Inside Nuremberg

From the acclaimed author of Hitlerland and The Nazi Hunters, an immersive new history of the extraordinary human effort—by not only judges and prosecutors but also soldiers, translators, psychiatrists, refugees, clergy, journalists and others—that brought the top surviving Nazis to justice.

Nuremberg lay in ruins in the summer of 1945, its buildings obliterated by Allied bombs and those residents who hadn’t fled living in the rubble without gas or heat. Yet amidst the devastation stood, mostly intact, the massive Palace of Justice. It was about to become the setting for a trial unlike any the world had seen. In Inside Nuremberg, Andrew Nagorski reveals how four allies—the United States, Britain, France and the Soviet Union—transformed the destroyed city into a bustling theater for the first international war crimes trial in history.

This is the story as it unfolded not just in the legendary Courtroom 600 but in prison cells, in the star-studded press gallery, in the bar of the Grand Hotel, and in the homes commandeered to host witnesses, including both Nazis and their victims. Behind the proclaimed lofty goals of the trial were petty rivalries, romantic affairs, and the first chills of Cold War tension between the Americans and the Russians. Particularly intense were the unlikely relationships forged: between prosecutors and the reviled men in the dock; between the prisoners and those charged with tending to their mental and spiritual well-being; between a Hungarian countess in exile and Hitler’s boastful, unrepentant photographer; and, fleetingly, between a slovenly hangman and the men condemned to die.

Bringing together details from the vast archives of documentary evidence, the memoirs of participants, and interviews with participants and their family members, Nagorski presents the trial from all sides, offering a fresh and encompassing history of the deliverance of justice at Nuremberg.