Inside the Nuremberg trial: a prosecutor's comprehensive account - Review

Humanist, Nov-Dec, 2001 by Edd Doerr

Inside the Nuremberg Trial: A Prosecutor's Comprehensive Account by Drexel A, Sprecher (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1999); 1580 pp,; two volumes, $95 cloth,

While much has been written about the war crimes trials after World War II, there is little as comprehensive, comprehensible, and succinct as this book by one of the U.S. prosecutors at Nuremberg. Sprecher, who actually traveled in Nazi Germany in the mid-1930s, was a young army officer/lawyer when tapped to be a prosecutor in the first and most important of the thirteen Nuremberg trials--the one that convicted such Nazi bigshots as Hermann Goering, Rudolph Hess, Julius Streicher, Albert Speer, and Martin Bormann.

In this excellent book, Sprecher details how the first trial came to be set up and how the U.S. British, French, and Soviet legal systems were melded to ensure a fair trial--one that ultimately sentenced twelve war criminals to hang and seven to prison terms, while acquitting three other people.

The charges against the individual defendants and defendant organizations (for example, the SS and the Gestapo) were conspiracy to commit crimes against the peace and against humanity, specific crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. In his closing argument before the judges, U.S. chief prosecutor Justice Robert Jackson set out five groups of overt acts by the defendants:

* the seizure of power and subjugation of Germany to a police state

* preparation for wars of aggression

* warfare in disregard of international law

* the enslavement and plunder of populations in occupied countries

* persecution and extermination of Jews and Christians.

In his book, Sprecher presents almost a daily summary of the actions by both the prosecution and defense, who each were allowed to present evidence, as well as call and cross examine witnesses. (German admiral Karl Doenitz was able to get U.S. Admiral Chester Nimitz to provide him with a mitigating statement.) He shows how defendants tried to shift the blame onto two Nazi leaders who didn't live to be tried: Adolph Hitler and Heinrich Himmler--a strategy the judges didn't buy. Sprecher also enriches his narrative with such details as the comments of defendants to a court-appointed psychologist and includes a nine-page bibliography and an eight-page chronology of important events.

Sprecher also worked on the later war crimes trials and edited the official fifteen-volume Trial of War Criminals Before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals. But his account of the first Nuremberg trial is as much a page turner as a pop thriller--but a helluva lot more important. I recommend it and give it five stars. (It can be ordered directly from him by sending $64 to 4601 N. Park Avenue #608, Chevy Chase, MD 20815.)

Nuremberg, unfortunately, didn't put an end to war crimes. Since then the world has seen war crimes and genocide in the former Yugoslavia, Cambodia, Iraq, Kuwait, Rwanda, Vietnam, and elsewhere. Support is growing for a permanent International Criminal Court, although U.S. opposition has so far held back that development.

Edd Doerr is a former history teacher.