Coming to Terms

Rule of Law
by Winton Higgins
Brandl & Schlesinger, 2016, 305 pages, $29.95
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This novel about the first Nuremberg trials appears at a time when the US government is re-formulating its role in world affairs. It comes as a sharp reminder of another, more heroic moment in the US contribution to a safer, better world. Higgins’s retrieval of this legacy is thus highly topical.

Higgins breathes life into the atmosphere and dramatics of the first Nuremberg trial. He has used historical sources to draw out the characters of some of the major participants, such as the Allied prosecutors, the judges, and those on trial. While the book appropriately notes the importance of the trials to creating an international rule of law, the moral shades of grey over such an enterprise are exposed.

This is a special kind of historical novel that works with rather than against the historical record, to which it sticks closely, while “filling in the gaps” in the record to bring the historical figures and their predicaments to life, to create a work of human drama rather than a dry narrative populated by stick figures.

At end of the Second World War the victorious allies faced the issue of what should be done with surviving members of the Nazi high command who had participated in major state crimes.  Stalin wanted a show trial, ending in executions. The British, French and the majority opinion in the US government wanted summary executions. A more enlightened plan devised by Henry Stimson, US Secretary for War and a Harvard law graduate, pointed to a genuine trial that would overturn impunity for state crimes and lay the foundations for an international rule of law. Perpetrators were to be brought to account irrespective of their status and where their crimes were committed—an idea that overrode national sovereignty. The doctrine of conspiracy would cast a wider net over second-order villains and abolish the superior-orders defence.

While many years have passed since the trial, this book gives us a timely reminder (as its title suggests) of the importance of the concept of the rule of law in the attempt to found a new post-war international-relations system.

Some opposed the trial as they believed it would simply impose “victors’ justice”, or because they thought it was an innovation without an adequate foundation in existing law. Nor did the tribunal consider the crimes committed by the Allied Powers such as the deliberate bombing of civilian populations in German cities such as Hamburg and Dresden.

The trial has been described as “the greatest trial in history” by Norman Birkett, one of the eight judges on the tribunal, among many others. Higgins describes how the trial, like any other theatrical event, demanded pace, gladiatorial clashes and dramatic intensity. In the upshot, the tribunal passed twenty-two sentences: seven defendants received long prison sentences, three were acquitted, and twelve received death sentences. One of these was Martin Bormann, tried in absentia and almost certainly already dead. Another was Hermann Göring, who famously killed himself to avoid the noose. So the hangman ended up with just ten clients.

Other works have accounted for the background and course of the trial. For instance, Telford Taylor’s magisterial account, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials (1992), describes the trial from a prosecutor’s perspective. Many readers will remember the masterly courtroom drama of a subsequent trial, Judgment at Nuremberg, directed by Stanley Kramer, with Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Marlene Dietrich and Judy Garland in the leading roles. A follow-on trial was also rendered into historical fiction by William Buckley in Nuremberg: The Reckoning (2002). Higgins’s book came out at the same time as the prominent international lawyer Philippe Sands’s much publicised East West Street, a fascinating narrative about the emergence of post-war human rights and anti-genocide legal developments, both of which sprang from the first Nuremberg trial. Thus other writers see the current need to revive the Nuremberg legacy.

The work enlivens the minute details of the trial: the seating arrangements in the courthouse, the array of interpreters, and the numerous intrigues of the tribunal’s personnel. We see the fine line in the victors’ minds between a repulsion for the accused and their determination to honour due process—not merely to deliver “victors’ justice”.

What makes Higgins’s book worthwhile is the stories of some of the main participants in the trial. One point-of-view character is Richard Sonnenfeldt, a young German-Jewish GI with a talent for languages. His work as a prosecution interpreter rekindled his rage at what the Germans did to the Jews and intensified his own feeling of Jewishness.

A prominent perpetrator was Hermann Göring. He had (amongst other things) created the Gestapo and the first Nazi concentration camp, Dachau. At the trial, Higgins shows how Göring dominated his co-defendants with his intelligence and demeanour, and made himself the focus of attention in the courtroom. He claimed he knew nothing about the concentration camps, and he expressed in a defiant and robust manner the ideals of National Socialism. In his first cross-examination he outshone his cross-examiner and undermined the credibility of the trial procedure.

Another defendant, Hans Fritzsche, had been in charge of German radio and helped Goebbels mastermind the propaganda apparatus of the Nazi state. He claimed he was merely a radio journalist and that he held only a peripheral role in the regime. It was pointed out to him that one can only mask the truth if one already knows the truth that one is setting out to obliterate. Fritzsche hated the vulgarity, incompetence and swaggering behaviour of the Nazi chieftains. He argued that all sides committed atrocities in war, and that the trial—instead of exposing the terrible power of modern propaganda—had seized upon scapegoats who were the losers of the war. In reality he was a self-pitying narcissist who wanted to save his own skin.

The character of Katerina Thornton, a simultaneous interpreter at the trial, expresses a second theme in the novel, the aspiration of eventual German redemption. The trial record left no room for post-war German denial or trivialisation of a horrific period in national history. In this way it paved the way for the unique cultural phenomenon of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with past) in reunified Germany, as the book’s epilogue dramatises. Germany’s current standing as “the good European” can thus be traced back to the Nuremberg trial. No other country has managed and learned from its historic wrongs as well as Germany has.

This is a dramatic and compelling read with a cast of complex and diverse characters. They collectively bring to life a seminal historical event. The novel presents for the first time in a readable and digestible way the moral and intellectual struggle to establish an international rule of law. It is well written, historically accurate, and a valuable perspective on the universal anguish felt over the Nuremberg trial.

Winton Higgins practised law briefly, but has been a social-science academic and writer for most of his career. He has taught at Macquarie University, and is currently an associate at the University of Technology Sydney. His previous non-academic book was the Holocaust-themed travel diary Journey into Darkness.