Between November 1945 and October 1946, an International Military Tribunal composed of judges from the United States, France, England, and the Soviet Union tried 23 Nazis for crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
The trial was held in Nuremberg, where Adolf Hitler had held rallies announcing the Nazi regime’s most heinous edicts, which included The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor.
Newspapers, magazines, news organizations, and radio stations around the world recruited journalists, some of whom were literary luminaries, to cover the proceedings, which promised to address the culpability of Nazi civilian and military leaders, as well as the “collective guilt” of Germany.
In The Writers’ Castle: Reporting History at Nuremberg, Uwe Neumahr, a literary agent who has a PhD in Romance and German studies, provides an engaging account of the experiences (and sexual liaisons) of more than a dozen reporters in Nuremberg, their varied responses to the trial, and the legal and moral implications of punishment, deterrence, and catharsis.
A look at the Nuremberg trials
The early days of the trial, Neumahr indicates, were dramatic. In his opening statement, US chief counsel Robert Jackson declared that “the wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated.”
Acclaimed novelist John Dos Passos wrote that he would never forget the look on the faces of the defendants when Jackson, who was also an associate justice of the US Supreme Court, “read the orders for the massacre of the Jews.” For the first time, Dos Passos speculated, they seem to see themselves “as the world sees them.”
In October and November 1945, prosecutors showed films shot in the immediate aftermath of the liberation of concentration camps, giving spectators a glimpse of charred corpses from the crematoria, and emaciated prisoners with shaved heads. Many observers, Neumahr writes, concluded “that the defense faced an impossible task” in combating these images.
Reporting for The New Yorker in March 1946, Janet Flanner described a cross-examination of Herman Goering, perhaps the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany, as an unequal battle between a poorly prepared Jackson and a brilliant, quick-witted, Machiavellian, and unrepentant prisoner.
Delivering “a dissertation on the techniques of power,” Goering admitted his use of violence, denied the court’s right to investigate domestic policies, and defended actions undertaken “for the Greater German Reich.”
Convinced by Flanner’s suggestion that European prosecutors were doing a better job than their American counterparts, and realizing that this was not playing well with his readers, Harold Ross, editor of The New Yorker, replaced Flanner with Rebecca West, “the grand dame of British journalism.” West promptly portrayed Goering, who would commit suicide in October 1946, as a soft, effeminate, clownish joke.
WITH THESE notable exceptions, Neumahr notes, the proceedings, more often than not, were tedious. Long-winded testimony by witnesses, few of them Jewish, and a requirement that all written evidence be read aloud, led an exasperated Flanner to claim that the judges and lawyers had made “the world’s most completely planned and horribly melodramatic war seem dull and incoherent.” The best symbol of Nuremberg, West wrote, was a yawn.
“All we got” at Nuremberg, American journalist Max Lerner complained, “were bits and pieces of the Nazi story, “mainly color stuff, portraying the trial as spectacle.” Neumahr notes that reporters left Germany without anything approaching a consensus about lessons to be learned.
Most of the correspondents endorsed a version of the view advanced by British diplomat Baron Robert Vansittart – that Germans were fundamentally militaristic and aggressive and should be kept under strict surveillance for decades.
In a letter to her then-husband, Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, a noted war correspondent, endorsed this view.
William Shirer, who would write The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a runaway bestseller, noted with dismay that Germans regretted losing, not starting the war, and lacked empathy or even interest in the suffering of Nazi victims. Shirer subsequently revealed that his knowledge of Hitler’s “Final Solution to the Jewish question” came from the Nuremberg trials.
Willy Brandt, who had gone into exile when Hitler came to power in 1933 and returned to Germany in 1945 to report on the Nuremberg trials for an Oslo newspaper, agreed that all Germans bore some responsibility for Nazi crimes. But Brandt, who would become chancellor of Germany in the 1970s, rejected claims that all Germans were “born criminals,” innately and irredeemably barbaric.
Golo Mann, son of the iconic writer Thomas Mann, rejected collective guilt as an oversimplification, preferring the term “collective liability.” As he criticized the court for the arbitrary nature of the punishments it imposed, his hatred of Germany “melted away like snow in the May sun.”
Alfred Doblin, a Jew who fled Germany in the 1930s, praised the authorities in Nuremberg for constructing a “legalistic skyscraper” that legitimized the court’s punishments and provided the framework for a “restoration of humanity.”
Elsa Triolet, a French Stalinist, criticized the Nuremberg court, which “could have been a sledgehammer against Nazism,” for giving perpetrators of heinous crimes opportunities to justify their ideology.
Flanner castigated Nuremberg for failing to understand that a male-dominated, militaristic world made it impossible to protect and promote human rights.
The verdicts at Nuremberg were announced on October 1, 1946.
Gellhorn, who had been deeply moved by the atrocities at Dachau, believed that the punishments were the least that should have been done to affirm human rights.
Nuremberg offered no guarantees about the future, of course, but, Gellhorn wrote, “the hope is that the body of law will serve as a barrier against the collective wickedness, greed, and folly of any nation. In these dark times, it is only a hope. But without hope, we cannot live.”
The reviewer is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Emeritus Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.
- THE WRITERS’ CASTLE: REPORTING HISTORY AT NUREMBERG
- By Uwe Neumahr
- Pushkin Press
- 352 pages; $23