Nuremberg German Views Of The War Trials

A compilation of writings from various German authors, most previously published.

A long-awaited memoir of the Nuremberg war crimes trials by one of its key participants. In 1945 Telford Taylor joined the prosecution staff and eventually became chief counsel of the international tribunal established to try top-echelon Nazis. Telford provides an engrossing eyewitness account of one of the most significant events of our century.

At the end of World War II the Allies faced a threefold challenge: how to punish perpetrators of appalling crimes for which the categories of "genocide" and "crimes against humanity" had to be coined; how to explain that these had been committed by Germany, of all nations; and how to reform Germans. The Allied answer to this conundrum was the application of historical reasoning to legal procedure. In the thirteen Nuremberg trials held between 1945 and 1949, and in corresponding cases elsewhere, a concerted effort was made to punish key perpetrators while at the same time providing a complex analysis of the Nazi state and German history. Building on a long debate about Germany's divergence from a presumed Western path of development, Allied prosecutors sketched a historical trajectory which had led Germany to betray the Western model. Historical reasoning both accounted for the moral breakdown of a "civilised" nation and rendered plausible arguments that this had indeed been a collective failure rather than one of a small criminal clique. The prosecutors therefore carefully laid out how institutions such as private enterprise, academic science, the military, or bureaucracy, which looked ostensibly similar to their opposite numbers in the Allied nations, had been corrupted in Germany even before Hitler's rise to power. While the argument, depending on individual protagonists, subject matters, and contexts, met with uneven success in court, it offered a final twist which was of obvious appeal in the Cold War to come: if Germany had lost its way, it could still be brought back into the Western fold. The first comprehensive study of the Nuremberg trials, The Betrayal thus also explores how history underpins transitional trials as we encounter them in today's courtrooms from Arusha to The Hague.

In this prodigiously researched study, the author concentrates on the reaction to the trials by various segments of the American public largely in terms of the legality of the tribunal, the composition of the court, the justice of the verdicts, and the implications for the future. Originally published 1970. A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

This book is an attempt to make the material of the Nuremberg Trial available to a wider public in a comprehensible form. The verbatim reports of the court proceedings alone run to forty-two volumes. The authors have attempted to recreate for the reader the atmosphere of the immediate postwar period and a picture of the general circumstances of the time, as well as to describe the developments leading up to the Trial.

Available on the Military Legal Resources website.

“Fascinating. . . . The Tusas' book is one of the best accounts I have read.” --The New York Times

Examines each of the defendants in the Nuremberg Trials, during which charges were brought against members of Hitler's Third Reich for wartime atrocities, and considers questions of whether the trials were necessary and just.