Best Books on the Nuremberg Trials, in Reading Order
Nuremberg is worth reading about twice over: once as a courtroom drama with twenty-one defendants in the dock, and once as the moment two lawyers invented the legal categories — crimes against humanity, and genocide — that the rest of the century would be judged by. This path takes the trial narrative first, then the eyewitness reporting from inside the room, then the law and the men who wrote it, and finally the judgment's long afterlife from Eichmann to the international courts. The legal stage is far more gripping once you can already name the defendants.
The trial as it happened
BeginnerKnow who was in the dock, what each was charged with, how the four prosecuting powers divided the case, and how the verdicts fell.
▸ Study plan for this stage
Pace: 6–8 weeks for 1,063 pages at ~25 pages/day. Persico first — it is narrative history and reads quickly — then Tusa, which covers the same ground more carefully and can be read faster because you already have the shape. No prerequisites beyond a general outline of the Second World War.
- The four counts of the indictment: conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity — and which defendants were charged under which
- The four prosecuting powers and the division of labour: the Americans took conspiracy, the British crimes against peace, the French and Soviets the war crimes and crimes against humanity in the west and east respectively
- The London Charter of August 1945 as the tribunal's constitutive document, and the fact that it defined the crimes shortly before the men were tried for them
- The principal defendants and what distinguished them: Göring as the ranking survivor and the dock's dominant personality, Hess and the question of his fitness, Speer and his partial admission, Streicher as the propagandist, Kaltenbrunner for the security apparatus, Keitel and Jodl for the military c
- The American decision to build the case on captured German documents rather than on witness testimony, and what that choice bought and cost
- The verdicts: twelve death sentences, three acquittals, seven prison terms — and the specific reasoning behind the acquittals of Schacht, von Papen and Fritzsche
- The Soviet position on the tribunal and the awkwardness of the Katyn allegation, which the prosecution attempted and quietly abandoned
- Göring's suicide, the executions, and the practical questions of how the sentences were carried out
- List the four counts and name three defendants charged under each. Which count was most legally contentious and why?
- How did the four powers divide the prosecution, and what did each bring to the case in style and evidence?
- Why did the Americans build the case on documents rather than survivors? Give the argument for and the cost.
- Explain the reasoning behind each of the three acquittals. Were they justified on the tribunal's own terms?
- How did Göring conduct himself in the dock, and what effect did he have on the other defendants and on the prosecution's case?
- What happened when the Soviets raised Katyn, and what does the episode show about the tribunal's composition?
- Build a defendant table: all twenty-one in the dock, their position in the regime, the counts they faced and the verdict. Keep it beside you for the rest of the path — every later book assumes you can place a name instantly.
- Write a dated timeline from the London Charter in August 1945 to the executions in October 1946, marking the opening statements, the film screenings, the defence cases and the judgment.
- Take one defendant and write a two-page account of the case against them: the specific documents, the specific charges, the defence offered and the verdict.
- Compare Persico's and Tusa's treatment of the same episode — the negotiation of the charter, or the decision to try organisations as criminal — and write 250 words on where the dramatised and the documented accounts diverge.
- Write out the strongest version of the defence's core argument that the tribunal applied retroactive law. You will need it in stage three.
Next up: You now know who was in the dock and what the case was; the next stage puts you in the room with the people who watched it happen.
The most readable full narrative of the main trial, strong on the personalities of judges, prosecutors and defendants alike. The right first book.
A more measured and better-documented account of the same proceedings, including the political negotiations that produced the tribunal. Read second for the parts Persico dramatises.
In the room
IntermediateEncounter the trial through people who were physically present, and confront how ordinary the defendants appeared at close range.
▸ Study plan for this stage
Pace: 8 weeks for 1,260 pages. West's 321 pages should be read slowly and, as the path suggests, twice. Gilbert and Goldensohn are diaries and interview transcripts and are best read in parallel rather than in sequence — take the same defendant in both books and compare. Prerequisite: the defendant table
- West's central observation: the overwhelming atmosphere of the courtroom was boredom, and the ordinariness of the defendants at close range was itself the disturbing fact
- West as a stylist reporting a legal proceeding — her physical descriptions of the defendants, the courtroom and the ruined city, and what a literary sensibility catches that a legal record does not
- Gilbert's position as prison psychologist with daily cell access during the trial, and the contemporaneous nature of his notes
- The famous Gilbert material: the defendants' reactions to the concentration camp films, the Rorschach and IQ testing, and Göring's manipulation of the other defendants over lunch until Gilbert separated them
- Goldensohn's parallel record as prison psychiatrist, unpublished for half a century, covering many of the same men and also witnesses
- Where Gilbert and Goldensohn diverge: two trained professionals with the same access reaching different judgements about the same defendants' sincerity, remorse and pathology
- The methodological problem in all three: men on trial for their lives, talking to people they know are recording them, with obvious incentives to perform
- Speer as the test case — the defendant who admitted collective responsibility while denying specific knowledge, and who convinced observers to different degrees
- What does West say the courtroom actually felt like, and why does she treat boredom as the significant fact?
- How did the defendants react to the concentration camp footage, according to Gilbert? Which reactions do you find credible?
- Where do Gilbert and Goldensohn disagree about a specific defendant, and what would you need to adjudicate between them?
- What do the psychological test results show, and what were they taken to show at the time? Distinguish the two.
- Every defendant knew they were being recorded. How should that change your reading of what they said?
- Assess Speer's performance across all three books. What did he admit, what did he deny, and who believed him?
- Take three defendants and read every Gilbert entry and every Goldensohn interview about each, then write a one-page comparison per defendant of how the two professionals read them.
- Read West's A Train of Powder twice as the path suggests, and after the second reading write 300 words on a single paragraph of her prose and what it does that Persico's narrative cannot.
- Build an evidence-quality note for the interview material: for each of five statements by defendants, write what incentive the speaker had and how much weight the statement can carry.
- Write a 250-word portrait of Göring's conduct in the dock and out of it, drawing on all three books, and say what made him effective.
- Take Speer's claims and check them against the documentary record described in stage one. Write half a page on where his account is contradicted.
Next up: Having met the men, the next stage turns to the two lawyers who invented the categories under which they were charged.
West's reporting from Nuremberg is among the finest journalism of the century, and unmatched on the atmosphere of boredom and horror in the courtroom. Short, and worth reading twice.
The prison psychologist's contemporaneous notes on his cell conversations with the defendants, recorded as the trial ran. Primary material of a kind that exists for almost no other trial.
The prison psychiatrist's parallel record, unpublished for fifty years. Read alongside Gilbert to see two professionals reach different conclusions about the same men.
The law they had to invent
IntermediateUnderstand where 'crimes against humanity' and 'genocide' came from, why the two concepts compete, and the charge that the whole tribunal was victors' justice.
▸ Study plan for this stage
Pace: 4–5 months for 1,880 pages. Sands first at ~25 pages/day — it is narrative and braided and reads fast. Lemkin's Axis Rule is a 1944 legal treatise and should be read selectively, principally the chapter introducing genocide plus the occupation-law material; do not attempt it cover to cover. Taylor's
- Hersch Lauterpacht and crimes against humanity: protection of the individual, whatever group they belong to, which is where the concept enters the London Charter
- Raphael Lemkin and genocide: protection of the group as such, on the argument that individuals are attacked because of the group and the group is the thing destroyed
- Why the two categories genuinely compete rather than complement — Sands's central point, and the reason Lauterpacht opposed Lemkin's framing
- Lemkin's 1944 Axis Rule as a work of documentary legal analysis: it coins genocide, and it does so by analysing the actual decrees of occupation
- That genocide was not a charge at Nuremberg — the word appears in the indictment but the judgment rests on crimes against humanity, which is the outcome Lemkin regarded as a defeat
- Taylor's insider account of how the case was constructed: the negotiation of the charter, the evidentiary strategy, the internal disagreements among the prosecutors
- The victors' justice charge in its serious form: retroactive law, the tu quoque problem of Allied conduct including area bombing and the Soviet presence on the bench, and the answers the tribunal's defenders give
- The subsequent proceedings that Taylor led — doctors, judges, industrialists, Einsatzgruppen — and why they matter as much as the main trial
- State the difference between crimes against humanity and genocide precisely, and explain why Lauterpacht thought the group framing was dangerous.
- How did Lemkin arrive at the concept of genocide, and what evidence in Axis Rule is it built on?
- Why was genocide not the basis of the Nuremberg judgment, and what did Lemkin do about it afterwards?
- State the victors' justice charge in its strongest form — retroactivity, tu quoque, the composition of the bench — and give the best answer to each element.
- What does Taylor reveal about how the prosecution actually built its case that the trial narratives in stage one do not?
- What were the subsequent proceedings, and why does Taylor consider them essential to what Nuremberg achieved?
- Write a 500-word comparison of the two legal concepts, with a case from the last fifty years that each would characterise differently. The difference is not academic and the case will show it.
- Read Lemkin's chapter introducing genocide in Axis Rule and write out his definition in his own terms, then compare it word by word with the definition in the 1948 Genocide Convention.
- Trace the drafting of Article 6(c) of the London Charter using Sands and Taylor, noting every change of wording and what each change did.
- Write the defence brief arguing that the tribunal applied retroactive law, in one page, using only arguments available in 1945. Then write the prosecution's reply.
- Take one of the subsequent proceedings Taylor describes and write a one-page account of what it established that the main trial did not.
- Follow Hans Frank through all three stages read so far — the trial narrative, the prison interviews and Sands's account — and write 400 words on what each source can and cannot show about him.
Next up: With the law understood, the final stage asks what the judgment established, what it failed to, and what happened to the men it never reached.
Braids the lives of Hersch Lauterpacht and Raphael Lemkin, who invented the two rival categories, with Sands's own family history and the trial itself. The best possible entry into the legal question.
The 1944 book in which Lemkin first used the word genocide and documented the occupation law that justified it. Read at least the relevant chapter after Sands has introduced him.
The memoir and history of a prosecutor who later led the subsequent trials, and the fullest insider account of how the case was actually constructed. The authoritative book on this path.
Judgment and afterlife
IntermediateAssess what Nuremberg established and what it failed to, and follow the precedent forward to later war crimes trials and the men who escaped.
▸ Study plan for this stage
Pace: 4–5 months for 1,719 pages. Conot at ~20 pages/day; Douglas is a short academic book that repays slow reading; Arendt's 312 pages should be read carefully and, given the controversy, with the standard criticisms to hand; Sands's The Ratline reads as narrative and goes quickly. Read in the order give
- Conot's document-led reconstruction, which follows the evidence of the crimes rather than the courtroom drama and is consequently the hardest of these books to read
- Douglas's central claim: these were didactic trials as much as criminal ones, intended to create an authoritative historical record — and his question of whether a court is the right instrument for that
- The tension Douglas identifies between due process and pedagogy: a trial designed to teach history strains the rules that make it a trial
- Arendt's 'banality of evil' argument and what it actually claims — thoughtlessness and bureaucratic conformity rather than monstrous motive — as against how it is usually summarised
- The sustained objections to Arendt: her reading of the Jewish councils, her characterisation of Eichmann against the later evidence of his own recorded statements, and her tone
- How the Eichmann trial differed from Nuremberg in jurisdiction, evidence and purpose — an Israeli court, survivor testimony, and a single defendant
- The Nuremberg principles' path into the Genocide Convention, the Geneva Conventions, the ad hoc tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and the International Criminal Court
- Otto Wächter and the escape networks in The Ratline: an indicted governor who was never tried, and the Church, intelligence and border routes that carried such men out
- What does Conot's document-led approach show about the crimes that the courtroom narratives do not?
- State Douglas's argument about didactic legality, and give one case where the pedagogical aim visibly compromised the legal one.
- What does Arendt actually claim by 'the banality of evil'? Distinguish her claim from the popular version of it.
- What is the strongest evidence against Arendt's characterisation of Eichmann, and does it defeat her general argument or only her portrait of him?
- How did the Eichmann trial's use of survivor testimony change what a war crimes trial was for?
- What does The Ratline show about why so few perpetrators were tried, and who is responsible for that?
- Write a 600-word assessment of what Nuremberg established and what it failed to establish, citing a specific book for each claim and marking where the sources disagree.
- Read Arendt's account of one session of the Eichmann trial and then a standard scholarly criticism of it, and write a page adjudicating the specific disagreement.
- Build a lineage diagram from the London Charter through the Genocide Convention, the ad hoc tribunals and the Rome Statute, marking at each step which Nuremberg category survived and which was modified.
- Follow Otto Wächter's escape route as Sands reconstructs it, and write 300 words on which institutions made it possible and what evidence Sands has for each.
- Write a final two-page answer to the question the path exists for: was Nuremberg justice, and what did it make possible? Cite specific books and state honestly where the answer is contested.
- Return to the victors' justice brief you wrote in stage three and revise it with everything the final stage added.
Next up: This closes the path: from the dock to the law to the long afterlife, including the men the law never reached.
A detailed reconstruction that follows the documentary evidence rather than the courtroom drama, and is unusually good on the crimes themselves.
Argues that Nuremberg and the trials after it were as much about creating a historical record as delivering verdicts, and asks whether courts can do that job. The most searching book here.
The trial that took up where Nuremberg stopped, and the most contested piece of writing about any of it. Its argument only makes sense against the Nuremberg defendants you have already met.
Sands follows one indicted governor who was never tried, and the escape networks that carried men like him out of Europe. The right ending: a reminder of how partial the justice was.
Discussion
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