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The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir

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This is quite a long book that gives a detailed exposition of the events of the initial 21 or so cases at Nuremberg. Taylor participated at a high level. He is a distinguished author and scholar.

This covers not only description of the cases, but gives insights into all the main personalities present, including Goering and Jackson. It is written nearly 50 years after the event, so interesting information on what happened in the years afterward is given as well.

Taylor writes well, gives his own opinions in a balanced way and does not back off from sensative issues. And they don't come much more sensative than this.

Strongly recommended.

An important history of the trial, written by a
participant. Taylor does not pull his
punches, he calls them as he saw them.
If you are interested in WWII in any aspect
in particular the legal aspects of the trial
from an insiders viewpoint, this is one book
that you must read.

The author, Telford Taylor, died on May 23, 1998, at the age of 90. He was also the author of "Grand Inquest" (1955), which is regarded as one of the best challanges to the methods of Sen. McCarthey. In this, he traced back the history of congressional investigations to the 18th century. This "book was probably the most influential of the nine he wrote" {The Economist, May 30, 1998).

Telford Taylor is an optimist. He waited a while -- over 40 years -- to get a certain distance and perspective before writing up his experiences as a junior (later chief) prosecutor at the Nuremburg International Military Tribunal to try war crimes.
He made it. Then he wrote more than 600 pages, which should have been a lot more than any but specialists would want to read on that subject at this date (1992, when this review was first published).
But various terrible situations, especially in Yugoslavia, have made the subject of war crimes trials current again. (And, in 2006, still, with new venues, like Liberia, Rwanda, Sudan, Iraq, East Timor and, for some, the USA or Israel, under consideration.)
People have floated the idea, usually hesitantly, that maybe the prospect of retribution would give the Serbs, Iraqis etc. pause.
At a higher level, Taylor is an optimist because he believes the rule of law can be used to reduce the overall level of frightfulness in human disputes. He is not so naive an optimist as to believe the disputes themselves can be quelled.
'The Anatomy of the Nuremburg Trials' is a handbook on how to go about using pieces of paper to control, or at least to retaliate against, ruthless, powerfully armed men of evil intent. The trials have been studied by historians, but Taylor offers a deeper look.
He reveals some of the jockeying for position, the careerism and ambition of the players, especially the American team. He assesses the legal tactics, the high-flown sentiments and the low-down cynicism. Overall, he gives the effort good marks.
The idea of war crimes trials was not new in 1945, but the effort after World War I had been futile. The World War II Allies, the United States, Britain, France and the USSR, had widely differing notions of what to do with the Nazi criminals. The eventual Nuremburg tribunal was largely the idea of New York lawyers in the Army, who created legal theories from 1944 on.
The implementation of those theories takes up much of Taylor's book. For present purposes, the interest centers on the ideas of Murray Bernays. There were so many Germans implicated in murder, looting, slavery and other crimes that, in 1944, there seemed no way to process them all for justice.
At Yalta, Stalin suggested shooting the top 50,000 Germans (roughly, everyone with the rank of colonel or equivalent and higher). This would have been justice, since none of these men was innocent. But Winston Churchill wouldn't go along. The usual story is that Churchill took Stalin seriously but turned him aside with a joke. Taylor thinks Stalin was joshing and that Churchill was the serious men. Both men were drunk.
Bernays recommended finding certain organizations criminal, then processing the members for punishment. Mere membership would then include an assumption of guilt, and the accused would have to prove themselves innocent or coerced or in some other fashion unworthy of punishment.
The organizations were monstrous enough -- the SS, German High Command, Gestapo etc. At the trial, some of the organizations were convicted, some acquitted.
The Americans and Britons, unlike the Russians and the Germans, did not have the stomach to keep killing helpless people endlessly, no matter how much they deserved it, so in the end the members of the criminal organizations were mostly turned over to German courts, which set hundreds of thousands of brutal killers free, or slapped wrists.
Taylor says he was always uneasy about the Bernays theory and was relieved when military authorities intervened to set up 'denazification' procedures that allowed the Nuremburg tribunal to mostly duck the issue.
However, niceties about being innocent until proven guilty are exactly the problem with using war crimes measures to prevent, say, massacre of Bosnians. (Technically, today it would be necessary to use the rubric 'crimes against humanity,' since no one bothers to declare war formally any more. The distinction is of interest only to lawyers.)
The big killers can't operate without the help of the little killers. But the little killers have no incentive to rebel against their masters as long as they believe they will be treated lightly if they lose the war. Therefore, to be credible, the threat of retribution must be made against all members of organizations -- the Bernays solution.
This was, I had thought, the position of Taylor in his book 'Nuremburg and Vietnam,' which courageously said that there was sufficient evidence to incriminate Americans, including some in Washington, in war crimes in Vietnam. The only practical way you can do this is to prosecute all members of criminal groups; you will never find an order that says, 'Go commit genocide.' Even Hitler never (so far as anyone has found) put his Final Solution down on paper.
But in 'Anatomy,' Taylor opposes the Bernays theory and says he has done so consistently.
He does say that 'the laws of war do not apply only to the suspected criminals of vanquished nations. There is no moral or legal basis for immunizing victorious nations from scrutiny.' That is the optimistic viewpoint.

ADDENDUM: I was wrong in 1992 to think that no one would ever put his name on a genocide order. The Iranians and Palestinians and Lebanese Hezbollah changed the old, European rules.

The author was a member of the American Prosecution staff at the International
Military Tribunal that was held in Nuremberg in 1945-6 with the purpose of judging
major Nazi war criminals. The book, as the subtitle states, is a personal description of the trial,
including its pre-history, that is, the negotiations between the Allies in the last part of
the War that resulted in the decision of constituting the IMT and helding the trials (largely
an American idea) instead of some other methods of dealing with the emprisioned Nazi top leadership (such
as shooting them without trial, as Churchill defended, or prosecuting them in national courts). The
problems and frictions encontered in drafting the Charter of the IMT, the Indictements, and the selection
of the defendants is covered in detail in the first fourth of the book. The remaining deals with the
trial itself. What makes this a very interesting book is that it not only describes the public
part of the trial but also the backstage, and even some developments that would probably never been known
if the author had not been himself personaly involved in the works. Near the end of the trial the author was
made Chief U.S. Prosecutor for the ensuing war crimes trials that took place in Nurember for the
next three years. It would have be interesting to read his account of those ones.

I'm one of those people that thinks that the Nuremberg Trials was one of the most important events in Human history.
Most folks only consider the "bringing Nazis to justice" concept. But at Nuremberg it was decided for the first time in all of Civilization that aggressive war was an international crime. The country that strikes first is the guilty party.
A lot of time and effort went into making the case against Nazi Germany being the aggressor and therefore guilty of starting a war of aggression.
The second big decision was that even soldiers who must follow orders were not totally free of guilt or responsibility. There are crimes that even in times of war that go beyond the scope of "following orders." These crimes would forever now be labeled as "Crimes against Humanity" and even under orders or in consequence of your own life these actions should be denied or refused compliance.
The fact that this book is also a memoir gives it a lightness and readability not found in other books dealing with such a serious subject matter.

Richard Edward Noble - The Hobo Philosopher - Author of:

Mein Kampf - An Analysis of Book One

Why? In a word, "objectivity".

Was Jackson a failure? On the contrary. True, he stumbled in Goering's cross-examination. But the prosecution -- under Jackson -- had submitted an enormous amount of documents and witness' statements, implicated Goering deeply in the regime's worst crimes, which Goering could not refuted, even if Jackson hadn't bothered to cross-examine him. What's more, Jackson realized, far more than anybody else, that the trial is also a moral example to the world; thus he supports Jackson's calling of eyewitnesses to Nazi horrors despite the fact that technically (due to the existence in evidence of relevant documents) the witnesses were superfluous.

Was Streicher the worst of the lot? Surprisingly, Taylor notes it is questionable whether Streicher, however disgusting "Der Sturmer" was, was actually guilty of any of the four counts in the indictment, let alone guilty enough to be hanged. He criticizes the tribunal's quick condemnation of Streicher to death, "as if they were stepping on a worm".

Were the judges biased? No. Nobody was convicted merely because horrors were done by SOMEBODY; all defendants convicted of war crimes or crimes against humanity (with the exception of Streicher) were closely connected to specific crimes. True, he thinks Streicher, Jodl and Syess-Inquart were too severely punished, while Speer and Funk escaped the gallows unfairly -- Speer by playing penitent, Funk by his weakness. But he notes that such disagreements are part of the very nature of a human judicial process, and in no way makes the trial a miscarriage of justice.

Did the presence of the USSR make the trials "show trials"? No. He notes that whatever one thinks of the USSR, it had a right, as the country who suffered by far the most, to be in Nuremberg. But never have the Soviets managed to hide embarrassing facts about their own behavior from coming out (e.g., the Katin massacre or the secret agreement on the partition of Poland), nor had any defendant been convicted without at least two of the three other, non-Soviet (voting) judges agreeing. Had the Russians not been there, the verdicts might well have been the same.

These and numerous other claims of "common wisdom" about the trials are exploded in this detailed, fascinating book. The feeling one gets is of a trial -- imperfect in some things -- that was as close as humanely possible to achieving its two main aims: be a moral light to the world, as well as being fair to the defendants.

A very enjoyable read and enlightening in ways that a narrative history can't be...Mr. Taylor tells it like he saw it, especially about the key people involved!