Nuremberg: The Reckoning

by William F. Buckley Jr.

Book Overview

Nuremberg's Palace of Justice, 1945: the scene of a trial without precedent in history, a trial that continues to haunt the modern world. Leading the reader into the Palace is Sebastian, a young... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0151006792
• ISBN13: 9780151006793
• Release Date: June 2002
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.2" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Well written, I couldn't put it down!

I'm a World War II buff as my father was in World War II with three battle stars in France and Germany. This was my first novel by WFB and it won't be my last. I thought it was a great novel and I wonder if the author was just trying to bring across one idea as to how Goering got a cyanide pill? The one destined for Gen. Armedeus. That was my take on the book. As you read the book and try to visualize being there it makes for great reading. He covered such a small portion of the trials as they were enormous in scope. For me I'd highly recommend the book.

A good novel exploring Nuremburg's troubling ambiguities

Buckley tackles the dicey subject of the Nuremburg trials in what proves to be a pretty good book. Conservative readers will appreciate some of the troubling ambiguities he discovers in what tends otherwise to be seen as one of humanity's finer moral hours - most obviously, that the Russians, who sat in judgment, were guilty of almost all the same crimes as the Germans, and the other allies were guilty of some of them. That international law was more or less invented for the trial, and the defendants tried ex post facto, is another problem. It might have been more honest to do as Churchill wanted, and just to shoot them, which history would most likely have excused the victors for doing after the worst war in history. Documenting the Nazis' crimes, though, had its own value, not only in the courtroom of Nuremburg, but the courtroom of history. The plot revolves around Axel, a German engineer who marries an American woman of German background, bringing her back to Germany in the 1920s where they have a son. On the eve of the war, Axel carefully and quietly plots a trip to the United States, purportedly to take their son to an American school, but actually to flee Germany. At the last minute, Axel is forced by the Gestapo to stay behind with no explanation to his family, who are allowed to leave. Soon they hear no more from him. His son turns 18 in time to get drafted in the U.S. near the war's end, and his German-language ability brings him to Nuremburg as a translator. Sebastian - a bit like Buckley's Blackford Oakes, cool and dignified beyond his years - gains the trust of trial prosecutors led by Robert Jackson, assigned specifically to a fictional but plausible defendant who ran a concentration camp. Meanwhile, Axel's fate unfolds, as does the fateful history of Annabelle's German-born mother, and how they all tie together in the war's terrible maelstrom, coming together at Nuremburg to put Sebastian in a terrible dilemma. Buckley does a great job incorporating the politicking and backroom deliberations before and during the trial, as well as the Germany-in-ruins backdrop.

Nuremberg is not the focus...

...instead this is a story of personal tribulations and struggles raising interesting questions; the most interesting of which being centered around the importance of choosing how we meet our end. I think the the previous reviewers missed the point of the novel, and were instead expecting a courtroom thriller. While I can concede some to some of the points raised in nit-picking the novel to death, the ulimate score a book receives should be based, in my opinion, on the total enjoyment derived from reading it. Buckley weaves a complicated tale seamlessly together to create a book which I could not bring myself to stop reading. So: a courtroom thriller...nope; an engaging, intellect-provoking tale...you bet!!!

Buckley makes a good Judgment of Nuremberg!

William Buckley has made his living with words (is there anyone alive with a greater vocabulary?). Some of his scholarly works are, indeed, scholarly and rest on their own merits.With his fiction, however, he takes the famous Buckley I'm-an-Ivy-Leaguer-and-you-are-not approach. Even his Blackie Oakes adventures have that tongue-in-cheek appearance. It's almost as if he condescends to the rest of us mortals when he publishes his fiction.That said, however, it is rather difficult to dismiss his attempts at "common fiction" in "Nuremberg: A Reckoning." Told, basically, from the point of view of Sebastian Rheinhardt, whom we meet as a 13-year-old in l939 about to be spirited away to the safety of America in a time when critical signs were showing the imminent Nazi stranglehold on Europe, the book looks at the war from different perspectives, least of all a German-emigre part Jewish. Sebastian and his mother are permitted to leave The Fatherland, but his father is not. What happens from this point on is a critical issue in the plot development. "Nuremberg: A Reckoning" perhaps should read "the Reckonings," as Buckley uses wide-vision here.Taking this setting--and particularly the Nuremberg trials--is a daunting task; indeed, not one to be taken lightly. And Buckley doesn't take it lightly. Knowing full well that Nuremburg (and the Nazis) have been written by so many and in so many ways, Buckley sets about to present his take on this entire picture. It's his personal spin on the subject and via the fiction genre.His scholarly background shows through in the sensitivities he portrays, in the description of the landscape (such as it is in 1945) and atmosphere in the immediate aftermaths of the war. And he certainly reflects what Nuremberg was like in l945 and of the frustration of the entire trial. Buckley in his inimical style is at times bitchy and poignant. Never one to suffer fools lightly, he doesn't here, feeding us tidbits of titillating information about various judges trying the case. Too, it's clear that his personal animosity towards things Soviet shows up here, but perhaps justifiably so, as history seems to have revealed.Young Sebastian, however, finds himself in the sort of dilemma that Stephan Crane presented in "Red Badge of Courage," although Sebby is not in a conflict within himself over his courage. One can see the reflection of Buckley in Sebastian (examples of sharp wit and energetic thought processes), yet the narrative and plot development don't become author self-centered. Buckley's attitude is that you can accept or not, but the story's still there. C'est tout, c'est fini.Buckley's "take" on various segments of our society (his society) is more than just "interesting" (his "Elvis in the Morning" illustrates this perfectly!). Buckley seems to feel that he has a right (and he does) to make commentary (fictional or otherwise) on any subject. His talents are well known.In "Nuremberg" he spares us from much of the cust

ACTUALLY, PRETTY GOOD

I thought this book was quite good, well-plotted, with characters to whom life happens, that is, characters who move the story forward without hugely contrived events. The things that happen to them seem like things that could happen, life wrapping itself around them unpredictably. The main character is Sebastian Reinhard, a well Americanized kid, who grows up and goes to Germany in the military, where he discovers some shocking family secrets--including a father who could stand up to help an individual, his friend, but who could not summon the strength to help a race, or at least, to refuse to be part of the brutal genocide despite his views. History brutalizes him; he feels compels to help one of the German prisoners, only to discover that he has been lied to again. It is excellent characterization, and good, complex storytelling. The historical actors--Goering, Speer, Robert Jackson, others--are convincingly presented, the moral problems well handled, the complex problems of trying to be good against evil in a world which is both so overwhelmingly corrupt and so banal is well-done. Not to criticize anyone else's views too much, but I read one review on this page that seemed to be of a different novel than the one I read so quickly and enjoyed so much. The book doesn't tell us new things about Nuremberg, or the Germans, but it personalizes the problems in a thoroughly convincing way. You could imagine yourself dealing with them, perhaps better, perhaps worse, than the participants in this story. I strongly recommend this book.