own atrocities, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So was this a case of the victors exacting vengeance upon the defeated? But how could the atrocities committed by the Nazis go unpunished? The author also wondered if any lessons were learned from the trials. Based on the current rise of authoritarianism in the world, it seems obvious that there were not.
I could go on about this book, but I'll end it there. It was a very sobering read and I feel like I learned a lot. It made me think about difficult issues. Highly recommended.
It is a fascinating look at not just the trials themselves but also a glimpse of the psyche of the defendants. I think most of us have wondered how decent people could follow such an authoritarian and why. One of the prison psychologists, Gustav Gilbert (he wrote a book about his experience and I will be reading that one, too), felt that he'd deciphered the seemingly indecipherable, after numerous interviews with the defendants.
He felt it was three things: the propensity of the Germans to follow orders; the years of anti-Semitic propaganda that were spewed in the decades prior to Germany's invasion of Poland; and the lack of simple human empathy that many of them seemed to display. They were able to send millions to their deaths because they considered the Jews and others to be sub-human.
The author did not hesitate to discuss the moral ambiguities inherent in this trial. In the midst of war, the Allies perpetrated some of their own atrocities, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So was this a case of the victors exacting vengeance upon the defeated? But how could the atrocities committed by the Nazis go unpunished? The author also wondered if any lessons were learned from the trials. Based on the current rise of authoritarianism in the world, it seems obvious that there were not.
I could go on about this book, but I'll end it there. It was a very sobering read and I feel like I learned a lot. It made me think about difficult issues. Highly recommended.
March 14, 2025
Well written and extremely insightful look at the leaders of NAZI Germany and their crimes against humanity. This author provides a deep analysis of the leaders of Nazi Germany and their atrocities, it provides a deep analysis of the leaders of Nazi Germany and their atrocities.
June 5, 2020
I wanted to say that Joseph E. Persico’s “Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial” (1994) is the best book you can read on Nuremberg, but I realized I couldn’t truthfully make that claim unless I’d read every book in print about Nuremberg (to say nothing of the countless out-of-print and foreign titles probably unobtainable and lost to time).
But, you know what? I’m still going to claim that “Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial,” is the best book you can read about the International Military Tribunal, because I almost can’t conceive of a better book on the subject. Now in its 25th year of publication, Persico’s book is a cornucopia of interesting factoids and observations about World War II, and the post-WWII world. It renders technical legal concepts palatable to the layman, and it’s a near-perfect combination of exhaustive research and a suspenseful narrative that can read like a thriller.
What’s more, N:IoT tackles the lofty questions raised by the Nuremberg Tribunal, and the war in general, i.e., Is evil a matter of opinion? If so, whose? If the old chestnut ‘history is written by the winners’ is true, were some of the defendants right to claim that the trial—and accompanying executions—were merely the war’s winners wreaking vengeance on the losers? (it’s easy to see why Nuremberg is a staple of philosophy classes the world over).
To be sure, Perisico is not neutral on these questions; he does take sides. However, he does so adroitly; readers never feel they’re being convinced of something, so much as given short, concise answers to these quandaries.
But, you know what? I’m still going to claim that “Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial,” is the best book you can read about the International Military Tribunal, because I almost can’t conceive of a better book on the subject. Now in its 25th year of publication, Persico’s book is a cornucopia of interesting factoids and observations about World War II, and the post-WWII world. It renders technical legal concepts palatable to the layman, and it’s a near-perfect combination of exhaustive research and a suspenseful narrative that can read like a thriller.
What’s more, N:IoT tackles the lofty questions raised by the Nuremberg Tribunal, and the war in general, i.e., Is evil a matter of opinion? If so, whose? If the old chestnut ‘history is written by the winners’ is true, were some of the defendants right to claim that the trial—and accompanying executions—were merely the war’s winners wreaking vengeance on the losers? (it’s easy to see why Nuremberg is a staple of philosophy classes the world over).
To be sure, Perisico is not neutral on these questions; he does take sides. However, he does so adroitly; readers never feel they’re being convinced of something, so much as given short, concise answers to these quandaries.
“Yet Nuremberg defenders counter that the atomic bomb, however devastating, was used to end a war. The death factories operated by Nazi Germany exterminated people from nations already defeated. A war ending in German victory would certainly not have meant an end to mass murder, but its unfettered continuation.” (p. 437)
August 31, 2020
“The greatest crime is Homicide. The accomplice is no better than the assassin. The theorist is worst.” (Pg. 212)
Held for the purpose of bringing Nazi war criminals to justice, the Nuremberg trials were a series of 13 trials carried out in Nuremberg, Germany, between 1945 and 1949. The defendants, who included Nazi Party officials and high-ranking military officers along with German industrialists, lawyers and doctors, were indicted on such charges as crimes against peace and crimes against humanity. Nazi leader Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) committed suicide and was never brought to trial. Although the legal justifications for the trials and their procedural innovations were controversial at the time, the Nuremberg trials are now regarded as a milestone toward the establishment of a permanent international court, and an important precedent for dealing with later instances of genocide and other crimes against humanity.
This is one of the most extensively researched book but reads like a fast paced thriller. Using new sources--ground-breaking research in the papers of the Nuremberg prison psychiatrist and commandant, the letters and journals of the prisoners, and accounts of the judges and prosecutors--Joseph Persico retells the story of Nuremberg, combining sweeping history with psychological insight. The book includes brilliant, chilling portraits of the Nazi warlords and riveting descriptions of the tensions between law and vengeance.
Held for the purpose of bringing Nazi war criminals to justice, the Nuremberg trials were a series of 13 trials carried out in Nuremberg, Germany, between 1945 and 1949. The defendants, who included Nazi Party officials and high-ranking military officers along with German industrialists, lawyers and doctors, were indicted on such charges as crimes against peace and crimes against humanity. Nazi leader Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) committed suicide and was never brought to trial. Although the legal justifications for the trials and their procedural innovations were controversial at the time, the Nuremberg trials are now regarded as a milestone toward the establishment of a permanent international court, and an important precedent for dealing with later instances of genocide and other crimes against humanity.
This is one of the most extensively researched book but reads like a fast paced thriller. Using new sources--ground-breaking research in the papers of the Nuremberg prison psychiatrist and commandant, the letters and journals of the prisoners, and accounts of the judges and prosecutors--Joseph Persico retells the story of Nuremberg, combining sweeping history with psychological insight. The book includes brilliant, chilling portraits of the Nazi warlords and riveting descriptions of the tensions between law and vengeance.
August 24, 2011
Not bad, but not as good as it could have been. Persico tried hard to construct a suspenseful account of the Nuremberg trials, and mostly succeeded… but his narrative style forced him to sacrifice rigor for “readability”. Persico did a nice job illustrating the various tensions at play between the trial’s participants, but I certainly would have preferred less of the who-was-dating-who stuff, and more documentary meat on the bones of the narrative. It’s not safe to assume that all readers of this book will already be aware of the depths of Nazi depravity… a closer look at the evidence brought forward at trial was merited.
August 28, 2016
Interesting overview of the Nuremberg trial, but it lacked thoroughness and rigor. There were several minor factual errors, as well as a horde of unattributed quotations. Footnotes and endnotes: use them! The author also had an obnoxious habit of giving internal monologues to defendants and court figures who left no written record of their thoughts. Yes, a view into Goering's "mind" is interesting reading, but it interferes with historical accuracy.
November 4, 2024
I couldn’t put this down it. Reading it at the same time/soon after other memoirs, diaries, and books about events taking place before/during/after the war provided historical context from different perspectives (e.g., Katyn events in this book vs. the Goebbels Diaries, Persico’s portrayal of Gilbert in this book vs. Gilbert’s own work, Nuremberg Diary), which made it all the more interesting to read.
June 6, 2009
I have just finished this book, and it is chilling and powerful. To anyone who ever encounters Holocaust deniers or skeptics, send them this book, because it demonstrates so very clearly how the Nuremberg convictions against Nazi war criminals were obtained: by the use of Nazi Germany's very own,and meticulous records.
Never again!
Jim RePass
Never again!
Jim RePass
November 25, 2010
This was assigned for my Nuremberg Trials class. At first I didn't like it very much because it presented historical events in a sort of fairy tale form, worded like fiction. After a while, the author started to present good insights and the writing took on a journalistic style. I would rather read straight non-fiction reporting of these events, but it wasn't entirely bad.
March 16, 2010
A solid and readable account of the trial and personalities involved. I have yet to find a book, however, that tackles some of the thorny legal issues head on. Persico does mention them, but gives them only a brief discussion.
December 31, 2008
Good-but I did not finish it (maybe read ~2/3). Heavy material, but written like a novel. It's just really long....
September 30, 2025
Nuremberg: Infamy On Trial by Joseph E Persico
☀️☀️☀️⛅ (3.5 rounded down)
This detailed account of the Nuremberg Trials blends non-fiction with narrative style storytelling to outline the saga from start to finish.
After travelling to Germany in 2018, my tour guide in Nuremberg recommended this book in particular as a good starting point for those wanting to learn more about the town's historical importance and the trials themselves. I can see why it was his go-to suggestion: Persico does his absolute best to craft the facts into a form of narrative driven writing, building tension and framing different figures as lead characters in a story. This can be seen as a benefit or a disservice, but I personally found it helpful to engage with the facts beyond a traditional non-fiction style.
The book is divided into sections of chronology, detailing the lead up to the trials, the prosecution and defence, and the post-trial fallout. The breadth of information was difficult to take in at times, and Persico seems to have made a conscious choice to focus less on the crimes themselves (this is distinctly not trauma porn), but rather on the 'characters' themselves, which does differentiate it from other WWII media I've consumed.
Part of the difficulty for me was inevitable: there are simply too many relevant players to keep track of everyone adequately, and not being significantly versed in the history beforehand, I spent a great deal of time referring back to the list at the beginning. In his defence, Persico does his best to alleviate this, but it did make reading this slower and more disjointed.
The parallels between Germany then and the USA now were clear enough before, but after reading this I would rebrand that to staggering. This topic, devastatingly, could not be more relevant. I wish that it weren't so.
"The trial of war criminals, Jackson had become convinced, must signal not simply the triumph of superior might, but the triumph of superior morality. He was in a position to fashion a future in which aggressive warfare would no longer be resignedly accepted as the extreme edge of political activity, but dealt with as a crime, with aggressors treated as criminals. That could be the greatest leap forward in the history of civilization."
☀️☀️☀️⛅ (3.5 rounded down)
This detailed account of the Nuremberg Trials blends non-fiction with narrative style storytelling to outline the saga from start to finish.
After travelling to Germany in 2018, my tour guide in Nuremberg recommended this book in particular as a good starting point for those wanting to learn more about the town's historical importance and the trials themselves. I can see why it was his go-to suggestion: Persico does his absolute best to craft the facts into a form of narrative driven writing, building tension and framing different figures as lead characters in a story. This can be seen as a benefit or a disservice, but I personally found it helpful to engage with the facts beyond a traditional non-fiction style.
The book is divided into sections of chronology, detailing the lead up to the trials, the prosecution and defence, and the post-trial fallout. The breadth of information was difficult to take in at times, and Persico seems to have made a conscious choice to focus less on the crimes themselves (this is distinctly not trauma porn), but rather on the 'characters' themselves, which does differentiate it from other WWII media I've consumed.
Part of the difficulty for me was inevitable: there are simply too many relevant players to keep track of everyone adequately, and not being significantly versed in the history beforehand, I spent a great deal of time referring back to the list at the beginning. In his defence, Persico does his best to alleviate this, but it did make reading this slower and more disjointed.
The parallels between Germany then and the USA now were clear enough before, but after reading this I would rebrand that to staggering. This topic, devastatingly, could not be more relevant. I wish that it weren't so.
"The trial of war criminals, Jackson had become convinced, must signal not simply the triumph of superior might, but the triumph of superior morality. He was in a position to fashion a future in which aggressive warfare would no longer be resignedly accepted as the extreme edge of political activity, but dealt with as a crime, with aggressors treated as criminals. That could be the greatest leap forward in the history of civilization."
April 23, 2025
World War II was the worst event in history due to technology and ideology. The Nuremberg trials was an attempt to hold the leaders of Germany culpable for not only the war but also the attempted genocide of Jews. Since the highest ruling figures were killed or committed suicide during and after the war, the Allies worked to hold lesser figures responsible for their superiors’ actions. The planning for a war was a conspiracy put together by the military and the various paramilitary groups put together by the Nazis such as the SS, the Gestapo as well as the rulers of Germany themselves. However, Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler were not available so Goering, Speer and others would have to do. The Nuremberg trials was put together by the International Military Tribunal at the behest of Churchill and Roosevelt with the reluctant participation of the French and the Soviets who would have been just as happy to shoot the accused with no trial.
Rules and processes had to be promulgated, and a defense team had to be found to defend the accused. A prosecuting team and judges had to be put together. Charges had to be formulated that would not appear to be the winners simply punishing the losers. There was disagreement on all these issues that had to be compromised upon. This book attempts to cover all this and somewhat accomplishes its goal. In addition to all the above, there are also anecdotes about participants on both sides and how they rubbed each other the wrong way. There are many personal stories that weave in and out of the events described including how one person influenced the head judge and therefore how the whole trial proceeded. The book wraps up by discussing how the trial was an event that hoped to teach future leaders that they could be held accountable for their actions during times of conflict. A good introduction to the issues involved. It focuses on the trial with minimal mention of other similar proceedings in other countries that just lined up perpetrators against a wall. It would probably take several books to fully explain the philosophies, history and impact of the Nuremberg trial.
Rules and processes had to be promulgated, and a defense team had to be found to defend the accused. A prosecuting team and judges had to be put together. Charges had to be formulated that would not appear to be the winners simply punishing the losers. There was disagreement on all these issues that had to be compromised upon. This book attempts to cover all this and somewhat accomplishes its goal. In addition to all the above, there are also anecdotes about participants on both sides and how they rubbed each other the wrong way. There are many personal stories that weave in and out of the events described including how one person influenced the head judge and therefore how the whole trial proceeded. The book wraps up by discussing how the trial was an event that hoped to teach future leaders that they could be held accountable for their actions during times of conflict. A good introduction to the issues involved. It focuses on the trial with minimal mention of other similar proceedings in other countries that just lined up perpetrators against a wall. It would probably take several books to fully explain the philosophies, history and impact of the Nuremberg trial.
August 29, 2022
After the conclusion of World War II, the Allied forces, (United States, Great Britain, France, and Soviet Union), came together to form the International Military Tribunal. This is more commonly referred to as the Nuremberg Trials, for the location of the court proceedings. Seven organizations and twenty four major war criminals were indicted for the activities during the war to start out with. After the conclusion of the initial trials, more proceedings were held at this location. This book gives an outline of the indictments, the crimes, the players on both sides of the courtroom, and the outcomes.
This book was gifted to me by my wonderful sister, so I loved it for that reason to begin with. It was very informative, and offered a great overview and valuable facts about the trials and the people that were charged. I do want to learn more about the subsequent trials, so I will have to be on the lookout for a book like that. This was a pretty good book, especially since it was a gift.
This book was gifted to me by my wonderful sister, so I loved it for that reason to begin with. It was very informative, and offered a great overview and valuable facts about the trials and the people that were charged. I do want to learn more about the subsequent trials, so I will have to be on the lookout for a book like that. This was a pretty good book, especially since it was a gift.
February 12, 2024
there is a quote out there i think of often - i want to credit peter zeihan with it, but im not sure if it was him.
the quotes essentially says: all men [and women] are capable of extraordinary violence. the only non dangerous men [women] out there are those that understand they could commit the extraordinary violence, given the circumstance, and have devoted parts of their mind to ward against that plausible evil. a naive man [woman], that believes he/she is simply innately not evil, is just a man/woman pliable in the hands of corruption.
this insight into the lives and psyches of the nuremberg trials made me dwell on that quote. most of the men described are not so much evil men, as they are naive men. easily corrupted. swayed by a scheme they started out not believing in, but becoming tolerant to genocide to further their own selfish agendas. in the end, they met their fate.
this book was nicely paced and well written. not too dry, and personified the prisoners and lawyers of nuremberg well. i would recommend to history buffs and law enthusiasts alike.
the quotes essentially says: all men [and women] are capable of extraordinary violence. the only non dangerous men [women] out there are those that understand they could commit the extraordinary violence, given the circumstance, and have devoted parts of their mind to ward against that plausible evil. a naive man [woman], that believes he/she is simply innately not evil, is just a man/woman pliable in the hands of corruption.
this insight into the lives and psyches of the nuremberg trials made me dwell on that quote. most of the men described are not so much evil men, as they are naive men. easily corrupted. swayed by a scheme they started out not believing in, but becoming tolerant to genocide to further their own selfish agendas. in the end, they met their fate.
this book was nicely paced and well written. not too dry, and personified the prisoners and lawyers of nuremberg well. i would recommend to history buffs and law enthusiasts alike.
July 31, 2021
Though this was a large book to read, the author's writing style made it easy, and can I say enjoyable while considering the topics covered. Writing in a narrative style, the author took the reader step-by-step from the setting up of the trial with people and selecting the location. Then he went next to the prosecution's case, followed by the defense, then ending with the verdicts. Finally, there was a short final chapter on the executions.
This is not an all-inclusive look at the trial but certainly covers the many aspects very well. It whetted my appetite to read some other books on the subject such as the psychology of the defendants, the trials of the other lesser defendants, and a more intensive look at Rudolf Hess and his 1941 mission to England. Fortunately, I have several books on all of them as well as the Final Solution.
This is not an all-inclusive look at the trial but certainly covers the many aspects very well. It whetted my appetite to read some other books on the subject such as the psychology of the defendants, the trials of the other lesser defendants, and a more intensive look at Rudolf Hess and his 1941 mission to England. Fortunately, I have several books on all of them as well as the Final Solution.
September 28, 2021
Supposedly not as good as Telford Taylor's 'Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir', this is still an excellent book on the trials of the leading Nazis that took place in '45/'46, aimed at the general public.
Handles all the whys and hows, the cases for prosecution and defense, the defendants and their characters and strategies and also the deeper issues of law and justice underlying this trial, debated to this day. It should be noted, however, that this is not a work of legal history or philosophy of law, so the discussion is kept at a (refreshingly) readable level. It is also commendable that the author is not taken by Speer's charm, as many others have been.
What comes through is a trial that may have been inadvertently flawed, but was nevertheless a surprisingly fair attempt at justice. At about 450 pages of actual text, this was a surprisingly quick read.
Handles all the whys and hows, the cases for prosecution and defense, the defendants and their characters and strategies and also the deeper issues of law and justice underlying this trial, debated to this day. It should be noted, however, that this is not a work of legal history or philosophy of law, so the discussion is kept at a (refreshingly) readable level. It is also commendable that the author is not taken by Speer's charm, as many others have been.
What comes through is a trial that may have been inadvertently flawed, but was nevertheless a surprisingly fair attempt at justice. At about 450 pages of actual text, this was a surprisingly quick read.
August 6, 2024
Este libro es un recuento brillante de los hechos. y un comentario acertado sobre lo que representan los juicios de Nuremberg. Persico opta, inteligentemente, por explicar la teoría básica de la corte que juzgó a la cúpula Nazi de tal manera que el lector lego no quede abrumado por ella y se dedica a retratar a las personas que participaron, sus relaciones entre si y sus acciones al tiempo que las enmarca dentro de las relaciones geopolíticas cambiantes en la posguerra. Al mismo tiempo, va tejiendo las consideraciones éticas y de teoría del derecho para concluir que los juicios de Nuremberg fueron la ejecución realista de elevados ideales, llevada a cabo por humanos falibles y que a pesar de algunos de sus logros, la historia ha demostrado en sangre los niveles en los que se ha quedado corta.
October 26, 2017
I am glad I read this as my knowledge of the trial was pretty scant. It could have been a slog given all the details necessary but I feel Persico actually kept everything moving pretty well. I found it interesting all the infighting that went on behind the scenes, sometimes the worst of it coming from within one country. Interesting too was how those sitting in judgement figured out how they could prosecute knowing how easily the roles could have been reversed with a different outcome to the war.
"Tu quoque" is a complex premise but not sure how else the Allies could have proceeded otherwise.
Recommended.
"Tu quoque" is a complex premise but not sure how else the Allies could have proceeded otherwise.
Recommended.
September 30, 2018
https://www.goodreads.com/review/edit...# Excellent book on the Nuremberg trials of the major WWII Nazi leaders. I did not know very much about the trials and this book brought the period to light and the major personalities involved in crafting the legal theories behind holding war criminals responsible for their crimes. While some suggested (the Soviets) simply shooting them all without any trial, the Americans and British thought the trials would impress upon the German people the collective guilt of the German nation for the atrocities of wartime Germany. For history devotees this is a must read.
October 15, 2019
This was a very readable account of the trials. It's written in a narrative style so reads almost like a novel, which makes it easy to read and sort of like a political thriller even though you know the outcome. The downside of using that style however is that it makes you question the scholarship a little, as at times he attributes words, thoughts and motives to people. He does address this in the introduction however. Overall I'd say this is a good book to start with for someone who is interested in the trials and international law, but doesn't want to read anything overly heavy or academic.
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