Hermann Goring and 23 other Nazis stood trial at Nuremberg in 1945… but do you know the

On a hot August day, a young woman weaves her way down narrow corridors. In her haste, she slips on the smooth floors and is caught ‘in the strength of a man’s arms’. He rights her and sends her on her way, calling ‘be careful, my child’ after her.

This all seems perfectly normal – a kind man saving a busy woman from a sprained ankle.

Yet, the woman is Russian translator Tatiana Stupnikova, the corridors lead to Court 600 in Nuremberg’s Palace of Justice, and the man is Hermann Goring. One of the leaders of the Nazi party and close confidant of Hitler, Goring was one of the 24 defendants standing trial at Nuremberg in 1945.

Hermann Goring, Commander of the Luftwaffe, took to the stand for 9 days between March 13 and March 22, 1946

In this magnificent book, Natalie Livingstone provides a history of the trial that defined the 20th century, and all future international criminal legal proceedings, through the experiences of eight women integral to its success.

Livingstone pieces together the female journalists, authors, lawyers, translators, painters and witnesses – from England, France, Russia, Germany and America – that helped bring the Nazis to some form of justice.

Along with Stupnikova, who walked the impossible tightrope between survival in Soviet Russia and staying true to her principles, Erika Mann and Harriet Zetterberg stand out as women empowered to put their all into proceedings.

Erika, daughter of author Thomas Mann and a writer herself, was a staunch believer in both the punishment and rehabilitation of the German people.

Having written and performed a political cabaret denouncing the rise of fascism, she had fled Germany in 1935 and married gay English poet W.H. Auden before the Nazis stripped her of her German citizenship. 

Harriet Zetterberg and Ingeborg both played crucial roles in the smooth running of the trial

She religiously documented the trial, wanting to force readers to face the horrors inflicted over the previous ten years. 

Zetterberg was more involved in the legalities of the trial. As a lawyer for the American prosecution, she assembled the case against Hans Frank, the ‘butcher of Poland’. She sifted through letters and diary entries to piece together his crimes and construct an ironclad prosecution.

The beating heart of this book is Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier. A witness for the French prosecution, she would ‘shatter the protective air of professional drudgery’ that had settled over the trial.

 Tatiana Stupnikova worked as a Russian translator throughout the trial

Her clear and harrowing account of life as a political prisoner in Auschwitz and Ravensbruck silenced anyone who tried to deny the Holocaust.

Her descriptions of the living conditions, brutality and functionality of the gas chambers were fundamental to cementing the prosecution’s case of ‘crimes against humanity’, an indictment first used at Nuremberg.

Yet to Vaillant-Couturier, her purpose was perhaps greater.

In her testimony she concluded that she had but ‘one wish only: the wish that some of us would escape alive, in order to tell the world what the Nazi convict prisons were like everywhere, at Auschwitz as at Ravensbruck’.

Livingstone presents every deeply researched detail with the lightest touch, fitting each piece of the puzzle of these women’s lives into the framework of the trial with ease.

She doesn’t shy away from the complexity of her subjects – they are not perfect; they can appear as flawed, vane and selfish.

Laura Knight, the British artist whose painting of the trial was commissioned by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee and hangs in the Imperial War Museum, revelled in the wining and dining put on for VIPs.

German journalist Ursula von Kardorff often had her copy censored for its sympathetic stance towards the defendants.

Ingeborg Kalnoky, the glamorous aristocrat employed to host witnesses, gave detailed, almost admiring descriptions of her Nazi guests in her memoir.

Of the Jews who stayed under her roof, she barely devotes more than a line.

This book is a necessary reminder of the horrors of the Nazis’ reign over much of Europe, and a reclamation of the integral parts women played in bringing them to justice.