Nuremberg Writers

At the end of 2024 I was in Germany and went to the city of Nuremberg to visit the famous courtroom and museum where the Nuremberg Trials were held. It was a moving and extremely interesting experience, and I thought the museum there was excellent. So of course I was interested in seeing the new movie, with Russell Crowe as Hermann Goering. I thought the film was a bit slow and long drawn out in the first half, and very gripping in the second half. Russell Crowe was superb as Goering, and Richard E. Grant also wonderful as the British lawyer. You really felt you were there in all the post-war chaos, with the world discovering just how appalling the Nazis had been as the death camps were found by the Allies, and you learn about the process of even holding the trials at all so that the world could see that some sort of justice had been done. It’s a movie that is not exactly happy Christmas viewing, but I can recommend it.

One of the things that intrigued me at the courtroom museum was how many famous writers attended the trials and reported on them. It’s not surprising that well known newspaper reporters were present (such people as Walter Cronkite and Janet Flanner, esteemed American journalists) but what did surprise me was that well-known novelists were also there recording their impressions of events. Rebecca West published her reports as A Train of Powder which focused more on the human and moral experience, rather on legal technicalities, and showed how she felt witnessing this moment in history. Welsh writer Richard Llewellyn (famed for How Green was my Valley) was there as a journalist (he then moved on to become a screenwriter). John Steinbeck attended, so did Ernest Hemingway (he was reputedly sarcastic about the proceedings, stating the judges were like useless schoolteachers and the defendants were like unruly students), his ex-wife Martha Gellhorn was there as well (she had reported on Dachau and is today considered one of the finest war correspondents of the 20th century), and fellow American writer John dos Passos. Erich Kästner, author of Emil and the Detectives, was there too (his own books had been burned by the Nazis). Biographer and historian Harold Nicolson was another literary observer, and in his diary, he chronicled the personalities of key figures taking part.

It is such a tragic and important era of history and while aspects of the trials have been criticised, they were vital in showing the public that justice was being done for the atrocities committed by the Nazis. I like to think that writers with imagination and a gift for words were present, adding their versions to the annals of history.