Nuremberg: Evil on Trial. James Owen

by James Owen

Book Overview

As the Second World War ended, the first army unit to come across the Nazi leaders could have executed them summarily. Or their judgement might have fallen to the German people, as at the end of the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0755315456
• ISBN13: 9780755315451
• Release Date: January 2007
• Publisher: Headline Review
• Length: 376 Pages
• Weight: 2.00 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The trial that changed the world

When 21 former leaders of the Nazi regime filed into the dock at the Nuremberg Courthouse one bleak November morning in 1945 the world changed, less dramatically but far more comprehensively than when planes flew into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre 56 years later. For the first time waging war was to be treated as a legal as well as a moral crime, and those who were responsible were to face courtroom justice meted out by representatives of the victors. It was novel; without precedent. Throughout history the losers in any conflict had faced the sword, the bayonet or at best been forced to lived on in subjugation and slavery. Napoleon received the sentence of exile without trial. Half-hearted attempts to prosecute the German leadership after World War I fizzled out. It is no wonder the attention of the world was on Nuremberg that fateful autumn at the start of proceedings regarded with almost as much trepidation by the assembled legal teams of five nations as by the defendants themselves. It was to be almost a year before the trials were over and the sentences carried out. In between there were endless arguments, tedious detail, interspersed with glaring vignettes of horror from the concentration camps. The monochrome pictures of grim-faced, sullen men (hardly a single woman) on the cover and inside this book support the tone. Nobody wanted to be at Nuremberg and legal teams, guards, witnesses and officials were just as much prisoners as the defendants, sentenced to see the whole terrible business through to its conclusion. Owen wisely treats his account with a light hand, restricting himself to scene setting and explanations. The success of this project lies in his choice of primary sources, letting the players tell their stories from the former second in command of the Third Reich, Hermann Goring, down to court officials and medical staff resurrected from the obscurity of history by virtue of the diaries they wrote. Thus the flamboyant Goring, calm rational Albert Speer and the half mad Rudolf Hess speak from the grave. There are moments of bathos, as in Joachim von Ribbentrop's initial reaction to his death sentence: "Death! Death! Now I won't be able to write my beautiful memoirs." Or revulsion as almost all the defendants tried to excuse themselves from the Holocaust - "I was not there; I did not know its extent; others (usually senior Nazis already dead) were responsible." The fact that not all the 21 were sentenced to hang and three were actually acquitted on the grounds they were either too junior or too far removed from the Nazi inner circle during its most deadly moments, was a shock for many observers. Owen encapsulates the anger and frustration of the Russian team, which had believed the proceedings to be nothing more than window dressing for a clean sweep of hangings. After all, Joseph Stalin at the Allies' Tehran summit during the war had "half jokingly" suggested the leading 50,000 Nazis be summarily executed. Sad