Nuremberg: 2infamy on Trial

Persico ( Piercing the Reich ) has written an extraordinary, intensely dramatic re-creation of the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-1946 in which the U.S., France, the U.S.S.R. and Britain tried and executed Nazi war criminals. His stirring narrative, which attempts to conjure the mental states of the key participants, draws on interviews with prosecutors, interpreters, jailers, journalists and bodyguards; on hitherto untapped personal papers and archival documents; and on prisoners' letters and journals. In addition to conveying the courtroom drama that exposed the Nazis' mass murder of six million Jews and millions of others, Persico unveils behind-the-scenes wrangling. For example, defiantly unrepentant Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goring vied with Nazi arms minister Albert Speer, who preached confession and contrition. Meanwhile, the courthouse became a Cold War in microcosm as Soviet and Western judges clashed. Although Nuremberg may have been legally flawed, it was ``satisfying justice,'' concludes Persico, who suggests that the trials contributed to postwar German democracy. Photos not seen by PW. First serial to American History and Military History Quarterly. (May)