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Overview
"A vivid reconstruction of the actions of the wartime allies and the Nazi elite at Nuremberg. Persico eaily carries us into a deeper understanding of the trials."—New York Newsday.
The Nuremberg trials took place from November 1945 to October 1946, and, after nearly 50 years, they remain an extraordinary precedent for judging international atrocities. This extraordinary recreation of the Third Reich's day of reckoning offers chilling portraits of the Nazi warlords, as it captures the trials in bold strokes and minute detail. 16 pages of photos.
Synopsis
The Nuremburg trials remain, after nearly a half a century, the benchmark for judging international crimes. Using new sources—ground-breaking research in the papers of the Nuremburg prison psychiatrist and commandant, the letters and journals of the prisoners, and accounts of the judges and prosecutors as they struggled through each day making compromises and steeling their convictions—Joseph Persico retells the story of Nuremburg, combining sweeping history with psychological insight. Here are brilliant, chilling portraits of the Nazi warlords and riveting descriptions of the tensions between law and vengeance, between East and West, and of the friction already present in the early stages of the Cold War.
"Persico captures both the sweep and the detail of the war crimes trials in an account that sometimes reads like a Ludlum novel."—Los Angeles Times
Publishers Weekly
Persico ( Piercing the Reich ) has written an extraordinary, intensely dramatic re-creation of the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-1946 in which the U.S., France, the U.S.S.R. and Britain tried and executed Nazi war criminals. His stirring narrative, which attempts to conjure the mental states of the key participants, draws on interviews with prosecutors, interpreters, jailers, journalists and bodyguards; on hitherto untapped personal papers and archival documents; and on prisoners' letters and journals. In addition to conveying the courtroom drama that exposed the Nazis' mass murder of six million Jews and millions of others, Persico unveils behind-the-scenes wrangling. For example, defiantly unrepentant Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goring vied with Nazi arms minister Albert Speer, who preached confession and contrition. Meanwhile, the courthouse became a Cold War in microcosm as Soviet and Western judges clashed. Although Nuremberg may have been legally flawed, it was ``satisfying justice,'' concludes Persico, who suggests that the trials contributed to postwar German democracy. Photos not seen by PW. First serial to American History and Military History Quarterly. (May)