5 Books That Take You Inside the Nuremberg Trials

Gary Jonathan Bass, a one-time Economist reporter-turned-professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, takes his book’s title from Justice Robert H.Jackson’s soaring opening statement at Nuremberg: “That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.” 

Bass builds his book around that idea, asking why some governments choose trials over faster, harsher options that history has often delivered. Vanquished enemies, he reminds us, have met all kinds of fates: summary executions, show trials ending in death, forced labor, castration (a punishment both Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt floated), along with exile or quiet oblivion. With investigative rigor, Bass exposes the political drama behind history’s biggest war crimes trials. At Nuremberg, Roosevelt’s Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. nearly won approval for mass executions before War Secretary Henry Stimson pushed back, insisting that trials were, as Bass notes, “the American thing to do.” G. Kurt Piehler, director of the Institute on World War II and the Human Experience and an associate professor of history at Florida State University, praises Stay the Hand of Vengeance for how it “places the Nuremberg Trials in a larger context.”

“A fine and transformative literary achievement,” says Gerry Simpson, professor of public international law at the London School of Economics and Political Science Law School, of East West Street. In this acclaimed work, author Philippe Sands, a professor of law at University College London, braids together legal history, family memoir and wartime mystery to tell how two revolutionary legal concepts emerged from the ashes of the Holocaust to shape justice at Nuremberg. The book follows Hersch Lauterpacht and Raphael Lemkin, two Jewish lawyers who studied at the same university in Lviv (also known as Lwów, Lvov or Lemberg), now part of Ukraine. Working independently, they developed the rival legal concepts of “crimes against humanity” and “genocide”—ideas that would forever change international law. 

As Sands discovers his own grandfather was also from Lviv, his investigation evolves into a personal quest through buried family secrets. One of the book’s most haunting scenes unfolds at Nuremberg’s Palace of Justice, where Sands stands beside Niklas Frank, son of Hans Frank, governor general of occupied Poland, who was responsible for hundreds of thousands of Jewish deaths. “My father was a lawyer; he knew what he did,” Frank told him. 

At just 37, Telford Taylor arrived in Nuremberg as a young American lawyer on Justice Robert H. Jackson’s prosecution team. Soon rising to chief prosecutor in the 12 subsequent U.S. war trials held from 1946 to 1949, he served as a key player in this profound chapter of history. His memoir, nearly a half century in the making, combines deep archival research with an insider’s feel for the courtroom’s moods, alliances and shocks. 

What many expected to be a swift reckoning stretched into a grueling yearlong trial that ended with 12 executions, seven prison terms and three acquittals. Taylor writes with clear-eyed candor about flaws, including the “sloppiness of the selection” of defendants resulting in the mix-up over father and son Gustav and Alfried Krupp. Yet The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials ultimately affirms that justice, however imperfect, was served—and that its precedent still matters whenever the world confronts atrocity.

Tapping Hitler’s Generals isn’t about the Nuremberg Trials, per se, but it serves as a chilling prelude to justice, revealing the mindset that drove the crimes later brought to judgment there after the war. The book draws from secret British intelligence recordings of captured German generals held at Trent Park, a stately mansion in North London. Edited by Sönke Neitzel, professor of war studies at the University of Potsdam, the transcripts capture high-ranking officers speaking with startling candor about the war’s progress, Hitler’s leadership and atrocities committed. Unlike in court, where defendants carefully shaped their narratives, these men spoke freely—one recalling a captain who shot a Russian family and shrugged it off: “They weren’t human beings, they only count as animals; nothing at all can happen to us.” 

Simon Ball, professor of international history and politics at the University of Leeds, praises the book for showing “how the leaders of the Wehrmacht condemned themselves out of their own mouths—in between jollies to London’s Theatreland.”

“The shelves groan with books on Nuremberg—we need more on the other war crime trials, especially Tokyo,” Piehler says. Yuma Totani, professor of modern Japanese history at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, helps fill that gap with The Tokyo War Crimes Trial, one of the first full-length English-language studies on the International Military Tribunal for the Far East—better known as the Tokyo Trial,  Nuremberg’s eastern counterpart. 

Drawing on Japanese, American, Australian and Indian archives, Totani challenges the long-held view that the Tokyo proceedings were hopelessly tainted by ideology and politics. She reexamines the tribunal’s most contentious issues—including the Allies’ choice not to indict Emperor Hirohito—and argues that its legal proceedings were far more rigorous than critics have claimed. “Totani makes a convincing case that Tokyo was not simply victors’ justice,” Piehler says.