The struggle to capture the Nuremberg Trials

Staging Nuremberg: How the United States and the Soviet Union Fought Over the Portrayal of Nazi Crimes, Sylvie Lindeperg, Columbia University Press, £30

‘The world must be convinced that we are right… If such a campaign fails it would be better that there be no trials.’

Gordon Dean wrote those words in 1945 while serving as press officer to Robert Jackson, the US Supreme Court Justice who was entrusted by the Truman administration with leading the Allied prosecution at Nuremberg. Together Dean and Jackson understood a truth that lies at the centre of Sylvie Lindeperg’s fascinating new book: that Nuremberg was never simply about establishing guilt but also about the presentation of the guilty and the portrayal of their crimes. That insight provides the starting point for Staging Nuremberg and explains why, after so many books on the trials, Lindeperg has managed to find something genuinely new to say.

I’ve read a great many books about the trials over the years and watched the latest attempt by Hollywood to dramatise it, with Russell Crowe in the standout role as Hermann Goering. They focus on the lawyers, the defendants or the legal precedents that emerged from Courtroom 600. Thankfully, Lindeperg has little interest in retelling that familiar story. Instead, she directs our attention to the cameramen, translators, editors, photographers, public-relations officers and documentary-makers who helped shape how the world would see Nuremberg. We live in an age acutely aware of the power of images, and one of the strengths of this book is how it reminds us that the participants at Nuremberg also understood that power.

The problem facing the Allies in 1945 was unprecedented. Europe lay in ruins. The Nazi regime had left behind overwhelming evidence of criminality, yet the question of how to deal with those responsible remained contested. Some advocated summary executions. Others feared that public trials might become platforms for Nazi propaganda. Instead, the Allies decided they would establish a public record of guilt.

Lindeperg shows that, from the very beginning, the Allied personnel organising the event understood that they had to convince a watching world that justice had been seen to be meted out lawfully and proportionately. Hence the unprecedented decision to allow the cameras into the courtroom. In showcasing what had occurred under the Third Reich, they could make the argument that the Nazi regime was not merely a defeated military foe, but also a justly punished perpetrator of crimes against humanity.

But the devil is in the detail: who controlled the cameras? Which photographs were distributed? What films would be shown? How should the courtroom itself be arranged? One of the book’s most engaging characters is Budd Schulberg. Most readers will know him, if at all, as the future Hollywood screenwriter behind the Oscar-winning 1954 film On the Waterfront. Here he is in an earlier life: a young intelligence officer and film specialist sent into defeated Germany to search for visual evidence of the Nazi regime’s crimes. Schulberg’s quest for hidden archives, missing reels and surviving footage gives some of the book’s best chapters the pace of a detective story. Lindeperg makes a serious point, however. That the images which have helped define our own understanding of the Third Reich survived was not an historical inevitability.

Nuremberg was constantly balancing two competing demands. It had to satisfy the requirements of law while also addressing the expectations of a global audience. This tension is embodied by two men who were central to the story. Jackson, who led the prosecution, wanted to build the cases through memoranda, directives, records and captured archives. Meanwhile, William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, the charismatic wartime head of the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, wanted to put on a show: using stories, witnesses and emotional impact.

Lindeperg is particularly strong when describing the consequences of Jackson’s ultimate victory. The prosecution’s reliance on documentary evidence gave the tribunal its enduring authority, but it also produced moments of crushing tedium. Journalists complained and the public’s attention wandered. The trials survive today in popular memory as a sequence of dramatic confrontations – there are plenty of lawyers and US intelligence personnel running frantically down corridors in the latest Hollywood movie – but this often felt rather different in reality.

I found myself occasionally resisting her conclusions. She sometimes seems slightly too sympathetic to Donovan’s position. Dramatically, he may well have understood audiences better. Yet Nuremberg’s authority rests precisely on the documentary foundations Jackson insisted upon. One could argue that, had the proceedings placed greater emphasis on theatricality and less on evidence, they might have generated better headlines but a weaker legacy.

The narrative forces the reader to wrestle with questions that historians often prefer to avoid. What is a trial for? Is it enough to establish guilt? Or must it also communicate that guilt effectively to the wider world? Some of the best chapters explore those questions through film. Lindeperg’s reconstruction of the screening of Nazi concentration camps is particularly memorable. The film itself was devastating. Yet what interested her was the choreography surrounding the footage. The defendants were illuminated so their reactions could be observed while the evidence played. The audience was watching two spectacles at the same time: images of atrocity and the alleged perpetrators confronted with those images. Goering, in particular, appeared energised by footage that reminded him of his years at the centre of power. One of the book’s recurring lessons is that propaganda does not necessarily stop working simply because it is being played out in the apparently sober atmosphere of a courtroom.

Goering dominates much of the second half of the narrative. Unlike the prosecutors, he instinctively understood performance. He recognised that he could appeal to an audience far beyond the courtroom. I occasionally felt that Lindeperg overstates the importance of the Nazis’ victories in courtroom sparring with Jackson. Goering may have won some of these skirmishes for attention, but history has not remembered him on his own terms. Even so, she convincingly demonstrates how often contemporary reporters and observers were seduced in the moment.

The most original section of the book for me concerns the Soviet role. In many English-language histories the Soviet delegation remains oddly peripheral. The Americans may have organised the tribunal, but the Soviets, through filmmakers such as Roman Karmen, often proved more adept at creating clear and compelling cinematic interpretations of it. While American documentary projects were entangled in bureaucracy and competing agendas, Soviet filmmakers could work with far greater speed and clarity.

I do have slight reservations. There were moments when I wanted the legal significance of the tribunal to receive more sustained attention. Readers approaching Nuremberg primarily through the history of international law may occasionally feel that judges and lawyers are being overlooked while cameramen hog the limelight. Yet these are relatively minor criticisms when set against the achievement of the whole.

After decades of scholarship on Nuremberg it takes considerable originality to make familiar material appear new. Lindeperg asks different questions from most of her predecessors and follows them with impressive persistence and intelligence. The archival research is formidable. I don’t agree with every conclusion and occasionally Lindeperg’s central metaphor is pressed a little too hard. But I finished the book convinced that she had enlarged my understanding of a subject I thought I knew well, which is no small achievement.