Nuremberg is really two subjects wearing one name. The first is a courtroom drama with twenty-one defendants, four prosecuting powers who did not trust each other, and a set of verdicts. The second is the invention of the legal categories — crimes against humanity, and genocide — that the rest of the twentieth century would be judged by. Both are worth reading. Taking the legal one first is the standard mistake, because the arguments about jurisdiction and precedent are abstract until you can already name the men they were being applied to.
So the sequence below runs narrative, then eyewitness, then law, then afterlife. By the last stage the question is no longer what happened at the trial but what the trial established, which is still contested.
The trial as it happened
Nuremberg is the most readable full narrative of the main proceedings and the right first book — strong on the personalities of judges, prosecutors and defendants alike, and unembarrassed about being a story.
The Nuremberg Trial is the more measured and better-documented account of the same events, including the political negotiations between the four powers that produced the tribunal in the first place. Read it second, for the parts Persico dramatises.
People who were in the room
A train of powder collects Rebecca West's reporting from Nuremberg, and it is among the finest journalism of the century — unmatched on the atmosphere of the courtroom, which was mostly boredom punctuated by horror. It is short and rewards a second reading.
Nuremberg diary is the prison psychologist's contemporaneous record of his conversations with the defendants in their cells while the trial ran. The Nuremberg interviews is the prison psychiatrist's parallel record, unpublished for fifty years. Read them together: two professionals with comparable access reached noticeably different conclusions about the same men, and neither was a neutral instrument. Primary material of this kind exists for almost no other trial.
The law they had to invent
East West Street is the best entry into the legal question, braiding the lives of Hersch Lauterpacht and Raphael Lemkin — who invented the two rival categories — with the author's own family history and with the trial. Crimes against humanity protect individuals; genocide protects groups. The two concepts compete, and the competition has consequences that are still being argued in international courts.
Axis rule in occupied Europe is the 1944 book in which Lemkin first used the word genocide, documenting the occupation law that justified the killing. It is a dense legal survey rather than a narrative; read the relevant chapters after Sands has introduced the man.
Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials is the authoritative book on this path. Telford Taylor prosecuted at Nuremberg and later led the subsequent trials, and his account of how the case was constructed is the fullest insider record available. He also takes seriously the charge that the whole tribunal was victors' justice — retroactive law applied by the winners, with Soviet judges on a bench that would never try Katyn. He does not think the charge succeeds. Others do, and the argument is not closed.
Judgment, and afterwards
Justice at Nuremberg follows the documentary evidence rather than the courtroom drama, and is unusually good on the crimes themselves rather than on the procedure.
The Memory of Judgment asks the harder question: whether Nuremberg and the trials that followed were as much about creating a historical record as about delivering verdicts, and whether courts can do that job at all. It is the most searching book here.
Eichmann in Jerusalem covers the trial that took up where Nuremberg stopped, and it remains the most contested piece of writing about any of it — its account of Jewish councils and its phrase about the banality of evil have been disputed by historians ever since, on evidentiary grounds as well as moral ones. Its argument only makes sense against the defendants you have already met.
The Ratline is the right ending. Sands follows one indicted governor who was never tried, and the escape networks that carried men like him out of Europe — a reminder of how partial the justice was.
The staged version with study plans is on the full path; see also the Nuremberg trials hub.
Follow the full ordered path here: Best Books on the Nuremberg Trials, in Reading Order.
