Review by Choice Review
Writing for a general audience, Persico succeeds in his aim to introduce "a new generation" to the horrors documented at Nuremberg. His book is welcome and timely; Holocaust revisionists and others continue to deny the "final solution's" existence. The author skillfully juxtaposes the trial's principal issues, such as ex post facto law, criminal conspiracy, and criminal organization membership, with biographical vignettes and scenes of Nuremberg life. Advanced researchers will find the book disappointing. Persico relies exclusively upon American primary sources, despite the fact that Russian archives are opening to Western scholars. He also ignores important monographs, even though they bolster his case, such as Matthias Schmidt's Albert Speer: The End of a Myth (1984) and Peter Black's Ernst Kaltenbrunner: Ideological Soldier of the Third Reich (CH, Oct'84). Small factual errors mar the text. Nevertheless, college freshmen and sophomores could read the book with profit. Supplements, but does not supersede, Robert Conot's Justice at Nuremberg (CH, Oct'83), Ann and John Tusa's The Nuremberg Trial (CH, Feb'85), and Telford Taylor's The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials (CH, Mar'93). Recommended. J. R. White; University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Tod durch den Strang: condemned by those satisfying words, 11 of Hitler's paladins swung at Nuremberg. Aiming to interest a new generation in that legal spectacle, Persico presents a robust, populist narrative that combines the numerous accounts set down by the trial's participants (lately by prosecutor Telford Taylor in The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials [1992]). Here are flesh-and-blood portraits of the ogres, from Kaltenbrunner, the scar-faced deputy SS chief, to superficially less repulsive types, such as the technocratic Speer. But the judges, jailers, and prison psychiatrists are equally alive in Persico's hands, and the subdramas and conflicts within their separate guilds shade in the drama of the proceeding's admonitory purposes. He sketches the two shrinks vying for material for their books; the judges reconciling different national legal principles; and the prisoners demanding this or that exemption from the warden's regiment, all the while weaving among the personalities as if they were traffic cones along the trial's center line--the presentation of the evidence. A fluid re-creation from opening gavel to closing gallows. ~--Gilbert Taylor
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Attempting to capture the participants' psychological states, Persico recreates the war crimes trials of 1945-1946. (Aug.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Persico offers not the history but the story of the trial of Nazi Germany's major war criminals. He is concerned less with legal issues and courtroom procedures than with a fundamental question: Did it all matter? His answer is mixed. While the tribunal's validity remains debatable, to demand perfection from the institutions of justice is to deny justice itself. Persico demonstrates that Nuremberg was not a kangaroo court; the defendants had their choice of attorneys and full access to the prosecution's documentation. If individual verdicts may be questioned, no saints or statesmen lost life or freedom. The trial demonstrated beyond question Nazi Germany's crimes and destroyed beyond hope any Nazi martyrology. Arguably, it helped lay the grounds for Germany's eventual democratic reconstruction. The Nuremberg proceedings may not have deterred later aggressors, but they at least established a precedent for law that supersedes national sovereignty. This well-written, well-researched volume belongs in all collections on World War II.-D.E. Showalter, U.S. Air Force Acad., Colorado Springs (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Most books about the Nuremberg trials have focused on the jurisprudential aspects of this unprecedented event. Persico (Casey, 1990; Edward R. Murrow, 1988; etc.) has chosen to write an overview that offers a picture of the comparatively underreported battles behind the judgments. Persico traces the history of the war crimes tribunal, from the waning days of the war, when Churchill was calling for drumhead court-martials and summary executions. Truman wanted a legal proceeding that would show the world that Nazi barbarism was the exception, not the rule, and would make an example of the most heinous perpetrators. But would the result be victors' justice or the real thing? Throughout the several months from the time the idea was hatched to the execution of sentence, there raged a series of behind-the-scenes struggles. Within the prosecution, there were turf wars over who would take the lead in examining witnesses, over which of the four participating powers--the US, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union--would carry the most weight, and over genuine differences of opinion as to what kind of prosecution would be most effective. Among the defendants, there were numerous factions, with the supremely cynical anad evil Reichsmarshal Hermann Goering emerging as a dominant figure. Drawing on interviews with many participants who have never spoken of their experiences for publication, Persico delineates the personal clashes (Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, the head of the US prosecution team, vs. former attorney general Francis Biddle, the US judge; a duel between the prison psychiatrist and psychologist over who would publish a book first), often at the expense of the courtroom action. Gradually the focus on the out-of-sight nastiness among the Allies becomes numbing and unpleasant, and the book is most lively when it shifts its attention back to the proceedings themselves. Nuremberg has an undeniable timeliness, especially in light of the new wave of Holocaust deniers. Persico writes well, despite occasionally drifting into melodrama, and the subject exerts its own fascination.
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Review by Choice Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
