The starting point for this original, provocative account of the Nuremberg trial, the judicial reckoning of the worst war crimes in history, begins with a sombre painting. The work, by British artist Laura Knight, depicts the Nazi high command in Courtroom 600, in the German city’s Palace of Justice. Suited, shrunken and somewhat shabby, the men – and the key point of the picture and of this book is that they are all men – are utterly diminished from their high point a few years earlier, when they believed they would rule the world, justifying untold atrocities, including the Holocaust.
There is not a single woman in Knight’s painting, which today hangs in the Imperial War Museum in London, testimony that still chills more than 80 years later. By giving prominence now to her and other women’s testimony at Nuremberg, the author Natalie Livingstone allows these valiant voices to have a final collective word on the mass killers who in their last days look pathetic and mundane, like faceless clerks in a failing City firm, as they await judgement and execution or jail for war crimes.
