Because I had a marvelous history teacher, in high school, I thought I knew a lot about the Nuremberg Trials. Because of this book I learned so much more.

This book takes you behind the scenes. Introduces you to all the people behind the trial-

The Justices: They wondered if they were putting the cart before the horse-The laws to judge the Nazi's were cemented in stone after the war had ended. Could they do this? Marvelous look into the legalize of those schooled to uphold the law. Could they judge these men, putting aside their own contempt for them?

The Nazi's: I learned their prior lives, how they grew up, how they ended up following a demented evil soul like Hitler. Were some of them "just following orders" as they pleaded? Or was that just a cover to absolve them of their guilt in the horrific crimes?

The Lawyers, the aides, the psychologist and psychiatrist, the doctors. Joseph E. Persico's looks at all of them and tells a non-fiction tale that reads so easily. There are, of course, hundreds of people who were involved. The book supplies you with a list of all the main principles to refer to, as you read. I was thankful for that. And of course, as with any great non-fiction, at the end there is follow-up telling you what happened to them all.

Highly Recommended if history is your interest. ( )

This book was a natural one to read after I had read a number of books on the Holocaust. I don't consider this to be a very well-crafted book, but I hadn't read much about the Nuremberg trials before, so I did learn a lot from reading it. Some things that stuck in my mind:

(a) The defendants come across as a rather pathetic bunch. I guess this isn't a very original observation, since the phrase "the banality of evil" was coined at the trial of a Nazi war criminal.

(b) The ground rules set at Nuremberg made tu quoque--"so did you"--an inadmissible defense. In the context of a specific trial, I think this makes good sense, but as an overall approach to the acts performed by the various sides in World War II it strikes me as the worst sort of hypocritical victors' justice.

(c) In Persico's words, it took some of the defendants an "unconscionable amount of time" to die on the gallows: German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop took 17 minutes; Colonel General Alfred Jodl took 18 minutes; Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel took 28 minutes. I'm glad that Goring was able to commit suicide; the fewer people we put through this sort of torture the better. ( )

Solid account of the famous war-crimes trial of 1945-1946 in which many of the surviving top leaders of Nazi Germany were tried on a variety of charges. The book isn't sparing of those on the Allied side that made mistakes and did poorly, such as Justice Robert Jackson (the US prosecutor) or Burton Andrus (the chief jailer, who lost a number of prisoners to suicide, most notably Goering). The Russians, interestingly enough, are bit players in this scenario. Then again, you'd rarely see any information by them in the public domain. Recommended. ( )

Persico's book is a good read for those who want additional information on the Nuremberg Trial. It is a good overview of the trial and the individuals involved. To date it has provided me with more infomation in general about the trial than I have been able to obtain in other works I have read thus far. ( )

A very powerful book. I was ignorant about the trials at Nuremberg. The author took an, I am there" approach, that really worked well. ( )