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, depicting testimony that still chills more than 80 years later. By giving prominence now to her and other women’s stories 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.
Evil when detached from power is usually reduced to impotence. What is not reduced is the lasting horror: six million were killed in the Holocaust, two million of them women. No woman’s fate is worth more or less than any man’s, but women do deserve a voice at the final reckoning. It is an affront to justice and history. Livingstone, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, has made that happen with impact and originality.
‘The Nuremberg Trial’ by Laura Knight (1946) (Public Domain)
Dame Laura Knight is one of eight women whose roles at the trial are highlighted before, during and after their time at Nuremberg, where each had to fight their corner simply to be there, mostly against the ingrained misogyny and chauvinism of the time. Some of the women have been, until now, mostly ignored, overlooked, hidden or forgotten in helping to hold the worst villains of the last century to account. Others, like Rebecca West and Erika Mann, were celebrated reporters.
A ninth I would have added is Gitta Sereny, the heroic British journalist who later exposed Albert Speer, Hitler’s close friend and ally, through dogged reporting and inquisition after the trial, when he was spared execution but became the world’s most infamous prisoner.
Livingstone is the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors (Supplied)
A particularly chilling moment recounted by Livingstone is when Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, a French Resistance camp survivor, offers searing testimony of the degrading mass slaughter and its systematic cruelty – during which a pin could have been heard in court, and then afterwards as she walked slowly and deliberately past the dock, pausing and looking into each of the accused’s eyes and vacant souls.
Livingstone’s eight heroines are compelling, their wider lives well drawn as they stepped forward to ensure the Nazi stain on humanity would never come to be ignored, diluted or forgotten. The Nuremberg Eight consist of a British painter, American lawyer, German reporter, Russian interpreter, British chronicler, German/ British star reporter, French photographer/resistance heroine and Hungarian countess who hosted both survivors and war criminals. There were no female judges or female decision-makers in the legal process. Each of the eight women fought for crucial elements of truth to be told. Their own back stories contain modesty and steely grit; most were ordinary women whose extraordinary qualities were revealed through the prism of Nuremberg, as if a trapped shaft of light and air from the 1940s had been kept in a time capsule and only now released.
Livingstone’s book shows that a world where women are sublimated so often leads to depravity (John Murray)
The underlying message of Livingstone is that women are, of course, morally necessary to illuminate this dark episode of male massacre and evil. Her account is not overladen or preached; the argument is made by showing rather than telling. It is why this book convinces. A world where women are sublimated so often leads to depravity. This is a kaleidoscopic eight-life biography with electrifying stories, which brings perspective and wider compassion to this shocking trial, the first time the words “war crimes” were officially used, and where the guiding principle, of how good must have a global legal structure to defeat evil, was put in place.
Women were far from absent in the Second World War – 640,000 were members of the British armed forces. One in five members of the French Resistance were women. And yet it was a man’s war, forged by men, mostly retold by men, and almost all the war criminals were men. This book helps us all never to forget. And like a knife, it brilliantly slices through the machismo, violence and mass horror inflicted by men in the war, in the absence of female influence.
Millions of women suffered in the Second World War, but they lacked a voice at the top table. As Rebecca West showed in her epic reportage for The New Yorker, light can dissemble and destroy darkness, truth can expose calumnies and atrocities; so this book adds significant testimony and argument to us all remembering what happened, and never being allowed to forget.
‘The Nuremberg Women’ by Natalie Livingstone is published by John Murray Press on 23 April
