Nuremberg: The Reckoning [Hardcover]

Jr. William F. Buckley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 3, 2002

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 German-American whose fate is to be intimately involved with the lives and deaths of others: the father who disappeared mysteriously, the ancestors whose stories become vitally relevant, and some of the towering figures of twentieth-century legal history, including Justice Robert Jackson, Albert Speer, Hermann Goering, and the dark, untried shadow of Adolf Hitler. In a gripping account of warmakers who must face the consequences of their actions, Nuremberg: The Reckoning flows through Warsaw, Berlin, Lodz, Munich, Hamburg, and finally Nuremberg, as Sebastian, an interpreter-interrogator, comes to terms with his family legacy and his national identity. With his customary authority and audacity, William F. Buckley Jr. has taken a pivotal moment in history and shaped it into absorbing and original fiction. The result is a riveting novel of insight and deep understanding exploring the characters and issues that made history.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Nuremberg: The Reckoning, William F. Buckley Jr.'s riveting historical novel about the 1945 International Military Tribunal that brought Nazi war criminals to justice, is driven by an illuminating synergy of fact and fiction. While drawing upon the record of furious, real-life events at Nuremberg and writing with mesmerizing authority about such participants as Herman Goering, Albert Speer, and Justice Robert Jackson (the United States' Chief Prosecutor at the Tribunal), Buckley provides readers a helpful, unifying entrée with his invention of the Reinhard family.

On the eve of Germany's 1939 invasion of Poland, building engineer Axel Reinhard and his American wife, Annabelle, finalize secret plans to flee their Hamburg home and, with son Sebastian in tow, emigrate to Phoenix, Arizona. There, Sebastian's grandmother will care for them; at least, that's the plan until the Gestapo forces Axel alone to stay behind. In subsequent years, Axel is pressured to design concentration camps while Sebastian grows into a smart, strapping officer in the U.S. Army. Assigned as a translator-interrogator at Nuremberg, Sebastian is not only thrust into the center of a legal maelstrom, but also finds himself at a crossroads of epic and personal history.

Buckley's work here is enriched by an edifying perspective on the enormous difficulties of developing coherent international law. Particularly fascinating are his insights into shaping a tribunal mentality that can survive generations of second-guessing: Was Nuremberg a perk for the war's victors? Or was it an imperative, delicately realized in the relative absence of legal antecedents? Buckley's superbly researched novel drops us squarely into a thicket of ideas, arguments, and reportage, while grounding our emotions in the Reinhards' collectively compelling story. --Tom Keogh

From Publishers Weekly

One might expect pundit and bestselling author Buckley (Spytime; Elvis in the Morning) to offer a revisionist take on the Nuremberg trials, filtered through his uniquely erudite conservative consciousness. But there's little that's fresh or unconventional in his description of a seminal moment in the history of war crimes prosecution. There's some sniping at the Soviet Union, which Buckley deems wholly ill-equipped to render judgment on any other nation's brutality and genocidal machinations. There are also a few intriguing tangents about the theatrical properties of the tribunal, and the fact that Allied legal minds were essentially making up the rules as they went along, since they were on such unprecedented ground. Buckley's protagonist, Sebastian Reinhard, is unusually well equipped to understand the proceedings: a German-born American officer who eventually discovers that he's part-Jewish, Reinhard lost a father to the Nazi war machine and witnessed the carnage that Hitler's megalomania had wrought. Acting as an interpreter for prosecutors at the trials, he is thrust into close contact with one of the defendants, camp commandant Kurt Waldemar Amadeus, and is shocked by the man's cold-blooded lack of conscience. Buckley's writing is serviceable throughout, if lacking his usual polysyllabic exuberance, but his characters are flat and featureless. In the end, his feel for the historical significance of the Nuremberg trials exceeds his ability to spin engrossing fiction out of them.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1st edition (June 3, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0151006792
• ISBN-13: 978-0151006793
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,683,024 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars ACTUALLY, PRETTY GOOD, May 14, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Nuremberg: The Reckoning (Hardcover)

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.

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very Engrossing, June 9, 2002

By 

bill runyon (Indiana) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Nuremberg: The Reckoning (Hardcover)

Buckley does his usual nice job of putting everything together
and giving us a cast of characters that are lively and entertaining.
At first glance, this seems like it will be a mystery or novel
with the Nuremberg trials after WWII the backdrop. But the author gives us so much background for the war crimes trials,
and so much personal detail about some of the defendants and
their feelings, it developes into an overview of the war crimes
trials, with the story in the background.
But the author does such a nice job of mixing the real-life characters with those of the fictional story, it turns into a
very entertaining and engaging book. This would be a first-class place to start for anyone interesting in delving into what
happened at the end of WWII, and how the Four Powers turned to
this tribunal to handle significant questions about how to treat
surviving Nazi leaders.

Plus, of course, we can follow a nice story about a German-American family and how their young son, in the US Army, fits
into all the international politics of the time.

A very engrossing book and one most of us will find it difficult
to put down.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A good novel exploring Nuremburg's troubling ambiguities, June 19, 2008

By 

Daniel Berger (Atlanta, GA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Nuremberg: The Reckoning (Paperback)

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.