Genocide on Trial. - 'Nuremberg: The Reckoning' - book review

National Review, June 17, 2002 by Michael Knox Beran

Nuremberg: The Reckoning, by William F. Buckley Jr. (Harcourt, 366 pp., $25)

They were supposed to throw themselves on the pyre. That, the Roman historian Tacitus said, was ever the German way: Better to perish in the conflagration than outlive the tribe's defeat. In the last days of the war, the German leader, holed up in his bunker, plotted the fireworks in which the Reich was to be consumed. "If the war is to be lost," Hitler told Albert Speer in March 1945, "the nation will also perish." There was "no need to consider the basis even of a most primitive [national] existence any longer." On the contrary, Hitler said, "it is better to destroy even that, and to destroy it ourselves." What remained of the German industrial base was to be demolished; and the German leaders were to fall on their swords.

It didn't happen that way. The end of the war found many of the Reich's viziers unreconciled to their doom. Even before Hitler's corpse had been burned in the chancellery garden, Himmler had attempted to open a negotiation with the Allies. Goering, the tyrant's designated heir, had declared himself "ready to fly personally to General Eisenhower" to arrange a capitulation. They soon discovered that the Allies were in no mood to bargain. At the same time, however, there was disagreement among the victors themselves about what ought to be done with the remnant of the Nazi leadership. Churchill, for his part, talked of rounding the high priests up and shooting them dead.

In his provocative new novel, Nuremberg: The Reckoning, William F. Buckley Jr. recreates the Allies' efforts to pronounce a more considered judgment upon the vanquished. The setting for the experiment was carefully chosen; Nuremberg was one of the holiest cities of National Socialism, a place where some of its most gigantic altars had been raised, and where, in the autumn of 1945, the disagreeable odors of its incense still hung heavily in the air. The fanatic citadel had not long before fallen to the American Seventh Army, and in his book Buckley brings the broken city to life. At the center is the Palace of Justice, where, Buckley writes, the defeated satraps, stripped of their badges of rank and honor, were "monitored twenty-four hours a day by jailers looking through slits in the cell doors, a naked overhead light on, day and night."

The book is immensely engaging. Buckley excels at taking an exceedingly intricate historical record and imposing order on it through his gift for language, the easy elegance of a master of the English sentence. The plot of this, his 15th novel, is skillfully woven and tells the story of Sebastian Reinhard, who with his mother fled Hamburg in 1939 to sail to the United States, and who returns to Germany in 1945 to assist the prosecutors at Nuremberg. After vicissitudes the young man, now an American army officer, makes a double discovery: He learns the truth about both his father's fate and his own heritage.

Nuremberg is a work of fiction, not a polemical essay; but the book raises important (and timely) questions about the kind of justice defeated bad guys deserve. There is an illuminating moment when Lieutenant Reinhard is ushered into the office of one of the prosecutors working under Robert H. Jackson, the American chief counsel at Nuremberg. "Looking for my law library?" Captain Carver, a military lawyer, asks his visitor. "Well, let me tell you something. There is no library for what we're up to. I mean, the IMT -- that's the International Military Tribunal -- is something brand new."

The "judicial and moral imaginations" had come together, Buckley writes, to try "to write into the empty spaces of international law a fresh covenant: that war crimes were definable. And punishable as criminal behavior." How far they succeeded remains a question. If Nuremberg traces the evolution of Lieutenant Reinhard's understanding of himself, it also uncovers those deficiencies in comprehension that undermined the efforts of Reinhard's superiors to prosecute the surviving Nazi leaders in the Palace of Justice.

Nothing could have been more devastating to the cause of those defendants than the footage of the death camps that Justice Jackson (on leave from the U.S. Supreme Court) arranged to have shown in open court. The film laid bare the reality of the Nazi charnelworks, the death vaults, the gas pipes, the furnaces. It exposed, Buckley writes, "butchery, torture, starvation." Anyone who views those scenes and is not a moral blockhead instinctively feels that those responsible for the degradation deserved the gibbet. The task of the Nuremberg tribunal was to turn this felt inarticulate revulsion into solid blocks of judicial masonry.

At a minimum the Allied lawyers needed to explain what the limits of acceptable conduct are, and to show that the Nazi leaders transgressed them. This work of drawing distinctions between different kinds of acts would have helped the world to understand why, for example, bombing campaigns in which civilians die are in certain circumstances within the civilized pale, but extermination camps are not. The Allied lawyers, however, shrank from this work; Buckley's novel is, in part, the story of their intellectual timidity, their inability to move from rhetoric to analysis. The crimes alleged in the indictments were broadly and inexactly defined; the briefs were loosely and hastily constructed. Goering, that crafty voluptuary, took advantage of the intellectual confusion. The former commander of the Luftwaffe was now, after months of incarceration, less grotesquely obese than he had been at the height of his power, but his features, those of a bloated mandarin, retained their look of cruel refinement. He languidly turned Jackson's questions against the prosecution. Within "what seemed like mere minutes," Buckley writes, his "dialectical prowess had apparently unsettled" the lead American counsel.